The Collected Stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer

by Isaac Bashevis Singer

  “One has to eat the year round.”

  “Why? To fatten up for the worms?”

  “A man has a soul, too,” I said.

  “The soul doesn’t need potatoes. Besides, did you ever see a soul? There is no such thing. Stuff and nonsense.”

  “Then how does one live?”

  “It’s Breathing. Electricity.”

  “Your wife—”

  Selig interrupted me. “She’s crazy!”

  One evening Tzeitel confided in my mother that Henia Dvosha had taken up residence in her left ear. She sang Sabbath and holiday hymns, recited lamentations for the Destruction of the Temple, and even bewailed the sinking of the Titanic. “If you don’t believe me, rebbetzin, hear for yourself.”

  She moved her wig aside and placed her ear against Mother’s.

  “Do you hear?” Tzeitel asked.

  “Yes. No. What’s that?” Mother asked in alarm.

  “It’s the third week already. I kept quiet, figuring it would pass, but it grows worse from day to day.”

  I was so overcome by fear that I dashed from the kitchen. The word soon spread through Krochmalna Street and the surrounding streets that a dybbuk had settled in Tzeitel’s ear, and that it chanted the Torah, sermonized, and crowed like a rooster. Women came to place their ears against Tzeitel’s and swore that they heard the singing of Kol Nidre. Tzeitel asked my father to put his ear next to hers, but Father wouldn’t consent to touch a married woman’s flesh. A Warsaw nerve specialist became interested in the case—Dr. Flatau, who was famous not only in Poland but in all Europe and maybe in America, too. And an article about the case appeared in a Yiddish newspaper. The author borrowed its title from Tolstoy’s play The Power of Darkness.

  At just about that time, we moved to another courtyard in Krochmalna Street. A few weeks later, in Sarajevo, a terrorist assassinated the Austrian Archduke Ferdinand and his wife. From this one act of violence came the war, the shortages of food, the exodus of refugees from the small towns to Warsaw, and the reports in the newspapers of thousands of casualties.

  People had other things to talk about than Selig the tailor and his family. After Sukkoth, Selig died suddenly, and a few months later Tzeitel followed him to the grave.

  One day that winter, when the Germans and Russians fought at the Bzura River, and the windowpanes in our house rattled from the cannon fire and the oven stayed unheated because we could no longer afford coal, a former neighbor from number 10, Esther Malka, paid a call on my mother. Issur Godel and Dunia, she said, were getting a divorce.

  Mother asked, “Why on earth? They were supposed to be in love.”

  And Esther Malka replied, “Rebbetzin, they can’t be together. They say Henia Dvosha comes each night and gets into bed between them.”

  “Jealous even in the grave?”

  “So it seems.”

  Mother turned white and said words I’ve never forgotten: “The living die so that the dead may live.”

  Translated by Joseph Singer

  The Bus

  WHY I undertook that particular tour in 1956 is something I haven’t figured out to this day—dragging around in a bus through Spain for twelve days with a group of tourists. We left from Geneva. I got on the bus around three in the afternoon and found the seats nearly all taken. The driver collected my ticket and pointed out a place next to a woman who was wearing a conspicuous black cross on her breast. Her hair was dyed red, her face was thickly rouged, the lids of her brown eyes were smeared with blue eyeshadow, and from beneath all this dye and paint emerged deep wrinkles. She had a hooked nose, lips red as a cinder, and yellowish teeth.

  She began speaking to me in French, but I told her I didn’t understand the language and she switched over to German. It struck me that her German wasn’t that of a real German or even a Swiss. Her accent was similar to mine and she made the same mistakes. From time to time she interjected a word that sounded Yiddish. I soon found out that she was a refugee from the concentration camps. In 1946, she arrived at a DP camp near Landsberg and there by chance she struck up a friendship with a Swiss bank director from Zurich. He fell in love with her and proposed marriage but under the condition that she accept Protestantism. Her name at home had been Celina Pultusker. She was now Celina Weyerhofer.

  Suddenly she began speaking to me in Polish, then went over into Yiddish. She said, “Since I don’t believe in God anyway, what’s the difference if it’s Moses or Jesus? He wanted me to convert, so I converted a bit.”

  “So why do you wear a cross?”

  “Not out of anything to do with religion. It was given to me by someone dying whom I’ll never forget till I close my eyes.”

  “A man, eh?”

  “What else—a woman?”

  “Your husband has nothing against this?”

  “I don’t ask him. There he is.”

  Mrs. Weyerhofer pointed out a man sitting across the way. He looked younger than she, with a fair, smooth face, blue eyes, and a straight nose. To me he appeared the typical banker—sober, amiable, his trousers neatly pressed and pulled up to preserve the crease, shoes freshly polished. He was wearing a panama hat. His manner expressed order, discipline. Across his knee lay the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, and I noticed it was open to the financial section. From his breast pocket he took a piece of cloth with which he polished his glasses. That done, he glanced at his gold wristwatch.

  I asked Mrs. Weyerhofer why they weren’t sitting together.

  “Because he hates me,” she said in Polish.

  Her answer surprised me, but not overly so. The man glanced at me sidelong, then averted his face. He began to converse with a lady sitting in the window seat beside him. He removed his hat, revealing a shining bald pate surrounded by a ruff of pale-blond hair. “What could it have been that this Swiss saw in the person next to me?” I asked myself, but such things one could not really question.

  Mrs. Weyerhofer said, “So far as I can tell, you are the only Jew on the bus. My husband doesn’t like Jews. He doesn’t like Gentiles, either. He has a million prejudices. Whatever I say displeases him. If he had the power, he’d kill off most of mankind and leave only his dogs and the few bankers with whom he’s chummy. I’m ready to give him a divorce but he’s too stingy to pay alimony. As it is, he barely gives me enough to keep alive. Yet he’s highly intelligent, one of the best-read people I’ve ever met. He speaks six languages perfectly, but, thank God, Polish isn’t one of them.”

  She turned toward the window and I lost any urge to talk to her further. I had slept poorly the night before, and when I leaned back I dozed off, though my mind went on thinking wakeful thoughts. I had broken up with a woman I loved—or at least desired. I had just spent three weeks alone in a hotel in Zakopane.

  I was awakened by the driver. We had come to the hotel where we would eat dinner and sleep. I couldn’t orient myself to the point of deciding whether we were still in Switzerland or had reached France. I didn’t catch the name of the city the driver had announced. I got the key to my room. Someone had already left my suitcase there. A bit later, I went down to the dining room. All the tables were full, and I didn’t want to sit with strangers.

  As I stood, a boy who appeared to be fourteen or fifteen came up to me. He reminded me of prewar Poland in his short pants and high woolen stockings, his jacket with the shirt collar outside. He was a handsome youth—black hair worn in a crewcut, bright dark eyes, and unusually pale skin. He clicked his heels in military fashion and asked, “Sir, you speak English?”

  “Yes.”

  “You are an American?”

  “An American citizen.”

  “Perhaps you’d like to join us? I speak English. My mother speaks a little, too.”

  “Would your mother agree?”

  “Yes. We noticed you in the bus. You were reading an American newspaper. After I graduate from what you call high school, I want to study at an American university. You aren’t by chance a professor?”

  “No, but I have
lectured at a university a couple of times.”

  “Oh, I took one look at you and I knew immediately. Please, here is our table.”

  He led me to where his mother was sitting. She appeared to be in her mid-thirties, plump, but with a pretty face. Her black hair was combed into two buns, one at each side of her face. She was expensively dressed and wore lots of jewelry. I said hello and she smiled and replied in French.

  The son addressed her in English: “Mother, the gentleman is from the United States. A professor, just as I said he would be.”

  “I am no professor. I was invited by a college to serve as writer-in-residence.”

  “Please. Sit down.”

  I explained to the woman that I knew no French, and she began to speak to me in a mixture of English and German. She introduced herself as Annette Metalon. The boy’s name was Mark. The waiters hadn’t yet managed to serve all the tables, and while we waited I told the mother and son that I was a Jew, that I wrote in Yiddish, and that I came from Poland. I always do this as soon as possible to avoid misunderstandings later. If the person I am talking to is a snob, he knows that I’m not trying to represent myself as something I’m not.

  “Sir, I am also a Jew. On my father’s side. My mother is Christian.”

  “Yes, my late husband was a Sephardi,” Mrs. Metalon said. Was Yiddish a language or a dialect? she asked me. How did it differ from Hebrew? Was it written in Latin letters or in Hebrew? Who spoke the language and did it have a future? I responded to everything briefly. After some hesitation, Mrs. Metalon told me that she was an Armenian and that she lived in Ankara but that Mark was attending school in London. Her husband came from Saloniki. He was an importer and exporter of Oriental rugs and had had some other businesses as well. I noticed a ring with a huge diamond on her finger, and magnificent pearls around her neck. Finally, the waiter came over and she ordered wine and a steak. When the waiter heard I was a vegetarian he grimaced and informed me that the kitchen wasn’t set up for vegetarian meals. I told him I would eat whatever I could get—potatoes, vegetables, bread, cheese. Anything he could bring me.

  As soon as he had gone, the questions started about my vegetarianism: Was it on account of my health? Out of principle? Did it have anything to do with being kosher? I was accustomed to justifying myself, not only to strangers but even to people who had known me for years. When I told Mrs. Metalon that I didn’t belong to any synagogue, she asked the question for which I could never find the answer—what did my Jewishness consist of?

  According to the way the waiter had reacted, I assumed that I’d leave the table hungry, but he brought me a plateful of cooked vegetables and a mushroom omelette as well as fruit and cheese. Mother and son both tasted my dishes, and Mark said, “Mother, I want to become a vegetarian.”

  “Not as long as you’re living with me,” Mrs. Metalon replied.

  “I don’t want to remain in England, and certainly not in Turkey. I’ve decided to become an American,” Mark said. “I like American literature, American sincerity, democracy, and the American business sense. In England there are no opportunities for anyone who wasn’t born there. I want to marry an American girl. Sir, what kind of documents are needed to get a visa to the United States? I have a Turkish passport, not an English one. Would you, sir, send me an affidavit?”

  “Yes, with pleasure.”

  “Mark, what’s wrong with you? You meet a gentleman for the first time and at once you make demands of him.”

  “What do I demand? An affidavit is only a piece of paper and a signature. I want to study at Harvard University or at the University of Princeton. Sir, which of these two universities has the better business school?”

  “I really wouldn’t know.”

  “Oh, he has already decided everything for himself,” Mrs. Metalon said. “A child of fourteen but with an old head. In that sense, he takes after his father. He always planned down to the last detail and years in advance. My husband was forty years older than I, but we had a happy life together.” She took out a lace-edged handkerchief and dabbed at an invisible tear.

  The bus routine required that each day passengers exchanged seats. It gave everyone a chance to sit up front. Most couples stayed together, but individuals kept changing their partners. On the third day, the driver placed me next to the banker from Zurich, who was apparently determined not to sit with his wife.

  He introduced himself to me: Dr. Rudolf Weyerhofer. The bus had left Bordeaux, where we had spent the night, and was approaching the Spanish border. At first neither of us spoke; then Dr. Weyerhofer began to talk of Spain, France, the situation in Europe. He questioned me about America, and when I told him that I was a staff member of a Yiddish newspaper his talk turned to Jews and Judaism. Wasn’t it odd that a people should have retained its identity through two thousand years of wandering across the countries of the world and after all that time returned to the land and language of its ancestors? The only such instance in the history of mankind. Dr. Weyerhofer told me he had read Graetz’s History of the Jews and even something of Dubnow’s. He knew the works of Martin Buber and Klausner’s Jesus of Nazareth. But for all that, the essence of the Jew was far from clear to him. He asked about the Talmud, the Zohar, the Hasidim, and I answered as best I could. I felt certain that shortly he would begin talking about his wife.

  Mrs. Weyerhofer had already managed to irritate the other passengers. Both in Lyons and in Bordeaux the bus had been forced to wait for her—for a half hour in Lyons and for over an hour in Bordeaux. The delays played havoc with the travel schedule. She had gone off shopping and had returned loaded down with bundles. From the way she had described her husband to me as a miser who begrudged her a crust of bread, I couldn’t understand where she got the money to buy so many things. Both times she apologized and said that her watch had stopped, but the Swiss women claimed that she had purposely turned back the hands of her gold wristwatch. By her behavior Celina Weyerhofer humiliated not only her husband, who accused her in public of lying, but also me, for it was obvious to everyone on the bus that she, like me, was a Jew from Poland.

  I no longer recall how it came about but Dr. Weyerhofer began to unburden himself to me. He said, “My wife accuses me of anti-Semitism, but what kind of anti-Semite am I if I married a Jewish woman just out of concentration camp? I want you to know that this marriage has caused me enormous difficulties. At that time many people in financial circles were infected with the Nazi poison, and I lost important connections. I was seriously considering emigrating to your America or even to South Africa, since I had practically been excommunicated from the Christian business community. How is this called by your people … cherem? My blessed parents were still living then and they were both devout Christians. You could write a thick book about what I went through.

  “Though my wife became converted, she did it in such a way that the whole thing became a farce. This woman makes enemies wherever she goes, but her worst enemy is her own mouth. She has a talent for antagonizing everyone she meets. She tried to establish a connection with the Jewish community in Zurich, but she said such shocking things and carried on so that the members would have nothing to do with her. She’d go to a rabbi and represent herself as an atheist; she’d launch a debate with him about religion and call him a hypocrite. While she accuses everyone of anti-Semitism, she herself says things about Jews you’d expect from a Goebbels. She plays the role of a rabid feminist and joins protests against the Swiss government for refusing to give women the vote, yet at the same time she castigates women in the most violent fashion.

  “I noticed her talking to you when you were sitting together and I know she told you how mean I am with money. But the woman has a buying mania. She buys things that will never be used. I have a large apartment she’s crowded with so much furniture, so many knickknacks and idiotic pictures that you can barely turn around. No maid will work for us. We eat in restaurants even though I hate not eating at home. I must have been mad to agree to go on this trip with
her. But it looks as if we won’t last out the twelve days. While I sit talking here with you, my mind is on forfeiting my money and leaving the bus before we even get to Spain. I know I shouldn’t be confiding my personal problems like this, but since you are a writer maybe they can be of use to you. I tell myself that the camps and wanderings totally destroyed her nerves, but I’ve met other women who survived the whole Hitler hell, and they are calm, civilized, pleasant people.”

  “How is it that you didn’t see this before?” I asked.

  “Eh? A good question. I ask myself the same thing. The very fact that I’m telling you all this is a mystery to me, since we Swiss are reticent. Apparently ten years of living with this woman have altered my character. She is the one who allegedly converted, but I seem to have turned into almost a Polish Jew. I read all the Jewish news, particularly any dealing with the Jewish state. I often criticize the Jewish leaders, but not as a stranger—rather as an insider.”

  The bus stopped. We had come to the Spanish frontier. The driver went with our passports to the border station and lingered there a long time.

  Dr. Weyerhofer began talking quietly, in almost a mumble, “I want to be truthful. One good trait she did have—she could attract a man. Sexually, she was amazingly strong. I don’t believe myself that I am speaking of these things—in my circles, talk of sex is taboo. But why? Man thinks of it from cradle to grave. She has a powerful imagination, a perverse fantasy. I’ve had experience with women and I know. She has said things to me that drove me to frenzy. She has more stories in her than Scheherazade. Our days were cursed, but the nights were wild. She wore me out until I could no longer do my work. Is this characteristic of Jewish women in Eastern Europe? The Swiss Jewish women aren’t much more interesting than the Christian.”

  “You know, Doctor, it is impossible to generalize.”

  “I have the feeling that many Jewish women in Poland are of this type. I see it in their eyes. I made a business trip to the Jewish state and even met Ben-Gurion, along with other Israeli leaders. We did business with the Bank Leumi. I have a theory that the Jewish woman of today wants to make up for all the centuries in the ghetto. Besides, the Jews are a people of imagination, even though in modern literature they haven’t yet created any great works. I’ve read Jakob Wassermann, Stefan Zweig, Peter Altenberg, and Arthur Schnitzler, but they disappointed me. I expected something better from Jews. Are there interesting writers in Yiddish or Hebrew?”