Shosha

by Isaac Bashevis Singer

  Zelig took a watch and chain from his breast pocket. I blushed and he said, ‘Whatever I may be and whatever they say about me, I’m still Shosha’s father. If she ever has a child – and I can’t imagine how, unless they perform a Caesarean – I’ll be a grandfather. I knew your father, may he rest in peace. We were neighbors for years. At times when there was a wedding at your house, they called me in to make a quorum. He always sat over his Gemaras. I also remember your mother. Not a bad-looking woman, though too skinny for my taste. You look like her. What will be with this Hitler? People are all terrified, but not me. If things get bad enough, I’ll dig myself a grave, take a shot of brandy, and go to sleep. When you see death every day, you stop being afraid of it. What’s life, anyway? You give the throat a squeeze and it’s all over. Here, take this watch. That’s my wedding present to you. It’s silver and it has seventeen jewels. Bashele’s father gave it to me to sleep with his daughter, and now I give it to you to sleep with my daughter. If you take care of it, one day you may give it to the fellow who’ll do the favor for your daughter.’

  ‘Oh, Papa, what’s to be done with you?’

  ‘Teibele, give up – you can’t do anything with me. I have a present ready for you too, when you find the right man. There is no God. I went to synagogue on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, but I didn’t do much praying.’

  ‘So where does the world come from?’ Teibele asked.

  Zelig pinched his beard. ‘Where does everything come from? It’s there and that’s all. In Praga, there were two friends and one got sick. Before dying, he made a deal with his friend that if there was another world he’d come back to give him greetings. He told his friend to light the candles in the Hanukkah lamp on the last day of the mourning period and he would come put them out. The friend did as he was told. On the last day of mourning he lit the Hanukkah lamp. But he was tired from working and he dropped off. Suddenly he woke up. A candle had fallen from the lamp and started a fire. His gabardine was burning. He ran outside and rolled in the gutter. He had to spend two months in the hospital.’

  ‘And what’s to be made from this?’

  ‘Nothing. There is no such thing as a soul. I’ve buried more rabbis and holy Jews than you’ve got hairs on your head. You stick them in the grave and that’s where they rot.’

  No one spoke for a while; then Zelig asked, ‘Shosha doesn’t sleep so much any more? That time when she got the sleeping sickness she slept nearly a whole year. They woke her, fed her, and she went right back to sleep. How long ago was it – fifteen years already, eh?’

  ‘Papa, what’s wrong with you?’ Teibele exclaimed.

  ‘I’m drunk. I didn’t say anything. She’s recovered now.’

  Ten

  1

  Dora was supposed to have gone to Russia months earlier, but she was still in Warsaw. Her sister Liza called me at the Writers’ Club to tell me Dora had attempted suicide by drinking iodine. It seemed that Wolf Felhendler, a fellow Communist who had gone to Russia a year and a half before, had broken out of Soviet exile and smuggled his way back into Poland. The news he brought was dismaying: Dora’s best friend, Irka, had been shot there. A whole group of comrades who had gone to the Soviet Union were either in prison or had been sent to the north to dig for gold. As word of his report spread, the Stalinists in Warsaw accused Wolf Felhendler of being a Fascist traitor and a spy for the Polish Secret Service. However, within Poland trust in Stalin’s justice suffered a mighty blow. Even before this, whole cells had become disillusioned and gone over to the Trotskyites, and many Communists had switched to the Jewish Bund or the Polish Socialist Party. Others had become Zionists or turned to religion.

  After Dora’s stomach had been pumped out, Liza arranged for her to spend a few days in Otwock. Back in her apartment, Dora telephoned me, and I went to visit her in the evening. Behind the door I heard a man’s voice – Felhendler’s. I hadn’t the slightest urge to meet with him. He used to warn the anti-Communists at the Writers’ Club that when the revolution came he would see them hanged from the nearest lamp post. Still, I knocked. In a few minutes, Dora opened the door. Even though it was half dark in the corridor, I could see that she looked pale and wasted. She clasped my hand and said, ‘I thought you would never want to see my face again.’

  ‘I hear you have company.’

  ‘It’s Felhendler. He’ll be leaving soon.’

  ‘Don’t keep him here. I don’t have the patience for him.’

  ‘He’s not the same person. He’s gone through hell.’

  Dora spoke softly and didn’t let go of my hand. She led me into the living room, where Felhendler sat at the head of the table. If I hadn’t known who he was, I wouldn’t have recognized him. He was thinner, aged; his hair had fallen out. His attitude toward me had always been arrogant – he addressed me as if the revolution already had come and he had been appointed a commissar. But now he jumped to his feet. He smiled and I saw that his front teeth were missing. He held out a clammy hand to me and said, ‘I called you at your room, but you weren’t home.’

  Even his voice had grown meek. I couldn’t bring myself to take revenge upon a person so beaten, although I knew that, if it had been within his power, he would have subjected me to the very treatment he himself had received. He said, ‘I’ve thought of you more than you know. Did your ears ever burn?’

  ‘Ears burn when you talk about someone, not when you think of him,’ Dora observed.

  ‘You’re right, of course. Lately, I’ve begun to forget things. For a time I even forgot the names of my own family. You’ve probably heard what happened to me. Well, I’ve paid my dues, as they say. But I didn’t only think about you, I actually spoke of you. I shared a cell with a man by the name of Mendel Leiterman, who had once been a reader of The Literary Magazine. Forty of us were jammed in a cell made for eight. We sat on the floor and talked. The greatest privilege was to be next to the wall where you could lean your head.’

  I assumed Felhendler would say goodbye and leave; instead, he settled down again. His suit hung so loosely that it seemed not to be his size. In the past, he had always worn a stiff collar and tie, but now his collar was open, revealing a scrawny neck. He said, ‘Yes, I recalled your words. You predicted everything in detail – you might have been some kind of prophet who had put a curse on me. I don’t mean this in a bad sense – I haven’t yet reached such a stage of superstitious nonsense. But words aren’t lost. At night when I lay on the bare floor, sick and grimy, my head reeling from the stink of the slop bucket – that is, if they let me lie and didn’t drag me off for an interrogation – and I heard the doors being opened to take someone else to be tortured, I thought, what would Aaron Greidinger say if he could see all this? It didn’t occur to me for a second that I would live to meet and talk with you again. We were all condemned to death or to work in the gold mines, which is worse than death. No, they don’t let you die so fast and easy. One time they questioned me for twenty-six hours straight. This kind of physical torture – I’m not speaking of the spiritual pain – I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemies, not even on Stalin’s minions. I don’t believe they were as cruel during the Inquisition or that it’s being done in Mussolini’s prisons. A man can take torture from an enemy, but when your friend turns out to be the enemy, then the anguish is beyond endurance. They wanted one thing from me – to confess that I was a spy sent by the Polish Secret Service. They literally begged me to do them the favor and confess, but I swore to myself, anything but this.’

  ‘Wolf, stop talking about it. It’s making you sick,’ Dora said.

  ‘Eh? I couldn’t be sicker than I am. I said to them, “How can I be a Polish spy when I did time in every Polish jail for our ideal? How can I be a Fascist when for years I was an editor of a magazine that attacked the Zionists, the Bund, the P.P.S., and that openly preached the dictatorship of the proletariat? My family was from the poorest of the poor, and all my life I’ve suffered hunger and want. Socialism was my only comfort. Why would I be
come a spy for the reactionary and anti-Semitic Polish regime? What military institutions was I being allowed to get near? Where has your sense of reason gone? Even in madness there has to be a trace of logic,” I said. But the fellow who sat facing me toyed with his revolver the whole time, smoked cigarettes, and drank tea while I was standing on swollen feet and everything inside me was shriveling from lack of food, water, and sleep. He glared at me. His eyes were murderous. “I’ve heard all your lousy excuses,” he said. “You are a Fascist dog, a counter-revolutionary traitor, and a Hitler spy. Sign the confession before I tear the tongue out of your pig’s snout.” He called me “thou,” that Russky. He lit a candle, took out a needle, held it to the flame, and said, “If you don’t sign, I’ll jam this under your filthy fingernails.” I knew what pain that meant, for the Polish Fascists had done it to me, but still I couldn’t label myself a spy. I looked at him – someone who should have been the defender of the working class and of the Revolution – and for all my anguish I started to laugh. This was bad theater, the worst kind of trash. Even Nowaczynski in the wildest stretches of his sick imagination couldn’t have dreamed up such an idiotic plot.

  ‘I stuck out my hand and told him, “Go ahead. If this is what the Revolution needs, do with me as you will.” He was called out and a new executioner took his place – a new executioner who was rested and full. That’s how they questioned me for twenty-six hours by the clock. I pleaded with them, “Shoot me and put an end to it.” ’

  ‘Wolf, I can’t listen to any more!’ Dora cried.

  ‘You can’t, can’t you? You have to! We are responsible for this. We spread the propaganda to bring it about. In 1926, when the news began to come out against Trotsky, we called him an agent for the Pilsudskis, the Mussolinis, the Rockefellers, the MacDonalds. We stuffed our ears and refused to hear the truth.’

  ‘Felhendler, I don’t want to rub salt in your wounds,’ I said, ‘but if Trotsky was in power, he wouldn’t act any differently from Stalin.’

  A mixture of irony and anger showed in Felhendler’s eyes. ‘How do you know how Trotsky would act? How dare you make assumptions about things that never happened?’

  ‘They’ve happened in all the revolutions. Whenever blood is spilled in the name of humanity, of religion, or of any other cause, it leads inevitably to this kind of terror.’

  ‘So according to you the working class should keep silent over what is happening in Russia, allow Hitler and Mussolini to seize the world and let itself be trampled like ants. Is this what you preach?’

  ‘I don’t preach.’

  ‘Yes, you do. If you can say that Trotsky would be no better than Stalin, it means that the whole human race is corrupt and there is no hope – that we must surrender to all the murderers, the Fascists, those who instigate pogroms and turn the clock back to the Dark Ages, to the Inquisitions, to the Crusades.’

  ‘Felhendler, England, France, and America haven’t resorted to inquisitions and crusades.’

  ‘Oh, haven’t they? America has locked its gates and is letting no one in. England, France, Canada, Australia – all the capitalist countries – are doing the same. In India, thousands of people die of hunger each day. English travelers admit this themselves. When Gandhi, submissive as he is, uttered a word, they threw him in jail. Is this true or not? Gandhi babbles about passive resistance. What a swindle! How can resistance be passive? It’s exactly as if you would say hot snow, cold fire.’

  ‘Then you’re still for revolution?’

  ‘Yes, Aaron Greidinger, yes! If you went to a dentist and instead of pulling a rotten tooth he purposely pulled three healthy teeth, this would surely be a tragedy and a crime. But the rotten tooth would still have to be pulled. Otherwise it could infect the whole mouth – even lead to gangrene.’

  ‘Right! One hundred percent correct!’ Dora exclaimed.

  ‘I hate to dash your hopes,’ I said, ‘but I will make another prediction for you: Trotsky’s permanent revolution, or whatever revolution it may be, will duplicate precisely what the Stalinists are doing now. I do not want you to have to say again that I was right. You’ve suffered enough.’

  ‘No,’ Felhendler said. ‘If I were to think in your terms, I’d have to hang myself this very night.’

  ‘Enough,’ Dora said. ‘I’ll put up tea.’

  2

  We drank tea, ate bread with herring, and Felhendler recounted his experiences from the time he crossed the border into Russia and was met by a delegate of the Comintern. He was taken to Moscow and assigned a room with another delegate from Poland, a Comrade Wysocki from Upper Silesia. Every other evening, they attended free performances of the theater or the opera or some new Soviet film. Suddenly in the middle of a night there was a knock on his door and he was placed under arrest. Five weeks he sat behind bars without knowing the charges against him. He comforted himself with the idea that his imprisonment was an error – he had obviously been mistaken for some other Felhendler and everything would be cleared up at the interrogation. He shared a cell with both political and criminal prisoners. The thieves, murderers, and rapists beat the politicals and took away their food rations. They played cards among themselves, using slips of paper, and gambled for each other’s rations, clothing, and the right to sleep on the hard bench instead of the floor. When one of the players lost all he possessed, he played for blows – the winner could slug the loser. Many of the criminals practiced homosexuality. A new prisoner who didn’t want to participate was raped. The Red authorities made no effort to protect the victims.

  Felhendler said, ‘In the Polish prisons, even in such a tough jail as Wronki, where I spent three years, they gave us books. I went through a whole library there. But in the land of socialism, we – the fighters for justice! – sat for weeks on end going mad. We kneaded chess pieces out of the claylike bread that they gave us, but there wasn’t enough room on the floor to set up a board to play on. None of the political prisoners had the slightest notion of what crimes they had been picked up for. Yet nearly every one of them remained dedicated to the cause. They put the blame on the lower officials of the G.P.U. without once accusing Stalin or anyone in the Central Committee or the Politburo. But I slowly became aware of the quicksand in which we were caught. Some of the prisoners confided to me that they had been forced to make false accusations against their closest comrades.’

  It was midnight when Felhendler left. The moment he closed the door, Dora burst into tears. ‘What can one do? How is one to live?’

  She clasped me by my wrists and drew me to her. She leaned her forehead on my shoulder and sobbed. I stood there gawking at the opposite wall. From the day I had left my father’s house I had existed in a state of perpetual despair. Occasionally, I considered the notion of repentance, of returning to real Jewishness. But to live like my father, my grandfathers, and great-grandfathers, without their faith – was this possible? Each time I went into a library, I felt a spark of hope that perhaps in one of the books there might be some indication of how a person of my disposition and world outlook could make peace with himself. I didn’t find it – not in Tolstoy or in Kropotkin, not in Spinoza or in William James, not in Schopenhauer, not in the Scriptures. Certainly the Prophets preached a high morality, but their promises of plentiful harvests, of fruitful olive trees and vineyards, protection against one’s enemies, made no appeal to me. I knew that the world had always been and would always remain as it was now. What the moralists called evil was actually the order of life.

  Dora wiped her tears. ‘Arele, I must move from here at once. The apartment isn’t mine, and even if it was, I couldn’t pay for it. Also, I’m afraid that my ex-comrades will turn me in to the Secret Service.’

  ‘The Secret Service knows about you, anyway.’

  ‘They could provide the necessary proof. You know how it is with the Stalinists – whoever isn’t for them must be liquidated.’

  ‘You yourself used to preach this.’

  ‘To my shame, yes.’

 
; ‘The Trotskyites follow the same principles.’

  ‘What shall I do? You tell me!’

  ‘I can’t tell you anything.’

  ‘I could be arrested any day. The last time you slept here I was still full of expectation. I even dreamed you might sooner or later come to me in Russia. Now I don’t look forward to anything.’

  ‘A half hour ago, you agreed with Felhendler’s Trotskyism.’

  ‘I’m no longer sure. I should have thrown myself out the window instead of drinking iodine.’

  That night I lay next to Dora, but that was all. I couldn’t sleep. Each time I heard the bell at the house gate I assumed it was the police coming to take us in. I rose at dawn and before I went I gave Dora some of the money I had with me.

  Dora said, ‘I thank you, but if you should hear that I’ve done away with myself, don’t feel too bad. I’ve been left with nothing.’

  ‘Dora, for the time being, don’t get involved with the Trotskyites. A permanent revolution is about as possible as permanent surgery.’

  ‘What will you do?’

  ‘Oh, live from day to day – or from hour to hour.’

  We said goodbye. I was afraid that a secret agent might be waiting by the gate to arrest me, but no one was there. I headed back to my room and my manuscript.

  On the way, I glanced at the high tower of the church on Nowolipki Street. In buildings around the enormous courtyard encircled by an iron picket fence lived nuns – Jesus’s brides. I often saw them pass in their starched cowls, long black robes, and mannish shoes, their bosoms hung with crucifixes. On Karmelicka Street I passed the ‘Workers’ Home,’ the club of the left-wing Poale Zion. In there, they espoused both Communism and Zionism, believing that only when the proletariat seized power would the Jews be able to have their own homeland in Palestine and become a socialistic nation. In No. 36 Leszno Street was the Groser Library of the Jewish Bund, as well as a cooperative store for workers and their families. The Bund totally rejected Zionism. Their program was cultural autonomy and common socialist struggle against capitalism. The Bundists themselves had split into two factions, one in favor of democracy and one in favor of immediate dictatorship by the proletariat. In another courtyard was the club of the Revisionists, the followers of Jabotinsky, extreme Zionists. They encouraged Jews to learn to use firearms and contended that only acts of terror against the English, who held the mandate, could restore Palestine to the Jews. The Revisionists in Warsaw had a semi-military unit that from time to time paraded through the streets carrying wooden swords and shouting slogans against those Zionists who, like Weizmann, believed in mediation and compromise with England. Nearly all the Jewish parties had their clubs in this area. Each year added some new splinter group and another office.