The Collected Stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer

by Isaac Bashevis Singer

  Winter nights are long, and idlers look for ways to while away the time. Soon after twilight, they would gather at Zise Feige’s house to hear the dybbuk’s talk and to marvel at his antics. Zise Feige forbade them to annoy her daughter, but the curiosity of the townspeople was so great that they would break the door open and enter.

  The dybbuk knew everyone and had words for each man according to his position and conduct. Most of the time he heaped mud and ashes upon the respected leaders of the community and their wives. He told each one exactly what he was: a miser or a swindler, a sycophant or a beggar, a slattern or a snob, an idler or a grabber. With the horse traders he talked about horses, and with the butchers about oxen. He reminded Chaim the miller that he had hung a weight under the scale on which he weighed the flour milled for the peasants. He questioned Yukele the thief about his latest theft. His jests and his jibes provoked both astonishment and laughter. Even the older folks could not keep from smiling. The dybbuk knew things that no stranger could have known, and it became clear to the visitors that they were dealing with a soul from which nothing could be hidden, for it saw through all their secrets. Although the evil spirit put everyone to shame, each man was willing to suffer his own humiliation for the sake of seeing others humbled.

  When the dybbuk tired of exposing the sins of the townsfolk, he would turn to recitals of his own misdeeds. Not an evening passed without revelations of new vices. The dybbuk called everything by its name, denying nothing. When he was asked whether he regretted his abominations, he said with a laugh: “And if I did, could anything be changed? Everything is recorded up above. For eating a single wormy plum, you get six hundred and eighty-nine lashes. For a single moment of lust, you’re rolled for a week on a bed of nails.” Between one jest and another, he would sing and bleat and play out tunes so skillfully that no one living could vie with him.

  One evening the teacher’s wife came running to the rabbi and reported that people were dancing to the dybbuk’s music. The rabbi put on his robe and his hat and hurried to the house. Yes, the men and women danced together in Zise Feige’s kitchen. The rabbi berated them and warned that they were committing a sacrilege. He sternly forbade Zise Feige to allow the rabble into her house. But Zise Feige lay sick in bed, and her boy, Tsadock Meyer, was staying with relatives. As soon as the rabbi left, the idlers resumed their dancing—a scissors dance, a quarrel dance, a cossack, a water dance. It went on till midnight, when the dybbuk gave out a snore, and Liebe Yentl fell asleep.

  A few days later there was a new rumor in town: a second dybbuk had entered Liebe Yentl, this time a female one. Once more an avid crowd packed the house. And, indeed, a woman’s voice now came from Liebe Yentl—not her own gentle voice but the hoarse croaking of a shrew. People asked the new dybbuk who she was, and she told them that her name was Beyle Tslove and that she came from the town of Plock, where she had been a barmaid in a tavern and had later become a whore.

  Beyle Tslove spoke differently from Getsl the fiddler, with the flat accents of her region and a mixture of Germanized words unknown in Shidlovtse. Beyle Tslove’s language made even the butchers and the combers of pigs’ bristles blush. She sang ribald songs and soldiers’ ditties. She said she had wandered for eighty years in waste places. She had been reincarnated as a cat, a turkey, a snake, and a locust. For a long time her soul resided in a turtle. When someone mentioned Getsl the fiddler and asked whether she knew him and whether she knew that he was also lodged in the same woman, she answered, “I neither know him nor want to know him.”

  “Why not? Have you turned virtuous all of a sudden?” Zeinvl the butcher asked her.

  “Who wants a dead fiddler?”

  The people began to call to Getsl the fiddler, urging him to speak up. They wanted to hear the two dybbuks talk to each other. But Getsl the fiddler was silent.

  Beyle Tslove said, “I see no Getsl here.”

  “Maybe he’s hiding?” someone said.

  “Where? I can smell a man a mile away.”

  In the midst of this excitement, Reb Sheftel returned. He looked older and even smaller than before. His beard was streaked with gray. He had brought talismans and amulets from Radzymin, to hang in the corners of the room and around his daughter’s neck.

  People expected the dybbuk to resist and fight the amulets, as evil spirits do when touched by a sacred object. But Beyle Tslove was silent while the amulets were hung around Liebe Yentl’s neck. Then she asked, “What’s this? Sacred toilet paper?”

  “These are Holy Names from the Radzymin rabbi!” Reb Sheftel cried out. “If you do not leave my daughter at once, not a spur shall be left of you!”

  “Tell the Radzymin rabbi that I spit at his amulets,” the woman said brazenly.

  “Harlot! Fiend! Harridan!” Reb Sheftel screamed.

  “What’s he bellowing for, that Short Friday? Some man—nothing but bone and beard!”

  Reb Sheftel had brought with him blessed six-groschen coins, a piece of charmed amber, and several other magical objects that the Evil Host is known to shun. But Beyle Tslove, it seemed, was afraid of nothing. She mocked Reb Sheftel and told him she would come at night and tie an elflock in his beard.

  That night Reb Sheftel recited the Shema of the Holy Isaac Luria. He slept in his fringed garment with The Book of Creation and a knife under his pillow—like a woman in childbirth. But in the middle of the night he woke and felt invisible fingers on his face. An unseen hand was burrowing in his beard. Reb Sheftel wanted to scream, but the hand covered his mouth. In the morning Reb Sheftel got up with his whole beard full of tangled braids, gummy as if stuck together with glue.

  Although it was a fearful matter, the Worka Hasidim, who were bitter opponents of the Radzymin rabbi, celebrated that day with honey cake and brandy in their study house. Now they had proof that the Radzymin rabbi did not know the Cabala. The followers of the Worka rabbi had advised Reb Sheftel to make a journey to Worka, but he ignored them, and now they had their revenge.

  IV

  One evening, as Beyle Tslove was boasting of her former beauty and of all the men who had run after her, the fiddler of Pinchev suddenly raised his voice. “What were they so steamed up about?” he asked her mockingly. “Were you the only female in Plock?”

  For a while all was quiet. It looked as though Beyle Tslove had lost her tongue. Then she gave a hoarse laugh. “So he’s here—the scraper! Where were you hiding? In the gall?”

  “If you’re blind, I can be dumb. Go on, Grandma, keep jabbering. Your story had a gray beard when I was still in my diapers. In your place, I’d take such tall tales to the fools of Chelm. In Shidlovtse there are two or three clever men, too.”

  “A wise guy, eh?” Beyle Tslove said. “Let me tell you something. A live fiddle-scraper’s no prize—and when it comes to a dead one! Go back, if you forgive me, to your resting place. They miss you in the Pinchev cemetery. The corpses who pray at night need another skeleton to make up their quorum.”

  The people who heard the two dybbuks quarrel were so stunned that they forgot to laugh. Now a man’s voice came from Liebe Yentl, now a woman’s. The Pinchev fiddler’s “r”s were soft, the Plock harlot’s hard.

  Liebe Yentl herself rested against two pillows, her face pale, her hair down, her eyes closed. No one rightly saw her move her lips, though the room was full of people watching. Zise Feige was unable to keep them out, and there was no one to help her. Reb Sheftel no longer came home at night; he slept in the study house. Dunya the servant girl had left her job in the middle of the year. Zalkind, Zise Feige’s assistant, went home in the evenings to his wife and children. People wandered in and out of the house as if it did not belong to anyone. Whenever one of the respectable members of the community came to upbraid the merry gang for ridiculing a stricken girl, the two dybbuks hurled curses and insults at him. The dybbuks gave the townspeople new nicknames: Reitse the busybody, Mindl glutton, Yekl tough, Dvoshe the strumpet. On several occasions, Gentiles and members of the local gentry ca
me to see the wonder, and the dybbuks bantered with them in Polish. A landowner said in a tavern afterwards that the best theater in Warsaw could not compete with the scenes played out by the two dead rascals in Shidlovtse.

  After a while, Reb Sheftel, who had been unbending in his loyalty to the Radzymin rabbi, gave in and went to see the rabbi of Worka; perhaps he might help.

  The two dybbuks, meanwhile, were carrying on their word duel. It is generally thought that women will get the better of men where the tongue is concerned, but the Pinchev fiddler was a match for the Plock whore. The fiddler cried repeatedly that it was beneath his dignity to wrangle with a harlot—a maid with a certificate of rape—but the hoodlums egged him on. “Answer her! Don’t let her have the last word!” They whistled, hooted, clapped their hands, stamped their feet.

  The battle of wits gradually turned into storytelling. Beyle Tslove related that her mother, a pious and virtuous woman, had borne her husband, a Hasid and a loafer, eight children, all of them girls. When Beyle Tslove made her appearance in the world, her father was so chagrined that he left home. By trickery, he collected the signatures of a hundred rabbis, permitting him to remarry, and her mother became an abandoned wife. To support the family, she went to market every morning to sell hot beans to the yeshiva students. A wicked tutor, with a goat’s beard and sidelocks down to his shoulders, came to teach Beyle Tslove to pray, but he raped her. She was not yet eight years old. When Beyle Tslove went on to tell how she had become a barmaid, how the peasants had pinched and cursed her and pulled her hair, and how a bawd, pretending to be a pious woman, had lured her to a distant city and brought her into a brothel, the girls who were listening burst into tears. The young men, too, dabbed their eyes.

  Getsl the fiddler questioned her. Who were the guests? How much did they pay? How much did she have to give the procurers and what was left for her to live on? Had she ever gone to bed with a Turk or a blackamoor?

  Beyle Tslove answered all the questions. The young rakes had tormented her in their ways, and the old lechers had wearied her with their demands. The bawd took away her last groschen and locked the bread in the cupboard. The pimp whipped her with a wet strap and stuck needles into her buttocks. From fasting and homesickness she contracted consumption and ended by spitting out her lungs at the poorhouse. And because she had been buried behind the fence, without Kaddish, she was immediately seized by multitudes of demons, imps, mockers, and Babuks. The Angel Dumah asked her the verse that went with her name, and when she could not answer he split her grave with a fiery rod. She begged to be allowed into hell, for there the punishment lasts only twelve months, but the Unholy Ones dragged her off to waste places and deserts. She said that in the desert she had come upon a pit that was the door to Gehenna. Day and night, the screams of sinners who were being punished there came from the pit. She was carried to the Congealed Sea, where sailing ships, wrecked by storms, were held immobile, with dead crews and captains turned to stone. Beyle Tslove had also flown to a land inhabited by giants with two heads and single eyes in their foreheads. Few females were born there, and every woman had six husbands.

  Getsl the fiddler also began to talk about the events of his life. He told of incidents at the weddings and balls of the gentry where he had played, and of what happened later, in the hereafter. He said that evildoers did not repent, even in the Nether Regions. Although they had already learned the truth of things, their souls still pursued their lusts. Gamblers played with invisible cards, thieves stole, swindlers swindled, and fornicators indulged in their abominations.

  The townsfolk who heard the two were amazed, and Zeinvl the butcher asked, “How can anyone sin when he is rotting in the earth?”

  Getsl explained that it was, anyway, the soul and not the body that enjoyed sin. This was why the soul was punished. Besides, there were bodies of all kinds—of smoke, of spiderwebs, of shadow—and they could be used for a while, until the Angels of Destruction tore them to pieces. There were castles, inns, and ruins in the deserts and abysses, which provided hiding places from Judgment, and also Avenging Angels who could be bribed with promises or even with the kind of money that has no substance but is used in the taverns and brothels of the Nether World.

  When one of the idlers cried out that this was unbelievable, Getsl called on Beyle Tslove to attest to the truth of his words. “Tell us, Beyle Tslove, what did you really do all these years? Did you recite psalms, or did you wander through swamps and wastes, consorting with demons, Zmoras, and Malachais?”

  Instead of replying, Beyle Tslove giggled and coughed. “I can’t speak—my mouth’s dry.”

  “Yes, let’s have a drop,” Getsl chimed in, and when somebody brought over a tumbler of brandy, Liebe Yentl downed it like water. She did not open her eyes or even wince. It was clear to everybody that she was entirely in the sway of the dybbuks within her.

  When Zeinvl the butcher realized that the two dybbuks had made peace, he asked, “Why don’t you two become man and wife? You’d make a good pair.”

  “And what are we to do after the wedding?” Beyle Tslove answered. “Pray from the same prayer book?”

  “You’ll do what all married couples do.”

  “With what? We’re past all doing. Anyway, there’s no time—we won’t be staying here much longer.”

  “Why not? Liebe Yentl is still young.”

  “The Worka rabbi is not the Radzymin schlemiel,” Beyle Tslove said. “Asmodeus himself is afraid of his talismans.”

  “The Worka rabbi can kiss me you know where,” Getsl boasted. “But I’m not about to become a bridegroom.”

  “The match isn’t good enough for you?” Beyle Tslove cried. “If you knew who wanted to marry me, you’d croak a second time.”

  “If she’s cursing me now, what can I expect later?” Getsl joked. “Besides, she’s old enough to be my great-grandmother—seventy years older than I am, anyway you figure it.”

  “Numskull. I was twenty-seven years old when I kicked in, and I can’t get any older. And how old are you, bottle-bum? Close to sixty, if you’re a day.”

  “May you get as many carbuncles on your bloated flesh as the years I was short of fifty.”

  “Just give me the flesh, I won’t argue over the carbuncles.”

  The two kept up their wrangling and the crowd kept up its urging until finally the dybbuks consented. Those who have not heard the dead bride and groom haggle about the dowry, the trousseau, the presents, will never know what unholy spirits are capable of.

  Beyle Tslove said that she had long since paid for all her transgressions and was therefore as pure as a virgin. “Is there such a thing as a virgin, anyway?” she argued. “Every soul has lodged countless times both in men and in women. There are no more new souls in Heaven. A soul is cleansed in a caldron, like dishes before Passover. It is purified and sent back to earth. Yesterday’s beggar is today’s magnate. A rabbi’s wife becomes a coachman. A horse thief returns as a community elder. A slaughterer comes back as an ox. So what’s all the fuss about? Everything is kneaded of the same dough—cat and mouse, bear hunter and bear, old man and infant.” Beyle Tslove herself had in previous incarnations been a grain merchant, a dairymaid, a rabbi’s wife, a teacher of the Talmud.

  “Do you remember any Talmud?” Getsl asked.

  “If the Angel of Forgetfulness had not tweaked me on the nose, I would surely remember.”

  “What do you say to my bride?” Getsl bantered. “A whittled tongue. She could convince a stone. If my wife in Pinchev knew what I was exchanging her for, she’d drown herself in a bucket of slops.”

  “Your wife filled her bed before you were cold …”

  The strange news spread throughout the town: tomorrow there would be a wedding at Reb Sheftel’s house; Getsl the fiddler and Beyle Tslove would become man and wife.

  V

  When the rabbi heard of the goings on, he issued a proscription forbidding anyone to attend the black wedding. He sent Bendit the beadle to stand guard at th
e door of Reb Sheftel’s house and allow no one to enter. That night, however, there was a heavy snowfall, and by morning it turned bitterly cold. The wind had blown up great drifts and whistled in all the chimneys. Bendit was shrouded in white from head to foot and looked like a snowman made by children. His wife came after him and took him home, half frozen. As soon as dusk began to fall, the rabble gathered at Reb Sheftel’s house. Some brought bottles of vodka or brandy; others, dried mutton and honey cake.

  As usual, Liebe Yentl had slept all day and did not waken even when the ailing Zise Feige poured a few spoonfuls of broth into her mouth. But once darkness came, the girl sat up. There was such a crush in the house that people could not move.

  Zeinvl the butcher took charge. “Bride, did you fast on your wedding day?”

  “The way the dead eat, that’s how they look,” Beyle Tslove replied with a proverb.

  “And you, bridegroom, are you ready?”

  “Let her first deliver the dowry.”

  “You can take all I have—a pinch of dust, a moldy crust …”

  Getsl proved that evening that he was not only an expert musician but could also serve as rabbi, cantor, and wedding jester. First he played a sad tune and recited “God Is Full of Mercy” for the bride and groom. Then he played a merry tune, accompanying it with appropriate jests. He admonished the bride to be a faithful wife, to dress and adorn herself, and to take good care of her household. He warned the couple to be mindful of the day of death, and sang to them:

  Weep, bride, weep and moan,

  Dead men fear to be alone.

  In the Sling, beneath the tide,

  A groom is waiting for his bride.

  Corpse and corpse, wraith and wraith,

  Every demon seeks a mate.

  Angel Dumah, devil, Shed,