The Collected Stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer

by Isaac Bashevis Singer

  “Call a doctor! Call an ambulance!” I shouted into the mouthpiece.

  “Our doctor isn’t in his office. One second, excuse me …”

  I waited a few minutes, but Oliver Leslie de Sollar didn’t come back and I hung up the receiver. “That’s what happens when you deal with people—right away complications arise,” I said to myself. “The deed itself is a sin,” I mentally quoted an Indian sacred book—but which one? Was it the Bhagavad Gita or the Dhammapada? If the child choked to death, God forbid, I would be indirectly responsible.

  My doorbell rang in a long and insistent summons. I hurried to open it and saw a young woman with blond hair falling to her shoulders, a straw hat, with flowers and cherries, of the kind worn when I was still a cheder boy, a white blouse with lace at the neckline and sleeves, a black embroidered skirt, and buttoned shoes. Although it was sunny outside, she carried an umbrella with ribbons and bows—all in all, a photograph come to life from an album. Before she could even close the door behind her, I said, “Your husband just called. I don’t wish to alarm you, but your child is having an attack of asthma and your husband can’t get a doctor. He wants to know where the drops are.”

  I was sure my visitor would dash to the telephone, which stood on a table in the hall, but instead she measured me with her eyes from head to toe, then back again, while a sweet smile spread across her face. “Yes, it’s you!” She held out a hand in a white glove reaching to the elbow and presented me with a package wrapped in shiny black paper and tied in a red ribbon. “Don’t be concerned,” she said. “He does this every time I go somewhere. He can’t stand my leaving the house. It’s pure hysteria.”

  “What about the child?”

  “Bibi is as stubborn as her father. She doesn’t want to let me out of the house, either. She’s his child from a former wife.”

  “Please come in. Thank you for the present.”

  “Oh, you filled a gap in my life. I’ve always been a stranger to myself. By chance I discovered one of your novels in a bookstore and from then on I’ve read everything you’ve written. I believe I’ve told you that I’m the Klendev rabbi’s grandchild. That’s on my mother’s side. On my father’s side I stem from adventurers.”

  She followed me into the living room. She was short and slim, with a smooth white skin seldom seen in adults. Her eyes were pale blue tinged with yellow, and somewhat squinty. Her nose was narrow and on the long side, her lips thin, her chin receding and pointed. She had on no cosmetics. Usually I form a concept of a person from the face he presents, but I couldn’t form a clear one of this young woman. Not healthy, I thought: sensitive, aristocratic. Her English seemed to me not American but foreign. As I chatted with her and asked her to have a seat on the sofa, I unwrapped the package and took out a ouija board with a planchette, obviously handmade, of costly wood and edged in bone.

  She said, “I gather from your stories that you’re interested in the occult, and I hope this is a fitting gift.”

  “Oh, you give me too many gifts.”

  “You’ve earned them all.”

  I asked her questions, and she responded willingly. Her father was a retired lawyer. He was separated from Elizabeth’s mother and was living with another woman in Switzerland. The mother suffered from rheumatism and had moved to Arizona. She had a friend there, an old man of eighty. Elizabeth Abigail had met her husband in college. He had been her philosophy professor. He was also an amateur astronomer and used to sit up with her half the night at the observatory studying the stars. A Jew? No, Oliver Leslie was a Christian, born in England but descended from Basques. Two years after she married him he became sick, fell into a chronic depression, quit his job, and settled in a house a few miles from Croton-on-Hudson. He had isolated himself completely from people. He was writing a book on astrology and numerology. Elizabeth Abigail smiled the smile of those who have long since discovered the vanity of all human endeavors. At times her eyes grew melancholy and even frightened.

  I asked her what she did in that house in Croton-on-Hudson and she replied, “I go crazy. Leslie doesn’t speak for days or weeks at a time except to Bibi. He tutors her—she doesn’t go to school. We do not live as man and wife. For me, books have become the essence of my being. When I find a book that speaks to me, this is a great event in my life. That’s why—”

  “Who takes care of the household?”

  “No one, really. We have a neighbor, an ex-farmer who left his family, and he brings us food from the supermarket. At times he cooks for us, too. A simple man, but in his own fashion a philosopher. He is also our chauffeur. Leslie can’t drive the car any more. Our house stands on a hill that’s awfully slippery, not only in winter, but whenever it rains.”

  My visitor grew silent. I was already accustomed to the fact that many of those who wrote me or came to see me were eccentrics—odd, lost souls. Elizabeth Abigail happened to resemble my sister slightly. Since she came from Klendev and was a rabbi’s grandchild, she might have been my relative. Klendev isn’t far from the towns where generations of my ancestors lived.

  I asked, “How is it that Bibi is with her father, not her mother?”

  Elizabeth replied, “The mother committed suicide.”

  The telephone rang and I heard the same stammering and throat clearing I had heard earlier. I immediately called Elizabeth, who approached slowly and with the reluctance of one who knows what’s coming. I heard her tell her husband where the drops were and order him sharply not to annoy her again. He spoke at length and she responded with an occasional brief phrase. “What? Well, no.” Finally she said, “That I don’t know,” in a tone of impatience. She came back into the room and resumed her seat on the sofa.

  “It’s become a system with them—the moment I go somewhere, Bibi gets these chest spasms and her father calls to alarm me. He can never find the drops, which don’t help in any case, because her asthma is deliberately brought on by him. This time I didn’t even tell him where I was going, but he eavesdrops on me. I wanted to ask you a number of questions, but he has driven them from my mind. Yes, where in heaven’s name is this Klendev? I couldn’t find it on any map.”

  “It’s a village in the Lublin area.”

  “Were you ever there?”

  “It just so happens that I was. I had left home and someone recommended me for a teaching position there. I gave a single lesson, and the school authorities and I agreed at once that I am no teacher. The very next day I left.”

  “When was this?”

  “In the twenties.”

  “Oh, my grandfather was no longer living then. He died in 1913.”

  Although what my visitor had to say held no special interest for me, I listened closely. It was hard for me to believe that only one generation separated her and the Klendev rabbi, his milieu, and his way of life. Her face had in a mysterious fashion molded itself to that of the Anglo-Saxons whose culture she had absorbed. I detected within her traces of other lands, other climates. Could it be that Lysenko was right after all?

  The clock showed twelve-thirty and I invited my guest to go downstairs with me for lunch. She said that she didn’t eat lunch. The most she might have was some tea, but if I wanted to have lunch, she’d go along with me. After a while we went into the kitchen and I brewed tea. I put cookies on a plate for her and for myself fixed bread with cottage cheese. We sat at a card table, facing each other like a married couple. A cockroach crawled across the table, but neither Elizabeth nor I made any effort to disturb it. The cockroaches in my apartment apparently knew that I was a vegetarian and that I felt no hatred for their species, which is a few hundred million years older than man and which will survive him. Elizabeth had strong tea, with milk, and I had mine weak, with lemon. When I drank, I held a cube of sugar between my teeth as had been the custom in Bilgoray and Klendev. She didn’t touch the cookies, and gradually I finished them off. There had evolved between us a familiarity that requires no preliminaries.

  I heard myself ask, “How long is it s
ince you’ve stopped sleeping with him?”

  Elizabeth began to blush, but when the blood had colored half her face it receded. “I’ll tell you something, though you won’t believe it.”

  “I’ll believe anything you say.”

  “I’m physically a virgin.” She blurted out the words and seemed astonished to have said them.

  To show that she had not shocked me, I said casually, “I thought this was an extinct breed already.”

  “There is always a Last Mohican.”

  “You never asked a doctor about the situation?”

  “Never.”

  “What about psychoanalysis?”

  “Neither Leslie nor I believe in it.”

  “Don’t you need a man?” I asked, bewildered by my daring.

  She raised her glass and took a sip of tea. “Very much so, but I’ve never met a man I wanted to be with. That’s how it was before I met Leslie and that’s how it’s been since. When I first knew him, I figured that Leslie would be a man to me, but he said that he wanted to wait for marriage. This seemed foolish to me, but we waited. When we were married we made several attempts, but they didn’t work out. At times I imagined that the Klendev rabbi wouldn’t let it happen because Leslie was a Gentile. After a while we both developed a revulsion toward the whole thing.”

  “You are both ascetics,” I said.

  “Eh? I don’t know. I indulge in passionate affairs in my daydreams. I’ve read Freud, Jung, Stekel, but I’m convinced that they cannot help me. I’m amazed at my frankness with you. I’ve never written to an author before. I generally don’t write letters. It’s even hard for me to write to my father. Suddenly I write you and phone you. It’s as if one of your dybbuks had entered me. Now that you seem to have opened, so to say, a sealed source within me, I’ll tell you something else. Since I’ve started reading you, you’ve become the lover in my fantasies—you have driven off all the others.”

  Elizabeth took another sip of tea. She smiled and added, “Don’t get scared. This isn’t the purpose of my visit.”

  I felt a dryness in my throat and had to strain to make my voice emerge clearly. “Tell me about your fantasies.”

  “Oh, I spend time with you. We take trips together. You take me along to Poland and we visit all the villages you describe. Strange, but in my imagination your voice is the same as your voice is now and I can’t conceive how this can be. Even your accent is as I imagined it. This is something really irrational.”

  “Every love is irrational,” I said, embarrassed by my own assumption.

  Elizabeth bowed her head and gave this some thought.

  “At times I go to sleep with these fantasies and they are transformed into dreams. I see towns full of movement. I hear Yiddish spoken, and although I don’t know the language, I understand everything in the dream. If I didn’t know that these places have been destroyed, I would go there to see if everything matches my dreams.”

  “Nothing matches any more.”

  “My mother always spoke to me of her father, the rabbi. She came to America with her mother—my grandmother—when she was eight. My grandfather was married for the second time when he was seventy-five to a girl of eighteen, and my mother was the result of this marriage. Six years later, my grandfather died. He left many exegeses. The whole family perished under the Nazis, and all his manuscripts were burned. My grandmother brought along a small Hebrew book he had published and I have it in my purse in the foyer. Would you like to see it?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Let me wash the dishes. You wait here. I’ll get Grandfather’s book and you can look it over in the time I do them.”

  I remained at the table and Elizabeth brought me a slim book entitled The Outcry of Mordechai. On the title page the author listed his genealogy, and as I studied it I saw that my visitor and I were actually related by a connection many centuries back. We were both descended from Rabbi Moses Isserles and also from the author of The Revealer of Profundities. The book by the Klendev rabbi was a pamphlet against the Radzyn rabbi, Reb Gershon Henoch, who believed that he had found in the Mediterranean Sea the murex whose secretion was used in ancient Israel to dye the ritual fringes blue, although it was traditionally accepted that the murex had been concealed after the destruction of the Temple and would be found again only when the Messiah came. Reb Gershon Henoch hadn’t reckoned on the storm of protest from the other rabbis, and he directed his followers to wear the blue fringes. This aroused great controversy in the rabbinical world. Elizabeth’s grandfather called Reb Gershon Henoch “betrayer of Israel, apostate, messenger of Satan, Lilith, Asmodeus, and their evil host.” He warned that the sin of wearing these sham fringes could bring dire punishment from heaven. The pages of The Outcry of Mordechai had grown yellow and so dry that pieces flicked off the margins when I leafed through them.

  Elizabeth washed the plates and our glasses in the sink with a sponge. “What’s written there?” she asked me.

  It wasn’t easy to explain to Elizabeth de Sollar the dispute between the Radzyn rabbi and the other rabbis and Talmudic scholars of his generation, but I somehow found the words. Her eyes sparkled as she listened. “Fascinating!”

  The telephone rang and I left Elizabeth to answer it. It was Oliver Leslie de Sollar again. I told him that I would fetch his wife, but he said, “Wait. May I have a few words with you?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  Oliver Leslie began to cough and clear his throat. “My daughter, Bibi, nearly died from her attack today. We barely saved her. We have a neighbor here, a Mr. Porter, who is a friend, and he found some medicine that another doctor had once prescribed. She’s asleep now. I want you to know that my wife is a sick woman, both physically and spiritually. She has tried to commit suicide twice. The second time she took so many sleeping pills she had to be kept three days in an iron lung. She has an enormously high opinion of you and is in love with you in her own fashion, but I want to warn you not to encourage her. Our marriage is extremely unhappy, but I’m like a father to her because her own father deserted her and her mother when Elizabeth was only a child. Her father’s indifference instilled in her a puritanism that has made our existence a nightmare. Don’t promise her anything, because she lives entirely in a world of illusions. She needs psychiatric care, but she refuses it. I’m sure that you understand and that you will act like a responsible person.”

  “You may be completely sure.”

  “She exists on tranquillizers. I used to be a philosophy professor, but after we married I could no longer hold my position. Fortunately, I have wealthy parents, who help us. I’ve suffered so much from her that my own health has deteriorated. This is the type of woman who robs a man of his potency. If, heaven forbid, you became involved with her, your talent would be the first casualty. If she lived in the sixteenth century, she would have been surely burned at the stake as a witch. In the years I’ve known her, I’ve come to believe in black magic—as a psychological phenomenon, naturally.”

  “I hear you’re writing a book on astrology.”

  “Is that what she told you? Nonsense! I’m doing work on Newton’s last thirty years and his religious convictions. You undoubtedly know that Newton considered gravity a divine force—the purest expression of godly will. The greatest scientist of all times was also a great mystic. Since gravity controls the universe, it follows that the celestial bodies influence the organic and spiritual world in every manner and form. This is aeons removed from the usual astrology with its horoscopes and other folderol.”

  “Shall I get your wife?”

  “No. Don’t tell her I called. She is capable of causing me terrible scandals. She once attacked me with a knife …”

  During the time Oliver Leslie had been talking to me, Elizabeth didn’t appear. I wondered why it was taking her so long to dry two plates and glasses, but I assumed that she hadn’t wanted to disturb my conversation. The moment I hung up I went into the kitchen, but Elizabeth wasn’t there. I guessed what had happen
ed. A narrow passage led from the kitchen to my bedroom, where an extension telephone stood on a night table. I opened the door to the passage and Elizabeth was standing on the threshold.

  She said, “I had to go to the bathroom.”

  From the manner in which she said this—quickly, guiltily, in a defensive tone—I knew that she was lying. She might have been on the way to the bathroom (although how could she know that this door led to it?) and spied the extension phone. Her eyes reflected a blend of anger and mockery. So that’s the kind of baggage you are, I thought. Every trace of restraint I might have felt toward her vanished. I put my hands on her shoulders. She trembled, and her face assumed the mischievous expression of a little girl caught stealing or dressing up in her mother’s clothes.

  “For a virgin, you’re a shrewd piece,” I said.

  “Yes, I heard everything, and I’ll never go back to him,” she said in a voice grown firmer and younger as well. It was as if she had thrown off a mask she had worn a long time and in that split second become someone else—someone youthful and frolicsome. She pursed her lips as if about to kiss me. I was overcome with desire for her, but I remembered Oliver Leslie’s warning. I bent toward her and our eyes came so close I saw only a blueness like that within a grotto. Our lips touched but didn’t kiss. My knees pressed against hers and she began to move backward. While I pushed her slightly and playfully, a solemn voice admonished me: “Beware! You’re falling into a trap!”

  At that moment the phone rang again. I lurched with such force that I nearly knocked her over. A ringing telephone evokes a reaction of wild expectations in me—I often compare myself to Pavlov’s dogs. For a moment I wavered between hurrying forward into the bedroom or back to the hall; then I ran to the hall with Elizabeth at my heels. I took up the receiver and she tried to wrest it from me, obviously convinced that her husband was calling again. I thought so myself, but I heard a firm, middle-aged female voice ask, “Is Elizabeth de Sollar with you? I’m her mother.”

  At first I didn’t grasp the meaning of the words—in my confusion I had forgotten my visitor’s name. But soon I recovered. “Yes, she is here.”