The Collected Stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer

by Isaac Bashevis Singer

  “When I arrived at our meeting place, it was already night. The street had trees on both sides and few lamps. I could see her in the half darkness. She seemed leaner, and her hair was combed up in a bun. She stood near a tree, wrapped in shadow. Except for her, the street was deserted. She started when I approached her. The trees were blooming and the gutter was full of blossoms. I said to her, ‘Here I am. Where can we go?’ ‘What I want to tell me?’ I asked. She hesitated. ‘I want to ask you to leave me in peace.’

  “I was startled, and said, ‘I don’t know what you mean.’ ‘You know very well,’ she said. ‘You don’t leave me in peace. I have a husband and I am happy with him. I want to be a faithful wife.’ It wasn’t talking but stammering. She paused after each word. She said, ‘It wasn’t easy to learn who you were and your telephone number. I had to invent a story about a broken chest to get the information from my aunt. I am not a liar; my aunt did not believe me. Still, she gave me your name and address.’ Then she became silent.

  “I asked, ‘Why can’t we go somewhere to talk it over?’ ‘I can’t go anywhere. I could have told you this on the telephone—it is all so strange, absolutely insane—but now you know the truth.’ ‘I really don’t know what’s on your mind,’ I said, just to prolong the conversation. She said, ‘I beseech you, by whatever is holy to you, to stop tormenting me. What you want I cannot do—I’d rather die.’ And her face became as pale as chalk.

  “I still played the fool and said, ‘I want nothing from you. It is true that when I saw you in your aunt’s drawing room you made a strong impression on me—but I haven’t done anything that should upset you.’ ‘Yes, you have. If we weren’t living in the twentieth century, I would think you were a sorcerer. Believe me,’ she went on, ‘I didn’t come easily to the decision to call you. I was even afraid that you might not know who I was—but you knew immediately.’

  “ ‘We cannot stand here on the street and talk,’ I said. ‘We have to go somewhere.’ ‘Where? If someone who knows me should see me, I am lost.’ I said, ‘Come with me.’ She hesitated for a while, and then she followed me. She seemed to have difficulty walking on her high heels and she took my arm. I noticed, even though she was wearing gloves, that she had most beautiful hands. Her hand fluttered on my arm, and each time a shudder ran through my body. After a while the young woman became more relaxed with me, and she said, ‘What kind of powers do you possess? I have heard your voice several times. I have seen you, too. I woke up in the middle of the night and you were standing at the foot of my bed. Instead of eyes, two green beams shone from your sockets. I woke my husband, but in a second you vanished.’

  “ ‘It’s a hallucination,’ I said. ‘No, you wander in the night.’ ‘If I do, it’s without knowing it.’

  “We approached the shore of the Vistula and sat down on a log. It’s quiet there. It’s not completely safe because it’s full of drunks and bums. But she sat with me. She said, ‘My aunt will not know what has become of me. I told her that I was going for a walk. She even offered to accompany me. Give me a holy promise that you will let me go. Perhaps you have a wife and you wouldn’t want anybody to molest her.’

  “ ‘I have no wife,’ I said, ‘but I promise you that, as far as it depends on me, I will not molest you. That’s all I can promise.’

  “ ‘I will be grateful to you until my last breath.’

  “That is the story. I never saw the woman again. I don’t even know her name. I don’t know why, but of all the strange things that have happened to me this made the strongest impression. Well, that’s all. I won’t disturb you any more.”

  “You don’t disturb me,” I said. “It’s good to meet a person with such powers. It strengthens my own faith. But how did it happen that Manya had the grippe when you left Warsaw? Why didn’t you order her to get well?”

  “What? I ask myself this question constantly. It seems that my power is only negative. To heal the sick, one must be a saint and, as you see, I am far from being a saint. Or it may be—who knows—that to have a woman along in those days was dangerous.”

  The stranger hung his head. He began to drum on the table with his fingers and to hum to himself. Then he got up. It seemed to me that his face had changed; it had become gray and wrinkled. Suddenly he looked his age. He even appeared less tall than before. I noticed that his raincoat was full of spots. He gave me his hand to say goodbye, and I accompanied him to the elevator.

  “Do you still think about women?” I asked.

  He thought it over as though he hadn’t grasped my words. He looked at me sadly, with suspicion. “Only about dead women.”

  Translated by the author and Dorothea Straus

  Something Is There

  I

  As a rule, Rabbi Nechemia from Bechev knew the cunning of the Evil One and how to subdue him, but the last few months he had been plagued by something new and terrifying: wrath against the Creator. A part of the rabbi’s brain quarreled with the Lord of the Universe, rebelliously arguing: Yes, you are great, eternal, all mighty, wise, even full of mercy. But with whom do you play hide-and-seek—with flies? What help is your greatness to the fly when it falls into the net of the spider that sucks out its life? Of what avail are all your attributes to the mouse when the cat clamps it in its claws? Rewards in Paradise? The beasts have no use for them. You, Father in heaven, have the time to wait for the End of Days, but they can’t wait. When you cause a fire in Feitl the water carrier’s hut and he has to sleep with his family in the poorhouse on a cold winter’s night, that is an injustice beyond repair. The dimming of your light, free choice, redemption, may serve to explain you, but Feitl the water carrier needs to rest after a day’s toil, not to toss about on a bed of rotten straw.

  The rabbi knew well that Satan was talking to him. He tried every means to silence him. He submerged himself in the icy water of the ritual bath, fasted, and studied the Torah until his eyes closed from weariness. But the Devil refused to be thwarted. His insolence grew. He screamed from morning till night. Lately, he had begun to defile the rabbi’s dreams. The rabbi dreamed of Jews being burned at the stake, of yeshiva boys led to the gallows, of violated virgins, tortured infants. He was shown the cruelties of Chmielnitzki’s and Gonta’s soldiers and those of the savages who consume the limbs of animals before the beasts expire. Cossacks impaled children with their spears and buried them still alive. A Haydamak with a long mustache and murderous eyes ripped open a woman’s belly and sewed a cat inside. In his dream, the rabbi waved his fists toward heaven and shouted, “Is all this for your glory, Heavenly Killer?”

  The whole court at Bechev was on the verge of collapse. The old rabbi, Reb Eliezer Tzvi, Rabbi Nechemia’s father, had died three years before. He had suffered from cancer of the stomach. Rabbi Nechemia’s mother had developed the same disease in her breast. Besides the rabbi, one daughter and a son remained. The rabbi’s younger brother, Simcha David, became an “enlightened one” while his parents were alive. He left the court and his wife, the daughter of the Zhilkovka rabbi, and went to Warsaw to study painting. The rabbi’s sister, Hinde Shevach, had married the son of the Neustater rabbi, Chaim Mattos, who immediately after the marriage sank into melancholia and returned to his parents. Hinde Shevach became an abandoned wife. Since he was considered insane, Chaim Mattos was not permitted to go through divorce proceedings. Rabbi Nechemia’s own wife, a descendant of the rabbi of Kotzk, had died together with her infant at childbirth. The matchmakers proposed various mates for the rabbi, but he gave them all the same answer: “I will think it over.”

  Actually, no appropriate match was offered. Most of the Bechev Hasidim had deserted Reb Nechemia. In the rabbinical courts, the same laws prevailed as among the fish in the sea: the big ones devoured the little ones. The first to leave were the rich. What could keep them in Bechev? The study house was half ruined. The roof of the ritual bath had caved in. Weeds grew everywhere. Reb Nechemia was left with a single beadle—Reb Sander. The rabbi’s house had many rooms, wh
ich were seldom cleaned, and a layer of dust covered everything. The wallpaper was peeling. Windowpanes were broken and not replaced. The entire building had settled in such a way that the floors all slanted. Beila Elke, the maid, suffered from rheumatism; her joints became knotted. Reb Nechemia’s sister, Hinde Shevach, had no patience for housework. She sat on the couch all day long reading books. When the rabbi lost a button from his coat, there was no one to sew it on.

  The rabbi was barely twenty-seven years old, but he appeared older. His tall figure was stooped. He had a yellow beard, yellow eyebrows, yellow sidelocks. He was nearly bald. He had a high forehead, blue eyes, a narrow nose, a long neck with a protruding Adam’s apple. He had a consumptive pallor. In his study, Reb Nechemia, wearing a faded housecoat, a wrinkled skullcap, and shoddy slippers, paced back and forth. On the table lay a long pipe and a bag of tobacco. The rabbi would light it, take one puff, and put it down. He would pick up a book, open it, and close it without reading. He even ate impatiently. He bit off a piece of bread and chewed it while walking. He took a sip of his coffee and continued to pace. It was summer, between Pentecost and the Days of Awe, when no Hasidim go forth on pilgrimages, and during the long summer days the rabbi had time enough to brood. All problems blended into one—why the suffering? There was no answer to be found to this question, neither in the Pentateuch, in the books of the Prophets, in the Talmud, in the Zohar, nor in The Tree of Life. If the Lord is omnipotent, He could reveal Himself without the aid of the Evil Host. If He is not omnipotent, then He is not really God. The only solution to the riddle was that of the heretics: There is neither a judge nor a judgment. All creation is a blind accident—an inkwell fell on a sheet of paper and the ink wrote a letter by itself, each word a lie, the sentences chaos. In that case, why does he, Rabbi Nechemia, make a fool of himself? What kind of a rabbi is he? To whom does he pray? To whom does he complain? On the other hand, how can spilled ink compose even a single line? And from where does the ink and the sheet of paper come? Nu, and from where does God come?

  Rabbi Nechemia stood at the open window. Outside, there was a pale blue sky; around a golden-yellow sun, little clouds curled like the flax that is used to protect the ethrog in its case. On the naked branch of a desiccated tree stood a bird. A swallow? A sparrow? Its mother was also a bird, and so, too, its grandmother—generation after generation, thousands of years. If Aristotle was right that the universe always existed, then the chain of generations had no beginning. But how could that be?

  The rabbi grimaced as if in pain. He formed a fist. “You want to conceal your face?” He spoke to God. “So be it. You conceal your face and I will conceal mine. Enough is enough.” He decided to put into action what he had contemplated for a long time.

  II

  That Friday night the rabbi slept little. He napped and awoke intermittently. Each time he fell asleep, horrors seized him anew. Blood flowed. Corpses lay strewn in the gutters. Women ran through flames, with singed hair and charred breasts. Bells clanged. A stampede of beasts with ram’s horns, pig’s snouts, with skins of hedgehogs and pussy udders emerged from burning forests. A cry rose from the earth—a lament of men, women, serpents, demons. In the confusion of his dream, the rabbi imagined that Simchas Torah and Purim had fallen on the same day. Had the calendar been altered, the rabbi wondered, or had the Evil One taken dominion? At dawn an old man with a crooked beard, wearing a torn robe, ranted at him and shook his fists. The rabbi tried to blow the ram’s horn to excommunicate him, but instead of a blast the sound was a wheeze that might have come from a deflated lung.

  The rabbi trembled and his bed shook. His pillow was wet and twisted, as if it had just been wrung out from the washtub. The rabbi’s eyes were half glued together. “Abominations,” the rabbi muttered. “Scum of the brain.” For the first time since he could remember, the rabbi did not perform the ablutions. “The power of evil? Let’s see what evil can do! The sacred can only stay mute.” He walked over to the window. The rising sun rolled among the clouds like a severed head. At a pile of garbage, the community he-goat was trying to chew last year’s palm leaves. “You are still alive?” the rabbi addressed him. And he remembered the ram whose horns were caught in the thicket which Abraham had sacrificed instead of Isaac. He always had a need of burnt offerings, the rabbi thought of God. His creatures’ blood was a sweet savor to Him.

  “I will do it, I will do it,” the rabbi said aloud.

  In Bechev they prayed late. On the summer Sabbaths there was barely a quorum, even counting the few old men who were supported by the court. The night before, the rabbi had resolved not to put on his fringed garment, but he did so anyway out of habit. He had planned to go bareheaded, but reluctantly he placed the skullcap on his head. One sin at a time is enough, he decided. He sat down on his chair and dozed. After a while, he started and got up. Until yesterday the Good Spirit had attempted to reprimand the rabbi and to threaten him with Gehenna or a demeaning transmigration of the soul. But now the voice from Mount Horeb was stifled. All fears had vanished. Only anger remained. “If He does not need the Jews, the Jews don’t need Him.” The rabbi spoke no longer directly to the Almighty but to some other deity—perhaps to one of those mentioned in the Eighty-second Psalm: “God standeth in the Congregation of the mighty, He judgeth among the Gods.” Now the rabbi agreed with every kind of heresy—with those who deny Him entirely and with those who believe in two dominions; with the idolators who serve the stars and the constellations and those who uphold the Trinity; with the Karaaites, who renounced the Talmud; with the Samaritans, who forsook Mount Sinai for Mount Gerizim. Yes, I have known the Lord and I intend to spite Him, the rabbi said. Many matters suddenly became clear: the primeval snake, Cain, the Generation of the Flood, the Sodomites, Ishmael, Esau, Korach, and Jeroboam, the son of Nebat. To a silent torturer one does not speak, and to a persecutor one does not pray.

  The rabbi hoped that somehow at the last moment a miracle would occur—God would reveal Himself or some power would restrain him. But nothing happened. He opened the drawer and took out his pipe, an object forbidden to the touch on the Sabbath. He filled it with tobacco. Before striking the match, the rabbi hesitated. He admonished himself, “Nechemia, son of Eliezer Tzvi, this is one of the thirty-nine tasks prohibited on the Sabbath! For this, one is stoned.” He looked around. No wings fluttered; no voice called. He withdrew a match and lit the pipe. His brain rattled in his skull like a kernel in the nutshell. He was plummeting into the abyss.

  Usually the rabbi enjoyed smoking, but now the smoke tasted acrid. It scratched his throat. Someone might knock at the door! He poured a few drops of ablution water into the pipe—another major violation, to extinguish a fire. He had a desire for further transgression, but what? He wanted to spit on the mezuzah but refrained. For a while, the rabbi listened to the turmoil within him. Then he went out into the corridor and passed along to Hinde Shevach’s room. He pulled at the latch and tried to open the door.

  “Who is there?” Hinde Shevach called out.

  “It is I.”

  The rabbi heard her rustling, murmuring. Then she opened the door. She must just have awakened. She wore a house robe with arabesques, slippers, and on her shaven head a silk kerchief. Nechemia was tall, but Hinde Shevach was small. Though she was barely twenty-five years old, she looked older, with dark circles under her eyes and the grieved expression of an abandoned wife. The rabbi rarely came to her room, never so early and on the Sabbath.

  She asked, “Has something happened?”

  The rabbi’s eyes filled with laughter. “The Messiah has come. The moon fell down.”

  “What kind of talk is that?”

  “Hinde Shevach, everything is finished,” the rabbi said, astounded by his own words.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m not a rabbi any more. There is no more court unless you want to take over and become the second Virgin of Ludmir.”

  Hinde Shevach’s yellowish eyes measured him crookedly. “What happened
?”

  “I’ve had my fill.”

  “What will become of the court, of me?”

  “Sell everything, divorce your schlemiel, or leave for America.”

  Hinde Shevach stood still. “Sit down, you frighten me.”

  “I’m tired of all these lies,” the rabbi said. “The whole nonsense. I’m not a rabbi and they’re not Hasidim. I’m leaving for Warsaw.”

  “What will you do in Warsaw? Do you want to follow in Simcha David’s path?”

  “Yes, his path.”

  Hinde Shevach’s pale lips trembled. She looked for a handkerchief among her clothes on a chair. She held it to her mouth. “What about me?” she asked.

  “You are still young. You’re not a cripple,” the rabbi said, baffled by his own words. “The whole world is open to you.”

  “Open? Chaim Mattos is not allowed to divorce me.”

  “He’s allowed, allowed.”

  The rabbi wanted to say, “You can do without divorce,” but he was afraid that Hinde Shevach might faint. He felt a surge of defiance, the courage and the relief of one who had rid himself of all yokes. For the first time he grasped what it meant to be a nonbeliever. He said, “The Hasidic institution is sheer mendicancy. Nobody needs us. The whole business is a swindle and a falsehood.”

  III

  It all passed smoothly. Hinde Shevach locked herself in her room, apparently crying. Sander the beadle got drunk after Havdalah, the ushering out of the Sabbath, and went to sleep. The old men sat in the study house. One recited the Valedictory Prayers, another read The Beginning of Wisdom, a third cleaned his pipe with a wire, a fourth patched a sacred book. A few candles flickered. The rabbi gave a final look at the study house. “A ruin,” he murmured. He had packed his satchel himself. Since his wife’s death, he had grown accustomed to fetching his own linen from the chest where the maid placed it. He took out several shirts, some underwear, and long white stockings. He didn’t even pack his prayer shawl and phylacteries. What for?