The End of Everything (New Yiddish Library Series)

by David Bergelson

  —They weren’t even aware of their good fortune.

  Mirel even smiled at this:

  —Eto khorosho. That’s good.

  But her smile was oddly feeble, too akin to the grimace that sometimes precedes tears.

  2.8

  In town, meanwhile, the fact that she was living with the midwife Schatz kept tongues wagging ceaselessly. In Avrom-Moyshe Burnes’s house, excessive pleasure was taken from this, and every recently arrived guest who might have something new to tell was joyfully accosted:

  —Well, what’s happening? What else had he discovered?

  In his own house, Reb Gedalye was profoundly vexed, and continually consulted his relative the bookkeeper about it:

  —He’d be quite frank with him: he could hardly wait for Gitele to return. Gitele was the only person who was capable of sorting this out … not so?

  And he rushed about all over the house in a highly agitated state of panic, continually pushing his gold-rimmed spectacles back and forth over his nose:

  —Who could say? Perhaps it would be best to send Gitele a telegram asking her to return home as quickly as possible?

  But very soon the Fast of Esther* came round on a beautiful, sunny day. The air was redolent with the warmth of winter’s end, and the frost was so limited and insubstantial that it could barely keep whole the blank white surface of snow on the surrounding fields, frolicking over it in the sunshine with myriad silver and diamond sparks.

  During the course of the day a sleigh arrived at the home of the midwife Schatz, bringing her a letter from the wife of a landowner in the village:

  —Her advice was sought, and if she wasn’t busy, she was asked to come.

  Covertly, the midwife was all for sending the sleigh back empty and to this end had even written a letter to the landowner’s wife. But Mirel suddenly became aware of this and responded very firmly:

  —No … The midwife was to go there at once.

  And when the midwife began arguing, Mirel’s face grew pale with anger and for some reason she set about washing up the dirty saucers and glasses.

  —If the midwife didn’t go, she’d get dressed and leave immediately.

  In this silent washing up of crockery there was a clear hint that, as an only child, she was accustomed to getting her own way and was fully capable of doing what she threatened and going off somewhere else; all this apart, there was something very singular in watching her at this work.

  Half an hour later, the sleigh bearing the midwife Schatz was gliding over the snow in a southwesterly direction far, far outside the shtetl, and Mirel was lying in calm despondency on the bed. In a quiet monotone, she invited the pharmacist’s assistant Safyan, who’d only just come in, to be seated, and just as quietly responded to his inquiries:

  —The midwife certainly wouldn’t return before evening.

  As usual, the pharmacist’s assistant Safyan was nervous, earnest, and dour. With his bulging, colorless eyes he looked not at her but somewhere into a corner of the room, evidently thought ill of the midwife, and was silent. After his departure, a heavy emptiness remained behind in the room. The silence intensified. Near the window outside, two Gentile girls in boots could be heard running about, chasing each other and laughing, laughing and chasing each other.

  Lost in thought, Mirel at length sat up on the bed and stared wearily at the rectangular patch of sunlight playing slowly in the middle of the floor.

  Quite suddenly she dressed herself, locked the midwife’s half of the cottage, and went outside. Since it was about half past three in the afternoon, the sun was still shining in the southwest, and in its sea of light the insubstantial frost still frolicked with myriad silver and diamond sparks. The big girls in their boots were still running about, chasing each other and laughing, laughing and chasing each other.

  Mirel turned left and walked slowly down toward the shtetl, from time to time looking to either side of her.

  The weather was so fresh and mild. Somewhere far away, in a great, noisy city, a young mother had for the first time surely sent her three-year-old child out for a walk with the governess and the child had returned home enchanted, with its little cheeks bright red, with a fresh and smiling little face, and with a single strange new word:

  —Mama, vyesna! vyesna! … Spring! Spring!

  And here in the shtetl, next to the synagogue which stood a little farther down from the pharmacy, some Jews of various ages stood in a little huddle; patiently waiting for the Torah reading during the afternoon service that would signal the end of their fast,* they were delightedly watching some urchins throwing snowballs at each other.

  Noticing her, these men forgot about the urchins for a while. They knew:

  —She, Mirel Hurvits, had left her father’s house and was living over there … She was living with the midwife Schatz.

  Slowly and wearily she walked farther down into the shtetl. In front of the house with the blue shutters that belonged to the man who should have been her father-in-law she lingered a little and saw:

  Her former fiancé’s sleigh stood before the verandah and the front door, and through the back door, which led into the kitchen, the scent of freshly baked sugar pastries regularly wafted out together with the steady pounding of a few restless brass pestles, bringing to mind an approaching and long-awaited wedding:

  —The groom’s a refined and reserved young man … and the bride is worthy of him … worthy … worthy …

  And strangely enough:

  All this awakened no sense of yearning in Mirel, and aroused no fear for her future life.

  With cold, vaguely formed resolution she neared her father’s house, and with the same icily unemotional determination she went inside. The empty rooms were all in semidarkness, and there was no one about who might notice her. Slim and sorrowful, she lingered at the door, and it occurred to her that she didn’t live as other people lived but wandered all alone along the periphery of life, in the World of Chaos;* that from childhood on she’d been stumbling about there in a long restless dream that had no beginning and no end:

  Now, it seemed, she’d come to some decision and would take some action, yet perhaps she’d come to no decision and would take no action. All alone she’d merely continue to stumble about as in an eternal dream of chaos and would never arrive at any destination.

  And now she stood once again in the very house in which she’d stood so many times before, wandering slowly from one room to another. As in times gone by, the gloom of twilight held sway, intensified, and was transmuted into haze. But in times gone by there had been people here, and now there were none. The doors between one room and another stood open; here and there a dark emptiness yawned in those corners where before one or another piece of familiar soft furniture had always stood. Mirel could see no one. No one stopped her, no one was made happier by her arrival. Something, it seemed, was too late here, had already ended. But the people? What had become of all the people?

  Suddenly she noticed Reb Gedalye all alone in the semidarkness of the study. Her constricted heart was powerfully drawn to him, and she put entirely out of mind her vaguely defined resolution. Hunched over and markedly shrunken, he sat there with his back toward her, his head thrown oddly forward and his mouth open, gasping like a fish before the medicinal steam he was pumping from the nickel vaporizer he’d brought back with him from abroad. In the deepening gloom of late twilight, the little machine burned before him with a blue-green flame, a turquoise light that barely illuminated his face, wet with countless drops of sweat and condensed steam.

  He stopped pumping steam and extinguished the vaporizer. Slowly he wiped his face with a handkerchief, still not sensing her presence behind him. But she was shattered. Choked with tears, she moved slowly over toward him filled with compassion for a father who’d been transformed into a helpless child.

  —What had become of him!

  A little while later she stood at the window with him. She wiped his face, kissed his brow, and noticed the
way he kept turning weakly away from her toward the window with the whole of his hunched body trembling, sobbing quietly to himself as though fearful that he might drool:

  —Wh -wh - wh - ff - ff - ff—why’ve I deserved this? Ff - ff - ff—In my old age—. - ff - ff ff ff ff

  He calmed himself a little when the maid returned from town and lit lamps in both the study and the dining room. Then Mirel went out into the dining room where she found the bookkeeper and looking straight at him, paused to say:

  —What did he think: if a telegram were sent to Zaydenovski immediately, could the betrothal party still be held that Saturday night? Yes? Then she’d ask him to attend to that telegram at once.

  —But if he would wait a moment … She thought she’d wanted to tell him something else but had forgotten … No, no … She’d remembered now. He could go off and attend to the telegram … She’d remembered now … The key … She still had the key to the midwife’s locked cottage; she’d have to take it back directly herself.

  An hour and a half later, when she returned home, she found the house brightly illuminated. Reb Gedalye was still hearing the Book of Esther read in the Sadagura prayer house, and in the dining room, next to the table with its fresh white cloth and burning candles, stood Gitele, newly arrived, her face aflame with color. Perhaps still thinking about what she’d brought back with her from her rich great-uncle, she was listening as a pious Hasid, wearing his prayer girdle,* was reading the Book of Esther to her:

  —In those days while Mordecai sat in the king’s gate … †

  She stopped Mirel with a gesture, wanting to ask her something, but afraid to speak out and interrupt the reading she pointed instead to a scrap of scribbled paper lying on the table.

  —Well—… this … well … See if Zaydenovski’s address is correct.

  And for some reason, reading over the address, Mirel made her no reply. She went off to her own room and in the darkness lay down on her bed.

  What followed was impossible to believe:

  In town someone swore later that the very same evening, when the midwife returned home she found Velvl Burnes’s sleigh waiting next to her darkened house. Velvl Burnes himself stood there bareheaded in the moonlight for perhaps ten minutes and could barely speak for agitation:

  —He’d thought he might see Mirel here—he said.—He wanted … he wanted to tell her something … But actually … Actually, he hoped the midwife Schatz would pardon him.

  Two days later, a thirty-five-year-old bachelor stopped his sleigh outside Reb Gedalye’s house and inquired from Avreml the rabbi, whom he encountered coming out:

  —Does Reb Gedalye’s daughter, Mirel Hurvits, live here?

  The rabbi glanced questioningly at him and at his huge sergeant-major’s mustache, followed him into the entrance hall, and watched as he took off his sheepskin coat and warmed his ice-cold nose and whiskers. The rabbi assumed that this was some new emissary from Zaydenovski who’d come in connection with the betrothal contract and the marriage. Subsequently this thirty-five-year-old bachelor, who was Nosn Heler’s uncle and who worked in the sugar refinery, sat on interminably in the salon with Mirel and, in the big-city manner, bored her until nightfall. He spoke Russian badly, like a dentist,* saying “s” instead of “sh” and relating that his nephew, Nosn Heler, still asked after her, Mirel, in every one of his letters:

  —In every letter he begged to be informed of how she was.

  Because this old bachelor wasn’t overly intelligent, because no rational person was capable of paying this foolish, small-town social call, Mirel found it frightfully tedious to sit here in the salon with him, and she was irritated both by his tales about Nosn Heler and by the suspicious glances with which Gitele continually kept hovering in the doorway. She wrapped herself in her shawl and kept wishing for him to go, and when he finally did leave, she found the whole house as intolerable as the betrothal party that was being prepared there, the whole of her future life, and Gitele’s questions:

  —What did he want, that young man?

  In agitated anger she responded:

  —Let her mother quickly get a rider to saddle up and gallop after him to ask what he wanted.

  She went off to her room, undressed, and retired to bed very early that evening. Several days yet remained before the betrothal party: something might yet happen before then, and even now she had absolutely no obligation to think about him, that wealthy young man named Shmulik Zaydenovski, or about the unpleasant new experiences awaiting her.

  Before she fell asleep, a thought of Heler unexpectedly flashed into her mind, and the whole night thereafter she dreamed of his oblong face which made him look like a Romanian. Around ten o’clock at night he was wandering alone somewhere in the great city, that provincial capital in which he lived, was on his way to visit a friend who lived at the opposite end of town, and all the way there could think of nothing but his friend’s warm, well-lighted room.

  There one could sit for a long time with a glass of tea and pensively and with great longing relate:

  —In a little shtetl somewhere far, far away lived a young woman named Mirel Hurvits. She once loved me, this Mirel Hurvits … she once loved me very deeply.

  She recalled his features all the next wintry day, recalled them vaguely and with shadowy fondness, and drew the thought close to her heart. But in the house the approaching betrothal party made itself increasingly strongly felt. In her bedroom the noise of tables being moved about in the adjacent rooms, of someone complaining and calculating could all be heard:

  —What do you think? We’ll really have problems if there are more than three in the Zaydenovskis’ party.

  So she no longer had any desire to hold Nosn Heler’s features in her mind’s eye and made every effort to dwell on the fact that Shmulik Zaydenovski looked like a European:

  —She’d thought of this once before … Walking out with him in the provincial capital she’d thought of it.

  2.9

  Together with the bridegroom, their eldest child, they arrived on Friday afternoon, the middle-aged parents who lived at the quiet end of a suburb in the distant metropolis, bringing with them a refined, barely concealed smile of inward self-satisfaction and the bridegroom’s seven-year-old little sister, their late-born youngest daughter. This smile later became seductive: it appeared even on the faces of total strangers from the town, making the Zaydenovskis appear deeply good-natured, and compelling everyone to reach the same conclusion:

  —These people, these prospective in-laws, loved each other very much … Years before they’d even made pilgrimages to Sadagura together, and to this very day they loved each other even more than the newly betrothed couple.

  Like an adult, the seven-year-old little girl changed her dresses far too frequently, and clambered onto her mother’s chair too often every time her parents told the story of how she’d contradicted an elderly general in the second-class railway carriage they’d occupied.

  —Since her older daughter—the mother-in-law-to-be related—was completing her schooling at the gymnasium this year; she was obliged to study and had no time to spare, but they’d brought this one, their youngest, so she could enjoy herself a little.

  Looking deeply into the child’s face, her mother blinked her little black eyes rapidly like some short-sighted night bird and, peering with menacing suspicion at a black spot on the child’s nose, demanded in her hoarse voice:

  —How d’you like the bride? Have you seen her yet?

  Sitting in polite silence opposite, Gitele scrutinized her:

  She was a tall, scrawny, somewhat worn woman with a dull, saturnine complexion on the elongated face of a well-to-do bourgeoise, a small, very dull mind, and extraordinarily big hands and feet. The huge heirloom hairpin in her chestnut-colored horsehair wig bore a diamond and was evidently valuable, but since she herself had no conversation, she went on smiling excessively in self-satisfaction and began the same account from the very beginning every time:

  �
��Well, as soon as the telegram arrived, just as the Purim feast was about to begin, in fact … and as always there were some fifteen people at our feast … well then he, Yankev-Yosl that is, gave the instruction immediately, of course: Wine! Bring up the wine! (He’d laid down wine in the cellar in the very year Shmulik was born.) Well, you can imagine …

  A little farther away, at an open volume that lay on the little bookshelf, stood the slim, twenty-four-year-old bridegroom in company with the family’s intimate, the bookkeeper. He was in awe of the florid Hebrew style of the bookkeeper’s two letters which had reached him at home, regarded him as a maskil,* and therefore spoke loudly about Ahad Ha’am† to show that he too was an educated man:

  —Do you understand? Ahad Ha’am is quite capable of publishing nothing for a whole year.

  He wore a still-youthful reddish-blond beard, which, freshly trimmed and bypassing his ears, merged with the chestnut-brown hair on his head and stretched round his face like a taut leather strap. Yet he closely resembled his thickset, powerful father, that brisk, cheerful, dark individual of medium height and middle age with his huge, intensely black untrimmed beard and sharp, lacquer-black eyes. When tea was served, this cheerful soon-to-be relative by marriage openly and generously embraced Reb Gedalye, barely restrained himself from kissing him, and perhaps compensated for this by abruptly bellowing across to Gitele in his rich baritone:

  —My dear mother of the bride! You’ll soon see the quality of the six sponge cakes we’ve brought you for the party.

  Preparations for attending evening prayers to welcome the Sabbath were made.

  By now, meanwhile, seated between the mothers of the bridal couple was Libke the rabbi’s wife with her visiting mother-in-law, a woman with a homely face who’d lost her front teeth in early youth and wore a silk kerchief on her head. This woman was at a loss about what to do with her rough, work-worn hands, and was anxious to hide one of her thumbs which had for many years a useless sixth finger growing from it. Next to the groom’s father, Avreml the rabbi was smiling and twisting one of his curly earlocks. He took pleasure from the fact that in honor of the Sabbath the groom’s father wore a black silk surtout,† albeit somewhat shortened, and from the fact that well-to-do observant Jews were still to be found in the world. In consequence, he shyly and quietly expressed an opinion in passing: