The End of Everything (New Yiddish Library Series)

by David Bergelson

  3.8

  Two days later she returned to the suburb, late at night when everyone was already asleep. She looked unwell, as though she were recovering from an illness, spoke to no one, lay fully clothed on her bed, and did not leave the house for several days. Some books in Shmulik’s study which she’d carried into her bedroom one by one were scattered around the bed on which she lay. Now she had nothing against Shmulik: he could make her neither better nor worse. She was simply firm in her determination to leave him as soon as possible. She could not endure his occasional lingering about in her room, however, never looked at him, and never replied if he spoke to her.

  Shmulik knew that the doctors had despaired of her father’s life; Avreml the rabbi had communicated this information to him in a letter. In her own house, his mother was dumbfounded and wholly unable to comprehend:

  —How can this be? When a father is dangerously ill, how can a daughter not bring herself to spend at least a few days with him?

  When he tried to speak to Mirel about this for the third time, she grew agitated and interrupted him:

  —She didn’t know … she didn’t know …

  Tears rose to Shmulik’s eyes then, and he drifted over to the window in the dining room where he stood for some time, staring out with these tear-filled eyes at the overcast scene outdoors. He was deeply upset, and his mind was a blank. In this distracted state he went across to his father in the big house where something in his troubled expression excited comment, so his mother discreetly drew him aside:

  —What’s the matter, Shmulik? Is there something new wrong again?

  But downhearted as he was, he assumed the expression of a grave and serious-minded adult and even frowned in displeasure:

  —No, who says that? … No … Nothing …

  He went directly to his father’s study where three employees from different stables were discussing the possibilities of taking another drove of oxen to Warsaw. When his father sought his opinion, he had no idea what was being asked of him, and responded:

  —Eh?

  In the dining room of the mother-in-law’s house one afternoon during the intermediate days of Sukkot* the family had gathered to drink tea round the long table, covered with its white cloth. Because of the festival, almost all their relatives from the city were present, all cheerful and deliberately blocking out every thought of Mirel. It occurred only to his mother that all was not well with Shmulik, but she was so dull-witted that she soon forgot about this and began foolishly blinking her eyes.

  Also seated at the table was the former student Miriam Lyubashits, cradling in her arms a six-month-old baby, a blonde little girl with uncovered head, eyes like bits of blue glass, and a damp, pouting upper lip. Only fifteen minutes before, almost the entire household had been fussing round this infant. Every member in turn had snatched her up to dance round with her and lift her high up into the air, and the frightened child had stared at all this with her eyes like bits of blue glass, frequently whimpering. The mother-in-law had then taken the baby in her arms and, blinking her eyes, had started talking to her, whereupon the child had wrinkled up her little snub nose, poked out her little tongue, and begun smiling merrily. Everyone had been utterly charmed, and Miriam Lyubashits had announced:

  —Do you all see? … She loves her auntie already.

  Now silence had descended on the dining room. All the relatives had moved into the salon and the child lay in Miriam’s arms. Dribbling, the little one raked her weak little fists over her mother’s face, emitting a piercing yell that carried across the hushed room, as though her mother’s face were a windowpane and the child were stubbornly determined to smash it. Turning her face to one side as though afraid of a blow from these little fists, the mother tried her best to answer her aunt’s question:

  —What’s there to think about? Mirel certainly can’t be regarded as a normal person.

  Almost all the chairs around the table were unoccupied and the children were playing noisily in an adjoining room. The mother-in-law peered round to check that no one could overhear what she said, asked someone to shut the door that led into the passage, and moved closer to Miriam:

  —Who can speak of “normal” now?

  And the former student listened in silence to the mother-in-law’s complaints and shared her opinion that there was no question of any normality here:

  —Because, after all, take her, Miriam Lyubashits herself, for example. Dear Lord … here she was—she also lived with a husband!

  Miriam rose, gave the baby to the elderly Gentile wet nurse, and set off home. All the way to the streetcar stop, the mother-in-law, who was accompanying her, expatiated on her complaints:

  —And another thing: what does she want of Shmulik? Does she want a divorce? If she wants a divorce, let her say so …

  Outdoors was cloudy and drizzling. Alone, Mirel stood in the window with a shawl over her head watching the two of them with sadness in her eyes.

  Suddenly they stopped and saw:

  Descending from the streetcar that had just arrived from the city was Montchik Zaydenovski. Preoccupied, carrying two large bundles of books under his arms, he passed by without noticing them. One book fell from under his left arm, and an unknown woman walking behind him shouted out loudly after him:

  —Listen! … Excuse me! … You’ve dropped something!

  But without turning round he strode rapidly on, straight to Mirel’s wing of the house.

  On her way back, the mother-in-law called in at the same wing and saw:

  The house was quiet and drowsy and Big Montchik was no longer there. In his white shirtsleeves Shmulik was sleeping on the sofa in his study, and in the bedroom, with many books both old and new scattered all around her, Mirel was lying on the bed which hadn’t been made since very early that morning.

  From then on, the mother-in-law viewed Montchik with great disfavor and began harboring suspicions against him.

  She found herself unable to look him straight in the face.

  She had no idea how to share her suspicions with her family but if he had, broadly speaking, gone over to Mirel’s side and had no desire to tell anyone what he discussed with her, she felt justified in accosting him as he came in on one occasion and asking him sarcastically:

  —Perhaps he could explain to her what Mirel wanted from Shmulik? Word had it that he, Montchik, knew all Mirel’s secrets.

  Montchik stared at her with his huge round eyes and made no answer. He spent a short while in his uncle’s study where he had money matters to discuss, left immediately to return home, stopped before the front door of Shmulik’s wing without going in, and then made his way rapidly to the streetcar stop, thinking that he needed to discipline himself:

  —What kind of conduct was this? People might justifiably think that he wanted to rob Shmulik of his wife.

  He stopped coming down to the suburb.

  3.9

  Meanwhile, at sunset one ordinary weekday evening Shmulik returned from the stables at Libedin where, over two days, he’d made an inventory of the new oxen, and found Mirel’s door locked from within.

  For a while he stood there, knocking on the door, paused a little and then knocked again. No one inside responded. He began pacing across the dining room and the study, stopping every now and then to stare through the window at the overcast scene outdoors. He remembered that Mirel hadn’t spoken to him for the past two weeks; that his underwear was now very dirty and that several days before he’d needed to get to the closet in Mirel’s room; that the relationship between him and Mirel was worsening all the time; and that he was powerless and could find no solution for all these problems.

  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.

  Shmulik returned to his study and lay down on the sofa, unable to sleep, not knowing what to do, scratching on the oilcloth next to him:

  —His life was hopeless, it seemed … hopeless.

  Eventually he dozed off in his clothes, waking with a start once, about one o’clock in the morning, when Mirel’s room seemed flooded with light, and a second time very early, when the servant girl was still washing the floors and the first light of a new rainy, overcast day had started to peer through the windows.

  Now Mirel’s room was dark. She was sleeping.

  He went outside, roused his coachman, bade him harness his britzka, and went off to the distillery.

  Once arrived, however, he felt that he needed to be not here but there, in his own home. He could busy himself with nothing. His office was located among the ceaselessly boiling copper vats in the largest set of buildings where the heat was intense and the air pungent with the stench of malt, distilled alcohol, and scorched barley. Around two o’clock in the afternoon, the sun struck though the cloudy skies to reveal the frightful ugliness of everything in the distillery courtyard on which its sickly silvery light fell. Many wagons loaded with iron barrels, drawn up near the open cellar next to the stream that flowed past the distillery, were receiving bellowed instructions in Russian from the perpetually drunk, perpetually bad-tempered cellar-master:

  —Stoi! Stop!

  —Podavay! Give it here!

  —Kuda poliez? Where the devil are you going?

  From somewhere in the rear, from the valley behind the largest set of buildings, wafted the foul-smelling vapor of the fresh beer must that was being offloaded in the oxen stable, and the vats were being heated for the night shift.

  Then Shmulik again ordered the britzka harnessed and drove back home.

  Though it was not raining, the weather had turned cloudy and cold again. The sky was as gloomy as dusk, and the sodden fields all around reeked of damp, ploughed earth, of fresh horse manure, and of rotting pumpkins from a partially cultivated bed nearby. Both his big bay horses trotted along with confident energy, merrily bowing their heads and responding instantly to every sweep of the coachman’s whip with either a contented forward bound or a healthy equine sneeze. The wellsprung britzka swayed as it effortlessly followed after them, and Shmulik sat deep within it, reflecting all the while that it was he, Shmulik Zaydenovski, who was traveling along in this way, he who already possessed his own capital of more than thirty thousand rubles, was no longer dependent on anyone, not on a single soul, not even on his own father, and was now hurrying home. There he had a wife who’d been lying locked up in her own room for nearly two weeks. Now he needed to go in and ask her:

  —Mirel—he ought to ask her—do you perhaps find my presence oppressive? I can rent two or three rooms for you in the center of the city where you can live apart from me. Do you understand, Mirel? I demand nothing of you.

  Thinking of these things, he took so much pity on himself that tears sprang to his eyes, yet it seemed to him that what he was about to say to her was beautiful and that he would please Mirel with it.

  He wanted to get home all the more quickly.

  As soon as he drove into his father’s courtyard, however, he suddenly felt as bad as he had the previous restless night, and was starkly conscious of the burdensome, lonely hours that lay before him this day, the next day, and all the days thereafter … Outdoors it was already dark as the evening drew on. Inside his father’s big house, almost all the windows that overlooked the courtyard were illuminated, whereas those of his own house were all dark. Light was visible only in the two windows of Mirel’s room at the very end of the wing, but the shutters were bolted from within.

  She was evidently still locked up in there.

  Climbing down from the britzka, he remembered the dirty underclothing he was wearing and started making his way straight toward his home.

  He was suddenly stopped, though, by his father’s maid, who’d hurried over to him from the big house:

  —He was being summoned—she shouted after him—he was being summoned to his father’s study. They were insisting that he come in immediately.

  —Immediately?

  He couldn’t understand what had suddenly possessed them over there, and went over, only to find his father’s study hot and thick with cigarette smoke. Everything suggested that an earnest discussion about him and Mirel had been going on in there for hours.

  At the desk opposite his father sat his mother, Miriam Lyubashits, and the younger Lyubashits, the student Shoylik, all of whom had the flushed faces of people who’d been airing their views and conferring together for a long time. As soon as Shmulik entered, the younger Lyubashits left the room. He was embarrassed, apparently, and went over to speak to Rikl in the dining room. Not looking at Shmulik as he came in, his father seemed afraid to meet his eyes, lowered his head, and lit a fresh cigarette. Miriam moved something along the desk top with a finger. Only his mother half-turned toward him, blinked her eyes a few times, and beckoned him closer to the table:

  —Come over here, Shmulik …

  One of Shmulik’s temples started throbbing and he grimaced slightly, so unpleasant and difficult did he find the conversation that his mother initiated:

  In bewilderment he heard her mention his name and Mirel’s name. She was saying something about how she, his mother, had gone into Mirel’s room and had started speaking to her, and how Mirel had immediately interrupted her and answered like a person who was certainly no longer in her right mind:

  —I don’t wish to speak—she’d said to her—I wish to remain silent.

  And soon he heard the word “divorce” frequently repeated on his mother’s lips.

  Greatly troubled by the fact that his mother kept on repeating the word “divorce” so often, he even grew angry and mimicked her briefly:

  —That’s a fine thing: divorce, divorce … a very fine thing.

  Recalling Mirel, who was now lying on her bed in her room, he muttered this angrily. He wanted to get home as quickly as possible and knock on her door. But his father suddenly raised his head and began saying the same things as his mother:

  —What else but a divorce? Have you another alternative?

  And Miriam Lyubashits rose from her place and supported his father:

  —One can’t live like that forever.

  Also rising from her place, his mother added:

  —There’s never been anything like this since the world began. It’s unheard of.

  After a silence of some minutes, all three of them left him alone in the study. They had nothing more to say to him.

  His mother went over to the younger Lyubashits, the student, in the dining room and whispered to him:

  —Go into the study and tell him … He respects you, after all.

  So the younger Lyubashits went into the study, spent a while scratching at the blue cloth over the desk, and finally said:

  —The fact is, Mirel dislikes you … She disliked you even before the wedding. You see yourself that she doesn’t want to live with you. How can you force her?

  Shmulik stood with his back toward him and heard:

  —The fact was, Mirel disliked him …

  He had no idea where these words originated: whether they came directly from Mirel’s own mouth, or were simply Lyubashits’s conjecture. Nevertheless, if all of them, all the members of his family, understood this, and if Shoylik said that she disliked him, then this was certainly no fanciful notion … Shoylik wouldn’t say something like that without good reason. And if Mirel truly did dislike him, he certainly couldn’t force her to live with him. />
  Barely aware of what he was doing, he left Shoylik in the study and, hunched over, went into the dark nursery nearby. The window had been covered from inside with some kind of black cloth. All around, the youngest children were already fast asleep in their little beds against the walls, breathing steadily. He leaned his hunched back against the clothcovered window and lost himself in thought:

  —Then of course he’d divorce Mirel. And afterward she’d live somewhere with her father in the shtetl … And he, Shmulik … he’d be back here … all alone, he’d be here.

  He’d certainly never marry again … Who could think of getting married now? … And now his life was truly hopeless … for good and all …

  And, quite unexpectedly, here in this room, his heart contracted tightly with infinite pity for himself, and over there, in the dining room, all fell silent and heard him weeping aloud.

  —Who’s that?—his mother demanded in fright, listening intently and with a sinking heart to the sounds from the nursery.

  Quiet prevailed, and someone’s heart could be heard pounding. Suddenly someone else said loudly:

  —It doesn’t matter. Let him have a good cry.

  Everyone looked round, astounded to discover that this remark had come from Shmulik’s sister, Rikl.

  She knew about everything that had taken place between Mirel and Nosn Heler. A male student of her acquaintance had told her.

  Out of a great sense of propriety she’d kept this to herself the whole time, but now … now she felt able to relate that one evening she’d been walking along Nosn Heler’s street in company with this student acquaintance of hers and had seen Mirel arriving from the suburb on her own, turning in the appropriate direction, and entering Nosn Heler’s lodgings.

  3.10

  Shmulik locked himself up in a room alone and refused to come out.

  Miriam Lyubashits pottered about in the dining room. For the past few days she’d stayed over with her child, continually wearing the grave expression of an experienced midwife whose expectant mother was going into labor in the adjoining room. About Shmulik she’d remarked: