The Collected Stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer

by Isaac Bashevis Singer

  “What? Where?”

  “Come.”

  “What will happen to the corpse?”

  “Come, come.”

  Somewhere the janitor found Reb Mordecai Meir’s coat. Reb Mordecai Meir wanted to ask the one in charge why he was being arrested, but he could speak neither Polish nor Russian. Anyway, what good would it do to ask? The civilian took him by one arm, a policeman by the other, and they led him down the dark staircase. The janitor lit matches. He opened the gate. A small carriage with barred windows was waiting outside. They helped Reb Mordecai Meir get in and sat him down on a bench. One of the policemen sat next to him. Slowly the carriage began to move.

  “Well, let me imagine that it is my funeral,” Reb Mordecai Meir said to himself. “No one will say Kaddish for me anyhow.”

  A strange calm came over him and the complete surrender that accompanies misfortune so great that one knows nothing worse can occur. Before, when they had brought Fulie’s body, he had rebelled in his thought, but now he regretted his resentment. “Father in Heaven, forgive me.” There came to his mind the saying from the Talmud: “No one is subject to penalty for words uttered in agony.”

  “What time is it?” he wondered. Suddenly he remembered that he had not taken his prayer shawl and phylacteries. Well, it was too late even for that. Reb Mordecai Meir started to confess his sins. “We have transgressed, we have betrayed, we have cheated, we have deceived …” He raised his hand and tried to make a fist to beat his breast, but his fingers were rigid. Well, he has probably already atoned for his mistakes, Reb Mordecai Meir was thinking about Fulie. His intentions were good. He wanted to help the poor. He pitied the hungry. Perhaps that was his salvation. In Heaven everything is judged according to intention. Maybe his soul is already cleansed.

  It was not customary to say Kaddish without a quorum or for someone who had not yet been buried, but Reb Mordecai Meir knew that he had little time left. He mumbled the Kaddish. Then he recited a chapter from the Mishnah which he knew from memory. “At what time is it permissible to recite the Shema in the evening? From the time that the priests enter the Temple to eat their food offerings. So sayeth Rabbi Eliezer. And the sages say: Until midnight.”

  “Hey, you, Jew, old dog, who are you talking to, your God?” the policeman asked. Somehow Reb Mordecai Meir understood these few words. What does he know? How can he understand? Reb Mordecai Meir defended him in his thoughts. Since no evil can come from God, those created in His image can’t be completely wicked. He said to the policeman, “Yes, I am Jew. I pray God.”

  Those were all the Gentile words Reb Mordecai Meir knew.

  Translated by Evelyn Torton Beck and Ruth Schachner Finkel

  Old Love

  HARRY BENDINER awoke at five with the feeling that as far as he was concerned the night was finished and he wouldn’t get any more sleep. Actually, he woke up a dozen times every night. He had undergone an operation for his prostate years before, but this hadn’t relieved the constant pressure on his bladder. He would sleep an hour or less, then wake up with the need to void. Even his dreams centered around this urge. He got out of bed and padded to the bathroom on shaky legs. On the way back he stepped out onto the balcony of his eleventh-story condominium. To the left he could see the skyscrapers of Miami, to the right the rumbling sea. The air had turned a bit cooler during the night, but it was still tropically tepid. It smelled of dead fish, oil, and perhaps of oranges as well. Harry stood there for a long while enjoying the breeze from the ocean on his moist forehead. Even though Miami Beach had become a big city, he imagined that he could feel the nearness of the Everglades, the smells and vapors of its vegetation and swamps. Sometimes a seagull would awake in the night, screeching. It happened that the waves threw onto the beach the carcass of a barracuda or even that of a baby whale. Harry Bendiner looked off in the direction of Hollywood. How long was it since the whole area had been undeveloped? Within a few years a wasteland had been transformed into a settlement crowded with hotels, condominiums, restaurants, supermarkets, and banks. The street lights and neon signs dimmed the stars in the sky. Cars raced along even in the middle of the night. Where were all these people hurrying to before dawn? Didn’t they ever sleep? What kind of force drove them on? “Well, it’s no longer my world. Once you pass eighty, you’re as good as a corpse.”

  He leaned his hand on the railing and tried to reconstruct the dream he had been having. He recalled only that all those who had appeared in the dream were now dead—the men and the women both. Dreams obviously didn’t acknowledge death. In his dreams, his three wives were still alive, and so was his son, Bill, and his daughter, Sylvia. New York, his hometown in Poland, and Miami Beach merged into one. He, Harry or Hershel, was both an adult and a cheder boy.

  He closed his eyes for a moment. Why was it impossible to remember dreams? He could recall every detail of events that had happened seventy and even seventy-five years ago, but tonight’s dreams dissolved like foam. Some force made sure that not a trace of them remained. A third of a person’s life died before he went to his grave.

  After a while Harry sat down on the plastic chaise that stood on the balcony. He looked toward the sea, to the east, where day would soon be dawning. There was a time when he went swimming the first thing in the morning, particularly during the summer months, but he no longer had the desire to do such things. The newspapers occasionally printed accounts of sharks attacking swimmers, and there were other sea creatures whose bites caused serious complications. For him it now sufficed to take a warm bath.

  His thoughts turned to matters of business. He knew full well that money couldn’t help him; still, one couldn’t constantly brood about the fact that everything was vanity of vanities. It was easier to think about practical matters. Stocks and bonds rose or fell. Dividends and other earnings had to be deposited in the bank and marked down in an account book for tax purposes. Telephone and electric bills and the maintenance of the apartment had to be paid. One day a week a woman came to do his cleaning and press his shirts and underwear. Occasionally he had to have a suit dry-cleaned and shoes repaired. He received letters that he had to answer. He wasn’t involved with a synagogue all year, but on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur he had to have a place to worship, and because of this he received appeals to help Israel, yeshivas, Talmud Torahs, old-age homes, and hospitals. Each day he got a pile of “junk mail,” and before he discarded it, he had to open and glance at it, at least.

  Since he had resolved to live out his years without a wife or even a housekeeper, he had to arrange for his meals, and every other day he went shopping at the local supermarket. Pushing his cart through the aisles, he selected such items as milk, cottage cheese, fruit, canned vegetables, chopped meat, occasionally some mushrooms, a jar of borscht or gefilte fish. He certainly could have permitted himself the luxury of a maid, but some of the maids were thieves. And what would he do with himself if other people waited on him? He remembered a saying from the Gemara that slothfulness led to madness. Fussing over the electric stove in the kitchen, going to the bank, reading the newspaper—particularly the financial section—and spending an hour or two at the office of Merrill Lynch watching the quotations from the New York Exchange flash by on the board lifted his spirits. Recently he had had a television set installed, but he rarely watched it.

  His neighbors in the condominium often inquired maliciously why he did things himself that others could do for him. It was known that he was rich. They offered him advice and asked him questions: Why didn’t he settle in Israel? Why didn’t he go to a hotel in the mountains during the summer? Why didn’t he get married? Why didn’t he hire a secretary? He had acquired the reputation of a miser. They constantly reminded him that “you can’t take it with you”—as if this were some startling revelation. For this reason he stopped attending the tenants’ meetings and their parties. Everyone tried in one way or another to get something out of him, but no one would have given him a penny if he needed it. A few years ago, he boarded a b
us from Miami Beach to Miami and found he was two cents short of the fare. All he had with him was twenty-dollar bills. No one volunteered either to give him the two cents or to change one of his bank notes, and the driver made him get off.

  The truth was, in no hotel could he feel as comfortable as he did in his own home. The meals served in hotels were too plentiful for him and not of the kind that he needed. He alone could see to it that his diet excluded salt, cholesterol, spices. Besides, plane and train rides were too taxing for a man of his delicate health. Nor did it make any sense to remarry at his age. Younger women demanded sex, and he hadn’t the slightest interest in an old woman. Being what he was, he was condemned to live alone and to die alone.

  A reddish glow had begun to tinge the eastern sky, and Harry went to the bathroom. He stood for a moment studying his image in the mirror—sunken cheeks, a bare skull with a few tufts of white hair, a pointed Adam’s apple, a nose whose tip turned down like a parrot’s beak. The pale-blue eyes were set somewhat off-center, one higher than the other, and expressed both weariness and traces of youthful ardor. He had once been a virile man. He had had wives and love affairs. He had a stack of love letters and photographs lying about somewhere.

  Harry Bendiner hadn’t come to America penniless and uneducated like the other immigrants. He had attended the study house in his hometown until the age of nineteen; he knew Hebrew and had secretly read newspapers and worldly books. He had taken lessons in Russian, Polish, and even German. Here in America he had attended Cooper Union for two years in the hope of becoming an engineer, but he had fallen in love with an American girl, Rosalie Stein, and married her, and her father, Sam Stein, had taken him into the construction business. Rosalie died of cancer at the age of thirty, leaving him with two small children. Even as the money came in to him so did death take from him. His son, Bill, a surgeon, died at forty-six, of a heart attack, leaving two children, neither of whom wanted to be Jewish. Their mother, a Christian, lived somewhere in Canada with another man. Harry’s daughter, Sylvia, got the very same type of cancer as her mother, and at exactly the same age. Sylvia left no children. Harry refused to sire any more generations, even though his second wife, Edna, pleaded that he have a child or two with her.

  Yes, the Angel of Death had taken everything from him. At first his grandchildren had called him occasionally from Canada and sent him a card for the New Year. But now he never heard from them, and he had cut them out of his will.

  Harry shaved and hummed a melody—where it had come from he didn’t know. Was it something he had heard on television, or a tune from Poland revived in his memory? He had no ear for music and sang everything off-key, but he had retained the habit of singing in the bathroom. His toilet took a long time. For years the pills he took to relieve constipation had had no effect, and every other day he gave himself an enema—a long and arduous process for a man in his eighties. He tried to do calisthenics in the bathtub, raising his skinny legs and splashing his hands in the water as if they were paddles. These were all measures to lengthen life, but even as Harry performed them he asked himself, “Why go on living?” What flavor did his existence possess? No, his life made no sense whatsoever—but did that of his neighbors make more sense? The condominium was full of old people, all well off, many rich. Some of the men couldn’t walk, or dragged their feet; some of the women leaned on crutches. A number suffered from arthritis and Parkinson’s disease. This wasn’t a building but a hospital. People died, and he didn’t find out about it until weeks or months afterward. Although he had been among the first tenants in the condominium, he seldom recognized anybody. He didn’t go to the pool and he didn’t play cards. Men and women greeted him in the elevator and at the supermarket, but he didn’t know who any of them were. From time to time someone asked him, “How are you, Mr. Bendiner?” And he usually replied, “How can you be at my age? Each day is a gift.”

  This summer day began like all the others. Harry prepared his breakfast in the kitchen—Rice Krispies with skimmed milk and Sanka sweetened with saccharin. At about nine-thirty he took the elevator down to get the mail. A day didn’t go by that he didn’t receive a number of checks, but this day brought a bounty. The stocks had fallen, but the companies kept paying the dividends as usual. Harry got money from buildings on which he held mortgages, from rents, bonds, and all kinds of business ventures that he barely remembered. An insurance company paid him an annuity. For years he had been getting a monthly check from Social Security. This morning’s yield came to over eleven thousand dollars. True, he would have to withhold a great part of this for taxes, but it still left him with some five thousand dollars for himself. While he totaled up the figures, he deliberated: Should he go to the office of Merrill Lynch and see what was happening on the Exchange? No, there was no point to it. Even if the stocks rose early in the morning, the day would end in losses. “The market is completely crazy,” he mumbled to himself. He had considered it an iron rule that inflation always went along with a bullish market, not with a bearish market. But now both the dollar and the stocks were collapsing. Well, you could never be sure about anything except death.

  Around eleven o’clock he went down to deposit the checks. The bank was a small one; all the employees knew him and said good morning. He had a safe-deposit box there, where he kept his valuables and jewelry. It so happened that all three of his wives had left him everything; none of them had made out a will. He didn’t know himself exactly how much he was worth, but it couldn’t be less than five million dollars. Still, he walked down the street in a shirt and trousers that any pauper could afford and a cap and shoes he had worn for years. He poked with his cane and took tiny steps. Once in a while he cast a glance backward. Maybe someone was following him. Maybe some crook had found out how rich he was and was scheming to kidnap him. Although the day was bright and the street full of people, no one would interfere if he was grabbed, forced into a car, and dragged off to some ruin or cave. No one would pay ransom for him.

  After he had concluded his business at the bank, he turned back toward home. The sun was high in the sky and poured down a blazing fire. Women stood in the shade of canopies looking at dresses, shoes, stockings, brassières, and bathing suits in the store windows. Their faces expressed indecision—to buy or not to buy? Harry glanced at the windows. What could he buy there? There wasn’t anything he could desire. From now until five, when he would prepare his dinner, he needed absolutely nothing. He knew precisely what he would do when he got home—take a nap on the sofa.

  Thank God, no one had kidnapped him, no one had held him up, no one had broken into his apartment. The air conditioner was working, and so was the plumbing in the bathroom. He took off his shoes and stretched out on the sofa.

  Strange, he still daydreamed; he fantasized about unexpected successes, restored powers, masculine adventures. The brain wouldn’t accept old age. It teemed with the same passions it had in his youth. Harry often said to his brain, “Don’t be stupid. It’s too late for everything. You have nothing to hope for any more.” But the brain was so constituted that it went on hoping nonetheless. Who was it who said, A man takes his hopes into the grave?

  He had dozed off and was awakened by a jangling at the door. He became alarmed. No one ever came to see him. “It must be the exterminator,” he decided. He opened the door the length of the chain and saw a small woman with reddish cheeks, yellow eyes, and a high pompadour of blond hair the color of straw. She wore a white blouse.

  Harry opened the door, and the woman said in a foreign-accented English, “I hope I haven’t wakened you. I’m your new neighbor on the left. I wanted to introduce myself to you. My name is Mrs. Ethel Brokeles. A funny name, eh? That was my late husband’s name. My maiden name is Goldman.”

  Harry gazed at her in astonishment. His neighbor on the left had been an old woman living alone. He remembered her name—Mrs. Halpert. He asked, “What happened to Mrs. Halpert?”

  “The same as happens to everybody,” the woman replied smu
gly.

  “When did it happen? I didn’t know anything about it.”

  “It’s more than five months already.”

  “Come in, come in. People die and you don’t even know,” Harry said. “She was a nice woman … kept herself at a distance.”

  “I didn’t know her. I bought the apartment from her daughter.”

  “Please have a seat. I don’t even have anything to offer you. I have a bottle of liqueur somewhere, but—”

  “I don’t need any refreshments and I don’t drink liqueur. Not in the middle of the day. May I smoke?”

  “Certainly, certainly.”

  The woman sat down on the sofa. She snapped a fancy lighter expertly and lit her cigarette. She wore red nail polish and Harry noticed a huge diamond on one of her fingers.

  The woman asked, “You live here alone?”

  “Yes, alone.”

  “I’m alone, too. What can you do? I lived with my husband twenty-five years, and we didn’t have a bad day. Our life together was all sunshine without a single cloud. Suddenly he passed away and left me alone and miserable. The New York climate is unhealthy for me. I suffer from rheumatism. I’ll have to live out my years here.”

  “Did you buy the apartment furnished?” Harry asked in businesslike fashion.

  “Everything. The daughter wanted nothing for herself besides the dresses and linens. She turned it all over to me for a song. I wouldn’t have had the patience to go out and buy furniture and dishes. Have you lived here a long time already?”

  The woman posed one question after another, and Harry answered them willingly. She looked comparatively young—no more than fifty or possibly even younger. He brought her an ashtray and put a glass of lemonade and a plate of cookies on the coffee table before her. Two hours went by, but he hardly noticed. Ethel Brokeles crossed her legs, and Harry cast glances at her round knees. She had switched to a Polish-accented Yiddish. She exuded the intimate air of a relative. Something within Harry exulted. It could be nothing else but that heaven had acceded to his secret desires. Only now, as he listened to her, did he realize how lonely he had been all these years, how oppressed by the fact that he seldom exchanged a word with anyone. Even having her for a neighbor was better than nothing. He grew youthful in her presence, and loquacious. He told her about his three wives, the tragedies that had befallen his children. He even mentioned that, following the death of his first wife, he had had a sweetheart.