Shosha

by Isaac Bashevis Singer

  ‘Where did you get a cane all of a sudden?’ I asked, just to change the conversation.

  ‘Oh, I stole it. One of my Americans left it to me. Lately my feet have been making monkey business. I walk on a flat road and suddenly my feet begin to run by themselves as if I were ice skating or going downhill. What kind of a malady is this? I will have to ask our literary physician Dr Lipkin, who understands as much about medicine as he understands about literature. Meanwhile, I have decided that a cane cannot do any damage. Tsutsik, you look pale. What’s the matter? Are you sick?’

  ‘He’s perfectly well and crazy,’ Betty said. ‘A first-class maniac.’

  5

  Feitelzohn assured us that he had eaten breakfast, and when Betty ordered rolls, an omelette, and coffee for him, he smiled and said, ‘If one lives in America a few years, one becomes an American. What would the world do without America? When I lived there I complained of Uncle Sam steadily – talked only about his shortcomings. But now that I’m here, I miss America. I could go back if I chose, on a tourist visa. It might even be that I could get a visa as a professor. But in New York and Boston no university would give me a permanent job. And to teach in those small colleges somewhere in the Midwest means dying of boredom. I cannot sit all day long and read like a bookworm. The students there are more childlike than our cheder boys. All they talk about is football, and the professors are not much cleverer. America is a country of children. The New Yorkers are a little more grown up, but not much. Once some friend of mine put me on a ferry to Coney Island. This, Tsutsik, I wish you could see. It is a city in which everything is for play – shooting at tin ducklings, visiting a museum where they show a girl with two heads, letting an astrologer plot your horoscope and a medium call up the soul of your grandfather in the beyond. No place lacks vulgarity, but the vulgarity of Coney Island is of a special kind, friendly, with a tolerance that says, “I play my game and you play your game.” As I walked around there and ate a hot dog – this is what they call a sausage – it occurred to me that I was seeing the future of mankind. You can even call it the time of the Messiah. One day all people will realize there is not a single idea that can really be called true – that everything is a game – nationalism, internationalism, religion, atheism, spiritualism, materialism, even suicide. You know, Tsutsik, that I am a great admirer of David Hume. In my eyes he is the only philosopher who has not become obsolete – he is as fresh and clear today as he was in his own time. Coney Island fits David Hume’s philosophy. Since we are sure of nothing and there is even no evidence that the sun will rise tomorrow, play is the very essence of human endeavor, perhaps even the thing-in-itself. God is a player, the cosmos a playground. For years I have searched for a basis of ethics and gave up hope. Suddenly it became clear to me. The basis of ethics is man’s right to play the games of his choice. I will not trample on your toys and you will not trample on mine; I won’t spit on your idol and you will not spit on mine. There is no reason why hedonism, the cabala, polygamy, asceticism, even our friend Haiml’s blend of eroticism and Hasidism could not exist in a play-city or play-world, a sort of a universal Coney Island where everyone would play according to his or her desire. I’m sure, Miss Slonim, that you have visited Coney Island more than once.’

  ‘Yes, but I never came to your philosophical conclusions. By the way, who is David Hume? I’ve never heard of him.’

  ‘David Hume was an English philosopher and a friend of Jean Jacques Rousseau before he became a disgusting schnorrer.’

  ‘Here is your omelette, Dr Feitelzohn,’ Betty said. ‘I have heard of Jean Jacques Rousseau. I’ve even read his Confessions.’

  ‘It is easy to read David Hume, too. A child can understand him. I’m sure, Tsutsik, you know that 7 + 5 = 12 has been judged an analytic sentence, not a synthetic a priori one. Hume was right, not Kant. But you still haven’t explained what happened to you. You vanished like a wishing ring. I began to think you had gone to Jerusalem and were sitting in a cave trying to bring the Redemption.’

  ‘Dr Feitelzohn, his cave is on Krochmalna Street.’ Betty turned to me. ‘May I tell him the truth?’

  ‘If you like. I don’t care any more.’

  ‘Dr Feitelzohn, your Tsutsik has found himself a bride-to-be on Krochmalna Street.’

  Feitelzohn put down his fork. ‘Is that so? According to the way you used to praise that madman Otto Weininger, I thought you would turn into an old bachelor.’

  I wanted to answer him, but Betty prevented me. ‘He could have remained a bachelor, but he found such a treasure – her name is Shosha – that he had to break all his principles and convictions.’

  ‘She’s making fun of me,’ I managed to say.

  ‘What? You cannot run away from the female species. Sooner or later you fall into their net. Celia was looking for you desperately. Shosha? A modern girl with such an old-fashioned name? What is she, a fighting Yiddishist?’

  Again I tried to answer and again Betty interrupted me: ‘It would be hard to say just what she is, but if such a connoisseur of women as your Tsutsik decides to marry, you know she has to be something extraordinary. If your David Hume had met her, he would have divorced his wife and run away with Shosha to Coney Island.’

  ‘I don’t think David Hume had a wife,’ Feitelzohn said after some hesitation. ‘Well, mazel tov, Tsutsik, mazel tov.’

  Only now did Betty let me speak. ‘She makes fun of me,’ I said. ‘Shosha is a girl from my childhood. We used to play together before I went to cheder. We were neighbors at No. 10 Krochmalna. Later I went away and for many years …’

  Feitelzohn picked up his fork. ‘Whatever the case, you don’t run away from your friends. If you get married, you cannot keep it a secret. If you love her, we want to know her and accept her as one of us. May I call up Celia and tell her the good tidings?’

  I saw that Betty was about to come out with some new joke and I said to her, ‘Do me a favor, Betty, and don’t speak in my name. And please don’t be so sarcastic. Dr Feitelzohn, it’s not such good tidings and I don’t want Celia to know about it. Not yet. Shosha is a poor girl without any education. I loved her as a child and I was never able to forget her. I was sure that she was dead but I found her – thanks to Betty, as a matter of fact.’

  ‘I wasn’t being sarcastic. I meant it all seriously’ – Betty tried to defend herself.

  ‘Why isn’t Celia allowed to know the truth?’ Feitelzohn asked. ‘Whenever I expect life to remain status quo, something unexpected pops up. World history is made of the same dough as bagels. It must be fresh. This is why democracy and capitalism are going down the drain. They have become stale. This is the reason idolatry was so exciting. You could buy a new god every year. We Jews burdened the nations with an eternal God, and therefore they hate us. Gibbon tried so hard to find the reason for the fall of the Roman Empire. It fell only because it had become old. I hear that there is a passion for newness in the sky also. A star gets tired of being a star and it explodes and becomes a nova. The Milky Way got weary of its sour milk and began to run to the devil knows where. Does she have a job? I mean your fiancée, not the Milky Way.’

  ‘She has no job and she cannot have one,’ I said.

  ‘Is she sick?’

  ‘Yes, sick.’

  ‘When the body gets tired of being healthy, it becomes sick. When it gets tired of living, it dies. When it has enough of being dead, it reincarnates into a frog or a windmill. The coffee here is the best in the whole of Warsaw. May I order another glass, Miss Slonim?’

  ‘Ten glasses, but please don’t call me Miss Slonim – my name is Betty.’

  ‘I drink too much coffee and I smoke too many cigars. How is it possible that one never gets tired of tobacco and coffee? This is really a riddle.’

  PART TWO

  Eight

  1

  Two days before Yom Kippur eve, Bashele bought two hens with which to perform the sacrificial ceremony, one for herself and the other for Shosha. She wanted to
buy a rooster for me, but I refused to let a rooster die for my sins. Certain writers in the Yiddish newspapers had come out against this rite, calling it idolatrous. The Zionist supporters proposed sacrificing money instead, which would go to the Jewish National Fund for Palestine. Still, from all the apartments on Krochmalna Street one could hear the clucking of hens and the crowing of roosters. When Bashele went to Yanash’s Court to have the hens slaughtered, she didn’t return for two hours. The crowd was so large she couldn’t get to the slaughterers. Toward evening, the street emptied even of pickpockets. The den at No. 6 was closed down. Candles were lit in the brothels and no visitors were permitted. Even the Communists were hiding somewhere. Bashele had bought a seat in a synagogue. Toward the evening meal, she lit a large candle stuck in a pot of sand – a ‘soul candle’ – and put on a silk holiday dress that went back to the time we had lived at No. 10. She took out of a chest two prayer books she had received as a wedding present, and went off to services. Before leaving, she blessed Shosha and me. She placed her hands on my head and mumbled the benediction as if I were her son: ‘God make thee as Ephraim and as Manasseh.’

  I stayed with Shosha for some time. I tried to kiss her and she admonished me that it was forbidden. She had been busy all day long helping her mother prepare for the after-holiday meal, and she kept yawning and falling asleep. She looked pale. She asked me again and again to read some prayers from her grandmother’s prayer book, with its faded pages and spots made by tallow candles and tears, but I refused. After a while I wished her a good holiday and left. Dr Feitelzohn had invited me to spend the evening with him.

  A silence had descended over all the Jewish streets. The trolleys made their way empty, and shops were closed. Overhead, the stars flickered like the flames of memorial candles. Even the prison on Dluga Street, the ‘Arsenal,’ appeared veiled in reverent melancholy with its dim glow behind the barred windows. I imagined that the night itself took score of its mission. Feitelzohn’s apartment was in a house near Freta Street. He had told me no other Jewish tenants lived there besides him. At times I felt that no Gentiles lived there, either. The front windows were never lit in the evenings, nor were there lights at the gate entrance. I climbed the four flights of stone stairs to his place and not a rustle could be heard from behind a single door. I often played with the idea that this was a house of ghosts.

  I knocked, and Feitelzohn opened. The apartment consisted of a huge, almost empty room, with gray walls and a high ceiling with a solitary lamp. A door led to a tiny kitchen. How strange, this erudite man owned hardly a book except for an old German encyclopedia. Nor did he have a desk. He slept not in a bed but on a couch, which was covered with a black blanket. Mark Elbinger sat on the couch now – erect, tense.

  I had apparently interrupted a dispute between them, for after a long pause Feitelzohn said, ‘Mark, of all the errors Jews have made, our greatest was to delude ourselves – and later other peoples – that God is merciful, loves His creatures, hates malefactors, and all the rest of it our saints and prophets preached, from Moses down to Chafetz Chaim. The ancient Greeks never nursed this delusion and that was their greatness. While the Jews accused other nations of idolatry, they themselves served an idol of justice. Christianity is an outcome of this wishful thinking. Hitler, savage that he is, is now trying to de-hypnotize the world from these fallacies, but – oh, the telephone again! On Yom Kippur!’

  I was not in a mood to take part in any discussions and I went over to the window. On the right side I could see the Vistula. A three-quarter moon cast silver nets upon the dark water. Elbinger materialized at my side. He murmured, ‘A strange person, our Feitelzohn.’

  ‘What is he?’

  ‘I’ve known him over thirty years and I don’t begin to fathom what he is. All his words have one aim – to cover up what he’s really thinking.’

  ‘What is he really thinking?’

  ‘Gloomy thoughts. He is disappointed in everything, but mostly in himself. His father was an ascetic. He may still be alive somewhere. Morris has a daughter whom he last saw in her diapers. I myself have known two women who committed suicide over him. One a German in Berlin, and the other a missionary’s daughter in London …’

  Feitelzohn grunted and put down the receiver. ‘It’s my opinion that woman’s number-one passion isn’t sex but talking,’ he said.

  ‘What does she want?’ Elbinger asked.

  ‘You ought to know, you’re the mind reader.’

  The conversation turned to occultism, and Feitelzohn said, ‘There are unknown forces here, yes, there are, but they’re all part of the mystery called nature. What nature is no one knows, and I suspect that she doesn’t know herself. I can easily visualize the Almighty sitting on the Throne of Glory in the Seventh Heaven, Metatron on His right, Sandalphon on His left, and God asking them, “Who am I? How did I come about? Did I create Myself? Who gave Me these powers? After all, it couldn’t be that I’ve existed forever. I remember only the past hundred trillion years. Everything before that is hazy. Well, how long will it go on?” Wait, Mark, I’ll get you your cognac. Something to nibble on? I have cookies as old as Methuselah.’

  Feitelzohn went into the kitchen. He came back after a long time with a plate holding two glasses of cognac and a few biscuits. I had told him I was fasting, not because I believed that this was God’s will, but to remain in some way a part of my family and all the other Jews. Feitelzohn clinked his glass with Elbinger’s. ‘L’chaim! We Jews keep on wishing ourselves eternal life, or at least immortality of the soul. In fact, eternal life would be a calamity. Imagine some little storekeeper dying and his soul flying around for millions of years still remembering that once it sold chicory, yeast, and beans, and that a customer owes it eighteen groschen. Or the soul of an author ten million years later resenting a bad review he got.’

  ‘Souls don’t stay the same. They grow,’ Elbinger said.

  ‘If they forget the past, they are no longer the same. And if they remember all of the pettiness of life, then they cannot grow. I have no doubt that soul and body are two sides of the same coin. In this respect Spinoza had more courage than Kant. Kant’s soul is nothing but a false figure in a false system of bookkeeping. L’chaim! Let’s sit down.’

  The conversation turned again and again to the secret powers, and Elbinger said, ‘Yes, they exist, but what they represent I do not know. My own experience with them started when I was still a child. We were living in a village so small I could never find it on any map – Sencymin. Actually, it was a hamlet into which two to three dozen Jewish families had moved. My father, a melamed, was a pauper. We occupied two rooms – one used for the cheder; the other for the kitchen, the bedroom, and everything else. I had an older sister, Tzipa, and an older brother, Yonkel. I was named Moshe Mottel after a great-grandfather, but I was called Mottele, which later evolved into Mark. I recall a number of episodes in my life as far back as the age of two. My bed was set up in the cheder room, where the children studied by day. The two windows there had shutters and they must have faced east, because the sun shone through them in the mornings. What I’m speaking of now has no connection with the so-called occult but with a feeling that everything is full of mysteries. I recall that once I woke quite early – my parents, brother, and sister were still asleep. The rising sun shone through the cracks in the shutters, and columns of dust rose from sunbeams. I remember that morning with remarkable clarity. Obviously, I was too young to think in the context of words, but I wondered, “What is all this? Where does it all come from?” Other children no doubt go through the same thing, but on that morning my feeling was unusually strong, and I knew instinctively that I shouldn’t ask about this and that my parents couldn’t supply any answers. Our ceiling had beams, and a web of sun and shadow played across it. I realized that I myself and what I was seeing – the walls, the floor, the pillow on which I rested my head – were all one. In later years I read about cosmic consciousness, monism, pantheism, but I never experienced it wi
th such impact. More, it provided me with a rare pleasure. I had merged with eternity and I relished it. At times I think it was like the state of passing over from life to what we call death. We may experience it in the final moments or perhaps immediately after. I say this because no matter how many dead people I have seen in my life, they have had the same expression on their faces: Aha, so that’s what it is! If I had only known! What a shame I can’t tell the others about it! Even a dead bird or mouse presents this expression, although not as distinctly as man.

  ‘My first psychic experiences – if you can call them that – were of a kind that might have come in a dream or while I was awake, although I’m as convinced that they weren’t dreams as I am that my sitting here with you now is no dream. I remember one time leaving our house at night. Our house – actually, all the Jewish houses were built around a sandy area called the Market. The shops were there, the prayer house and a ritual bath, as well as the tavern. I couldn’t say how late it was, but the Market was deserted, all the stores were shut, and the shutters closed. I managed to slip out of bed and open the door. The night was bright – if not from the moon, perhaps from the stars.

  ‘Across the way from us stood another house. The peasant shacks had roofs of straw, while the Jewish houses had crooked shingle roofs. Needless to say, the houses were low. The moment I stepped outside I saw something sitting on the roof across the way. I imagined it was a man, yet different. For one thing, he had no arms or legs. For another, he didn’t stand on the roof, he didn’t sit – he hovered there. He didn’t speak to me, but I understood that he wanted me to come up to him, and I knew that to go up would be the same as going to where my dead brother and sister had gone. Just the same, I felt a strong urge to go to him. I stood gaping in indecision, frightened and disbelieving my own eyes.