The End of Everything (New Yiddish Library Series) (9 page)

With the deference of a loyal and bashful pupil, he stood before Tarabay listening to him prattle on cheerfully about how he’d recently met Velvl’s former fiancée in town and had conducted a polite conversation with her.

Before he left, he’d embraced her in the aristocratic manner there in her father’s house, had addressed her in Polish as
jas´niewielmoz·na panna,
“most distinguished young lady,” and had whispered a secret to her about Velvl:

—He, Tarabay, had a match for her … an uncommonly fine match.

And he screwed up one of his eyes, gave Velvl a knowing wink, and laid his hand on his shoulder:

—Velvl wasn’t to worry about a thing but was simply to trust Tarabay.

And Tarabay added an oath as well:

—He wished he might have as many happy years for himself as Velvl would have with so fine a wife as Mirele.

At the time he’d been immensely grateful to that shrewd, cheerful Tarabay, and smiling to himself had thought about him with great esteem as he traveled home.

—That’s a clever man … That’s a true man of the world.

For nearly two successive weeks afterward he was excited and happy, overeager to offer tea to the broker from town who called on him; he even made an unnecessary trip to the stables, where he cheerfully repeated to his driver:

—We ought to get you a new cap, Aleksey … Please remind me about this when we’re next in the provincial capital …

It was good to lie on his bed all evening thinking about a time when Mirele’s autumn jacket would at last be hanging in the entrance hall, and to imagine how, lying here on this same bed, he would answer Mirele’s question:

—Why not? He didn’t stint her use of the buggy, did he? If she wanted to go into town, she had only to order the buggy harnessed up and go whenever she pleased.

He was waiting for something, beside himself with impatience trying to guess how Tarabay would keep his promise.

—Well, Tarabay would come to town shortly … He’d certainly have to come down soon in connection with his business affairs and then he’d call on the man who should’ve been Velvl’s father-in-law.

But days passed, and there was no sign of Tarabay’s phaeton in town.

Mirele was as solicitous for the crippled student as for a blood brother, even meddled in his affairs, and pleaded his case behind his back:

—What was the point of it? Was there any viable future for him in staying tied to his mother’s apron strings, teaching Torah to the girls of the town?

There was no news in town apart from nasty rumors that started spreading about the old Count of Kashperivke who was already living abroad with his son-in-law:

—The Count was heading for bankruptcy, no question, and Kashperivke would be sequestrated by the bank.

In response to these rumors, Velvl’s mother sent him frequent notes in which she cursed his former fiancée and her father and continually complained:

—Six thousand rubles … this was no triviality! Six thousand rubles, in these days!

And more:

—To this very day the promissory notes were still made out in Reb Gedalye Hurvits’s name and the Count recognized no one but him as an interested party.

Without being fully aware of it, he once again began sleeping away many of the brief, chilly days of late autumn, filling the air of his silent furnished cottage with the sound of his heavy, despondent snoring, starting awake every now and then and reminding himself:

—He was going through a very difficult time … and nothing would come of having thought continually about Mirele … And above all … above all, he’d been a fool to squander so much money on new furniture and new horses.

A while later here in town an unusually warm Sunday afternoon drew to a close. The slanting sun steeped straw roofs and leafless trees in red gold, and peasants in black sackcloth coats standing near the shop attached to an isolated Jewish house took enormous childlike delight in this red glow, felt tremendously pleased with themselves at the thought of all the grain they’d stored up for the winter season, and smiled at one another:

—It’s time to pack bundles of straw against the walls of the houses to keep out the cold, eh?

That was when a messenger from his father arrived with the Count’s promissory notes, woke him from sleep, and imparted some oddly disquieting information:

—The old Count had arrived in Kashperivke in the dead of night, and the man who was to have been his father-in-law … more than likely the man who was to have been his father-in-law had rushed over there in his britzka
*
very early that morning.

Half-asleep, he hurried off to Kashperivke in his own buggy, encountered the old Count alone in the bare manor house from which even the furniture had been packed away, and had all his promissory notes, made out in the name of Gedalye Hurvits, paid out in full. The old Count was even under the impression that Gedalye Hurvits himself had sent him here to cash in these notes of hand and consequently asked him to inform his principal:

—He was paying out six thousand rubles now and the remaining three thousand … He didn’t have the balance at the moment, so he’d have to remit it from abroad.

Velvl understood from this that the three thousand rubles belonging to the man who should’ve been his father-in-law were lost for good, felt that he was now doing something contemptible, yet nodded his head at the Count:

—Good, good … he’d inform him accordingly.

Only at nightfall, climbing the first hill on the road home from Kashperivke in his buggy, did he recognize in the distance the britzka of the man who should’ve been his father-in-law with the Gentile lad who was its driver. He felt his heart pounding violently as he quickly instructed his own driver to turn left into a very narrow side road. He was alarmed, could hardly believe what he was doing, and for the first time gave a thought to the man who should’ve been his father-in-law:

—Did this mean that he’d spent the whole day from very early that morning on his own in the little wood? … Was he only now making his way to the Count of Kashperivke?

For some reason, from the narrow side road he kept glancing at the britzka of the man who should’ve been his father-in-law and saw:

As usual, the lank, emaciated horses were badly harnessed: the traces on the right-hand animal were too short, forcing it to keep leaping forward; the harness breechings on the left-hand horse with its blind, bulging eye were too loose, so that beast was forced to pull not with its chest but with its back. And up above, with his arms folded, sat Reb Gedalye Hurvits himself, his expression preoccupied, his head with its sharply pointed nose and gold-rimmed spectacles thrust a little upward, and his dark, forked beard blown to left and right by the wind.

Velvl felt profoundly distressed and shocked and wondered:

—Did this mean that the engagement was over? … Irrevocably over? …

The next day he rose very early and ordered his buggy harnessed up.

Outdoors it was cloudy and cool, and a late autumn shower dripped down intermittently, starting, stopping, and starting all over again.

All the way into town he was visibly angry and distressed, thought about Nokhem Tarabay’s proud, unpleasantly sullen daughter whom he’d once seen in the provincial capital, and came to a decision:

—Nokhem Tarabay’s daughter wouldn’t want him—she definitely wouldn’t want him.

The night before, thinking about Mirele, he’d made up his mind:

—He’d go over to the man who should’ve been his father-in-law and pay him his share of the money.

This decision pleased him so much that he was even keen to know what other people would say about it, above all, what Nokhem Tarabay would say about it …

But while he was still in the passage as he entered his father’s house, he could hear Reb Gedalye Hurvits’s appointed arbitrator yelling heatedly from his father’s little study, and the way his father kept interrupting him with the softly-spoken argument of an unlettered man:

—What if things had happened the other way around?

He stood there for a while listening to the arguments.

Mentally he turned over the same question yet again:

—Did this mean that the betrothal was really over, that this was the end of everything?

And for some reason, instead of going into the little study he went into the dining room where his mother was reviling his former fiancée to visiting strangers. With a severe and displeased expression, he rebuked her angrily but politely:

—Hush! Just look at her!

*
Reb
is a Yiddish title of respect accorded to older men or strangers; it is the equivalent of the Polish term
Pan
.

*
Marienbad is a spa town in the Carlsbad region of what is today the Czech Republic. During the second half of the nineteenth century, when the town was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, many European celebrities and aristocrats came to enjoy its curative carbon dioxide springs. Wealthy and assimilated Jews went there to seek well-connected matches for their daughters and sons. Before World War I it averaged about twenty thousand visitors every year.

†
This kind of large farm, known in Polish as a
folwark
, was operated in the Polish- Lithuanian Commonwealth from the fourteenth until well into the twentieth centuries to produce surplus grain for export. The first
folwarks
were created on church-owned land; later they were adopted by both the Polish nobility (
szlachta
) and rich Polish peasants, and the export grain they produced was a central part of the economy.

*
Shavuot, the Feast of Weeks, coincides with the harvest festival and is celebrated, according to the Hebrew calendar, on the sixth day of the month of Sivan (usually corresponding to the secular month of June).

*
Because the root of the sugar beet contains a high concentration of sucrose, it was grown commercially for sugar in the tsarist empire.

*
A light four-wheeled open carriage with one or two seats facing forward, drawn by a pair of horses.

*
An imperial Russian unit of distance approximately equal to one kilometer or twothirds of a mile.

*
The Russian Orthodox Church permits some categories of its priests to marry.

*
A Polish-Russian open carriage with a folding hood in which passengers can recline on long trips.

Reb Gedalye Hurvits’s business affairs plunged into ever greater confusion, and an ill-concealed disquiet troubled this preoccupied Torah scholar and his entire aristocratically reserved, well-to-do household.

With his worldly cousin, who was also his bookkeeper and closest intimate, Reb Gedalye now spent night after night conferring in secret. Both men stayed locked up all night deliberating in private, oblivious to the passing of the third watch,
*
at length threw back a shutter, opened a window, and noticed:

The dark beginning of the Elul day
^†
approaching silently and sadly from the northeast corner of the sky, slowly but steadily drawing closer, mutely driving away the final moments of the pale, lingering night. All around, everything had now turned gray; cows still confined in the courtyards of sleepy households lowed longingly for their penned-up calves and for the damp grass of the fields; and in various corners of the shtetl and the adjoining peasant village, cocks awakened for the third time. They crowed from close by and from farther off, one interrupting the other in haste to utter the first protracted blessing for the coming of day:

—Ku-ku-ri-ku-u!

His intimate, the considerate and deeply devoted bookkeeper, was still lost in thought, slowly tapping his nose with a finger while, as always, the perpetually preoccupied Reb Gedalye bombarded him with new, wide-ranging plans, continually leaning ever closer to his pondering adviser as though wanting to draw him over to his own side of his gold-rimmed spectacles and hurriedly demand of him:

—What do you think? Not so?

At this time, his soft Galician accent
*
was more than commonly evident in his speech, and when seated he’d throw the entire top half of his body forward whenever people called on him at home, as though someone had suddenly pressed an electric button concealed between his shoulder blades, abruptly compelling him to honor his guest with a bow and the sudden articulation of the few customary words:

—Please sit down, dear sir!

The entire household was afraid of some undefined menace, terrified that it might burst into the house at any moment; this state of fear lasted until well into the winter when for entirely specious reasons these business affairs became even more tangled, and disturbing rumors spread over virtually the entire district:

A rumor involving Reb Gedalye Hurvits’s long-standing enemy in the provincial capital, who’d laid an accusation against him in a bank there.

A rumor involving the old director of the same bank, previously a consistently good friend to Hurvits, who personally served notice that all should be strictly on their guard and no longer extend a single kopeck’s credit to him.

Far too often at this time Reb Gedalye would hurry off to the provincial capital in his own buggy.

For the most part he traveled there on Sunday, almost always returning just before the lighting of the Sabbath candles the following Friday evening when he’d rush into the house in great haste and notice:

His wife, Gitele, wearing her black silk jacket, the ritual wig
*
she reserved for the Sabbath, and her diamond earrings, already seated near the silver candlesticks and the covered Sabbath loaves arranged on the dining room table which was now spread with its fresh white cloth, examining her red, freshly scrubbed fingernails and waiting for the first little fire of Friday evening to be kindled in the window of the rabbi’s house in the row of whitewashed dwellings on the opposite side of the street.

At such times, as had become habitual, Reb Gedalye was extremely busy and preoccupied, gulping tea from a saucer at this table, unaware that the peak of his silk skullcap was slightly askew. Between one gulp and another, he rapidly responded to Gitele’s inquiries: