The Penitent

by Isaac Bashevis Singer

  I needn’t tell you that people milked money from me on all sides. I often gave to causes in which I hadn’t the slightest interest and to people whom I didn’t trust at all. The pious Jews demanded that I support the Torah and the secular ones begged for culture. Culture here, culture there. I often felt like asking, “What is this culture of yours? Where does it lead? What kind of people will it raise?” The yeshivas, I felt, would raise daydreamers and parasites. Well, and whom and what would the culture raise? I knew it even then: cynics and whores. But I didn’t dare say anything, for what was I myself but a whoremonger? I wallowed deep in the mud, convinced at the same time that one cannot crawl out of it. If yeshivas were no good, perhaps the theater was. If both were no good, then what was worthwhile? …

  Celia noticed that I was busier than I used to be, for I would often come home late. Although I had told Liza not to phone me at home, she did so anyhow. Celia began to tease me that I had a sweetheart. Since I was afraid that she’d make a scandal or revenge herself by taking a lover, I flatly denied it. I thought up all kinds of excuses. I took false oaths, too. Liza’s demands kept growing. She gave up her job. She needed a bigger apartment, since the daughter would be coming to live with her now. No matter how much I gave her, she lamented that it wasn’t enough. The daughter arrived, bringing along her lover. He had red hair and the face of a murderer. He said almost the same things Celia used to say when she was a Communist: that the revolution would soon erupt and I would be promptly liquidated. The masses, he claimed, were losing patience. I said to him, “Is it my fault I was born into a capitalist system? Can a man pick out his system?” But he said, “When the masses grow tired of bearing the burden, they don’t want to know about guilt or innocence. They kill, burn, and do whatever they want. That’s revolution.”

  “Yes, that’s revolution,” agreed Liza’s daughter, the student of sociology.

  I told them they had no guarantee that the same mobs wouldn’t liquidate them, too. I told them that many Jewish Reds who had threatened me and my kind with the gallows had themselves died in Soviet prisons or been tortured in Stalin’s slave camps. But this sounded to them like some fairy tale. Here in America things would be different. Here the masses would know exactly who was a friend and who an enemy. Even if they made a mistake, it would be no misfortune. Errors were made in all revolutions …

  Liza’s daughter lived with that brute literally before her mother’s eyes. They were constantly kissing and fondling each other. They spoke with the highest regard about all kinds of terrorists. The mother tried to contradict them, especially when I was present, but they made mincemeat of her. What did she know about such things? They were always carrying books, pamphlets, appeals, petitions. The telephone kept ringing. Liza now had a separate room that she had designated as “my,” Joseph Shapiro’s, room. When it grew too painful for me to argue with the daughter and the “son-in-law” (as I called him), Liza took me into “my” room and all she talked about was how expensive everything was becoming and how hard it was for her to meet her obligations. I was not only supporting Liza but her daughter and the man who promised me death when the masses arose, but I seldom dared to say something to Liza about her precious child. She would promptly bawl and grow hysterical. What did I have against Micki (that was the daughter’s pet name)? She was still a child. She had grown up without a father, poor thing. Naturally, Liza would have preferred that Micki marry a doctor, a lawyer, even a dentist, rather than run around with this roughneck from Texas—but who could give today’s children advice? It was another world, a different time.

  Yes, it was another world and a different time, but I lay deep in the mire and did the Devil’s work.

  And now comes the episode that changed my life.

  2

  It was a cold winter day. I had spent the whole day with my partners on Long Island, where we were building. I phoned Celia to tell her that I wouldn’t be home that night. She asked me the name of my hotel and I told her that I didn’t know it yet since we had to go to a few other places and I wasn’t sure where I’d be sleeping. Our telephone conversations, as our other talks generally, were curt. Actually, I had arranged with Liza to have supper at her house and spend the night with her. Liza prided herself on being a good cook. She said to me more than once that the best way to a man’s heart was through his stomach. I’m not much of an eater, but she cooked the kinds of dishes I remembered from home and I often complimented her on them.

  I finished my work as quickly as possible, and exactly at six I knocked on her door. I was afraid that I’d find her daughter and her lover there, but thank God they were out of town. That evening Liza’s apartment seemed more attractive and comfortable than usual. It was freezing cold outside but inside it was nice and warm. She had lots of time, and she polished and cleaned the furniture, the rugs, and the silver so that every corner of the apartment sparkled. The smell of my favorite dishes drifted in from the kitchen. Liza and I had cocktails, then sat down to eat. Between one course and the next, she bewailed her fate. She was alone. Her daughter was giving her trouble, pressing her for money, because her lover had forgotten to be careful and had impregnated her. Micki needed an abortion and this cost no less than seven hundred dollars for a good doctor who wouldn’t endanger her life. The lover didn’t have a penny and Micki had come whining to her mother. These words repelled me so that the food stuck in my gullet. I was supposed to pay for the abandon of some wild youth with the eyes and face of a killer. I said that if Micki was ripe enough to live with a man, she should have enough sense to be careful. Liza began to weep bitter tears. What could she do? That was the younger generation. If she said a wrong word to Micki, the girl promptly threatened to kill herself, or convert, or do whatever came to her mind.

  Liza cried and cried until I couldn’t stand it and I promised to give her the seven hundred dollars. This besides the other moneys that she wheedled out of me under various pretexts.

  This ruined not only our supper but our sex as well. When a man gets angry and feels exploited and humiliated, he loses his passion. I tried to restore my potency with whiskey, but it didn’t help. I lay impotent next to Liza, feeling as if old age had settled upon me. She tried to arouse me with good words, with false words, with sharp words, and even with smut, but nothing helped. Finally she accused me of not loving her. I wanted to ask, “Why should I love you? What is there about you to love? Love must go with respect, but how can I respect a woman who milks me of money, not only for herself, but for two young and healthy brutes, neither of whom intend to do some decent work?” I thought of my parents, of my grandparents, and I felt as if I had betrayed them and the whole of Jewish history. I remembered what I had heard and read about our martyrs in Poland; how Jews had donned prayer shawls and phylacteries and gone off to the cemeteries to die martyrs’ deaths. I was descended from such Jews, I had been taught their Torah, but what had I traded it all for?

  I fell asleep, but instead of bringing me comfort, sleep only intensified my pain. I dreamed that I was in a cellar with my parents and other Jews hiding from the Nazis. Shooting, wild screams could be heard outside. Suddenly someone lit a match and in the flash of light I saw that I was dressed as a Nazi in a brown uniform and a swastika. A fear came over me. How could this be? And what would the Jews say if someone lit another match and they saw who was among them? In the dream I felt that my Nazi uniform was the result of my way of life. More than anything I feared the disgrace that I would cause my parents. I awoke from the nightmare exhausted.

  Suddenly there was a loud, insistent ring at the front door. Liza had dozed off, too, but she awoke with a start. “Who can that be?” she asked. “I won’t open.” But the ringing grew ever more insistent. Liza slipped on a robe and went to the door. As I lay there, I heard muttering and angry whispers. I realized at once that it was Micki. The mother and daughter began arguing, and soon the whispers became shouts. It didn’t take long before I heard screams and the sound of blows. Micki was beatin
g her mother. I threw on a robe and ran to separate them. I came in to see Micki holding her mother’s hair and dealing her blow after blow.

  Liza was screaming, “Whore! Bitch! Tramp!”

  And Micki responded with, “And what are you? I know all your tricks. You change men like gloves. It was you who made me what I am. You have two lovers now!” Micki hit her so hard I was afraid that she’d kill her.

  “Liar! Thief! Prostitute! Out of my house!” Liza screamed in a wild voice.

  “Yes, you have two lovers and you suck money from them both!”

  And Micki told all the details of her mother’s conduct, naming names. Liza fell on the floor and began to gasp spasmodically.

  The daughter cried, “That’s the last time I’ll ever look at you, you old strumpet!”

  I began to dress quickly. I wanted to vomit. I was afraid that the fight between mother and daughter would end in murder. I recalled what I had learned as a boy: if you broke one of the Ten Commandments, you would break them all. I dressed hurriedly.

  Liza lay on the floor like a bundle of rags. Suddenly she leaped up and began to shriek, “She’s a liar! A liar! Don’t go! Where are you going? Oh, I’ll kill her! …”

  She ran into the kitchen and came back with a knife. Her eyes were wild, her face drained, her mouth twisted. The daughter tried to take the knife away from her. I managed to reach the door and raced down the stairs because the elevator wasn’t fast enough. I ran down so many stairs that it seemed as if the house had a hundred floors. When I tried to exit from the staircase into the lobby, it turned out that the door was locked. My heart was pounding and I was dizzy. I went down into the cellar, where the oil tanks and the gas meters were located, and a drunken man began to shout at me and wave his fists. I managed somehow to explain my predicament and gave him a dollar. He led me to the lobby, and from there I went out into the street and looked for a cab. The frost cut like a knife, and the wind tore at my hat and slapped my face. I felt frozen, and there wasn’t a taxi in sight. All of a sudden one appeared, and I started to wave my arms. I was half frozen and my spiritual bitterness forced a physical bitterness up from my stomach into my mouth. I again felt like throwing up and I had to make a superhuman effort not to befoul the cab. As usual when in trouble, I forgot my heresy and begged God to spare me this humiliation, too. I could have told the driver to stop and gotten out to vomit, but he looked like an angry man. He didn’t say a word to me, only grunted to himself. His face reflected the rage of those who stay up nights. Somehow I managed to control myself. When we reached my house I handed the driver a ten-dollar bill. He made a gesture to give me change, but I couldn’t wait any longer and I motioned him to go. All the time I was sitting in the cab, I was afraid that he might rob me or even kill me. He looked to me like a criminal.

  As soon as the cab had gone, I stooped over a pile of snow and vomited up all the good food and drinks that Liza had served me. I soiled my coat. My whole being was one skein of bitterness, sourness, and shame over my own degradation. There was supposed to be a doorman in the lobby, but I knew very well where he was—down in the basement playing cards with the cop whose duty it was to patrol the street and protect the inhabitants. You couldn’t say a word about this because, for all the fine talk about democracy, law, and freedom, the world always did and still does follow the principle of might makes right. Now that Jews mimic Gentiles, they follow the same principle. Even in those days someone was being killed in New York every other day and the police never found the perpetrator. If he was found, the lawyers promptly bailed him out and the court later freed him for lack of evidence. If a witness did show up, he had to be kept in confinement to protect him from the criminals. In America, as in Sodom, the perpetrator went free and the witness rotted in jail. And all this was done in the name of liberalism. The whole worldly justice protects the criminal and leaves the actual or potential victim at his mercy. Everyone knows this, but try talking about it and you’re called the worst names. In my own business you had to constantly hand out bribes to inspectors, police, all kinds of officials. The mayor knew this. It was, as they say, an open secret. Today’s Jew is no better than the Gentile. He often exploits this situation for his own ends and for profits. Many lawyers teach the criminals how to circumvent the law, to make a mockery of it, and I myself was part of this system.

  3

  After I recovered, I rode the elevator to my floor. I had broken up with Liza for good, and I thought, So many people are satisfied with one wife, why can’t I be, too? In comparison to Liza, Celia now seemed decency itself. She had studied and was trying to find a job, a profession. I had an excuse ready for Celia as to why I had come home in the middle of the night. A man who lives with several women becomes an expert at telling lies. I was fool enough to think that Celia believed my lies. It’s a rule that those who deceive others also deceive themselves. Every liar is convinced that he can fool the whole world. Actually, he is fooled more than anyone else.

  I had a key to my apartment, but the front door was bolted and chained from inside. I rang the doorbell, but Celia didn’t answer. I rang again and again, ever more firmly and insistently. I kept on ringing. Celia had apparently sunk into a deep sleep and I would have to wake her, although she was normally a light sleeper. I began to fear that some tragedy had befallen her. Our apartment had two entrances, a front and a rear. I had a key to the back door. A door led to a corridor running from the passenger elevator to the freight elevator where the garbage was put out. I opened this door and saw the back door to my apartment open and a man come out. I knew him—he was one of the professors supervising Celia’s thesis. Behind him stood Celia in her nightgown. My dear friend, there occurred in my house that which is shown in all the melodramas and cheap films: the husband coming unexpectedly home and the wife sneaking her lover out the back door. I grew so ashamed that I closed the door again. Maimonides says somewhere that Gehenna is shame. In that moment, I experienced the shame that is Gehenna.

  In the melodramas, the husband assaults the lover and they fight to the death, but I was in no mood to wage combat against this elderly lecher. I waited until I could no longer hear his footsteps on the stairs, and in the meantime, Celia opened the front door for me. Then she ran and locked herself in the bathroom. That night, I drained the cup of misery to its very dregs, as the phrase goes, and I knew what I must do: put an end to the kind of life I’d been leading, sever for once and all my ties with everything and everybody in my environment. I had been dealt a blow that I could not ignore. Actually, I had known right along that my life was a shame and a disgrace—all that chasing after money, my affairs with women, being part of a society that was corrupt from beginning to end and whose justice was the encouragement of crime.

  Celia took her time in the bathroom, which gave me the opportunity to collect my things and to pack the most necessary ones. Fortunately, I found a passport that was valid for a few more years. I also had a bankbook and a number of important documents that I kept at home. I heard Celia coughing in the bathroom. From time to time, the water ran as if she was washing. The whole packing took me some three-quarters of an hour. I was afraid that Celia would rush out and start all the talk and justifications that are employed in such situations, but she was silent. I had the feeling that she guessed I was packing my things and had decided to wait until I was gone.

  I took my two satchels and left. I walked down the stairs and was soon out in the cold street again. I knew that not only was I leaving my house but I was beginning a new life. I couldn’t remain out in the street. The frost was biting and an icy wind blew. A taxi came by and I told the driver to take me to the first hotel I could think of. I signed the register with the first name that came to my mind. I had lost my wife, my mistress, and my business as well, because I no longer wished to remain in New York or even in America—but I felt no sense of loss. I lay down in bed and slept the sleep of total resignation. When I opened my eyes the sun was shining. I decided to turn everything I owne
d into cash, and whatever couldn’t be quickly liquidated, I would simply abandon. I wouldn’t say that I felt reborn; it was more the feeling of one who has just died and whose soul has entered a strange body.

  My first impulse was to take a bath or shower, and go down to the restaurant or coffee shop for breakfast. I even considered ordering eggs with ham or bacon. But I quickly reminded myself that last night in the cab I had decided to be a Jew, and a Jew didn’t eat pork. At the same time I knew how fraught with problems my decision would be. To be a Jew, to adhere to the laws of the Shulhan Arukh, one had to—as you said before—believe in the Torah and the Gemara, and that everything that all the rabbis wrote was given by Moses on Mount Sinai. But I didn’t have this faith. I had read much, first in Warsaw, later in Russia, and later still in America, and somehow it wasn’t easy for me to accept the notion that along with the Ten Commandments Moses had received all the interpretations and all the restrictions of the rabbis of all generations. I hated the modern world and everything it represented—its barbarism, its licentiousness, its false justice, its wars, its Hitlers, its Stalins, everything—but I had no proof whatsoever that the Torah had been given by God or that there even was a God. True, there had to be some force that moved the universe, I told myself. I had never been a materialist who contends that the universe was created by an explosion and that everything evolved on its own. I had read a history of philosophy, and although I’m no philosopher, I saw how foolish, how weak and unconvincing all their theories were. Actually, all modern philosophy has a single theme: we don’t know anything and we cannot know anything. Our small brain isn’t capable of grasping eternity, infinity, or even the essence of the things which we see and touch. But to what did this lead? Their ethics weren’t worth a fig and committed no one to anything. You could be versed in all their philosophies and still be a Nazi or a member of the KGB. I hadn’t been only physically stripped that day, but spiritually bared as well.