The Collected Stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer

by Isaac Bashevis Singer

  “Yes.”

  “Tell my husband to make a fool of himself instead of others. We don’t need boarders. We need them like a hole in the head.”

  “I told him the same thing,” the girl added.

  “I am sorry but I got here with a taxi and it has gone back to the village. Perhaps I could stay for one night?”

  “One night, huh? We have for you neither a bed nor linen. Nothing,” the woman said. “If you like, I will call you another taxi. My husband is not in his right mind and he does everything for spite. He dragged us out here. He wanted to be a farmer. There is no store or hotel here for miles and I don’t have the strength to cook for you. We ourselves eat out of tin cans.”

  The cow did not stop bellowing, and although the girl had just given me a nasty answer, I could not restrain myself and I asked, “What’s the matter with the cow?”

  The woman winked at the girl. “She needs a bull.”

  At that moment the farmer came in, as small and broad-boned as his wife, in patched overalls, a jacket which reminded me of Poland, and a cap pushed back on his head. His sunburned cheeks sprouted white stubble. His nose was veined. He had a loose double chin. He brought in with him the smells of cow dung, fresh milk from the udder, and newly dug earth. In one hand he held a spade and, in the other, a stick. His eyes under bushy brows were yellow. When he saw me he asked, “From the paper, huh?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why didn’t you call? I would have come with my horse and buggy to meet you.”

  “Sam, don’t make a fool of the young man,” his wife interrupted. “There’s no linen for him, no one to cook for him, and what are ten dollars a week? It would cost us more.”

  “This leave to me,” the farmer answered. “I have advertised, not you, and I am responsible. Young man”—he raised his voice—“I am the boss, not they. It’s my house, my ground. Everything you see here belongs to me. You should have written a card first or phoned, but since you are here, you are a welcome guest.”

  “I am sorry, but your wife and your daughter—”

  The farmer didn’t let me finish. “What they say is not worth more than the dirt under my nails.” He showed me a hand with muddy fingers. “I will clean up your room. I will make your bed, cook your food, and provide you with everything. If you receive mail I will bring it to you from the village. I go there every second or third day.”

  “Meanwhile, perhaps I can sleep here tonight? I’m tired from the trip and—”

  “Feel at home. They have nothing to say.” The farmer pointed at his family. I had already realized that I had fallen into a quarrelsome house and I did not intend to be the victim. The farmer continued, “Come, I will show you your room.”

  “Sam, the young man won’t stay here,” his wife said.

  “He will stay here, eat here, and be satisfied,” the farmer replied, “and if you don’t like it, go back to Orchard Street together with your daughter. Parasites, pigs, paskudas!”

  The farmer put the spade and the stick into a corner, grabbed my valise, and went outside. My room had a separate entrance with its own flight of stairs. I saw a huge field overgrown with weeds. Near the house was a well and an outhouse like in a Polish shtetl. A bedraggled horse was nibbling on some grass. Farther away there was a stable, and from it came the plaintive cry of the animal, which had not stopped in all this time. I said to the farmer, “If your cow is in heat, why doesn’t she get what she needs?”

  “Who told you that she’s in heat? It is a heifer and I just bought her. She was taken from a stable where there were thirty other cows and she misses them. She most probably has a mother or a sister there.”

  “I’ve never seen an animal that yearns so much for her kin,” I said.

  “There are all kinds of animals, but she will quiet down. She’s not going to yell forever.”

  II

  The steps leading into my room squeaked. One held on to a thick rope instead of a banister. The room smelled of rotting wood and bedbug spray. A stained, lumpy mattress with the filling sticking out of the holes was on the bed. It wasn’t especially hot outside but inside the room the heat immediately began to hammer at my head and I became wet with perspiration. Well, one night here will not kill me, I comforted myself. The farmer set my valise down and went to bring linen. He brought a pillow in a torn pillowcase, a coarse sheet with rusty spots, and a cotton-filled blanket without a cover. He said to me, “It’s warm now, but the moment the sun sets, it will be deliciously cool. Later on you will have to cover yourself.”

  “It will be all right.”

  “Are you from New York?” he asked me.

  “Yes, New York.”

  “I can tell from your accent that you were born in Poland. What part do you come from?”

  I mentioned the name of my village and Sam told me he came from a neighboring village. He said, “I’m not really a farmer. This is our second summer here in the country. Since I came from Poland I was a presser in New York. I pulled and pushed the heavy iron so long that I got a rupture. I always longed for fresh air and, how do you call it—Mother Earth—fresh vegetables, a fresh egg, green grass. I began to look for something in the newspapers and here I found a wild bargain. I bought it from the same man who sold me the heifer. He lives about three miles from here. A fine man, even though he’s a Gentile. His name is Parker, John Parker. He gave me a mortgage and made everything easy for me, but the house is old and the earth is full of rocks. He did not, God forbid, fool me. He told me everything beforehand. To clean up the stones would take twenty years. And I’m not a young man any more. I’m already over seventy.”

  “You don’t look it,” I complimented him.

  “It’s the good air, the work. I worked hard in New York, but only here I started to work for real. There we have a union, it should live long, and it did not allow the bosses to make us slaves like the Jews in Egypt. When I arrived in America, the sweatshops were still in existence, but later on things got easier. I worked my eight hours and took the subway home. Here I toil eighteen hours a day and, believe me, if I did not get the pension from the union I could not make ends meet. But it’s all right. What do we need here? We have our own tomatoes, radishes, cucumbers. We have a cow, a horse, a few chickens. The air itself makes you healthy. But how is it written in Rashi? Jacob wanted to enjoy peace but the misfortune with Joseph would not allow it. Yes, I studied once; until I was seventeen I sat in the study house and learned. Why do I tell you this? My wife, Bessie, hates the country. She misses the bargains on Orchard Street and her cronies with whom she could babble and play cards. She’s waging war on me. And what a war! She went on strike. She doesn’t cook, she doesn’t bake, she doesn’t clean the house. She refuses to budge and I do everything—milk the cow, dig in the garden, clean the outhouse. I should not tell you, but she refuses to be a wife. She wants me to move back to New York. But what will I do in New York? We have given up the rent-controlled apartment and gotten rid of the funiture. Here we have something like a home—”

  “How about your daughter?”

  “My Sylvia takes after her mother. She’s already over thirty and she should have gotten married, but she never wanted to become anything. We tried to send her to college and she refused to study. She took all kinds of jobs but she never stuck with them. She has quite a good head, but no sitzfleisch. She tires of everything. She went out with all kinds of men and it always ended in nothing. The moment she meets one, she immediately begins to find fault with him. One is this way, the other one is that way. For the past eight months she’s been with us on the farm, and if you think she helps me much, you are mistaken. She plays cards with her mother. That’s all she does. You will not believe me, but my wife still has not unpacked her things. She has, God only knows, how many dresses and skirts, and everything is packed away like after a fire. My daughter, too, has a lot of rags but hers are also in her trunk. All this is to spite me. So I decided, Let some people move in here and I will have someone to talk to
. We have two other rooms to rent. I’m not trying to get rich by offering a room and three meals a day for ten dollars weekly. I won’t become a Rockefeller. What is your business? Are you a teacher or something?”

  After some hesitation I decided to tell him the truth, that I write for a Yiddish newspaper as a free-lancer. The man’s eyes immediately lit up.

  “What is your name? What do you write there?”

  “A Bundle of Facts.”

  The farmer spread out his arms and stamped his feet. “You are the writer of A Bundle of Facts?”

  “It’s me.”

  “My God, I read you every week! I go to the village Friday especially to get the paper, and you won’t believe me, but I read A Bundle of Facts before I even read the news. The news is all bad. Hitler this, Hitler that. He should burn like a fire, the bum, the no-good. What does he want from the Jews? Is it their fault that Germany lost the war? From just reading about it one could get a heart attack. But your facts are knowledge, science. Is it true that a fly has thousands of eyes?”

  “Yes, it’s true.”

  “How can it be? Why does a fly need so many eyes?”

  “It seems that to nature everything comes easy.”

  “If you want to see the beauty of nature, stay here. Wait a minute. I must go and tell my wife who we have here.”

  “What for? I’m not going to stay here anyhow.”

  “What are you saying? Why not? They are bitter women, but when they hear who you are, they will be overjoyed. My wife reads you too. She tears the paper out of my hand because she wants to read A Bundle of Facts first. My daughter also knows Yiddish. She spoke Yiddish before she knew a word of English. With us she speaks mostly Yiddish because—”

  The farmer dashed out. His heavy shoes pounded on the steps. The heifer kept howling. There was frenzy in her voice, an almost-human rebellion. I sat down on the mattress and dropped my head. Lately I had been committing one folly after another. I had quarreled with Dosha over a foolishness. I had already spent money to get here and tomorrow I would have to take a taxi and a bus to get back to New York. I had begun to write a novel but I got bogged down and I couldn’t even decipher my own scribbling. As I sat there, the heat roasted my body. If only there were a shade to cover the window! The heifer’s lamenting drove me mad. I heard in it the despair of everything that lives. All of creation was protesting through her. A wild idea ran through my mind: Perhaps during the night I should go out and kill the heifer and then myself. A murder followed by a suicide like this would be something new in the history of humanity.

  I heard heavy steps on the staircase. The farmer had brought his wife over. Then began the apologies and the strange exaggerations of simple people when they encounter their beloved writer. Bessie exclaimed, “Sam, I must kiss him.”

  And before I managed to say a word, the woman caught my face in her rough hands, which smelled of onion, garlic, and sweat.

  The farmer was saying good-naturedly, “A stranger she kisses and me she lets fast.”

  “You are crazy and he’s a scientist, greater than a professor.”

  It took but a minute and the daughter came up. She stood in the open door and looked on half mockingly at the way her parents fussed over me. After a while she said, “If I have insulted you, excuse me. My father brought us here to the wasteland. We have no car and his horse is half dead. Suddenly a man with a valise drops from the sky and wants to know why the heifer is yelling. Really funny.”

  Sam clasped his hands together with the look of a man about to announce something which will astound everyone. His eyes filled with laughter. “If you have so much pity on animals, I am going to give back the heifer. We can do without her. Let her go back to her mother, for whom she pines.”

  Bessie tilted her head to one side. “John Parker won’t give you back the money.”

  “If he won’t return the whole amount, he will return ten dollars less. It’s a healthy heifer.”

  “I will make up the difference,” I said, astonished at my own words.

  “What? We will not go to court,” the farmer said. “I want this man in my house all summer. He won’t have to pay me. For me it will be an honor and a joy.”

  “Really, the man is crazy. We needed the heifer like a hole in the head.”

  I could see that husband and wife were making peace because of me.

  “If you really want to do it, why wait?” I asked. “The animal may die from yearning and then—”

  “He’s right,” the farmer called. “I’m going to take the heifer back right now. This very minute.”

  Everyone became silent. As if the heifer knew that her fate was being decided this minute, she let out a howl which made me shudder. This wasn’t a yearning heifer but a dybbuk.

  III

  The moment Sam entered the stable the heifer became quiet. It was a black heifer with large ears and huge black eyes that expressed a wisdom which only animals possess. There was no sign that she had just gone through so many hours of agony. Sam tied a rope around her neck and she followed him willingly. I followed behind with Bessie near me. The daughter stood in front of the house and said, “Really, I wouldn’t believe it if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes.”

  We walked along and the heifer did not utter a sound. She seemed to know the way back because she tried to run and Sam had to restrain her. Meanwhile, husband and wife argued before me the way couples used to argue when they came to my father’s court for a Din Torah. Bessie was saying, “The ruin stood empty for years and nobody even looked at it. I don’t think someone would have taken it for nothing. Suddenly my husband appears and gets the bargain. How does the saying go? ‘When a fool comes to the market, the merchants are happy.’ ”

  “What did you have on Orchard Street? The air stank. As soon as daylight began, the crash and noise started. Our apartment was broken into. Here you don’t have to lock the door. We can leave for days and weeks and no one will steal anything.”

  “What thief would come to such a desert?” Bessie asked. “And what could he take? American thieves are choosy. They want either money or diamonds.”

  “Believe me, Bessie, here you will live twenty years longer.”

  “Who wants to live so long? When a day is over, I thank God.”

  After about an hour and a half I saw John Parker’s farm—the house, the granary. The heifer again tried to run and Sam had to hold her back with all his strength. John Parker was cutting grass with a crooked scythe. He was tall, blond, lean, Anglo-Saxon. He raised his eyes, amazed, but with the quiet of a person who is not easily astounded. I even imagined I saw him smiling. We had approached the pasture where the other cows were grazing and the heifer became wild and tore herself out of Sam’s hands. She began to run and jump with the rope still around her neck, and a few cows slowly raised their heads and looked at her, while the others continued to rip the grass as if nothing had happened. In less than a minute the heifer, too, began to graze. I had expected, after this terrible longing, a dramatic encounter between the heifer and her mother: much nuzzling, fondling, or whatever cows do to show affection to a daughter who was lost. But it seemed that cattle didn’t greet one another that way. Sam began to explain to John Parker what had happened and Bessie too chimed in. Sam was saying, “This young man is a writer. I read his articles every week and he is going to be our guest. Like all writers, he has a soft heart. He could not stand the heifer’s suffering. My wife and I cherish every line he writes. When he said that the heifer might disturb his thinking, I made up my mind, come what may. So I brought the heifer back. I am ready to lose as much as you will say—”

  “You will lose nothing, it’s a good heifer,” John Parker said. “What do you write?” he asked me.

  “Oh, facts in a Yiddish newspaper. I am trying to write a novel too,” I boasted.

  He remarked, “Once I was a member of a book club, but they sent me too many books and I had no time to read. A farm keeps you busy, but I still get The Saturday Evenin
g Post. I have piles of them.”

  “I know. Benjamin Franklin was one of the founders.” I tried to show erudition about American literature.

  “Come into the house. We’ll have a drink.”

  The farmer’s family came out. His wife, a darkish woman with short black hair, looked Italian to me. She had a bumpy nose and sharp black eyes. She was dressed city-fashion. The boy was blond like his father, the girl Mediterranean-looking like her mother. Another man appeared. He seemed to be a hired hand. Two dogs dashed out of somewhere and, after barking for a few seconds, began to wag their tails and to rub up against my legs. Sam and Bessie again tried to explain the reason for their visit, and the farmer’s wife scrutinized me half wondering and half with irony. She asked us in, and soon a bottle of whiskey was opened and we clinked glasses. Mrs. Parker was saying, “When I came here from New York I missed the city so much that I almost died, but I’m not a heifer and nobody cared about my feelings. I was so lonesome that I tried to write, even though I’m not a writer. I still have a few composition books lying around and I myself don’t remember what I put down in them.”

  The woman looked at me hesitatingly and shyly. I knew exactly what she wanted and I asked, “May I look at them?”

  “What for? I have no literary talent. It is kind of a diary. Notes about my experiences.”

  “If you have no objections, I would like to read them, not here, but back at Sam’s farm.”

  The woman’s eyes brightened. “Why should I object? But please don’t laugh at me when you read the outpourings of my emotions.”

  She went to look for her manuscript and John Parker opened a chest drawer and counted out the money for the heifer. The men haggled. Sam offered to take a few dollars less than what he had paid. John Parker wouldn’t hear of it. I again proposed to make good the difference, but both men looked at me reproachfully and told me to mind my own business. After a while Mrs. Parker brought me a bundle of composition books in an old manila envelope that smelled of moth balls. We said goodbye and I took their phone number. When we got back, the sun had already set and the stars shone in the sky. It was a long time since I had seen such a starry sky. It hovered low, frightening and yet solemnly festive. It reminded me of Rosh Hashanah. I went up to my room. I could not believe it but Sylvia had changed my linen: a whiter sheet, a spotless blanket, and a cleaner pillowcase. She had even hung up a small picture with a windmill.