The End of Everything (New Yiddish Library Series)

by David Bergelson

  —An end … Now an end must come …

  Through the silence that reigned in all the surrounding rooms came the sounds of Shmulik pacing slowly across the dining room, the dirty oxen dealer expressing his pleasure at the few thousand rubles’ profit that would now accrue to him as his small commission, and his continued amazement at the extraordinarily buoyant market Shmulik had found:

  —The like of such a market, he might venture to say, hadn’t been seen since Napoleon’s time … Could Shmulik believe it? Seven rubles a pood! …

  His diseased eyes watered under their inflamed lids. Oblivious of the tears running down his cheeks and in places into his grizzled, dirty, yellowing beard, he stuffed tobacco into his nose and raised his smiling face somewhat higher, like a blind man in a daydream. He was visualizing another such profitable market:

  —So if Shmulik really wanted to go to Warsaw again straight after Sukkot,* the eighteen heifers from Popivke would have to be left in the Stolin stables … Also the seven from Yelizavet that were housed near the door … Yes, and the frisky one as well, the one with the big horns … Here was a funny thing: three of them had been there for nearly three and a half months but they hadn’t put on any weight … He’d taken a feel of them there the other week … Yes … No weight to speak of … He disliked oxen like that.

  The old man finally left, and Shmulik locked the door behind him. The silence was now total, as in the dead of night. All that could be heard was Shmulik pacing slowly across the dining room, the squeaking of his new shoes disclosing something about their owner’s great heaviness of heart, about the fact that he was now thinking of Mirel lying in bed in her darkened room, that he loved her, wanted to go to her, but couldn’t and didn’t know how; that he felt unhappy, and that this unhappiness would never ever leave him:

  —For example here he was, home after an absence of four weeks …

  He’d earned a considerable sum of money … He was becoming a very wealthy man … He’d bought and brought home for Mirel blouses and other gifts, thinking they would please her … And his thoughts had taken him even further:

  —When he returned home after having been away for six weeks, she’d start speaking to him again …

  He was still chewing the matchstick, and there were still tears in his eyes:

  —Mirel considered him a fool.

  He saw her fresh, sweet-smelling face vividly before him. Now she was lying on her bed in the dark adjoining room with her eyes shut. Perhaps she was already asleep in there, or perhaps not. He knew:

  Were he to approach her now, he’d have nothing to say. Yet he went in all the same, slowly, step by step, stopping every few moments, never raising his bowed head, always bearing in mind:

  —Mirel considered him a fool.

  He crossed the threshold of the darkened room and stopped. The glow from the lights in the dining room reached in here; on the bed opposite, her figure took shape, a slender, lissome figure tightly sheathed in its narrow black dress. Slowly, infinitely slowly, with his head bowed, he went up to her: first one step, then stopping, then another step. Now he saw her face: positioned a little downward, high on the pillow, eyelids shut. For a while he stood beside the bed, his own eyes downcast.

  Knowing that he ought to turn back, he nevertheless moved still closer, noticed her partially outstretched hand drooping over the side of the bed, and quietly took hold of it.

  Quietly, very quietly, he stood holding her hand, and just as quietly began to weep.

  She did not take her hand from his. He heard her speak. As though half-asleep, she sighed and said, softly and tonelessly:

  —Why do you need me, Shmulik?

  He sat down on the bed then, and began sobbing. He kissed her hand. Again and again he kissed her hand. She neither opened her eyes nor said anything. He moved closer and embraced her. Still she did not open her eyes and still she said nothing. And for a short while, farther away in the kitchen, the servant girl awoke from a deep sleep. Her bare feet slapping over the floor, she went from room to room extinguishing the lamps.

  3.7

  The day after Rosh Hashanah, when Shmulik had driven off to the distillery for a few hours, Mirel packed some things into her yellow leather valise and prepared to go home to her father.

  She said not a word about this to anyone and stuck doggedly to her predetermined plan:

  —Now everything was definitely coming to an end … She’d free herself of the Zaydenovskis.

  The oppressive atmosphere of the Fast of Gedalye* hung heavy in her mother-in-law’s dining room. In his expansive, self-congratulatory manner, the master of the house sat at the head of the table entertaining a female relative of some wealth who was passing through with her scholarly husband. She stayed too long and spoke too loudly with an unmistakably provincial inflection.

  The conversation touched on Aunt Pearl in Warsaw who, according to Shmulik, had enjoyed a very good year; on Aunt Esther here in town whose situation in life, might she be spared the Evil Eye, was even more comfortable now than it had been while her husband was still alive and who traveled abroad every summer; on the fact that Montchik, who supported her, had been born in the very year in which Uncle Ezriel-Meir had lost his first wife, and that, although he was now twenty-six years old and earned very well, Montchik was in no haste to marry and never spoke of it.

  Suddenly a member of the household came in to whisper Mirel’s secret plan into the mother-in-law’s ear; she in turn whispered it immediately to her husband, staring challengingly into his face and blinking her eyes in a peculiar manner. For the last few days Shmulik had looked very happy. On the afternoon of the second day of Rosh Hashanah he’d been seen standing with Mirel in the sunshine on the steps of the verandah, and as a result the mother-in-law had had even gone so far as to canvass the opinion of Miriam Lyubashits:

  —According to Miriam’s sense of justice, which of them should now be the first to get back on speaking terms with the other, eh? Surely it behooved Mirele to make the first approach, eh?

  With her shawl over her shoulders, the mother-in-law hurried over to Mirel’s wing and there began warily to initiate a conversation, first with the servant girl and presently, even more warily, with Mirel herself:

  —Are you going away for long, Mirele?

  And more:

  —Perhaps you’ll wait until Shmulik gets back?

  With an expression of grave inflexibility on her face, Mirel busied herself with her two pieces of luggage, began rapidly pulling on her overcoat, sent out for a droshky, and answered her mother-in-law’s questions brusquely and to the point:

  —She didn’t know.

  —She’d see.

  —She couldn’t wait.

  Her mind was now so firmly set on carrying out her plan that she surprised even herself:

  —She could’ve done this simple thing a month before, even two months before … What had she been thinking of all that time?

  During the entire eighteen-hour train trip she felt as light and fresh as though all her past and present hopes depended exclusively upon this journey, as though from this moment on she were beginning to live anew, totally anew. She took excessive pleasure in standing for half hours on end at the clean, wide window of the second-class carriage looking out on unfamiliar cottages, on unknown fields and vistas adorned with orchards and coppices that rapidly revealed themselves to the speeding train and were just as rapidly left behind. At the same time, she recalled her own blue eyes, looking out with great sadness from under their long black lashes, and was alive to the fact that she, this tall, slender young woman clad in black, was now free and on her own among these travelers with their unfamiliar faces, all of whom gazed at her with intense curiosity each time she was obliged to pass by close to them, who made way for her with great respect yet dared not engage her in conversation. A blond man sitting opposite her, who’d been uninterruptedly devouring the pages of a book in German with keen interest, at length fixed his eyes on her for quite some t
ime and then politely inquired:

  —Hadn’t he met her two years before in Italy?

  At a large station where for a full half hour the dust-blanketed train stopped to draw breath, she attracted the prolonged attention of a tall, wealthy Christian, a hunter who carried a double-barreled shotgun slung over his shoulder. He hovered near the table at which she was breakfasting and finally sat down directly opposite her to drink his tea.

  On the second day of her trip, in the buggy that was transporting her from her final stop, all this still came to mind together with vague, undefined thoughts about a new life and a sense that she’d done well to answer the probing of Shmulik and her mother-in-law with cold imprecision:

  —She didn’t know; she’d see.

  But later that same day, around one o’clock in the afternoon when the unanticipated hired buggy drove up to the outskirts of the shtetl, a blast of bygone despair from the old, familiar melancholy houses struck her, and she was overwhelmed with the everyday desolation of her girlhood, as though she’d never left this place and hadn’t returned to it now.

  The entire insignificant, poverty-stricken little shtetl with all its old, familiar, impoverished, and scattered houses seemed to have been frozen into a single never-ending, all-pervasive thought:

  —There was no way to reverse the misfortune … And there was no one on whom to build any hope …

  And there, a little farther down, already peering out from behind the marketplace was her father’s house with its verandah; as always, the house stood there in sorrowful loneliness, still telling everyone who passed its façade:

  —She’s has been married o. now, has Mirel … She’s over there now, in a suburb of the metropolis, is Mirel …

  No one came to see her, and no one rejoiced at her arrival. No changes had taken place in the house. Gitele had merely started wearing every day the ritual wig she’d previously kept only for Sabbaths, and her jewelry was still missing. When she first caught sight of Mirel, she rose slowly, very slowly, from her chair at the round table, flushed, and barely smiled:

  —Just look—she said with quiet diffidence—it’s Mirele …

  For some reason she still clutched the top of the round table on which she leaned both her hands. Evidently she found very odd both Mirel’s sudden and unexpected arrival and the fact that for the entire three and a half months during which Mirel had lived in the suburb of the metropolis, no one had heard a single word from her; Shmulik alone had added a formal greeting in Hebrew on her behalf in each of his letters.

  —My dear wife Mirel, long may she live, sends you her regards.

  Without thinking, it seemed, Gitele added:

  —Mirele’s looks hadn’t improved at all.

  And in a little while she took the compresses from the servant girl and went off to the bedroom to apply them to Reb Gedalye, who’d recently suffered a recurrence of the previous winter’s illness.

  Fully dressed, he lay there on one of the two old single wooden beds.* Without groaning, he held the tin compress close to his belly.

  —I’m lying down now—he said to Mirel, smiling in some embarrassment—but earlier today I was walking about.

  His face was yellow and he looked more ill than usual, while his smile no longer suited the sharpness of his nose.

  For some reason, a glance at him prompted the thought that he wasn’t fated to live much longer, that his voice had changed to resemble that of someone who’d already been summoned to heaven and been shown the severe judgment inscribed against his name in the Book of Life:

  —Look here: you will die … When?—That’s not for you to know.

  At sundown, when his pain had abated, he rose from his bed and gave instructions for the buggy to be harnessed so he could ride out to the Kashperivke woods where he needed to be. Having donned his dust coat in readiness to leave, he went up to Mirel and, revolving something in his mind, stood for a little while before her with his head bowed.

  Outdoors the harnessed buggy was already waiting for him, and Gitele was no longer in the room.

  Quite possibly he was troubled by the thought that while he ought to give his visiting daughter some kind of gift, he no longer had the means to do so.

  Suddenly he asked her:

  —How was she getting along? He meant how was she getting along with Shmulik? He was surely not a bad husband …

  But evidently he seemed to feel that this wasn’t what he wanted to say to her and, overcome with embarrassment, he again bowed his head and lost himself briefly in thought before finally pulling himself together:

  —Well! Let’s get on our way.

  For some reason, soon after his departure the taciturn Gitele slowly and quietly began speaking:

  She related that the Kashperivke wood had turned out to be far from the bargain it was initially thought to be; that as they no longer had any work for him, Reb Gedalye’s relative, their bookkeeper, had taken a position with some merchant partners in the provincial capital:

  —Yes, well, he’d always been a capable, devoted, and considerate employee. Velvl Burnes specifically invited him to come and work for his father and offered him a salary of a thousand rubles a year … Gedalye and I urged him to take it … And Avreml the rabbi also told him he was mad not to accept … Well, he’s a stubborn man and didn’t want to.

  After this confidence, they drank tea and had nothing more to talk about. Later Mirel stood for some time alone near the front door, gazing out at the shtetl.

  As always, everything there was desolate and sunk in penitential dejection. In the late twilight the teacher Poliye, who’d taught there two years before, was on her way to visit the midwife Schatz who lived in the village, as were the pharmacist’s assistant Safyan and the crippled student Lipkis … The shtetl was dark and cold and a gust of wind drove the dust from the marketplace. Velvl Burnes already knew that she’d arrived and had therefore driven off very early to spend the night on his farm. Only in the big Sadagura prayer house, which peered out through its illuminated windows from a side alley opposite, was there any sign of life: there Jews in penitential depression swayed in the traditional manner as they recited the evening prayers, shouting aloud in great sorrow after the cantor:

  —A psalm of David!

  Newly awakened from a refreshing afternoon nap, a stocky young man with coarse, unfamiliar features and the appearance of a would-be intellectual, evidently a new teacher at the Talmud Torah, passed close by in the gloom of the chill early evening. His powerful body shivered with cold and he had pleasure in thinking:

  —There’d be light and warmth at his destination; a lamp would be burning on the table that held the welcoming glasses of tea, and there would be joking and laughter.

  But to Mirel, everything appeared nugatory and stupid. It was stupid to have pinned her hopes on someone all the time she was traveling here. It was stupid that gathered together now in the midwife Schatz’s Gentile-owned cottage were the very same people who’d gathered there two years before; stupid that they were presently talking about the very same things they’d talked about last year. All of them—the midwife, Poliye, Safyan, and Lipkis—all were discontented with their lives, but none of them did anything to reconstruct those lives. There were many such people in the world, and all of them were now coming together to pass the evening in illuminated houses in various towns and villages, and afterward all of them returned to their homes where they went on doing those things they’d done the day before, things that had been repugnant to many people before them.

  And in the end … now in this chill twilight that was enfolding the whole world …

  —In the end, there had to be others who were trying to do something different.

  When she went back indoors, the hanging lamp on its pulley had long been lit in the dining room, and Libke the rabbi’s wife had long been sitting there, smiling at the taciturn Gitele and making some worldly wise, married woman’s remark about Mirel’s condition:

  —Is that so, indeed?<
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  Disgusted and oppressed, Mirel went into what had formerly been her own room opposite the dark salon, stopped inside, and contemplated it by the light of the lamp she was carrying. Everything in there was so fusty: the tables uncovered, the air as chilly as though it were winter outdoors but the stove hadn’t been heated for a whole month; in the empty closet hung one of the dresses she’d left behind with a short, shabby autumn jacket padded with cotton-wool. The bed wasn’t made up, but loosely covered in such a way that the pillows and the featherbed poked out from under the blanket. And for some reason it seemed to her much easier to be eternally a homeless wanderer than ever to lie down in that bed again.

  She found it difficult to remain in there. Returning to the dining room, she sat down at the table with her head in both hands, thought for a while, and then suddenly began inquiring about trains to the metropolis:

  —Two trains used to go from here … She didn’t know which one would be more sensible for her to take in order to return home the next day—the one in the morning or the one in the evening?

  With a smile, Gitele posed an astonished question. The rabbi’s wife added a remark. Mirel heard nothing; she was still staring straight ahead of her.

  —So she’d be going back to the suburb of the metropolis the next day …

  This journey of hers had been a total failure. She found it impossible to spend more time than was absolutely necessary here in this house. She had now to find some way to save her life entirely on her own. And if she were now returning to the suburb, it wouldn’t be for long, in any event … she was only going back for a short while.