Love and Exile

by Isaac Bashevis Singer

  I had written down many addresses, telephone numbers, and prices in my notebook but I hadn’t found what I wanted. It was late in spring but the weather was cold and damp. I left the last apartment of the day and my brain felt dulled from all the talk, all the impressions, and maybe even from hunger since I hadn’t eaten any lunch. I hadn’t yet told Gina that I was leaving and I had to make up some lie to cover my whereabouts all day. I walked down half-dark streets and I wasn’t sure where I was. I glanced up at illuminated windows. Other people had somehow managed to settle in, to eat dinner with their families, and to hold down more-or-less stable jobs but I roamed through the wet city like a phantom. I had awakened that morning with plans for a novel, for stories or even a play, but it had all evaporated. Night had fallen. A deep melancholy settled over me.

  I smelled the waste that was carried out from the refuse bins in the evenings and I inhaled the aromas of trees, blossoms, and turned-over soil. I passed a house gate where streetwalkers lurked calling out to passers-by. Certainly it would be crazy, having Gina, to go with one of them and risk venereal disease. I barely had enough in my pocket to pay for a meal if I decided to eat out. But somehow, my pace slowed. I was seized by a desire for a strange body, for unheard words spoken by a different voice. “Why fear syphilis?” a voice within me asked. “You’re not long for this world anyhow.”

  I stood there and beneath the shine of the gas street lights examined the live ware. One was small and thin with a narrow face, sunken cheeks and big black eyes that exuded a Jewish fear as if she had just escaped a pogrom or had skipped over the few hundred years from Chmielnicki’s massacres. She was huddled in a shawl of a type rarely seen in Warsaw. She looked straight at me and her glance seemed to say: “You’re the only one who can drag me out of this mire into which I have fallen.”

  The second was tall, stout, wearing a yellow dress and green boots. Her hair was as red as fire. A man had stopped near her and seemed to be bickering with her about something but she apparently had no patience for him and looked away. This was probably not a patron who used a girl and paid her, but some pest who came just to gab or to try to get something for nothing. In one hand he held a box of the kind laborers sometimes carry to factories or workshops. The red-haired whore had spotted me and she winked to me to save her from the pest. She even amiably showed me the tip of her tongue.

  A third stood off in a corner not looking at anything. Her face was red from rouge or perhaps she had rubbed it with red paper. I had the feeling that she neither wanted to nor was able to compete with the others. She was obviously waiting patiently till the other two were engaged and her turn came.

  I could decide neither to choose one of them nor to keep going. What I now felt wasn’t lust but an urge to demean myself, to convince myself once and for all that all my hopes were for naught and that I was already at the end of my road. “If you catch syphilis,” my inner enemy went on, “you’ll have to commit suicide and that will put an end to all the foolishness.”

  My feet crossed the street as if of their own accord. I had intended to take another one but instead I went over to the skinny one with the frightened eyes. She trembled.

  “Me?”

  “Yes, you.”

  She cast a glance at the redhead which expressed both surprise and something akin to triumph. She ducked inside the dark gate archway and I followed—“like a sheep to slaughter,” I told myself. Only yesterday I had concluded that man’s resemblance to God lay in the fact that both possessed freedom of choice, each in his own fashion and according to his ability. But here I was doing something that mocked all my ideas. The girl walked downstairs and I found myself in a hallway so narrow only one person could pass at a time. Blackened walls loomed heavily on either side ready to come together and crush me. The floor was bumpy and pitted. A smell of earth, rot, and something moldy and greasy assailed my nostrils. Suddenly in the shine of a tiny kerosene lamp a huge individual with a black patch instead of a nose, a face pocked as a crater, and dressed in rags, materialized. His eyes reflected the laughter of those who have looked down into the abyss and found it less frightening than comical. He walked with a waddle and blocked our path. He stank like a carcass. I started to run backward and my ears rang as if from bells tolling. My mouth filled with nauseating bile. The whore shouted and tried to run after me. The giant began to bellow, guffaw, clap his paws. I groped for the stairs but they had vanished. I heard a meowing of cats and the muffled sounds of an accordion.

  “God in heaven, save me!” the believer within me cried.

  I turned around and the stairs emerged. I raced up them and in a moment was outside again. The red-haired whore shrieked words I only deciphered later:

  “Fool, cheat, dead beat! …”

  It was all like a nightmare or one of those trials by Satan described in holy volumes or storybooks. I had intended to surrender myself to the powers of evil but the forces that rule the world had interfered. I was drenched with sweat. My heart pounded and my throat was parched. I was overcome by a deep feeling of shame and the silence of one who has just extricated himself from mortal danger. I prayed to the God with Whom I waged war to forgive me. I vowed never to defy Him again.

  4

  I had found what I had been looking for—a room with an old couple on Dzika Street, part of which the Warsaw City Council now called Zamenhof Street after the creator of Esperanto. The owner of the apartment, Dr. Alpert, an eye doctor, had actually been a friend of the late Dr. Zamenhof, who had lived and practiced two houses away. I had studied Esperanto in Bilgorai. I had even tried writing a sketch in this international language and I considered it an honor to live at the home of a colleague of its creator. Although I had sinned, Providence had granted me what I wanted—a clean room, not expensive, decently furnished, sunny, with a window overlooking the street, and located on the fourth floor so that the outside noises weren’t too disturbing. I realize now that the couple wasn’t as old as they seemed to me at the time. They had a son of twenty-three or four but Dr. Alpert was completely gray and toothless, and spoke in the thin voice of an old man. He was small, stooped, had a weak heart and a half-dozen other ailments. He no longer had any connections with a hospital, and few patients came to see him. Those who did were all poor and paid according to their means. From time to time the doctor himself became sick and had to be taken to a hospital. His dull eyes beneath the bristly white eyebrows exuded the tranquillity of those who have given up all ambition and have accepted the coming of death.

  Husband and wife both spoke Polish even though they knew Yiddish. Mrs. Alpert was younger than her husband, no taller than he, with hair that had begun to thin, a pointy chin that sprouted a gray womanly beard, and brown eyes that expressed all the worries and suspicions burdened spirits carry from cradle to grave. From the very first moment she opened the door to me, she appeared frightened. She measured me sidelong, inquisitively, and began questioning me before she even allowed me inside the foyer. She told me quite frankly: Although she could have used the extra money toward the rent, she had seldom taken in a roomer. What could you know about a stranger anyway? He might be a thief, a murderer, a swindler. He might also be a Communist, an anarchist, or a syphilitic. You read of so many terrible things in the paper that no matter how careful you were, you could still fall into a net. Under no circumstance would she take in a woman lodger. Women wanted to wash out their stockings and underwear, to cook themselves meals in the kitchen. They also began to take an instant hand in the running of the household. I assured Mrs. Alpert that I wouldn’t wash or cook anything, merely sit at my table and write.

  After an extended interview she asked me into the living room and also showed me the doctor’s reception room, the kitchen, and even her bedroom. Everything was old but clean. I needed but one glance at the son, Edek, to tell that he was sickly. He was tall, lean, and pale as a consumptive, with a high forehead, a long neck, narrow shoulders, a sunken chest, a crooked nose, and bulging eyes. His arms were as
thin as sticks. He listened to his mother’s talk and made no response. From time to time he coughed. A whole stack of newspapers and magazines lay before him on a table and I noticed that they were all old and creased. Articles or ads had been clipped out of some. A scissors lay on top of the pile just like on an editor’s desk.

  The maid, Marila, had a high bosom and round hips. Her calves were broad and muscular, her pale blue eyes exuded a peasant strength. Mrs. Alpert introduced us and said that if I ever needed anything, a glass of tea, breakfast, or whatever, Marila was always at my service. She would make up my bed, sweep up, and keep the room in order. The girl nodded and smiled showing a mouthful of wide teeth, and dimples.

  When Gina heard that I was moving out, she became hysterical. She screamed, wept, tore the hair from her head, and swore that she would take poison, hang herself, or throw herself under a streetcar. She warned me that in the other world, where she was heading, she would kneel before the Throne of Glory and tell the Almighty all the evil I had perpetrated down here on earth. She assured me that the punishment was imminent both for me and for the woman who was snatching me from her. I took a solemn oath that there was no one and that my reason for moving was so that I could work in peace, but Gina whined:

  “It’s true that I’m a fool but I’m not the dunce you take me for. You found a younger and maybe a prettier one than me, but I gave you my heart and soul, and she, that whore—may she burn like fire, dear Father in heaven—will only give you what you can get for two zlotys on Smocza Street. The trouble with men is that they don’t know the difference. They’re all a bunch of damn idiots, dullards, madmen, low-lifes—down to the very last one. Mama of mine, look what they’re doing to me! Sainted Grandmother, come and take me to you! I can no longer stand so much shame and anguish. I’ll be with you, Grandma, and with all the holy women. This phony world disgusts me. Oy, I have to vomit!”

  And she dashed into the toilet where I heard her retch, cry, and like Job, curse the day she had been born. After a while it became unnaturally quiet in there. I began to pound on the door but she didn’t answer. I tried to break the door down but the lock or the chain wouldn’t give.

  I cried: “Gina, come out! I’ll stay. I’ll stay with you as long as I live! I swear on all that is holy!”

  The door swung open.

  “Beast, don’t swear! Take your bundle and go. I don’t want you here any more. Oy, Holy Father of mine!”

  And she went back into the toilet and resumed throwing up.

  When Gina came out again I got the strange feeling that she had suddenly aged. This wasn’t Gina but someone else perhaps ten years older, sallow, with bags under eyes grown dim and an expression about the mouth I had never seen on her. A bitterness hovered about her lips and something akin to mockery over her own ill fortune. For the first time I grasped the fact that love was no game. Love killed people. Again and again I offered to stay with her, but she said:

  “No, my dearest, you are just beginning and I’m on the verge of closing the book forever.”

  Three

  1

  The revived Polish nation was barely seven years old, but within that short time it had already gone through a war with the Bolsheviks, an assassination of a president, and a great number of political crises. One spring day as I sat in my room trying to write a story, the door opened and Mrs. Alpert came in. She appeared more frightened than usual.

  She said, “You sit there and write and outside a revolution has broken out.”

  “What kind of revolution?”

  I expected to hear that the Communists were about to do to Poland what Lenin, Kamenev, Zinoviev, and Stalin had promised to do to all Europe, but Mrs. Alpert replied: “Pilsudski has taken over the power.”

  I had been prepared to toss my manuscript in the basket and run to wherever my legs would carry me, since the Communist hacks at the Writers’ Club had all assured me that when the Revolution came, they would hang me from “the nearest lamppost” along with all the rabbis, priests, members of the Polish Socialist party, Zionists, Bundists, Poale Zionists both the right and the left, and all other counterrevolutionaries. But I had nothing to fear from Pilsudski. The party politicians at the Polish parliament, the Sejm, had forgotten that Pilsudski had established the new Poland and they ignored him. Every few weeks a new government crisis erupted. All poetic hopes that a liberated Poland would bring with it new spiritual values and a Messianic spirit for all mankind had been dashed. Now it appeared that the army with Pilsudski at its head would set up a dictatorship. For Jews in general, and for someone like me in particular, this would make no difference whatsoever. I had read somewhere that Pilsudski had criticized the Polish Ministry of War for allowing the conscription of inept and unfit recruits. I was scheduled to go before a military commission again and it occurred to me that this revolution might somehow help me avoid the draft.

  It happened like this. My brother had persuaded the Palestine Bureau in Warsaw to issue me a certificate of immigration to Palestine, but since such a certificate was good for a whole family, the office made a stipulation that I marry first—whether actually or in name only. This meant going through a ceremony with a girl in Warsaw, then getting a divorce once in Palestine. Such counterfeit marriages were a frequent occurrence those days. They served to bring more Jews to the Land of Israel and also helped poor pioneers who couldn’t afford the fare. The alleged “wife” would pay the travel expenses for herself and for her “husband.” The whole thing smacked of fraud but Poland wanted to get rid of Jews and England didn’t care if a few more Jews settled in Palestine. A large number of those that immigrated suffered disappointment, unable to adjust to the climate and the hard work, and after a while they turned back to either Poland or wherever they were admitted.

  There couldn’t be even the slightest thought of my getting married for real. I had read Otto Weininger’s Sex and Character and had resolved never to marry. Weininger, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and my own experiences had transformed me into an antifeminist. I lusted after women yet at the same time I saw their faults, chief of which was that they (the modern, not the old-fashioned kind) were amazingly like me—just as lecherous, deceitful, egotistical, and eager for adventures. Some frankly declared that marriage was an outdated institution. How could you make a contract to love for an entire lifetime? they asked. What could be a greater contradiction than love and a contract? The novels these girls read, the magazine articles, the plays they saw, all mocked the husband who worked hard, raised his children and was deceived, and at the same time they glorified the lover who got everything for free. My experiences with Gina and with those that I met later only confirmed this conviction. Well, and what about the things I observed at the Writers’ Club! In my own writings the husband emerged an object of scorn.

  Even a marriage in name only frightened me somewhat. What would I do if the girl changed her mind later and refused to divorce me. I was ashamed to accept money from a woman. I didn’t know where to find such a woman in the first place. My shyness was apparently obvious to the people at the Palestine Bureau, and one of the officials there recommended a girl who was ready to go through such a clandestine marriage. He told me about her in detail. She was engaged to an engineer in Warsaw, a graduate of the Warsaw Polytechnic Institute, and the wedding had been imminent when the fiancé committed some folly and was forced to flee Poland. After long wanderings he had illegally entered Palestine but he wasn’t able to bring his fiancée over. Panna (Miss) Stefa came from an affluent home and was deeply in love with her fiancé. She had already met several youths with certificates of immigration but one promptly fell in love with her and urged her to enter into a real marriage with him; a second changed his mind about the whole thing since he had a girl of his own who had somehow managed to scrape together the fare for them both; and a third had tried to swindle money out of her. Miss Stefa had grown so despondent that she had given up on the entire notion. The official urged me:

  “Above all, you ha
ve to convince her that you have no ulterior motives. I’ll call her right now. Her father was once a very rich man but Grabski ruined him with the taxes. The daughter studied at the university, knows languages, and who knows what else.”

  Everything happened quickly. The official telephoned and apparently spoke well of me, for Miss Stefa asked that I come right over. I told the official that I would like to shave first and put on a better suit but he argued that the more shabby I appeared, the better my chances would be. Miss Stefa’s parents lived on Leszno Street in a house built in 1913 just before the war. It had an elevator and all the modern conveniences. The official spoke of this Miss Stefa with such high regard that I was overcome with childish fear and shame at the prospect of meeting her.

  Although I didn’t walk quickly, I became drenched in sweat. I had knotted my shoelaces but after each few steps they came untied as if by some unseen hand. As usual whenever I grew embarrassed, the imps began to toy with me. I sneezed and my collar button fell off. I searched for it on the sidewalk but it had vanished. A button popped off my overcoat. I suddenly noticed that my trousers were hanging loosely and trailing. I tried to hitch up my suspenders but the loop holding up the trousers had snapped. I tried to apply self-hypnosis à la Coué, told myself to be bold and not allow myself to be cowed by some female no matter how rich or educated she might be, but to no avail. Crossing the street I was nearly run down by a droshky. I walked past a store front with a mirror and caught a glimpse of myself. I looked pale, drained, disheveled. I walked inside the building gate where the janitor was lounging. When I told him whom I wanted to visit he measured me arrogantly and asked: