The End of Everything (New Yiddish Library Series)

by David Bergelson

  She returned to the shtetl with him when it had already begun to grow dark outside and the enveloping mists had started descending ever closer to the snow, thickening as night drew on. She stopped in front of her house in order to thank him once more:

  —She was deeply gratified that he found it as pleasant to be with her as she with him … After all, she’d taken up so much of his time.

  But on the threshold of a store situated in the row of houses opposite, a smiling relative of her former fiancé’s mother appeared, called the attention of someone there to Mirel and Safyan and, it seemed, took pleasure in doing so:

  —She’s found another fish to fry, thank God.

  So Mirel deliberately turned round to the departing Safyan once more and shouted out loudly after him:

  —If he wished, she’d call him out of the pharmacy tomorrow as well.

  Turning toward him yet again, she shouted out even more loudly:

  —She’d call for him at the pharmacy at the same time as today.

  Afterward, the whole evening in her isolated room was vacuous: vacuous because of the few hours she’d spent strolling about with the pharmacist’s assistant Safyan, vacuous because of her former fiancé’s relative, and vacuous because in the dining room a disgruntled Gitele was seated on the sofa listening in uncommunicative silence to the chatter of the rabbi’s young wife, examining her fingernails with a little smile, and never for a moment forgetting about Mirel, in respect of whom she’d been implementing a policy of obdurate silence for the past two weeks, and because of whom the long-awaited guest still hadn’t arrived, that guest for whose sake the drapes had been hung up, the velvet runners spread out, and the chilly salon heated.

  Unable to remain calmly in her room, Mirele donned her jacket and coat again, swathed her head in her scarf, and paused for a moment in the dining room to observe to her mother:

  —The salon doesn’t need to be heated any longer, it seems to me; it makes no difference … and on the whole, I think it’s high time to clear away all this festive decor.

  On the sofa, the uncommunicative Gitele made not the slightest move, not even turning to glance at her daughter. Only an inflexibly stubborn smile played around her tight mouth as she remarked, coldly and quietly, looking away toward the big window above and behind the rabbi’s wife:

  —Whom does it bother that the house is festively decorated?

  Provoked, Mirel left the house and disappeared alone for the rest of the evening. Meeting their relative the bookkeeper not far from the house, she stopped him to comment:

  —Could he explain what kind of oddity her mother was?

  And more:

  —Essentially, her mother went on smiling without speaking as though to spite someone … Presumably, one was supposed to think that she actually had a great deal to say and kept silent only because she was too clever.

  This pattern subsequently repeated itself for several days in succession: without a word to anyone she left home in the early evening and returned well past midnight, by which time the lamps had been extinguished all over the shtetl, and her own home was sunk in deep and heavy sleep. Where she disappeared to, no one could guess.

  After all, for the past five days the midwife Schatz had been away in a neighboring village at the bedside of a landowner’s wife who was in labor, and a huge padlock hung on the door of her cottage at the remotest end of the shtetl.

  Once, coming into town on the landowner’s cart to make some purchase at the pharmacy, the midwife Schatz drove up to their house and inquired for Mirel. Gitele flushed a little and replied quietly:

  —Mirel’s gone visiting … She’s undoubtedly gone off to Royzenboym the photographer’s wife.

  But when the midwife Schatz called there, she found no one except the two sisters of Mirel’s former fiancé, who were sitting in a small room with a low ceiling and a bright red floor filled with flower pots and the smell of Gentile cooking, listening to Royzenboym the photographer’s wife playing a guitar.

  —Hasn’t Mirel been here?—she asked, coming into the room.

  At which the sisters smiled oddly and exchanged glances, and the photographer Royzenboym’s wife raised her head from her guitar and answered in astonishment:

  —When did Mirel Hurvits ever come here?

  What a totally Christian appearance this Royzenboym woman had! Not without reason was the whole shtetl alive with rumors that before she’d married the photographer Royzenboym she’d lived with an officer somewhere in a big town.

  On one of these evenings, when, as always, Mirel was not at home, an unfamiliar hired conveyance stopped in the darkness next to Reb Gedalye Hurvits’s house, and an out-of-town Jew of average height muffled up in furs alighted from it and made his way into the illuminated hallway, where he stood smiling and twinkling his little eyes:

  —He’d been sent here … sent here from Yankev-Yosl Zaydenovski.

  Gitele and their young relative the bookkeeper received him, saw him slowly disencumber himself of his fur overcoat and his sheepskin undercoat, and watched as, equally slowly, he hung them both up on the coat rack. Then they sat with him at the dining room table, listening to him relate in a deliberate and leisurely manner:

  —He was, to be sure, no professional matchmaker … and, thank God, he had no need to depend on that kind of work for his livelihood …

  He ran a warehouse of sacks in a large shtetl near the metropolis, and was a close, long-standing friend of Yankev-Yosl and his household.

  He had a substantial graying beard and, curving right down to his mouth, a long nose under the skin of which stretched a network of blue-brown veins; he looked oddly respectable in his long, black frock coat, and his small gray eyes never stopped twinkling with great urbanity.

  —He’d been sent here, to be sure … sent by Yankev-Yosl Zaydenovski.

  The lamp hanging from the ceiling in Reb Gedalye Hurvits’s dining room burned late into that night.

  At length Gitele retired to her bedroom and lay down to sleep. Someone prepared a fresh bed in Reb Gedalye’s study for this emissary who was their guest, and also went to bed. Only then did their out-of-town visitor draw from his bag Lippert’s Kulturgeschichte* in its Hebrew translation and sit down at the dining room table, apologetically explaining to the departing bookkeeper as he did so:

  —He’d once owned a Jewish bookshop … From that time on he’d retained the habit of reading late into the night.

  The relative took his leave and went home to bed. The maid locked the front door behind him and soon began snoring loudly in the unoccupied pantry. And the guest went on sitting over his book at the table, drawing the hanging lamp on its pulley farther and farther down toward him. When Mirel’s knocking finally made itself heard from one of the outer shutters farthest away, he rose from his book and went to open the door for her, poking out his head with its twinkling gray, kindly eyes and, overcome with peculiar sensitivity and confusion like an embarrassed child, began stammering:

  —Hm … A pleasure … A pleasure.

  As soon as she saw this unknown face thrust out at her, Mirel trembled all over, and instantly and violently drew back, clutching at her beating heart:

  —Oh! … How frightening this was!

  Coming into the house, she kept edging ever farther away from him as though afraid he’d make a move toward her.

  Clad as she was from head to foot in black, her figure appeared more slender and lissome than usual, and she emanated a barely perceptible fragrance all around her, all of which so agitated the out-of-town Jew that he found himself unable to stop smiling and stammering:

  —Hmm … hm … frightened? How could this be? A pleasure … a great pleasure.

  His childlike sensitivity and the fact that he decorously refrained from offering her his hand* made him appear thoroughly respectable, yet for a long time afterward she was unable to compose herself, waiting until he’d lain down to sleep before going to wake the soundly snoring servant girl:

  �
��Who was this person?

  —At any rate, at least she knew he certainly wasn’t a thief.

  And the stranger, their guest, could still hear her voice as he lay in his bed, and either from good nature or from tension smiled to himself in embarrassment:

  —A thief ? How could this be? … A good child … A very good child.

  The emissary lingered on in the house for several days, and every morning when Mirel awoke she heard them slowly drinking tea with milk in the dining room opposite the quiet salon, and knew there was no one there except the stranger who was assuring both the genteelly uncommunicative Gitele and her devoted relative, the bookkeeper:

  —To be sure, they naturally want Mirele wholeheartedly … What a question …

  —The young man himself, Shmulik, to be sure, desires it … and Yankev-Yosl himself … and Mindel, his wife.

  And what else?

  —They ask no money of you, not even a promise of money … They specifically bade him say so.

  Hearing all this as she lay in bed, Mirele was revolted to her very soul. And the quiet, truncated conversation continued to reach her from the dining room:

  —And as people, he was obliged to say, the Zaydenovskis were unusually highly regarded … genial …

  —And the young man himself … a fine young man … truly, a very fine young man.

  The emissary eventually left and began sending frequent letters and urgent telegrams which Gitele and that tall young man, their devoted bookkeeper, eagerly perused. Gitele did so with the wordlessly venomous resentment of a woman obdurately determined not to speak, and the bookkeeper, standing silently next to her, wore a deeply furrowed brow, lifted his nose and snorted far too pensively, delaying his intention to discuss this with Mirele so long that one day she herself stopped him outside the house to say:

  —Would he please be so good as to inform her mother: she could rest assured that nothing would come of this …

  She was greatly agitated when she told him this, yet a few days later, after she’d taken herself off to the provincial capital on the spur of the moment, someone from the city came down and spread new rumors about her over the whole shtetl:

  —Yes, she’d been seen walking out with Shmuel Zaydenovski.

  She’d been seen in the Ukrainian theater with him and near the prison on the outskirts of the city as well.

  Whether in traveling to the provincial capital Mirel had known she’d meet him there, or whether, even as far as Gitele and the bookkeeper knew, their meeting had been accidental and unplanned, no one could say.

  A few days later, she returned pale and cheerless from the provincial capital. It was about two o’clock in the afternoon, and in the dining room the white cloth laid for lunch was still spread on the round table. Gitele still sat in her usual place opposite her relative the bookkeeper, picking her teeth with a matchstick. Passing through, Mirele spoke not a single word to anyone and for perhaps fully half an hour shut herself in her isolated room. During all that time, Gitele kept urging her relative the bookkeeper:

  —Why couldn’t he just go into to her room and ask her? She couldn’t begin to understand why not …

  But the preoccupied young bookkeeper was in no hurry, furrowed his brow, raised his nose and snorted. In her room, meanwhile, Mirel changed, put on her black jacket and scarf and started making her way out into the street. Only then did he rise from his chair, follow her out into the hallway, and stop her there:

  —Yes, he wanted to ask her … He wanted …

  He instantly received an answer, one displeased and peculiarly harsh:

  —She’d already told him once that nothing would come of this.

  For a time he hovered in the hallway, uncertain of whether or not to go back into the house, while with dispassionate cheerlessness she calmly descended the steps of the verandah and made her way slowly up into the shtetl somewhere. The dark melancholy day was in the grip of the light yielding frost that follows a sunny fair. The dirty snow was slippery underfoot, and Gentile pigs and Jewish cows thrust their snouts into such muddily filthy straw as lay scattered about. Here and there, swathed in furs and tightly bundled up, young wives stood near the doors of the small flour shops they ran, following her with curious glances:

  —Is it true what they say—that Mirel’s about to become a bride?

  She turned left into the back street at the very end of the town, entered Lipkis’s home through the front door and inquired:

  —Isn’t Lipkis at home?

  His widowed mother saw her out with great respect, repeating several times:

  —He’s teaching somewhere at the moment … He’s giving lessons to his pupils somewhere.

  Leaving, she took herself off along the well-worn footpath that led out of the shtetl to the home of the midwife Schatz, found a lock hanging on the door there, and learned from her Gentile neighbor:

  —She’d been called out to a woman in childbirth in Kashperivke yesterday evening.

  Deeply depressed, Mirel returned to town, paused in front of the pharmacy but, appearing to think better of it, walked on, passing close by the house of her former fiancé’s father with its unusual blue shutters; stealing a glance in that direction she saw:

  Not a single conveyance was stationed in front of the verandah and no one was to be seen there. Only a tall farmer, a szlachticz* who’d apparently sought a small loan with which to cover the costs of the coming summer’s work, left the house empty-handed, sighed very deeply, pulled the flaps of his fur hat down over his ears and reflected that as it made no difference now where he ended up, he might as well take himself off wherever his eyes might lead him.

  She wandered about aimlessly until it began to grow dark outside and an even darker night began to descend on the shtetl. Not far from her father’s house she met her former fiancé’s eighteen-year-old cousin on his way to take tea with his uncle, and in a despondently quiet monotone she complained to him:

  —Did he have any explanation for the blank emptiness that had started taking hold of everything here in town? … There was simply no one here with whom to exchange a word.

  2.5

  Virtually every day thereafter she stood outside next to the house and saw:

  With the approach of the midwinter festival of Christmas, the mild frosts grew more severe, and for long gray days on end the dirty, frozen, snow-covered district faced that depressingly murky region toward which the searing wind blew ever more strongly. From that direction, the town awaited yet another ill-starred, drifting snowstorm, hearing the violent sorrow with which the bare languishing trees all around creaked in expectation of it:

  —Eventually this new snowstorm must break loose … it must …

  In various corners of the town, warmly clad children returned one by one to heder* after their lunch. They walked slowly and sluggishly, stopping every now and then with their backs to the wind to muse:

  —The blind night’ll come … It’ll definitely come very soon.

  Every now and then, along the road that led hither from the dismal murkiness of the fields, a new out-of-town sleigh would arrive, bringing someone else for the festive season, perhaps a lightly dressed and severely chilled telegraph clerk who’d arrived in these parts very early by train. In the teeth of the burning wind, the sleigh swept him farther and farther onward, wordlessly making him fine promises:

  —Soon, very soon: there’ll be a cheerfully warm and brightly lit cottage, a home … there’ll be a friendly smile from peasant parents and a long, dark village night—it’s the festive season.

  A local Jew who remained arrogant despite being unemployed and having come down in the world approached Mirel slowly, his back stooped. With his arms folded into his sleeves, he stopped, looked into the distance with a sigh, and slowly began telling about his young daughter, a former friend of Mirel’s, who was now in her third year of study in Paris:

  —From there she wrote home to say that she’d not be returning any time soon, this daughter of his
… She’d not come back until she’d completed her studies.

  The man looked broodingly into the distance along the road that led to that substantial, distant village with its sugar refinery where the perpetually jolly and perpetually busy Nokhem Tarabay ran his wealthy household in the style of a nobleman, and even more slowly began relating that this Nokhem Tarabay’s children had all arrived in the village for the Gentile festive season.

  —His younger son, the student at the polytechnic, was already there in the village, as well as his older son, a student at the science-oriented high school … and another young polytechnic student, a friend of his son’s, so they say.

  Great longing could be heard in the voice of this Jew who’d come down in the world, and he spoke of these two newly arrived polytechnic students with as much tenderness as though both were nothing less than bridegrooms for his pampered daughter who was now in her third year of study in Paris. When he’d finally grown bored with standing here and had wandered away to impart the same information to someone else, Mirel stood near the house for a long time, thinking about herself and about the days that were slipping by:

  —Her life dragged by in such a banal fashion … It had been banal right up until this midwinter festive season and it would go on and on being banal.

  Far, far away, a mere speck on the horizon, an image of the unknown village with its sugar refinery rose in her mind’s eye, and her yearning heart was drawn in powerless silence to those two young, fresh-faced polytechnic students who were now probably taking a stroll after their long afternoon nap. An image also rose of the big city from which they’d come down only the day before, and the thought occurred:

  —Before this Gentile festival, they’d finished some task in the big city … and returning there, they’d prepare themselves to start another.

  —And she, Mirel, what had she accomplished up until this midwinter festive season?