Love and Exile

by Isaac Bashevis Singer

  “Ten o’clock.”

  “So early? Well, it’s all the same. Bring me back something to read, at least. Yesterday I finished Dreiser’s An American Tragedy.”

  “Is it good?”

  “Neither good, nor bad. There is nothing American about this tragedy.”

  “I’ll drop by Bresler’s and bring you a whole stack of books.”

  “Don’t get lost in Warsaw.”

  I was hungry after last night’s meager supper. I was in a mood for fresh rolls, coffee with cream, and a piece of herring, but all we had was stale bread and a package of chicory. The little bit of milk that remained had turned sour overnight. Maybe it’s already time to return to the grave? I asked myself. But somehow, I wasn’t ready yet. Experience had taught me that whenever things grow extremely bad and I think that the end is near, something inevitably happens that seems a miracle. Though I had refuted God I still believed that somewhere in the celestial register accounts were being kept of every person, every worm, every microbe. I did not expect to fall asleep, but I did when I lay down on my torn mattress, and when I opened my eyes the sun was shining.

  Lena lit the Primus stove and it began to seethe and stink of alcohol. She boiled water with chicory and handed me a thick slice of black bread smeared with jam. It seemed to me that she took a thinner slice for herself and less jam. Even though she preached equality of the sexes, a trace of respect for the male inherited from generations of grandmothers and great-grand-mothers still reposed somewhere within her. I chewed the stale bread for so long that it began to taste fresh. Even the chicory and water acquired flavor when you drank it slowly. Millions of people in India, China, and Manchuria didn’t even have this. Only ten years or so earlier, millions of peasants had starved to death in Soviet Russia.

  There was no point in getting dressed, since the sun had already begun to bake the roof overhead. I had a clean shirt for my trip to the city, but I didn’t want to get it sweaty. A few weeks before I had started a novel for which I nursed great hopes. Joshua had written that the Forward would publish my work if they liked it. Besides, I might be able to sell it to a Warsaw newspaper. But the longer I worked on it, the clearer it became to me that it had lost both its action and form. I tried to describe an ex-yeshivah student who had become a professor of mathematics and later grew senile, became an occultist and a believer in the mystical power of numbers, but I lacked the experience for this type of work. Lena had told me this right from the start.

  I had failed in every area. I had actually sabotaged myself and my own goals. I had squandered a lot of energy on this manuscript. Certain chapters had come easily to me—those in which I described the confusion and loss of memory inherent in old age. I often had the eerie feeling that I had been born old and senile. But I knew too little about mathematics and nothing at all about life at a university.

  It was too early to go to the station, but I could not spend all morning inside that ruin. Lena accompanied me. I warned her that she might be recognized and arrested and she contended that it would be better for her to be imprisoned. At least she wouldn’t have to worry about a maternity clinic and a place to live after the summer was over. We strolled along in the sand, each preoccupied with his own thoughts.

  Lena began to speak to me and to herself:

  “In what way is this miserable place better than a prison? At the Pawiak I had a clean bed. I ate better too. Before I had the fight with the girls, I also had more company. Here, hours go by that you don’t speak a word to me. I warned you to put aside that ridiculous novel but you clung to it like a drowning man to a straw. Simply watching you struggle over this damn manuscript is more painful to me than the toughest jail. At times I feel like stopping a policeman and saying, ‘Here I am.’ At least, I’d find a place for my son.”

  “How do you know it’ll be a son? It could be a daughter.”

  “For my part, it could be an incubus.”

  I tried to comfort her by saying that I would take her along to America, but she replied:

  “Do me no favors. You can take your America and stick it!”

  Finally, the train came and I climbed aboard. Lena turned around to go back. I had to keep reminding myself that I was a corpse, freed of all human anxieties. I was dead, dead, dead! I didn’t dare forget this for even a moment.

  After a lengthy wait, the train started off toward Warsaw. The car was empty. Fresh breezes blew in from the resort towns. Some vacationers already lay on folding chairs, sunbathing. In Falenica I saw a Jew standing beside a tree in a prayer shawl and phylacteries, swaying over the eighteen benedictions. He beat his breast as he intoned, “We have sinned … We have transgressed.” At a long table sat yeshivah students while the master lectured, gesticulating and pulling at his yellow beard.

  If no check came for me from Paris today, I was through for good. The only way out would be to jump into the Vistula. I received my mail not at my room on Nowolipki Street, but at the home of Leon Treitler, the husband of the former Miss Stefa and the present Madam Treitler.

  I was actually going to her. All my mail came at her address. I could have called her long-distance but this was not less expensive than a third-class ticket. I had reached such a stage of isolation where Stefa and a poor cousin of mine, Esther, had become my only contact with Warsaw. Zeitlin and his wife had gone to the Zakopane Mountains for their vacation. J. J. Trunk went to some spa abroad. The Yiddish Writers’ Club was deserted in the summer months.

  3

  Leon Treitler lived in his own building on Niecala Street, a few steps from the Saxony Gardens. The apartment consisted of eight rooms. Leon Treitler had read my stories in Yiddish and Stefa had tried translating them into Polish. She knew more Yiddish than she admitted. She no longer called it slang; she had ceased believing in assimilation. The Jews could neither become totally Polish nor would the Poles tolerate this weird minority. Stefa had been insulted several times in Polish cafes when she had gone there with her husband; she had been advised to go back to Nalewki Street or to Palestine. The anti-Semitic writers in the Polish press even attacked the converts. Some of these writers had accepted the racial theories of Hitler and Rosenberg—this at a time when the Nazi press was describing the Poles as an inferior race and maintaining that a number of their best families, such as the Majewskis and the Wolowskis, were descendants of the followers of the false messiah Jacob Frank, an Oriental Jew and a charlatan. There was even conjecture that the Polish national poet, Adam Mickiewicz, was of that breed since on his mother’s side he was a Majewski, which was the name assumed by all the Frankists who converted during the month of May. The Wolowskis, on the other hand, were the offspring of Elisha Shor, one of Frank’s most learned disciples.

  Warsaw lay in the grip of a heat wave. I couldn’t wait until I got to Stefa’s to learn whether a letter had come for me and I called her. Telephone service had already made direct dialing possible. I heard the ringing and, presently, Stefa’s voice. Stefa had so utterly rejected the idea of assimilation that she often insisted on being addressed as Sheba Leah, and she called me Yitzchok, Itche, and sometimes even Itchele. She now exclaimed:

  “Yitzchok, if you called me a minute before, no one would have answered! I went down to buy a paper.”

  “What’s the news?”

  “Bad as always. But I have some good news for you. There is mail for you.”

  “From where?”

  “From halfway around the world—from Paris, from New York, from the American consul. It seems there are two letters from New York. Shall I take a look?”

  “We’ll look together.”

  “Where are you?”

  “At the station.”

  “Come over. I’ll make breakfast for you.”

  “I’ve already had my breakfast.”

  “Either you eat with me or I’ll throw all your letters out the window.”

  “Sheba Leah, you’re terrible!”

  “That’s what I am.”

  I had intended
to walk to Niecala Street from the station to save the fare, but I now raced to catch a streetcar. What a few words can do to a corpse, I said to myself. I had come as close to Treitler’s house as the streetcar would take me and I ran the few remaining steps. The janitor knew me. Even his dog didn’t bark at me as he once had. On the contrary, he began to wag his tail when I entered the gate. Each time I paid a visit to this house I marveled at what time and human emotions could accomplish. I could never forget my first meeting with Stefa; how she had questioned me as I stood on the other side of the door; the contempt with which she had spoken of Yiddish and of Yiddishkeit; of how close she herself had been to suicide at that time. Now, Stefa was a rich matron and my Polish translator. A fragment of my novel had been published in a Polish newspaper and, thanks to me, her name had appeared in print for the first time. She had signed herself Stefa Janovska Treitler. Leon Treitler was so proud of seeing his name in print that he arranged an evening in honor of the occasion. Among those invited were Stefa’s former friends from the Gymnasium and the university, several of her relatives, and Leon Treitler’s partners with their wives and daughters. Champagne was drunk and speeches were made. Leon Treitler had bought a hundred copies of the paper and had had one of them framed. I had never before encountered such exaggerated respect for the printed word.

  Stefa’s former teacher, who was also present, made a toast and recalled that when Stefa had still been in the sixth grade at the Gymnasium he had predicted a literary career for her. He now prophesied that Stefa would forge a bond between Polish and Yiddish literature. The fact was that he had mistaken me for my brother. Joshua’s novel had come out in Polish after he had immigrated to America and it had received favorable reviews. Oddly, the most virulent Polish anti-Semite, the infamous Nowaczynski, had written a glowing review of this book, Yoshe Kalb. According to his article, my brother had demonstrated the extraordinary extent of Jewish energy in his novel, and how skilled the Jew was at hypnotizing himself and others—also, how the Pole, who was by nature soft, naïve, and weak in character, could easily be influenced by the Jew and dominated by him if he didn’t resist.

  The prophesies made by Stefa’s teacher that evening at the Treitlers’ didn’t come true. Outside of that single piece, no other work of mine was ever published in Polish. But a love awoke between Stefa and me that she didn’t bother to conceal from her husband. We kissed in Leon Treitler’s presence. He was one of those men who actually cannot exist without a hausfreund. He often called to reproach me for neglecting Stefa.

  Leon Treitler was tiny, with a pointed skull lacking even a single hair. He had a long nose, a sharp, receding chin, a pointed Adam’s apple, and jutting ears. He couldn’t have weighed over a hundred pounds. He dressed like a dandy, loud ties with pearl stickpins, buckled shoes, and hats with a little brush or feather. He had a thin nasal voice and he spoke in ironical paradoxes. He always began the conversation somewhere in the middle—needling and flattering at the same time. He would say, “And even when you’re a famous writer already, must you ignore every ordinary person just because he or she isn’t versed in all works of Nietzsche and can’t remember all of Pushkin by heart? I search for you like with candles and you hide out just as if I were your worst enemy. And even if I am an ignoramus and it’s beneath your dignity to associate with one of my kind, how is it Stefa’s fault? She simply dies of longing for you and you punish her for the fact that instead of marrying a poet she took a moneybags while her true love, that swindler Mark, deserted her with all his diplomas and medals.”

  This was Leon Treitler’s style. He nipped and the stroked. One eye winked and the other laughed. Stefa said that he was both a sadist and a masochist. He was crooked in business and was forever tied up in litigation, but he also gave money to worthy causes. Stefa swore to me that just four weeks after their wedding he had begun seeking a lover for her. He had a female secretary who knew all his tricks and who had been his lover for over twenty-five years.

  Leon Treitler was different from other people in many ways. He never slept more than four hours out of the twenty-four. For breakfast, he had bread and wine; for supper, cold meat and black coffee. His sexual gratification consisted of pinching Stefa’s bottom and calling her “whore.” He owned a whole library of pornographic pictures.

  Stefa said to me once, “What Leon Treitler really is, I’ll never know if I live to be a thousand. At times I suspect that he is one of your demons.”

  I rang and Stefa answered. The maid had gone out to market. Stefa had gained some weight but her figure was still slim and girlish. In protest against being constantly complimented on her Gentile appearance, she had dyed her hair brunette, and she wore a Star of David around her neck.

  Right there in the corridor we embraced and kissed a long time. Even though she maligned Leon Treitler at every opportunity, I had long since observed that she had acquired some of his mannerisms. She pledged me her love yet at the same time she needled me. Now she took me by the ear, led me into the dining room, and said, “You’ll eat with me even if you’ll stand on your head!”

  “Where are the letters?”

  “There are no letters. I fooled you. I don’t want you to go off to America and abandon me.”

  “Come with me.”

  “First eat! You’re as pale as death. They wouldn’t allow a skeleton into America.”

  I had assumed that I was full. My abdomen was bloated and I felt something akin to revulsion toward food. But the moment I bit into the first roll, I became hungry. I said, “Do me a favor and give me the letters. I swear I’ll finish everything.”

  “Your suit is covered with hair. Wait, I’ll brush you off.”

  She carefully plucked a hair from my lapel and examined it against the light of the sun. “A red hair?” she asked. “You told me she was a brunette.”

  “It’s my hair.”

  “What? You have no hair. It’s not your shade either.”

  “Sheba Leah, don’t be silly.”

  “You’re getting to be more like Mark every day. All you need is to forge a signature. What is it with me? It seems I attract this kind of man. One lunatic worse than the next.”

  “Stefa, enough!”

  “You look like death warmed over and you run around with God knows how many sluts. Once and for all I’ll give up all hopes of love. This seems to be my fate and that’s how it must remain. You’re leaving me anyhow. I see everything clearly—you’ll go off to America and I’ll never hear from you again. And even if I do get a letter, it’ll be all lies. Who is the redhead? Red hair doesn’t simply float through Otwock and just happen to light on your lapel. Unless your former wench—what was her name—Gina—rose from her grave and paid you a visit.”

  “Stefa, what’s wrong with you?”

  “I can endure the worst betrayals, but I can’t stand to be deceived. I told you as soon as we got together—everything yes, but no lies! You swore on your parents’ lives—your father was still living. Is this true or not?”

  “Yes, it’s true.”

  “Who is she? What is she? Where did you meet her? Tell me the truth or I’ll never look at your face again!”

  “She’s my cousin.”

  “A new lie! You never told me about any cousins. And what about this cousin? Are you having an affair with her?”

  “I swear that what I am about to tell you now is the sacred truth.”

  “What is the truth? Speak!”

  I started to tell Stefa about my cousin Esther, who was six years younger than I. When I came to Bilgorai in 1917, I was past thirteen and she was a child of eight. There evolved between us one of those silent loves that neither participant verbalizes nor even dares to think about. When I left Bilgorai for the last time in 1923, Esther was a girl of thirteen but I was a young man of nineteen teaching an evening course in Hebrew. I had begun to write, too, and was having a platonic affair with a girl. I didn’t even recall shaking Esther’s hand when I left the first time. A rabbi’s son didn�
�t shake hands with a girl when the family was present.

  Years passed and I didn’t hear from Esther. She wrote me only once, when her father, my uncle, died. Suddenly, she showed up in Warsaw, by now a grown woman of twenty-three. She had learned the milliner’s trade. She had read many books in Polish and Yiddish, my stories as well. She had become “enlightened” and had given up religion. She had come to Warsaw seeking a job in her trade, but also with the intention of revealing to me what she had kept concealed for so many years. She had confided the truth to only one girl friend, Tsipele. Tsipele now lived in Warsaw too, and worked as a cashier in her uncle’s stores. Esther and Tsipele shared a furnished room on Swietojerska Street, across from Krasinski’s Gardens.

  I presumed that Stefa would interrupt me and call me a liar, as she so often did, but she heard me out and said, “This sounds like a fairy tale out of a storybook, but it seems to be true. What did you do with this Esther? Did you manage to seduce her yet?”

  “Absolutely not.”

  “What is her hair doing on your lapel?”

  “Truly, I don’t know.”

  “You know, you know! Wait, I’ll get you your letters.”

  Stefa went out, then came back with a stack of letters that she flung on the table. I started to open them one after the other. My hands were trembling. One letter was from my brother. I could hardly believe my eyes. It contained a check from the Forward in the amount of ninety dollars. I had sent my brother one of my stories and he had sold it to the newspaper, of which he was a staff member.