The Collected Stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer

by Isaac Bashevis Singer

  “One Rosh Hashanah the rabbi had no more than twenty people in his study house. The following Yom Kippur he had only a quorum, including himself, the beadle, and the hangers-on. At the pulpit Rabbi Mendel recited all the prayers—Kol Nidre, the morning prayer, the midday prayer, and the closing prayer. It was already late when they finished the night prayer, and they blessed the new moon. The beadle offered the fasters some stale bread with herring and some chicken soup. None of them had any teeth left, and their stomachs had shrunk from undernourishment. Rabbi Mendel was older than any of them, but his voice remained young. His hearing, too, was good. The rabbi sat at the head of the table and spoke: ‘Those who run after the pleasures of the world don’t know what pleasure is. For them gluttony, drinking, lechery, and money are pleasures. There is no greater delight than the service of Yom Kippur. The body is pure and the soul is pure. The prayers are a joy. There is a saying that from confessing one’s sins one does not get fat. It’s completely false. When I confess my sins I become alive and vigorous. If I could have my say in heaven, every day would be Yom Kippur.”

  “After the rabbi said these words he rose from his chair and exclaimed, ‘I have no say in heaven, but in my study house I do. From today on for me it will be a perpetual Yom Kippur—every day except for the Sabbath and Feast Days!’ When the people of the village heard what the rabbi was about to do, there was pandemonium. The scholars and the elders came to the rabbi and asked, ‘Isn’t this breaking the Law?’ And the rabbi replied, ‘I do it for purely selfish reasons, not to please the Creator. If they punish me high up, I will accept the punishment. I also want to have some pleasure before I go!’ The rabbi called out to his beadle, ‘Light the candles; I am going to recite Kol Nidre.’ He ran over to the pulpit and started to sing Kol Nidre. I wasn’t there, but those who were present declared that such a Kol Nidre had not been heard since the world began. All of Bechtev came running. They thought that Rabbi Mendel had lost his mind. But who would dare to tear him away from the pulpit? He stood there in his white robe and prayer shawl and recited, ‘It shall be forgiven’ and ‘Our supplications shall rise.’ His voice was as strong as a lion’s, and the sweetness of his singing was such that all apprehensions ceased. I will make it short. The rabbi lived two and a half years more, and those two and a half years were one long Yom Kippur.”

  Levi Yitzchok took off his dark glasses and asked, “What did he do about phylacteries? Didn’t he put on phylacteries on weekdays?”

  “He put them on,” Meyer Eunuch answered, “but the liturgy was that of Yom Kippur. Toward evening he read the Book of Jonah.”

  “Didn’t he eat a bite at night?” Zalman the glazier asked.

  “He fasted six days of the week unless a holiday fell in the middle of it.”

  “And the hangers-on fasted with him?”

  “Some left him. Others died.”

  “So did he pray to the bare walls?”

  “There were always people who came to look and wonder.”

  “And the world allowed something like this?” Levi Yitzchok asked.

  “Who was going to wage war against a holy man? They dreaded his irritation,” Meyer Eunuch said. “One could clearly see that heaven approved. When a man fasts so long, his voice grows weak, he doesn’t have the strength to stand on his feet. But the rabbi stood for all the prayers. Those who saw him told how his face shone like the sun. He slept no longer than three hours—in his prayer shawl and robe, with his forehead leaning on the Tractite Yoma, exactly like at Yom Kippur. At midday prayer he kneeled and intoned the liturgy concerning the service in the Holy Temple of Jerusalem.”

  “What did he do when it actually was Yom Kippur?” Zalman the glazier asked.

  “The same as any other day.”

  “I never heard this story,” Levi Yitzchok said.

  “Rabbi Mendel was a hidden saint, and of those one hears little. Even today Bechtev is a forsaken village. In those times it was far away from everything—a swamp among forests. Even in the summer it was difficult to reach it. In the winter the snow made the roads impassable. The sleighs got stuck. And there was the danger of bears and wolves.”

  It became quiet. Levi Yitzchok took out his snuffbox. “Nowadays something like this would not be permitted.”

  “Greater transgressions than that are allowed in our day,” Meyer said.

  “How did he die?”

  “At the pulpit. He was standing up reciting, ‘What can man attain when death is all he can gain?’ When he came to the verse ‘Only charity and prayer may mitigate death’s despair,’ the rabbi fell down and his soul departed. It was a kiss from heaven—a saint’s death.”

  Zalman the glazier put some tobacco into the bowl of his pipe. “What was the sense of it?”

  Meyer Eunuch pondered for a while, and then said, “Everything can become a passion, even serving God.”

  Translated by the author and Dorothea Straus

  Brother Beetle

  I

  I BEGAN to dream about this trip when I was five years old. At that time my teacher, Moses Alter, read to me from the Pentateuch about Jacob crossing the Jordan while carrying only his staff. But a week after my arrival in Israel, at the age of fifty, there were few marvels left for me to see. I had visited Jerusalem, the Knesset, Mount Zion, the kibbutzim in Galilee, the ruins of Safad, the remains of the fortification of Acre, and all the other sights. I even made the at-that-time dangerous trip from Beersheba to Sodom, and on the way saw camels harnessed to the plows of Arabs. Israel was even smaller than I had imagined it to be. The tourist car in which I traveled seemed to be going in circles. For three days wherever we went we played hide-and-seek with the Sea of Galilee. During the day, the car was continually overheating. I wore two pairs of sunglasses, one on top of the other, as protection against the glare of the sun. At night, a hot wind blew in from somewhere. In Tel Aviv, in my hotel room, they taught me to maneuver the shutters, but in the one moment it took me to get out on the balcony, the thin sand carried by the khamsin wind managed to cover the linens of my bed. With the wind came locusts, flies, and butterflies of all sizes and colors, along with beetles larger than any I had ever seen before. The humming and buzzing was unusually loud. The moths beat against the walls with unbelievable strength, as if in preparation for the final war between man and insect. The tepid breath of the sea stank of rotten fish and excrement. That late summer, electricity failures were frequent in Tel Aviv. A suburban darkness covered the city. The sky filled with stars. The setting sun had left behind the redness of a heavenly slaughter.

  On a balcony across the street, an old man with a small white beard, a silken skullcap partly covering his high forehead, half sat, half reclined on a bed, reading a book through a magnifying glass. A young woman kept bringing him refreshments. He was making notes in the book’s margins. On the street below, girls laughed, shrieked, picked fights with boys, just as I had seen them do in Brooklyn, and in Madrid, where I had stopped en route. They teased one another in Hebrew slang. After a week of seeing everything a tourist must see in the Holy Land, I had my fill of holiness and went out to look for some unholy adventure.

  I had many friends and acquaintances from Warsaw in Tel Aviv, even a former mistress. The greatest part of those who had been close to me had perished in Hitler’s concentration camps or had died of hunger and typhoid in Soviet Middle Asia. But some of my friends had been saved. I found them sitting in the outdoor cafés, sipping lemonade through straws and carrying on the same old conversations. What are seventeen years, after all? The men had become a little grayer. The women dyed their hair; heavy makeup hid their wrinkles. The hot climate had not wilted their desires. The widows and widowers had remarried. Those recently divorced were looking for new mates or lovers. They still wrote books, painted pictures, tried to get parts in plays, worked for all kinds of newspapers and magazines. All had managed to learn at least some Hebrew. In their years of wandering, many of them had taught themselves Russian, German, English, and
even Hungarian and Uzbek.

  They immediately made room for me at their tables, and began reminding me of episodes I could not possibly forget. They asked my advice on American visas, literary agents, and impresarios. We were even able to joke about friends who had long since become ashes. Every now and then a woman would wipe away a tear with the point of her handkerchief so as not to smear her mascara.

  I didn’t look for Dosha, but I knew that we would meet. How could I have avoided her? That evening I happened to be sitting in a café frequented by merchants, not artists. At the surrounding tables the subject was business. Diamond merchants brought out small bags of gems and their jeweler’s loupes. A stone passed quickly from table to table. It was inspected, fingered, and then given to another, with a nod of the head. It seemed to me that I was in Warsaw, on Krolewska Street. Suddenly I saw her. She glanced around, looking for someone, as if she had an appointment. I noticed everything at once: the dyed hair, the bags under her eyes, the rouge on her cheeks. One thing only had remained unchanged—her slim figure. We embraced and uttered the same lie: “You haven’t changed.” And when she sat down at my table, the difference between what she had been then and what she was now began to disappear, as if some hidden power were quickly retouching her face to the image which had remained in my memory.

  I sat there listening to her jumbled conversation. She mixed countries, cities, years, marriages. One husband had perished; she had divorced another. He now lived nearby with another woman. Her third husband, from whom she was separated, more or less, lived in Paris, but he expected to come to Israel soon. They had met in a labor camp in Tashkent. Yes, she was still painting. What else could she do? She had changed her style, was no longer an impressionist. Where could old-fashioned realism lead today? The artist must create something new and entirely his own. If not, art was bankrupt. I reminded her of the time when she had considered Picasso and Chagall frauds. Yes, that was true, but later she herself had reached a dead end. Now her painting was really different, original. But who needed paintings here? In Safad there was an artists’ colony, but she had not been able to adjust herself to the life there. She had had enough of wandering about through all kinds of godforsaken villages in Russia. She needed to breathe city air.

  “Where is your daughter?”

  “Carola is in London.”

  “Married?”

  “Yes, I’m a sabta, a grandmother.”

  She smiled shyly, as if to say: “Why shouldn’t I tell you? I can’t fool you, anyhow.” I noticed her newly capped teeth. When the waiter came over, she ordered coffee. We sat for a while in silence. Time had battered us. It had robbed us of our parents, our relatives, had destroyed our homes. It had mocked our fantasies, our dreams of greatness, fame, riches.

  I had had news of Dosha while I was still in New York. Some mutual friends wrote to me that her paintings were not exhibited; her name was never mentioned in the press. Because she had had a nervous breakdown, she had spent some time in either a clinic or an asylum.

  In Tel Aviv, women seldom wear hats, and almost never in the evening, but Dosha had on a wide-brimmed straw hat which was trimmed with a violet ribbon and slanted over one eye. Though her hair was dyed auburn, there were traces of other colors in it. Here and there, it even had a bluish cast. Still, her face had retained its girlish narrowness. Her nose was thin, her chin pointed. Her eyes—sometimes green, sometimes yellow—had the youthful intensity of the unjaded, still ready to struggle and hope to the last minute. How else could she have survived?

  I asked, “Do you have a man, at least?”

  Her eyes filled with laughter. “Starting all over again? The first minute?”

  “Why wait?”

  “You haven’t changed.”

  She took a sip of coffee and said, “Of course I have a man. You know I can’t live without one. But he’s crazy, and I am not speaking figuratively. He’s so mad about me that he destroys me. He follows me on the street, knocks at my door in the middle of the night, and embarrasses me in front of my neighbors. I’ve even called the police, but I can’t get rid of him. Luckily, he is in Eilat at the moment. I’ve seriously thought of taking a gun and shooting him.”

  “Who is he? What does he do?”

  “He says he is an engineer, but he’s really an electrician. He’s intelligent, but mentally sick. Sometimes I think that the only way out for me is to commit suicide.”

  “Does he at least satisfy you?”

  “Yes and no. I hate savages and I’m tired of him. He bores me, keeps everybody away from me. I’m convinced that someday he’ll kill me. I’m as certain of that as that it’s night now. But what can I do? The Tel Aviv police are like the police everywhere. ‘After he kills you,’ they say, ‘we’ll put him in jail.’ He should be committed. If I had somewhere to go, I would leave, but the foreign consulates aren’t exactly handing out visas. At least I have an apartment here. Some apartment! But it’s a place to sleep. And what can I do with my paintings? They’re just gathering dust. Even if I wanted to leave, I don’t have the fare. The alimony I get from my former husband, the doctor, is a few pounds, and he’s always behind in his payments. They don’t know what it’s all about here. It’s not America. I’m starving and that’s the bitter truth. Don’t grab your wallet; it’s not really that bad. I’ve lived alone and I’ll die alone. I’m proud of it, and besides, it’s my fate. What I’m going through and what I’ve been through, nobody knows, not even God. There’s not a day without some catastrophe. But suddenly I walk into a café and there you are. That’s really something.”

  “Didn’t you know that I was here?”

  “Yes, but how did I know what you’d be like after all these years? I haven’t changed a bit, and that’s my tragedy. I’ve remained the same. I’ve the same desires, the same dreams—the people persecute me here, just as they did twenty years ago in Poland. They are all my enemies, and I don’t know why. I’ve read your books. I’ve forgotten nothing. I’ve always thought about you, even when I lay swollen from hunger in Kazakhstan and looked into the eyes of death. You wrote somewhere that one sins in another world, and that this world is hell. For you, that may have been just a phrase, but it’s the truth. I am the reincarnation of some wicked man from another planet. Gehenna is in me. This climate sickens me. The men here become impotent; the women are consumed with passion. Why did God pick out this land for the Jews? When the khamsin begins, my brains rattle. Here the winds don’t blow; they wail like jackals. Sometimes I stay in bed all day because I don’t have the strength to get up, but at night I roam about like a beast of prey. How long can I go on like this? But that I’m alive and seeing you makes it a holiday for me.”

  She pushed her chair away from the table, almost overturning it. “These mosquitoes are driving me crazy.”

  II

  Although I had already had dinner, I ate again with Dosha and drank Carmel wine with her. Then I went to her home. On the way, she kept apologizing for the poorness of her apartment. We passed a park. Though lit by street lamps, it was covered by darkness which no light could penetrate. The motionless leaves of the trees seemed petrified. We walked through dim streets, each bearing the name of a Hebrew writer or scholar. I read the signs over women’s clothing stores. The commission for modernizing Hebrew had created a terminology for brassières, nylons, corsets, ladies’ coiffures, and cosmetics. They had found the sources for such worldly terms in the Bible, the Babylonian Talmud, the Jerusalem Talmud, the Midrash, and even the Zohar. It was already late in the evening, but buildings and asphalt still exuded the heat of the day. The humid air smelled of garbage and fish.

  I felt the age of the earth beneath me, the lost civilizations lying in layers. Somewhere below lay hidden golden calves, the jewelry of temple harlots, and images of Baal and Astarte. Here prophets foretold disasters. From a nearby harbor, Jonah had fled to Tarshish rather than prophesy the doom of Nineveh. In the daylight these events seemed remote, but at night the dead walked again. I heard
the whisperings of phantoms. An awakening bird had uttered a shrill alarm. Insects beat against the glass of the street lamps, crazed with lust.

  Dosha took my arm with a loyalty unprofaned by any past betrayal. She led me up the stairway of a building. Her apartment was actually a separate structure on the roof. As she opened the door, a blast of heat, combined with the smell of paint and of alcohol used for a primus stove, hit me. The single room served as studio, bedroom, kitchen. Dosha did not switch on the lights. Our past had accustomed us both to undress and dress in the dark. She opened the shutters and the night shone in with its street lamps and stars. A painting stood propped against the wall. I knew that in the daylight its bizarre lines and colors would have little meaning for me. Still, I found it intriguing now. We kissed without speaking.

  After years of living in the United States, I had forgotten that there could be an apartment without a bathroom. But Dosha’s had none. There was only a sink with running water. The toilet was on the roof. Dosha opened a glass door to the roof and showed me where to go. I could find neither switch nor cord to turn on the light. In the dark I felt a hook with pieces of torn newspaper stuck to it. As I was returning, I saw through the curtains of the glass door that Dosha had turned on the lamp.

  Suddenly the silhouette of a man crossed the window. He was tall and broad-shouldered. I heard voices and realized immediately what had happened. Her mad lover had returned. Though terrified, I felt like laughing. My clothes were in her room; I had walked out naked.

  I knew there was no escape. The house was not attached to any other building. Even if I managed to climb down the four stories to the street, I could not return to my hotel without clothes. It occurred to me that Dosha might have hidden my things quickly when she heard her lover’s steps on the stairs. But he might come outside at any minute. I began to look around the roof for some stick or other object with which to defend myself. I found nothing. I stood against the outside wall of the toilet, hoping he wouldn’t see me. But how long could I stay there? In a few hours it would be daybreak.