The End of Everything (New Yiddish Library Series)

by David Bergelson

  Then with tears in his eyes, Shmulik had fallen silent. Yes … and then he’d taken Lyubashits by the arm once more and said:

  —Don’t think there are many such Mirels in the world, Shoylik … It’s only that she considers me a fool … A complete fool.

  3.5

  Shmulik did indeed not return home; he went straight from the distillery to Warsaw with the oxen.

  Frequent telegrams from him arrived at the father-in-law’s house reporting on the unusually lively state of the sizable market. Like an experienced merchant, he’d abruptly raised the price, decided to stay on with his oxen for a second week, and asked that the heaviest beasts from all their oxen stalls, both those in the vicinity and those farther away, be sent to him as soon as possible.

  This matter was discussed several times a day in the father-in-law’s study. Even the little children had been allowed to come in, and an opinion was jokingly sought even from the youngest, a freckle-faced six-year-old lad who reeked of the stables and whose little backside the mother-in-law frequently thrashed:

  —What do you say, little rascal? Shall we send the oxen?

  Everyone was genuinely in high spirits:

  —No question—when God helps and the market is favorable, one can earn a fortune.

  The mother-in-law devised a pretext on which to enter Mirel’s little house, ostensibly to check that the ceilings weren’t being painted too dark. She found Mirel lying on the sofa in the disarranged dining room, told her that Shmulik was in Warsaw and that a letter was presently being written to him:

  —Yes, so what message should be added from her, from Mirel?

  Mirel shrugged her shoulders with indifference.

  —Nothing … She had nothing to write to him.

  Since she was now standing with her face to the window, she didn’t see the expression on her mother-in-law’s face as the woman left the house. Instead, as Mirel returned to the sofa, the sense that this house was repulsive to her returned as well, together with the recollection that she ought to do something:

  —She had to find a way of leaving this house.

  Overcome with restlessness, she found herself unable to stay in one place. For several successive days she kept going into town, wandering about on her own for long periods of time, and finally, as evening drew on, making her way to the quiet street with its long central island of trees where her cousin Ida Shpolianski lived. She felt she ought to tell Ida, who paid no attention to the derisive rumors that were circulating about her in town:

  —Listen, Ida, you’ve certainly thrown off all conventional restraints, but what would you say were you to be told: Mirel’s cast Shmulik off and no longer wishes to live with him?

  As it happened, most evenings Ida was never to be found in her luxurious home, but was freely and openly taking her pleasure somewhere with the young, enormously wealthy officer whom Mirel had once met here at sundown, and neither of the two housemaids knew where she’d gone or when she’d be back.

  All five rooms were dark and quiet. Almost everywhere lay large new carpets on which fashionable soft furniture was arranged throughout, and all of it seemed pensive, as though possessed of many secrets about the mistress of the house, that well-known woman about town who was unfaithful to her husband while he was earning huge sums of money in the distant provinces of the Russian empire; about the fact that he, the master of the house, would eventually be made aware of this, and this home would be destroyed.

  After some hours of waiting and lazing about on the silk chaise longue in Ida’s bedroom, she finally left her cousin’s apartment feeling like some kind of vagabond idler. She returned home thinking that, alone in this huge provincial capital, she was superfluous and forlorn; that all the people she encountered were following specific goals and purposes. Whatever they did was what they had to do. And she, Mirel … she began recalling everything she’d done in her life and everything that had resulted from it:

  —Nothing would’ve been lost if she’d been left lying in her bed from the day of her birth and hadn’t moved from that day to this.

  Finally she stopped going into town entirely.

  For days on end she stayed indoors wearing the same dirty, unbuttoned, rust-colored dressing gown with an oversized pair of men’s slippers on her feet. She donned these garments as soon as she rose from bed at eleven o’clock in the morning, neglected to wash her face or comb her hair, lay down on the sofa in the dining room, and went on tormenting herself with the same old thought:

  —If she were truly unable to find some means by which to escape from her present life, then everything was lost … Whatever might be, remaining here in the Zaydenovskis’ home was out of the question for her and couldn’t go on much longer.

  After the incident respecting her letter to Shmulik, her mother-in-law had totally stopped speaking to her. Once she’d come in with her Gentile maidservant and set her to washing the windows and doors and cleaning the rooms with Mirel’s housemaid. Blinking her eyes, she spoke not to Mirel but to the two servants:

  —What’s going on here? It’s now almost four months since the walls were even wiped down.

  She instructed them to air all the bedclothes out in the garden, and sent in a floor polisher from town, making quite sure that he moved the beds and the chests of drawers when he shined the bedroom floor. In the third of the rooms, she even lifted her skirt and grimaced, looking down at a very dirty corner of the floor that she’d discovered. She could be heard spitting loudly in disgust, moving over to one side, pulling away one of the chairs, and instructing the floor polisher in Ukrainian:

  —Het’ skriz’ … het’ skriz’—everywhere, everywhere.

  While all this was going on, Mirel never stirred from her place on the sofa. Everything around seemed unendurably detestable to her. Overcome by a strange desire to rend the garments at her breast and to keep on ripping them, she pressed both her hands tightly, very tightly over her face in silent anguish:

  —What an unendurable debacle … To suffer from such intolerable helplessness … All she needed was a single plan, but such a plan seemed impossible to find.

  In the mother-in-law’s house, Shmulik was keenly expected. There they even knew exactly when and on what train he was due to arrive.

  Montchik Zaydenovski’s aid was quite suddenly enlisted when, preoccupied as always, he’d called in from town for a short while on a matter of business. He was ambushed as he emerged from Uncle Yankev-Yosl’s study and was dragged o. to a private room:

  —Montchik, a great misfortune’s befallen Shmulik! Why are we putting off dealing with it, Montchik? … Who else do we rely on?

  Montchik glanced absently at the women who’d surrounded him and called to mind the number of people who’d been left waiting for him in the corridor outside his office.

  Some six or seven individuals had probably been obliged to hang around for him there … He still had appointments in two banks … And they, his aunt and Miriam Lyubashits, were saying that Shmulik was greatly to be pitied … Come to think of it he, Montchik himself, had originally thought that this marriage had been a misalliance from the start … Eh? What was his aunt saying? … Certainly … He was of the same opinion:

  —He, Montchik, had a duty to do something about this.

  In great haste he returned to his business affairs, but he came back later and, after ringing sharply at the door, rushed into Shmulik’s wing of the house.

  There he found Mirel in her disheveled dressing gown and men’s slippers lying on the sofa, and absentmindedly noticed:

  Everything in the immaculately clean rooms was tidy and silent in anticipation of Shmulik’s arrival; even the table in the dining room was spread with a festive blue cloth. But none of this was of any concern to Mirel, who was lying listlessly on the sofa; as a result thoughts turned more to the wife than to the husband, and a strange air of desolation emanated from the newly waxed floors and the carefully arranged chairs.

  For a long time he sat opposite
her at the table pretending to notice nothing and speaking at length about his business affairs, about his mother, his sister, and his younger brother, all of whom he supported and with whom he’d lived from the time his father had died leaving his affairs in chaos:

  —His sister—he related—was only two years younger than he, dark as a Gypsy, who virtually from the day of her birth had chattered on and on like an old-fashioned flour mill. For a year after completing her studies at high school she’d stayed quietly at home, grown bored, and spoken ill of women students. Only now, during the past winter, had she started to convince herself that she had a voice and had begun taking singing lessons with a teacher.

  Without interest, Mirel stared into his mobile, preoccupied face and waited. With every passing moment it became ever more obvious that he’d been sent here from her mother-in-law’s house. The only surprise was that he didn’t immediately start asking:

  —Yes, well, what exactly did she think of Shmulik? What did she imagine could be the outcome of such a life?

  But snatching distracted glances at her every now and then, he went on retailing stories of various kinds, giving the impression at times that he had no other motive in doing so than to lift her despondent spirits for a while:

  —He, Montchik, certainly didn’t regard himself as musically gifted, but he literally couldn’t endure his sister’s voice, some kind of rasping shriek produced not in the chest but somewhere in the throat and nose. When he begged her not to sing while he was at home, she felt deeply insulted, wept, and complained about him to his acquaintances: a true brother, she said, ought to support and sympathize with her, but he—not content with lacking any sympathy for her, he also wanted to destroy her life’s most treasured ideal.

  Every now and then he stopped, looked at her in his preoccupied fashion, and seemed to be thinking of something else. Then he suddenly fell silent entirely, dropped his eyes, and began smoothing the blue tablecloth. The silence grew oppressive, filled with yearning. From the kitchen could be heard the voice of the mother-in-law, inquiring from the maid whether clean slips had been put on the pillows, the sound of her tread as she went into the bedroom with her own servant girl and rummaged about in the closet for a long time, searching for the key to the linen chest, and finally the sound of her bustle as she helped her servant girl pull on the pillowslips, left the room, and returned home without a backward glance at anyone.

  Still lost in thought, Montchik ultimately took his leave of Mirel and returned to his uncle Yankev-Yosl in the big house. In the entrance hall he failed to recognize some polite young man who offered him his hand in greeting, but went straight into the private room where he was beleaguered once more; he seemed lost in a dream as he fixed his black eyes on those around him in a radiant, wide-eyed stare:

  —What on earth could they possibly have against Mirel? … He’d just spent almost an hour with her … To tell the truth, he didn’t know who was suffering more, Mirel or Shmulik.

  When the women stared at him in astonishment wanting to remonstrate with him, he paced distractedly about the room without noticing them, suddenly recalled something and again stopped before them with a raised finger:

  —She’s highly intelligent—he insisted, wagging this finger—she’s shrewd, and she … he, Montchik, hadn’t known any of this at first.

  Mirel noticed him when, dreamily lost in thought, he was walking back to the streetcar stop and passed by near her window. Something suddenly occurred to her, so she rapped on the pane to attract his attention and prepared to start another conversation with him:

  —Before anything else, Montchik needed to be quite clear: if he was now in haste to get home, there was no urgent need for them to chat.

  Her face and eyes expressed a refusal to hear any excuses, however, and as he looked at her, Montchik, remembering that he did indeed have no time to spare, nevertheless responded courteously:

  —What? In haste? God forbid … On the contrary.

  He held her in great respect, and later accompanied her into town. And when she suggested they meet again the next day, he again responded courteously and agreed. His head spun with the impression that she was continually thinking not about what she was saying but about something she deliberately wished to conceal; that he had to tell Shmulik, whom he loved, something about her, this most interesting and intelligent woman who was assuredly no mate for him. But after he’d seen her home and gone back to the streetcar stop alone, he forgot all these considerations and distractedly immersed himself in his everyday business concerns. In the closely packed, illuminated streetcar, the very same young man who’d given him his hand in his uncle Yankev-Yosl’s entrance hall sat down next to him, and began discussing a business matter with which Montchik was thoroughly familiar, and Montchik stared at him wide-eyed and was angry at himself:

  —To be sure, he, Montchik, met hundreds of merchants every single day, but why couldn’t he recognize people any longer?

  3.6

  Late one evening a few days later, Mirel again traveled into town with Montchik and, walking down the central avenue with him, recognized Nosn Heler waiting for them at a deserted intersection in the distance. In his broadly cut autumn cloak he stood there on his own, looking unhappy and staring directly at Mirel.

  In order to avoid encountering him, she immediately led the abstracted Montchik across the road to the sidewalk opposite and took him into an overcrowded, noisy café where from nightfall on the clatter of plates had been competing fiercely against the screeching tunes of the strident orchestra. But when she left the place at midnight with Montchik, the young man in the autumn cloak was still standing opposite the café and, as before, was staring directly at her. Recognizing him, she actually trembled and pressed herself close to Montchik as though in fear:

  —Could Montchik understand why that man over there was staring so?

  For a moment Montchik roused himself from his commercial cogitations but failed to understand her question. He glanced around abstractedly but noticed nothing. Walking at her side, he soon lost himself in thought over the molasses factory in Kuropoliye, which was doing badly and was about to be sold:

  —The week before he’d succeeded in bringing together the Kuropoliye shareholders and the buyers … If their director weren’t such a swine and bribe-taker, something positive might come out of all this the following week.

  Suddenly he stopped and pressed two fingers to his frowning forehead:

  —Just a moment … For the life of him, he couldn’t remember whether or not he’d signed the telegram he’d sent to the director earlier that day!

  He felt distinctly uneasy and glanced at Mirel with an expression of great pleading, as though he desperately needed her compassion:

  —Mirel had to excuse him. He had to slip into the nearby telegraph office for a moment to make an inquiry.

  Mirel led him to the telegraph office herself, and there roundly rebuked him for his unwillingness to leave her outside on her own:

  —What was Montchik making a performance for? … He was to go into the telegraph office that instant. She’d find her way home without him.

  All the time she was talking to Montchik, and subsequently when she was left alone on the deserted sidewalk looking around her, she was drawn to Nosn Heler. The man himself was still standing at the intersection following her with his eyes. He wanted nothing; he was simply unhappy—and he followed her with his eyes.

  Suddenly she turned in the direction of the suburb in which she lived and swiftly seated herself in a droshky.*

  She was annoyed at the sentiment that drew her to him, at herself for continuing to drift about in the Zaydenovskis’ house, and at the fact that not a single useful thing had come from anything she’d ever done in her life.

  —She needed some means of freeing herself from Shmulik and couldn’t find it.

  —She’d been wandering about all over town with Montchik for several days now and had been considering asking him about such means, yet t
his was totally uncalled for and stupid … Because Montchik … Montchik was Shmulik’s near relation and loved him. And apart from that …

  —What could he possibly tell her about this?

  Unaware that she’d crossed the bridge leading to her suburb and had reached the farthermost street on which she lived, she suddenly noticed that all the windows of her house, except those of the bedroom, were brightly lit, boasting to the midnight darkness outdoors:

  —We have guests, guests, guests.

  Astonished, she peered in through these illuminated windows:

  —Perhaps her father or her mother … She’d not written them a single letter since her marriage.

  But while she was still in the passageway, after the maid had locked the front door behind her, she soon noticed that nothing untoward had occurred and that there were no guests: only Shmulik, after a month of tiring travel from Warsaw, had returned home. By coming back so oddly unannounced and somewhat self-consciously, he showed that he knew: no particular pleasure awaited him here.

  His hair and beard had been newly and closely cut, as though the next day were the eve of Passover. The new light-colored suit he wore had been made in Warsaw; his new shoes squeaked. All in all, he looked as pristine, animated, and fresh as though he’d only just come from the bathhouse, as though during the time he’d spent in his distillery and in Warsaw he’d taken pains with himself and curbed many of his boyish mannerisms.

  Mirel passed through the dining room without glancing at him, shaming him in the eyes of their oxen buyer, a grizzled, grimy old man who sat at the table with stick in hand and eyes inflamed and damaged, exuding the pungent stench of snuff and goat flesh. Mortified, Shmulik looked down and began chewing on a matchstick. Tears sprang to his eyes.

  Mirel was now in the brightly lit salon, where she took off her jacket, not knowing why she hadn’t gone directly from the dining room to her unlit bedroom. She tried without success to recall something but remembered only that Shmulik was next door. For some reason she started putting on her jacket again, but immediately removed it and once more passed straight through the dining room to her dark bedroom. There, without taking off her close-fitting silk blouse or tightly laced corset, she immediately lay down on the bed. Hiding her face in both her hands, she began preparing herself for what would soon take place: