The End of Everything (New Yiddish Library Series)

by David Bergelson

  Mirel’s relationships with men are always paralyzed by her image of life after marriage, which presents itself to her as a vision of endless boredom, isolation, and hopelessness, nowhere more vividly than at the party held to celebrate her betrothal to Shmulik Zaydenovski:

  The conversation flowed from sixty eating and drinking mouths simultaneously, but none of this prevented Mirel from feeling as isolated as she’d felt before when she thought of the great provincial capital where she’d live with Shmulik in three or four rooms, and imagined the streets she’d once visited there as a child with Reb Gedalye.

  —There one summer evening they’d stroll out somewhere as a couple, would walk slowly and have nothing to say to each other, would return home and again have nothing to speak about there. [2.9]

  All Mirel seems to require of men is wealth and good looks, requirements ironically emphasized by her choice of the crippled medical student Lipkis as an interim companion. Lipkis is poor and unattractive as well as crippled, and Mirel clearly uses him to spite the rest of the shtetl. She finds the blond Shmulik physically acceptable because he looks “like a European” (2.5), but she has a sexual affair with the swarthy but handsome idler Nosn Heler, who looks “like a Romanian” (2.8). When Heler starts to bore her, she breaks o. with him, realizing that a sexual liaison is not what she is looking for. Yet she rejects two other alternatives available to women of her time: the conventional role of wife and mother personified by the former revolutionary Miriam Lyubashits, and the promiscuous existence of a “free spirit” lived by her rich and dissolute cousin Ida Shpolianski. She seems always to be living between a break with one man and awakening affection for another.29 While still engaged to Velvl she has an affair with Heler; she then separates from Velvl to take up with Lipkis, and drops Lipkis in favor of the jaded but good-looking Hebrew poet Herz. For a time she seems to long for serious love, yet reminds herself that although “other people were living fully. [ … ] For a long time now, it seemed, they’d known that love wasn’t the most essential concern in life. [ … ] But then where was the most essential concern in life? Did life perhaps offer some hidden corner where a few words about it might be heard?” (2.11).

  Seemingly indifferent to her own life, she struggles to establish a connection with others whom she believes to be suffering as she does, seeing reflections of her own situation in trains and their assorted passengers (2.2). Yet she is fully conscious of “the alluring power of her graceful figure” (2.6), which attracts even the Burnes family’s callow young tutor, who is “captivated” by her voice, “modulated by the enervated tones of one who’d lived through a great deal yet remained stubbornly loyal to some private ideal and paid no mind to the opinions of others” (4.4). Mirel never hesitates to use her beauty to attract those she feels can assist her in some way. Thus where Heler provides her with the opportunity to explore her sexuality, Herz offers her the possibility of acquiring some intellectual insight. Setting out to capture his interest, she sees in him only what she wants to see—another directionless soul suffering in solitude. Herz’s response to life is the detached cynicism of an outsider, however. He wanders about questioning the peasants like an anthropologist (2.3), yet he tends to view the world of the shtetl with neoromantic idealization: one Sabbath eve he interprets the lassitude of twilight as a manifestation of what has been identified as “historical Jewishness,”30 an affectation undercut by Mirel’s realistic awareness of its quotidian tedium (2.15).

  Detached from social engagement, perhaps through disappointment at past failure, Herz withdraws completely from any practical commitment to life by writing poetry in Hebrew, an activity that embarrasses him by its futile evasion of reality at a time of revolutionary change: “Two years ago he’d poked fun at himself and told her: To write during the day was a disgrace to him personally, as well as to the entire Jewish population of the shtetl who had no need of it, so he wrote only at night, when people were asleep. At night, he said, everyone’s sense of shame was diminished. And then he’d smiled and held his peace. Nothing else was left to him, he said, except this smiling silence” (2.3). His helpless disillusionment finds vivid expression in his symbolic evocation, in his “Dead City” prose poem, of “bodies clutching stones tightly in their fists. Before their deaths they had, it seemed, desired to hurl these stones at someone” (2.3). Poseur and cynic that he is, he keeps the needy Mirel at an emotional distance by ignoring her letters for a long time, so that when he eventually does respond—twice (3.16 and 4.4)—to her desperate summons, he is no longer able to help her, even if he wanted to.

  For all his devotion, Mirel’s husband Shmulik is the most pitiable of the men with whom she has a relationship. Though Mirel tells him frankly that, despite their betrothal, she can never love him and will always treat him badly (2.12), he nevertheless insists on going through with the marriage and then suffers bitter consequences he could easily have avoided. Emotionally immature, prepared to accept any degradation at Mirel’s hands only to keep her, he lacks the dignified stoicism of Velvl Burnes, who loves Mirel just as deeply and tracks her doings with just as close an interest, but who accepts the inevitable. Mirel is vaguely aware of how badly she treats both of them but is too self-absorbed to consider their feelings. She continually pursues illusions so that, when Shmulik agrees to give her a divorce, she feels free, seemingly “recogniz[ing] on the horizon the important new life she sought” and fleetingly believing that “there was only one small thing she still needed to grasp [ … ] and the essence of her life, that which she’d been seeking for so long, from the time she’d been a child, would be clear to her” (3.10).

  Shmulik’s cousin Montchik, the last of the six men in the novel infatuated with Mirel, is the one with the most balanced awareness of what she is and the dead-end into which any relationship with her must lead. Fascinated by her beauty and her ever-present “sadness”—a key word almost always attached to any description of her—Montchik understands her need for “something” that no one can provide for her, but is honorably clear that, because she is the wife of another man—and one of whom he is very fond—he can be nothing more to her than a good friend, an office he loyally performs.

  3.

  The novel develops its theme through contrasts and parallels between the social worlds of the shtetl on one hand and the metropolis on the other. Mirel is the force that disrupts the settled rhythm of life in both, leaving no one with whom she comes into contact untouched or unchanged. Her most resolute enemy is finally not her dull-witted, self-satisfied mother-in-law but her namesake, the former student radical turned bourgeois homemaker, Miriam Lyubashits. Where Herz’s frustration sluices away in mocking indifference, Miriam’s thwarted zeal channels itself into the maintenance of the domestic status quo which insists that the only acceptable way of life for a woman is marriage and child-rearing, conditions that stand in total opposition to the personal autonomy Mirel demands. Having chosen the option Mirel is determined to avoid, Miriam speaks for the established social order in judging Mirel as “no longer a normal person” (3.8).31

  The values of an all-embracing bourgeois society and the all-pervasive reach of its limited provincialism are also bodied forth in such fleetingly marginal figures as Heler’s bachelor uncle who speaks Russian badly “like a dentist” and “sat on interminably in the salon with Mirel and, in the big-city manner, bored her until nightfall” (2.8); the rabbi’s mother, who has a sixth finger and is mortified by this divergence from the norm (2.9); or one of the guests at a late-night drinking party in Schatz’s cottage, “some teacher or other from a nearby shtetl, a shabby thirty-eight-year-old fellow in a blue peasant blouse who’d once had rabbinical ordination and the daughter of a ritual slaughterer for a wife, but was now in love with a prosperous shopkeeper’s daughter not yet seventeen years of age” (2.14).

  Often these subsidiary figures serve as a kind of chorus, commenting obliquely on the main action: the cutting remark of Schatz’s aged grandmother; for example—“Whoe
ver talks less about herself talks less foolishness” (2.3)—makes a sharp comment on the unremitting solipsism of both Schatz and Mirel. Similarly, a group of boisterous young tailors’ apprentices undercut Mirel’s pretensions by mocking her (2.5), and stress the irrevocable passing of the old order by accidentally breaking some windows in her father’s abandoned house (4.2). Members of the small-town intelligentsia that surround Mirel, like the pharmacist’s assistant Safyan, the student from Paris, Esther Finkel, and the local Hebrew teacher Shabad (2.11), are all indifferent to her besetting preoccupations, while her search for independence identifies her to the shtetl’s young bachelors merely as a woman of easy virtue and thus exposes her to lewd insults like that offered by the lascivious polytechnic student at Tarabay’s party (2.6). In the city, her beauty is objectified—on a streetcar it reminds an officer of his lost first love and his present unsatisfactory marriage (3.1)—and simply makes her conscious of what seems to be near-universal promiscuity (3.1).

  Characters are largely identified by recurring and judgmental epithets marking their distinguishing characteristics. For instance, Velvl—like Mirel’s father—always thinks of her in the affectionate diminutive as “Mirele,” Reb Gedalye is always presented as a pointed nose and gold-rimmed glasses, and Montchik has huge black eyes. Shmulik’s mother, whose personal name, Mindel, is mentioned only once (2.4), is always designated “the mother-in-law” regardless of the different relationship in which she stands to other characters. Themes, too, are developed through descriptions of the physical world that consistently reflect psychological interiority. Mirel’s horror of the frozenness of life in the shtetl, for example, is powerfully inferred from the anthropomorphism of the narrative’s presentation of its winter landscapes:

  Like great beasts, houses hunkered down ponderously under their heavy, snow-covered roofs and dozed in an unending reverie.

  It seemed:

  These houses had ears, hidden, highly attentive ears, continually listening to the great silence that bore down on everything around both from close by and from far away.

  It seemed:

  They were ready, in response to the slightest, most remote rustle from the fields, to spring up and in great rage and haste rush to confront it, like those starving dogs that race forward to challenge some alien intruder of their own species, an unwelcome guest. [2.2]

  Inanimate objects denote material and social standing, like the contrasting sleighs of the Hurvits and Burnes families en route to Tarabay’s party (2.6), or the expensive, imported curtains and velvet runners in the Hurvits house, which are signs of past prosperity and reminders of present decay (2.4); they are later invested with human emotions, seemingly mourning for the loveless marriage that will destroy Mirel and her family (2.15). Both in the shtetl and in the “quiet suburb” of the metropolis, the windows of houses are personified as eyes either looking out brightly or shut in darkness; almost always, those who stand outside are cut off from any emotional warmth, their emotions mirrored in the harsh elements outdoors, as with Shmulik:

  That night, walking round his house, he came to that part of the garden on which the windows of Mirel’s room looked out. The place was sodden. An autumn shower, driven by a gust of wind, streamed down diagonally while the cherry trees shuddered, were soaked, and protested faintly against something. A row of old poplar trees standing at one end of the orchard all bowed their crowns in the same direction, gesturing despondently to the heavily overcast corner of the sky from which the wind was driving the clouds:

  —From over there … That’s where the misfortune’s coming from.

  The shutters of Mirel’s room were fastened from within, but the glow of a burning lamp striking through their cracks indicated that she was still awake. [3.9]

  The subjective, emotional nature of reactions and reflections—those of other characters as much as Mirel’s—are frequently conveyed in this metaphorical correspondence between the physical and the emotional. A vivid illustration is the way the yearning for one character by another is conveyed almost cinematically by the use of light. Keen to see Herz again but unwilling to admit it even to herself, Mirel unexpectedly runs into him:

  A little while later, when she emerged from the pharmacy, the distant flame-red sun hung low on the western horizon like a great golden coin, and standing alone on the outskirts of a shtetl poised to receive the Sabbath was Herz. [ … ] With his face wholly steeped in the glow of the setting sun, he appeared to be made of gold. [2.15]

  A parallel description conveys Nosn Heler’s desperate desire to see Mirel once more:

  Every now and then he screwed up his eyes and gazed intently toward the farthest end of the street on which the distant low-hanging sun still blazed down, inflaming the yellowing leaves on the surrounding trees and the roofs on the nearby houses. From time to time some gilded person emblazoned with red-gold sunshine approached from that direction—but it wasn’t Mirel. When he did finally catch sight of her coming toward him, he failed to recognize her and didn’t believe that it could really be she. [3.2]

  The narrative’s repeated use of verbal markers of imprecision like “apparently,” “seemingly,” “thought” suggests that situations offered to the reader are perceived through some unnamed filtering consciousness. Indirect sentences using impersonal pronouns and the passive voice deliberately avoid identifying the perceiver and blur together the third-person narrative voice with the thoughts and speech of individual characters, as in Heler’s desperation to make Mirel commit herself to him, for example:

  He was still unable to gather the thread of his thoughts. Fancying that Mirel was looking at him as though he were a babbling idiot, he grew even more agitated; he was overcome with a powerful resentment against her that helped him to pull himself together and quite suddenly to say what he wanted, without fully anticipating it himself.

  —This was what he wanted to know: did Mirel love him? She couldn’t deny it. So he asked only one thing of her: why didn’t she want to divorce her husband and marry him, Heler?

  Mirel heard him out, shrugged her shoulders, and glanced down at the lines she’d scratched out on the ground with the tip of her parasol:

  —Well, and afterward, after the wedding … ? [3.2]

  The capacity of the novel’s allusive, indirect discourse to create a polyphony of voices that make it difficult if not impossible to determine not only who is speaking but what is being said—and the implications of what is supposedly said—is well illustrated in the ambiguity of Reb Gedalye’s dying words. These are not directly heard but are reported by a third party:

  Holding his glass of whiskey, the rabbi spoke to those assembled about Reb Gedalye of blessed memory:

  —This is what happened … Right at the end, this is what happened: he said to me, Avreml, he said to me, why are you weeping? … Foolish fellow: if I felt I were leaving anyone behind me, I’d make the journey there as readily as going to a dance.

  All those who stood round heard and were silent. Only one man, an emaciated, timid sycophant who was unemployed, edged unobtrusively closer to someone at the back and smiled foolishly in consequence of the liquor he’d drunk. Wanting to make some allusion to the many young men whom Mirel had always dragged around with her as she wandered over the shtetl and to the fact that she’d not come down to the shtetl here after her father’s death, he remarked snidely:

  —Evidently Reb Gedalye knew his own daughter, eh? Evidently he knew very well what she was. [4.2]

  This remark is puzzling, because its meaning is not straightforward. Strictly speaking, Reb Gedalye does “leave someone behind”: his daughter Mirel, who should be his heir. But Mirel is both unwilling and unable to inherit anything, whether material or spiritual, from her father. Her estrangement from her parents is clear even before her marriage, and intensifies after it. Does Reb Gedalye recognize on his deathbed that his daughter is as brutally unfeeling as the nasty bystander suggests to the rabbi’s listeners? Is Reb Gedalye mourning b
ecause his name will never be perpetuated through a male heir? Are these in truth Reb Gedalye’s last words, or are they a pious fabrication retailed by the rabbi? The fact that his purported remark fits any or all of these possibilities is part of the purpose of the narrative discourse, which subtly transforms ambiguous individual remarks into thematic statements. To accept only one of these possible meanings would restrict the implication of what has been said, and would make obvious and one-sided what the narrative insists is complex, indirect, and diffuse. Reb Gedalye’s ambivalent remark moves the particular to the general and the personal to the communal. The house he lives in becomes a metaphor for the society of which he was once a leading representative; it has no heir to take it over but remains deserted and desolate because the world it inhabits is dead. The polyphonic narrative discourse thus transforms the purported dying words of one individual into a metaphorical sigh of regret for the death of an entire world and way of life. The vision of a “dead city” expressed through the voice of the poet Herz can be read as a lament for the sociopolitical stagnancy that appeared to have taken permanent hold in Russia after the failure of the 1905 revolution. It may also be said to define the essential pessimism of Bergelson’s oeuvre. The characters crowding his fiction remain as perplexing to themselves as to others. Their speech and actions are never unambiguous: speech is often an intrusion upon more eloquent silence; actions are generally reactions to circumstances over which they have no control. In Bergelson’s early work, no particular actions are privileged above others; the events of his fiction, sometimes banal, sometimes violent, are presented with equal emphasis.

  To articulate this elusiveness, Bergelson developed a style characterized by the choric repetition of set phrases and sentences and the general subordination of direct to reported speech, a mode resembling the use of the free indirect discourse devised by the French novelist Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880) for Madame Bovary, which appeared in Russian translation in 1858, one year after it was first published in French.32 What is said by an individual character and what is observed by the third-person narrative voice frequently become indistinguishable, a process that Bergelson advances by his repeated use of the passive voice to cloud the possibility of ascribing judgments exclusively to the character from whom they ostensibly emanate.