Love and Exile

by Isaac Bashevis Singer

  I never had this story translated, but I wrote a number of variations on it, such as the story “Two Corpses Go Dancing.”

  “In the World of Chaos” might have provided me my first direction as to style and genre. Somehow I identified with this hero. Just like him, I lived yet was ashamed to live, ashamed to eat and ashamed to go to the outhouse. I longed for sex and I was ashamed of my passions. I always felt that the story in Genesis in which Adam and Eve eat of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge then grow conscious of their nakedness expressed the essence of man. Man is the only creature who is ashamed to be what he is. The whole human culture is one mighty effort to cover and embellish itself; one huge and complex fig leaf.

  As far as I knew, Gina had never gone away on vacation, but that summer she told me that she had rented a room with a kitchen in a villa lying between Otwock and Svider, and if I wanted, I could come to stay with her.

  This put me in a quandary. It was one thing to be secluded with Gina in a third-story flat on Gesia Street where no one visited or looked in through the door or windows. It was something else altogether to be with her at a summer resort where you lived on the ground floor, where the door and windows stood open, and where you spent most of your time outdoors surrounded by neighbors.

  The villa where Gina had rented the room lay close to Kacyzna’s villa where my brother was staying. To go out to a resort I needed a special summer wardrobe. Gina informed me that her place was close to the Svider River where the vacationers bathed and sunbathed along the shore. But this was hardly an attraction for me. I hated the nudity and noise of a beach. I was shy to undress even in front of men. Besides, my skin is so white that if I stay out in the sun for even a short while I burn and blister. Nor can my eyes tolerate the sun’s glare. I asked Gina if the doctor had told her to go away for the summer and she replied:

  “Yes, no, it makes no difference.”

  2

  My musings brought me no closer to any conclusions regarding the world nor my own duties toward God and man, but I enjoyed—I might say—philosophical fantasies: variations on Spinoza, Kant, Berkeley, and the cabala, along with my own cosmic dreams. Since time and space were merely points of view; since quality, quantity, and even existence itself were categories of reason; and since the thing in itself remained completely concealed, there was room left for metaphysical fantasizing. My God was infinite, eternal, and possessed of endless attributes, properties of which we humans could only grasp a select few. I didn’t agree with Spinoza that all that we know of God are His extension (matter) and His thinking. I was sooner inclined to see in Him other such qualities as wisdom, beauty, power, eternity, and maybe too a kind of mercy that we could never comprehend. The cabalists attributed sex to God, and I more than agreed with them in this concept. God Himself and all His worlds were divided into he and she, male and female, give and take, a lust that no matter how much it was satisfied it could never be sated completely and always wanted more, something new, different.

  Since man is created in God’s image, man could learn more about God by looking within himself, observing all his aspirations, yearnings, hopes, doubts. I envisioned God as resembling myself. He got much, much love from the Shechina, His feminine counterpart, the angels, the seraphim, the cherubim, the Aralim, the holy wheels and holy beasts, from the countless worlds and souls, but this wasn’t enough for Him and He also demanded love from insignificant man, the weakest link in the divine chain whom He exhorted: “And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might.”

  He wants love (as I do) regardless of whether He has earned it. He frequently punishes His creatures but He demands that they forgive Him and acknowledge that all His intentions are of the best. He Himself keeps many secrets yet at the same time He demands total candidness and a full baring of the soul.

  Now that Gina was in Svider, Stefa traveling with a husband she didn’t love, and I sleeping alone all the time, I would waken in the middle of the night and give my imagination free rein.

  “Think what you wish,” I ordered it, “you needn’t be ashamed before me. You can soar to the highest heavens or sink to the lowest abyss for in essence they are one and the same.”

  It wasn’t the Logos that was in the beginning, but the oneness, the unity. In God, everything is united—infinite thought and infinite passion, the ego and the non-ego, the greatest pleasure and the deepest despair, all matter and all spirit. The infinite had filled all space leaving room for nothing else. God was omnipotent, but He suffered from restlessness—He was a restless God. At first glance, this seems a contradiction. How can the omnipotence be restless? “Is anything too hard for the Lord?” How can an all-powerful suffer? The answer is that the contradictions are also a part of God. God is both harmony, and disharmony. God contradicts Himself, which is the reason for so many contradictions in the Torah, in man, and in all nature. If God did not contradict Himself, He would be a congealed God, a once-and-for-all-perfect being as Spinoza described Him. But God is not finished. His highest divine attribute is His creativeness and that which is creative exists always in the beginning stage. God is eternally in Genesis. Each time He lifts His gaze He sees chaos and He wants to create order. But creation is coupling and God must come together with His female aspects to produce birth. Male and female are contradictions that constantly yearn to unite, but the more they unite the sharper grow their longings and caprices.

  I slept some, awoke, dreamed, and came to again. Although my dreams were rife with fear, with demons, evil spirits, wild cruelties, and scenes of horror, I awoke from them with a lust that astounded me.

  I stood by the open window to catch a night breeze. The sky over the Zamenhof Street rooftops was filled with stars. I literally felt the earth revolving on its axis, rotating around the sun, wandering in the direction of a constellation which would take it millions of years to reach and at the same time racing along with the Milky Way toward a target and only eternity knew what it was and to where it extended. I am earth, I am the sun, I am the galaxy, I am a letter or a dot in God’s infinite book. Even if I am an error in God’s work, I can’t be completely erased. I tried to conceive the trillions, quadrillions, quintillions of planets in space, their individuality and the creatures that swarmed upon them, each with its own evolution, history, and passions. No, there was no death within this cauldron of life. Each atom, each electron lived and had its function, its ambitions, its unfulfilled desires. The universe shouted voicelessly. It sang a serenade to another universe. Not only I but the table in my room, the chair, the bed, the ceiling, and the floor all took part in the drama. A heat emanated from the walls. A shudder zigzagged down my spine.

  I tried to speak to Gina through telepathy. “Are you awake too? Do you also stand by a window looking out at the nocturnal mystery? What’s wrong, my love, what ails you? Don’t die, Ginele, for all death is a lie, a misunderstanding. Besides, I need you and I know that no one can take your place. Our coming together is a page in God’s novel and no one can tear it out. No one can ever kiss, attract and satisfy me as you have. I long for you, because we have already met who knows how many times and our lives are intertwined in such a way that it can never be severed. Our love commenced when we were still amoebas. We were fish in the sea, birds in the air, moles in the ground. We kneaded clay into bricks in Egypt. We stood at Mount Sinai together. Later, I was Boaz and you Ruth, I was Amnon and you Tamar. When Jeroboam disjointed the tribes of Jacob, you were in Jerusalem and I was in Beersheba but I smuggled myself across the border to search for you. I worshiped the Golden Calf and in your despair you became a harlot in the temple of King Manasseh. You danced before Baal and Ashtoreth and you bared your nakedness for half a shekel. For your betrayal I beat you the whole night but at dawn when the morning star emerged, we fell upon each other with a thirst that no sin could ever slake.

  “Because three thousand years ago you lay with the priest of Baal, Chammor son of Zev, tonight I will li
e with the maid, Marila, daughter of Wojciech. She waits for me in the kitchen on a straw pallet. Her belly is hot, her breasts are rigid, her groin is primed for me and for every male who comes her way. I know full well that this act will complicate our accounts even more, bring new reincarnations and maybe prolong the Diaspora, but even though free choice was bestowed upon us, everything is predestined. The divine ledger is manifold. Marila is the eleventh generation of a coachman who seduced the wife of a peasant, and I the thirteenth generation of a milkmaid raped by a squire. It’s all noted in our genes. God toys with us; He experiments with us in a test of reward and punishment, omniscience and free choice. A year hence, Marila will marry her fiancé, the soldier Stach, son of Jan, and for me there also awaits somewhere an ovary and a womb that will give birth to my son or daughter. God is the sum total not only of all deeds but also of all the possibilities. Good night, heaven. If you can, have mercy upon me.”

  3

  A letter from my father had arrived at Gina’s but since I seldom went there (even though I had a key) I didn’t get the letter until days later. The letter read as follows:

  To my dear son, the scholar and man of substance, long may he live.

  After I’ve wished you peace, I inform you that I must come to Warsaw to see a doctor since I am, may it not happen to you, not in the best of health. I’m suffering from stomach trouble as well as hemorrhoids and may the Almighty take pity and grant complete recovery to all the ailing of Israel. I’ve been away from Warsaw so long that I don’t know if any of my old friends are still alive since all kinds of misfortunes and plagues occurred during the war, heaven protect us, and I haven’t received any letters from them in a long time. “Thou knowest not what a day may bring forth.” I heard that a Dr. Sigmund Frankel in Warsaw is a great healer and they are all, as it is known, emissaries of God. I therefore ask you to get me an appointment for a visit with this doctor, and to meet me at the train that will leave, God be willing, on the evening of the 11th day of Tammuz and arrive in Warsaw on the morning of the 12th at 10 A.M. at the Danzig Depot. I’ll have to find a room at some inn in the Jewish quarter where the food is strictly kosher and which isn’t far from a house of worship. Best would be the old neighborhood where we once lived—on Gnonya or Grzybowska Streets, an area with which I’m familiar. I’ve written to my beloved son, your dear brother Israel Joshua, but his wife, my daughter-in-law, Gittel, wrote back that he is abroad on business and won’t be back for several weeks, and the local doctor feels I should see a Warsaw doctor immediately in case there is some growth, God forbid, that must be attended to. I certainly would like to visit with your brother, my son Joshua, and his family when he returns safely, and to greet them all heartily, and in behalf of your mother and myself I wish you all long life. Your father Pinchos Menachem, the son of the saintly Samuel, blessed be his memory.

  I read the letter and shuddered. What day of the month of Tammuz was this? Father had failed to indicate on what day of the week he was arriving. I had gone to Gina’s flat to pick up a German-Polish dictionary I had left there and which I now needed for a translation I was doing. I began to search for a calendar knowing full well that Gina wouldn’t have a Jewish calendar in the house. She didn’t have a calendar at all. Father’s letter had rattled me so that I left without the dictionary I had come for. Afterward, I wasn’t even sure that I had locked the door behind me.

  Once outside, I started looking for a stand selling Yiddish newspapers which would show the Jewish date on the front page. But there were no Yiddish newspaper vendors on Gesia Street or maybe in my confusion I failed to see them. As usual, funeral processions wound along, one after another. At the corner of Gesia and Franciszkanska Streets, I finally got a Yiddish newspaper and to my horror I saw that today was the 12th day of Tammuz! But the clock already showed twenty past noon. Was Father still waiting at the depot or had he wandered off somewhere? And if so—where? A feeling of despair came over me. Although it wasn’t far from where I was to the Danzig Depot I tried to flag a cab. But they were all taken. A streetcar came by and I did something I had vowed never to do—I sprang aboard as it was moving and caught a blow on my knee.

  The conductor turned to me: “Do you want to kill yourself or what?”

  And he added:

  “Idiots!”

  I began to pray to God that Father would still be waiting, recalling at the same time the saying in the Gemara that praying for something that was in the past constituted a false prayer. On the other hand, if time possessed no objective existence and the past was merely a human concept, maybe this wasn’t a false prayer after all. I sprang down from the trolley even before it had stopped and was nearly thrown under the wheels. I began to race toward the depot and near the entrance I spotted Father standing next to a white-bearded rabbi and another man. I ran up all breathless and cried out:

  “Papa!”

  “There he is!” the rabbi said, pointing to me.

  I wanted to hug Father, to kiss him and apologize, but somehow the opportunity never came. He held out his hand in greeting. He seemed perfectly composed. He half-said, half-asked:

  “You obviously were delayed.”

  “I just got your letter ten minutes ago. It came to an address where I’m no longer living. I just happened to drop by there to pick up a book I left behind. A miracle! A miracle!” I exclaimed, ashamed of my own words.

  The other man spoke up: “What did I tell you? It’s a good thing you listened to us and waited. Upon my word. Well, how does the saying go—All’s well that ends well.”

  “Praised be the Almighty!” Father said. “I didn’t know what to do. All of a sudden I recognized the rabbi from Kupiecka Street. It was really a stroke from heaven. We hadn’t seen each other for years but I’m good at recognizing people.”

  He turned to me. “You should remember the Kupiecka Street rabbi. He used to visit our house. It was during the time that Nahum Leib Weingut wanted to take all us neighborhood rabbis into the official rabbinate. This was yet under the Germans.”

  “How could he remember me?” the Kupiecka Street rabbi demanded. “He was just a child then. My beard has turned completely white since. But I remember him well with his red ear-locks. How long is it, eh?”

  “I remember you, I remember you!” I exclaimed, overcome with gratitude for the fact that Father hadn’t wandered off and I didn’t have to go searching for him. “I even recall what you said at that time: ‘If heaven wants us to be paupers, nothing Nahum Leib Weingut does will help.’ ”

  The old rabbi’s face beamed and his cherrylike eyes grew youthful.

  “Is that what I said? Some memory he’s got, the evil eye spare him! Yes, I recall now. Like father, like son. You know what, Rabbi? Since we’ve met, it’s a sign that it was fated. In which case, why should you go look for an inn? You’ll be my guest. Thank God I have a spacious apartment. So long as the children were still with us, it was somewhat crowded, but the daughters married and the sons left home. That’s the kind of world that’s evolved. Children no longer want to live with their parents. A father is likely to moralize a bit and who wants to hear the truth these days? The days fly by and there’s no one to exchange a word with. Rabbi, where will you find lodgings in Warsaw? Listen to me and come to my house. We’ll take a droshky and your son can ride along with us.”

  “No, no I couldn’t!” Father argued. “I’m deeply grateful to you but how does the saying go: ‘A stranger is a burden.’ The rich people have servants to help them but your good wife—”

  As the two old friends bickered, I studied my father. He had aged and seemed to me shorter. The reddish beard was now half-gray and shrunken, his forehead was sallow and wrinkled. His back was stooped and his gaberdine hung loosely on him. I saw in Father what I had seen in Gina a few weeks before—that he was much sicker than he knew. His blue eyes reflected the ponderings of those whose time has come. After lengthy haggling, Father agreed to stay at the Kupiecka Street rabbi’s house but only if he would
be allowed to pay his expenses. This was for me a blessing. I wouldn’t have known where to locate the strictly kosher quarters Father required nor did I have the money to pay for them. I barely had enough to cover the fare for the droshky.

  From the depot to Kupiecka Street was a short ride. We crossed Muranow Street, turned into Dzika Street, and soon were on Kupiecka. During the war all the houses had been allowed to go to seed. Some of the walls had to be buttressed with wooden beams to keep them from collapsing. We went into an apartment that reminded me of our own on Krochmalna Street years ago. The kitchen exuded the same familiar smells—chicory, onion, moldy bread, gas. We entered a room resembling Father’s old study—almost bare of furniture—containing only a table, two benches, bookshelves, and a lectern. The rebbetzin had gone shopping. Both men began to discuss learned matters. I said good-by to Father and went to arrange his appointment with the doctor. Father apparently sensed that I was broke for he gave me the money to buy the chit for the doctor and threw in a few extra zlotys besides. I didn’t want to accept them, but Father said:

  “Take, take. I’m your father.”

  And he nodded his head at a truth as old as the world itself.

  4

  I had purchased a chit at the doctor’s which would allow Father a visit, but not until a week hence. Father had brought along a manuscript and although he was short of money for a printer, he discussed the possibility of its publication with me. Even as a young man he had undertaken the responsibility of defending Rashi on every point on which he had been challenged by the tosaphists. He had been working on this manuscript virtually his whole life. I had heard him discuss it even while I was in cheder. One Purim when Father had had a drop too much, he began saying to me:

  “What happens to a person after he is gone? What becomes of his money, his houses, his stores, his honors? But the Torah and good deeds accompany him to the other world. It’s the greatest merit to write a book and to glorify the Torah. It is said of an author of a holy book that his lips speak from the grave.”