The End of Everything (New Yiddish Library Series) (41 page)

—It’s not necessary. It’s not necessary.

Apparently Reb Gedalye had asked after his daughter.

Once more they bent down to hear what he was saying. Evidently it moved them greatly. His sister turned aside, suppressing her sobs and wiping her eyes. Suddenly Velvl noticed the
feldsher
whispering something into the rabbi’s ear, and the rabbi shaking his head and leaving the room. He moved from the window to the verandah where he found a courier looking out for a buggy to drive him to the nearby village in search of more leeches. Taking the man by the sleeve, Velvl led him toward his father’s house:

—Here’s my buggy. It’s harnessed and ready to go … Tell the driver to hurry.

Around midnight, commotion and shouting from outside filled the Burnes’s dining room. Seated at the table, both the daughters of the house turned pale with shock: one clutched her heart and the other peered out through the double-glazed windows, noticed a number of people milling about in the pale gloom of night, and turned back to the table in fright:

—God help us! … Reb Gedalye’s just passed away, it seems.

One of the two children who were sleeping fully dressed on the sofa started awake with a frightened wail; although the daughters were afraid to stay in the house on their own, Velvl swiftly threw on his fur coat and with a pounding heart rushed outside once more. This time he didn’t steal round the back but went straight along the broad main street where lights were still burning in most of the houses. A number of Jews were standing in a huddle in the marketplace, all talking at the same time as though participating in the Blessing of the New Moon.
*
One of them shouted out:

—What about pallbearers?

—Have patience!

The entire shtetl was awake. People from all ends of the town kept going up into Reb Gedalye’s house, and Velvl followed them, pushing his way from one overcrowded room to another. In the crush of the dining room, he recognized his tall father; sundered from everyone else, he was leaning against a cupboard and gloomily smoking a cigarette from his silver holder. The congestion at the entrance to the third room was very great: numerous candles were burning in there and much weeping could be heard. Velvl found himself shoved from all sides. Behind him, someone pointed out Reb Gedalye’s son-in-law who’d only just arrived from the railway station. By the time Velvl had reminded himself that he need go no farther, it was too late and he found himself deep in the house, in the room with its numerous burning candles, and no one around him was shoving any longer. To his left, alongside Gitele and the sister from abroad, the newly arrived son-in-law was bent over the corpse, while opposite, his face contorted, was Avreml the rabbi, who looked at Velvl in a peculiar way. He wanted Velvl to be aware that he’d truly been a close friend of Reb Gedalye’s, and that tears were now flowing from his rabbinical eyes.

As the gray dawn broke, the corpse was carried out on a bier so narrow and short it seemed to have been made for a child. Running with it on their shoulders, as though carrying something that ought to be hidden from sight as quickly as possible, were the rabbi and the rabbinical judge, both the shtetl’s two ritual slaughterers, the son-in-law, and one other, an ordinary young man who used to buy two small wagonloads of flour every week from Reb Gedalye’s mill. Someone drew Velvl closer to the bier and pushed the young man aside:

—Stand back, stand back, it’s Velvl Burnes.

And Velvl put his shoulder beneath the burden and together with the son-in-law carried it a long, long distance, right to the cemetery. When he lowered the bier, he found himself greatly confused and dazed. Because he’d yielded place to him, the ordinary young man felt drawn to Velvl, approached him and said:

—He’s light, Reb Gedalye, eh? Completely emaciated …

And Velvl stared at this young man, unable to recall his name or remember where he’d seen him.

Gitele and Reb Gedalye’s sister observed the mandatory Seven Days of Mourning
*
in the house, and Avreml the rabbi arranged a prayer quorum twice a day
^†
by calling in passers-by from the street. No one was allowed to evade this duty:

—Never mind … Reb Gedalye deserved it and you owe it to him.

Doing as they were asked and joining the prayers, people noticed the stillness and emptiness of the house, and the way Gitele sat on the floor in the salon next to Reb Gedalye’s sister, looked down at the boards, and was silent.

Reb Gedalye’s sister wanted Gitele to return with her to her home abroad. When there was no one else in the house, seated on the floor next to Gitele she argued her case with their relative the bookkeeper and with Avreml the rabbi:

—After all, whom does Gitele have here? … I mean to say, why should she stay here all on her own?

—And for a little while … For a little while, at least, she could certainly come to stay with me.

Neither the rabbi nor the bookkeeper made any response, and the sister herself seemed scarcely to believe in the earnestness of her own tone. Gitele did not raise her head, the room was filled with silence, and the desolation that follows when everything has ended clung to the walls and ceiling, calling again to mind that Reb Gedalye was now dead and that Gitele had now no single place on earth.

A buyer was sought for Reb Gedalye’s house, but none was found. The furniture was sold covertly, without Gitele’s knowledge, and on the day of her departure, a carpenter was engaged to board up the windows from outside.

To bid her farewell came Avreml the rabbi, the former bookkeeper and his wife, Libke the rabbi’s wife, and an elderly, querulous widow who used to collect a Sabbath loaf from Gitele every Friday to provide for a poor shoemaker burdened with a great many children. Now this widow kept sighing even more frequently than usual and for some reason went on and on about her elder daughter who’d died:

—She’d continually pleaded with the Master of the Universe: Dear Lord, what use is my daughter to you? Take me instead …

So heavily swathed in furs and scarves that her face was barely visible, Gitele seemed to have been turned to stone, neither speaking nor moving from where she sat. She was the last to leave the house, but at the very moment she wanted to seat herself in the sleigh, something overcame her. Her head jerked round and she seemed on the point of collapse. Attempts were made to support her and assist her into the sleigh but she refused to permit them, freed herself, ascended the steps of the verandah once more, and kissed the mezuzah.
*

In town, word had it that Velvl Burnes had been at the railway station that day, that he’d gone up to Gitele and said to her:

—Be well.

And Gitele had risen from her bench in the second-class and replied:

—God might yet help him.

On the last warm Sabbath before Passover, some five local tailors’ apprentices were walking along the freshly trodden pathway that led down into the shtetl. Pleased that the mud was drying and that the tranquility of Passover was approaching, they cracked jokes and from some distance away denied free passage to all the well-rested servant girls who passed.

Conceiving a liking for the verandah of Reb Gedalye’s abandoned house, they sat down there to warm themselves in the sunshine, started indulging in horseplay, and unintentionally smashed a few panes of the front windows.

This was noticed by one of the town’s householders, an elderly Jew who was passing on his way to afternoon prayers. He stopped and yelled at the apprentices:

—Get off the verandah, you hooligans! … The devil take the lot of you, have you no respect?

The apprentices did as they were bidden and left the verandah. The panes, however, remained smashed, and blindly called to mind the suburb of the distant metropolis and Reb Gedalye’s daughter who hadn’t come down even to look around after her father’s death. Passersby stared gloomily at this house, which stood empty and had no heir:

—Reb Gedalye’s well and truly dead, eh? There’s nothing left.

Meanwhile, Avreml the rabbi drew on community funds somewhere and used them to erect a small mausoleum over Reb Gedalye’s grave. He quarreled with those shtetl householders who thought this inappropriate, and insisted on having his way:

—It’s fine, it’s fine … It’s entirely fitting and proper: Reb Gedalye bequeathed thirteen hundred rubles to the community, and the community erected a mausoleum over his grave—the one thing has nothing to do with the other.

Thereafter the rabbi didn’t leave his house for days on end, spending his time studying the Mishnah in Reb Gedalye’s memory.
*
When the mausoleum over the grave was finally completed, the rabbi had almost reached the end of one of the tractates, so he went down to the cemetery with some twenty men, completed his study of the last chapters at Reb Gedalye’s graveside, and recited Kaddish there. Later that morning, after Avreml the rabbi and his study group had returned, the noonday hour in the old Husyatin study house seemed to drag on much longer than usual; all felt faint with hunger, and took a drop of whiskey for the ascent of Reb Gedalye’s soul.

Everything in the study house was quiet and routinely commonplace. The first dust of the approaching spring lay on the lecterns and the benches, and the caretaker had already breakfasted at home somewhere. Discussion focused on the white shirt in which Reb Gedalye had asked to be clothed before his death:

—That shirt was probably inherited from a great-great-grandfather.

Holding his glass of whiskey, the rabbi spoke to those assembled about Reb Gedalye of blessed memory:

—This is what happened … Right at the end, this is what happened: he said to me, Avreml, he said to me, why are you weeping? … Foolish fellow: if I felt I were leaving anyone behind me, I’d make the journey there as readily as going to a dance.

All those who stood round heard and were silent. Only one man, an emaciated, timid sycophant who was unemployed, edged unobtrusively closer to someone at the back and smiled foolishly in consequence of the liquor he’d drunk. Wanting to make some allusion to the many young men whom Mirel had always dragged around with her as she wandered over the shtetl and to the fact that she’d not come down to the shtetl here after her father’s death, he remarked snidely:

—Evidently Reb Gedalye knew his own daughter, eh? Evidently he knew very well what she was.

Only during the intermediate days of Passover did Tarabay’s children come down to the village, bringing with them Heler’s friend, the student at the polytechnic. He encountered the midwife Schatz, who was now living near the sugar factory, and on Heler’s behalf related to her the exact nature of the illness Mirel had suffered there in the city at precisely the time Reb Gedalye had been lying on his deathbed here in the shtetl.

At the same time, those in Avrom-Moyshe Burnes’s house were made aware that Mirel no longer lived with her husband but apart, in a hotel with the midwife’s friend Herz; that she was somehow both divorced and not divorced; that she refused to receive any of her husband’s relatives except one, a cousin who was still a bachelor and was, so the rumor went, an immensely wealthy businessman. One Sunday afternoon all this became the subject of discussion in the dining room:

—What’s there to think about? Velvl can certainly praise and thank God that he escaped.

But when Velvl suddenly came out of his father’s study into the dining room, silence fell, and in the general discomfiture no one was able to look him in the face. Both daughters slipped out of the dining room one by one, and only his mother put her feet up and settled herself more comfortably on the sofa.

All was quiet.

—Velvl—his mother asked—when will all this come to an end, Velvl? … When will you make us all happy?

Scowling, Velvl turned to her:

—What?

He crossed angrily to the window and gazed out. He couldn’t understand what they wanted from him or why they kept on nagging him, so he stared at the house of Reb Gedalye’s relative, the bookkeeper, and at the furniture that was being carried out and piled into two heavily laden wagons:

—Now Reb Gedalye’s relative was also moving to the provincial capital, and soon no one would be left here in the shtetl …

Here in the shtetl, the long hot days would soon stretch out endlessly with all the tedium of summer. The place would be deserted, and there’d be no one left to respect. And he, Velvl Burnes … Yes, there were the three hundred
desyatins
of rich, loamy earth near the river on Miratov’s land that he was now being offered:

—He should certainly lease them, these three hundred
desyatins
.

Shortly after Shavuot a letter arrived from the crippled student Lipkis:

He’d undergone a successful operation on his leg.

On Friday night, after the Sabbath service, this was discussed in the Husyatin study house:

—What’s special about this news? The tendons in his leg had grown together, so it’s very likely he’ll now start walking straight like everyone else.

People were also standing around a prosperous householder whose seat was against the eastern wall
*
and who’d only that evening returned from the provincial capital, listening as he discussed the Zaydenovkis, who lived in a suburb over there, and one of their relatives, with whom he’d spoken personally:

—Mirel’s still living in a hotel, and it’s a lie that her husband’s supposed to have divorced her.

Then with infinite tedium the summer week stretched out over the shtetl, and a humid and boring Friday arrived, as purposeless as the solitary peasant wagon which had unloaded all its produce and been left in the deserted marketplace from early morning on.

By noon, the memory was still vivid of the many housewives who’d shoved and jostled around several carts loaded with vegetables as soon as the sun was up, and from various places, through open doors and windows, came the delayed but rapid pounding of choppers preparing fish on wooden boards, merging with the words shouted by one neighbor to another from inside the houses. A Jewish shopkeeper was carrying an interest-free loan
*
to someone, and the pharmacist’s assistant Safyan, returning to the pharmacy from elsewhere, couldn’t bear the smoke that belched from household chimneys and hung low and heavy in the air; he was furious at the shtetl: