Shosha

by Isaac Bashevis Singer

  I had won a moral victory over Dora, Felhendler, and their comrades, but everything had grown so wildly tangled that I could no longer sneer at anyone else’s wrongheadedness.

  I went to my room, which I now decided to keep until the wedding, but I was too tired to work. I stretched out on the bed, dozed off, and in my mind heard over and over Felhendler’s words and Dora’s lament: What can one do? How is one to live?

  Eleven

  1

  A few days before the wedding, my mother and Moishe arrived, and I met them at the Danzig depot. The train pulled in at 8 a.m. I barely recognized them. Mother seemed smaller, stooped, and as old as a crone. Her nose had lengthened; it curved down like a bird’s beak. Creases cut deep into her forehead and cheeks. Only the gray eyes still showed a youthful sharpness. She no longer wore a wig; a kerchief covered her head. Her skirt reached the floor, and she had on a blouse that I remembered from the time I lived at home. Moishe had grown tall. He had a ragged blond beard and earlocks hanging to his shoulders. His rabbinical hat was flecked and mangy, and his fur coat was ratty. The unbuttoned shirt collar exposed a soft, childish throat.

  He gazed at me with amazement in his blue eyes and said, ‘A real German.’

  After I had kissed my mother, she asked, ‘Arele, are you sick, God forbid? You’re as pale and drawn as if you just got out of a sickbed, may it never happen.’

  ‘I didn’t sleep the whole night.’

  ‘We’ve been on the road two days and nights. The wagon that took us to the train in Rawa Ruska turned over in the mud. It’s a miracle we weren’t hurt. One woman broke her arm. That’s why we missed the train we intended to take and had to wait twenty hours for another. The Gentiles became unruly. They wanted to cut off Moishele’s earlocks. The Jew is helpless. If it’s this bad now, how will it be when the murderers come? People shake in their skins.’

  ‘Mama, the Almighty will help,’ Moishe said. ‘There have been many Hamans and they all came to a bad end.’

  ‘Before they came to their bad end, they killed off plenty of Jews,’ Mother replied.

  I had rented a room for Mother and Moishe in a kosher boardinghouse on Gnoyna Street. The proprietor was a Hasid. I called a droshky to take them there, but Moishe said, ‘I don’t ride in droshkies.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘The seat may be linsey-woolsey.’

  After lengthy discussion it was decided that Mother would spread her shawl over the seat. Moishe had brought along a basket that closed with a wire and a little lock – the kind once used by yeshiva students. Mother carried her things wrapped in a sheet. Passersby stopped to stare at us. The driver went slowly, since the road was blocked by trolleys, taxis, freight wagons, and buses. The nag looked skeletal; it limped. Moishe began to sway and murmur. He was either commencing his morning prayers or reciting Psalms.

  Mother said, ‘Arele, child, for the fact that I’ve lived to see you again, and about to be a bridegroom at that, I must thank the Almighty, but why didn’t your father, too, live to see it? He studied the Torah almost to the last minute. I didn’t realize myself what a saint he was. Alas, I plagued him for dragging us off to such a faraway hole, but he accepted it all in good spirits. I eat my heart out now and don’t sleep nights on account of this. Whatever punishment is visited upon me I deserve. Arele, I can’t stay in Old Stykov any more. I don’t want to speak against Moishele’s wife, my daughter-in-law – may she stay healthy and strong – but I can’t live with her. She’s a country girl, her father is a farmer. In Galicia, Jews were always allowed to own land. She does and says things that displease me. I hear well, thank God, but she screams into my ears as if I were deaf. Her mind is always on petty things. It’s true that I’ve sinned, but how much can a person take?’

  ‘Well, ah, well!’ Moishe put two fingers to his lips – a sign that Mother’s words were slander and that he wasn’t permitted to speak now during prayer.

  ‘Well, ah well here, and well, ah well there! Certainly my words are sinful, but what flesh and blood can suffer has a limit. She hates me because I read books and she barely knows how to pray. But what do I have now besides my books? When I open The Duty of the Hearts I forget where I am and what’s become of me in my old age. Arele, I don’t want to die in Old Stykov. True, your father is buried there, but the few years or months allotted me to creep around in this world I don’t want to spend among boors. It’s bitter for Moishele, too. They pay him no wages. On Thursdays the beadle goes around with a sack collecting handfuls of wheat, corn, and groats – the way the Russians pay their priests, beg the comparison. The Gentiles there are Ruthenians and some of them boast that Hitler is on their side. They fight among themselves, too. One of them chopped off a girl’s head right outside our window, just because she’d been going around with another fellow. Our lives are in danger every minute. I pray for death. Each day I beg the Almighty to take me from here, but just because you want to die, you live.’

  ‘Well, ah well!’

  ‘Stop with those well, ah’s. You won’t go to my Gehenna. Arele, I want to say something to you, but I don’t want you to get angry at me. I will not go back to Old Stykov. Even if I have to sleep in the streets, I’ll stay here in Warsaw.’

  ‘Mama, you won’t sleep in the streets,’ I said.

  ‘Have pity on me. I hear there’s no longer a rabbi on Krochmalna Street. Maybe Moishele could get some job here? I myself am ready to go into an old-age home or wherever I can find a place to lay my head. What kind of girl is this Shosha? How did you happen to choose her? Well, it all comes from heaven.’

  The droshky pulled up before a gate on Gnoyna Street. Some of the courtyards here were over a hundred years old. There were alleys where farmers came at dawn with their produce from the nearby villages. Eggs were stored in lime in the cellars. In No. 3 was Krel’s studyhouse, where I went to read a page of the Gemara on my own after I had left cheder. In No. 5 was a synagogue and another studyhouse. The ritual bath where my mother went when she was a young woman was still in operation nearby. Even the oil cakes, the chick-peas with beans, and the potato cakes sold here smelled as I remembered them.

  Mother said, ‘Nothing has changed.’

  Several wagons were parked in front of the building where we had stopped. The horses were eating a mixture of oats and chopped straw from feedbags. Pigeons and sparrows pecked at the seeds dropped from them. Men in short sheepskin coats and caps carried sacks, crates, baskets. Through the partially frosted-over windows could be seen bottles, pots, diapers hanging to dry. From one window came the sound of children reciting a chant from the Pentateuch – a cheder. Muddy stairs led up to the boardinghouse on the third floor.

  After each half flight, Mother paused. ‘I’m not used to climbing stairs any more.’

  On the third floor I opened a door leading off the dark hallway. The boardinghouse consisted of a sitting room and a few small rooms. In the sitting room one man prayed in his prayer shawl and phylacteries, another packed paper boxes into a sack, and a third ate his breakfast. Two women, one in a wig and the other in a bonnet, sat on a bench mending a fur coat with a huge needle and string. The proprietor, with a pitch-black beard and wearing a skullcap, showed us to a room with two beds, where Mother and Moishe would spend the night.

  Moishe said, ‘It’s getting late and I want to pray. Is there a house of worship here?’

  ‘There are two prayer houses in the courtyard – one of the Kozienica Hasidim, the other of the Blendew Hasidim. There is a synagogue, too, but those who pray there are all Litvaks.’

  ‘I’ll go to the Kozienica prayer house.’

  ‘Would you want some breakfast?’ the proprietor asked Mother.

  ‘Is it strictly kosher?’

  ‘What a question! Rabbis eat here.’

  ‘Maybe a glass of tea for now.’

  ‘Something to nibble with it?’

  ‘I’ve lost my teeth. Would you have some soft bread?’

  ‘There isn’t a thing I do
n’t have.’ He went to fetch the bread and tea.

  A washstand stood in one corner of the room, with a basin of water, a dipper, and a dirty towel hanging on a hook. Mother said, ‘Compared to Old Stykov, this is a mansion. We live in a shack with a straw roof. It leaks. There is a stove, but the flue is broken and the smoke won’t go up through the chimney. When will I get to see the bride?’

  ‘I’ll bring her here.’

  2

  It was the first night of Hanukkah. The owner of the boardinghouse lighted and blessed the first of the eight Hanukkah candles for his guests, but my mother and Moishe refused to accept another person performing so holy a ceremony for them. Besides, he had lighted a candle, not a wick in oil. I went down to the street and bought a tin Hanukkah lamp for them, as well as a bottle of oil, wicks, and a special candle called ‘the beadle,’ which is used for lighting the wicks. In their room, Moishe poured the oil into the first little bowl, put a wick in place, lit the beadle, touched the wick with it, and recited the benedictions. Then he began to chant the liturgy: ‘O Fortress, Rock of my Salvation …’ These were my father’s tunes, even his gestures. At first the wick refused to catch fire, and Moishe had to try to light it again and again. When it did burn finally, it smoked and sputtered. Moishe had placed the little lamp on the window according to the law, so that the miracle of Hanukkah should be shown to the world, even though the courtyard below had three blind walls and no one was there. The window was not tight; wind blew in. Every few seconds the little light fluttered, but it did not go out. Moishe said, ‘Just like the Jewish people. In each generation our enemies rise up to destroy us, and the Holy One, blessed be He, is saving us from their hands.’

  ‘It’s high time our enemies should be praying for miracles,’ I said.

  Moishe clutched his beard. ‘Who are we to tell Him what to do and when to do it? Only yesterday you told Mother that the more the astronomers ponder and measure the stars, the larger they become. You said that many of them are larger than the sun. So how can insignificant creatures like us, with our tiny brains, understand what He is doing?’

  Moishe spoke with my father’s voice. Only a few years ago my father was arguing with me: ‘You can spill ink but it won’t write a letter by itself. The unbelievers are not only vicious but also fools.’

  Moishe left for the studyhouse after watching the Hanukkah light for half an hour. He found books there that he could never get in Old Stykov. With the little money he had, he bought The Roar of a Lion, The Responsa of Rabbi Akiva Eiger, and The Face of Joshua. He promised Mother he would not be late. She sat on her bed, propped up by a pillow, and her large gray eyes stared at the flickering light with curiosity, as if she were seeing such a light for the first time. I remembered her being medium in height, even somewhat taller than Father, but now she appeared shriveled. Her head kept nodding in a constant ‘yes, yes, yes.’ Then she said to me, ‘Arele, God forbid, I don’t intend to nag you, you are already an adult, I hope you outlive my bones, but what was the sense of it?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You know very well what I mean.’

  ‘Mother, not everything one does has to make sense.’

  My mother’s eyes showed the beginning of a smile. ‘What is it? Love?’

  ‘You can call it that.’

  ‘There is a saying that love is blind, but even love isn’t completely without reason. A shoemaker’s apprentice would not fall in love with a princess, and he certainly would not marry her.’

  ‘Even this can happen.’

  ‘What? In novels, not in real life. When we lived in Warsaw, I used to read the novels serialized in the newspaper. Your father – peace be with him – disliked newspapers and their writers. He said that they defiled the holy Jewish letters. Only when the war broke out and he wanted to know the news did he glance into a paper. Even in those trashy novels there was some logic. Now you come and marry Shosha. True, she’s a gentle child, unfortunately sick, perhaps a victim of her father, but couldn’t you find something better in the whole of Warsaw? I’m sinning, I know I’m sinning. I shouldn’t say these things. I’m losing the world to come. Look, the light is out!’

  We sat in silence. The air smelled of burned oil and of something sweet and long forgotten. Then Mother went on, ‘My child, it’s all so destined. My father, your grandfather – he should rest in peace – had the name of a genius. He could have become a rabbi in a big city, but he was content to stay in his little corner in a forsaken village, and there he remained until his end. Your paternal grandfather, the one from Tomaszów, hid from people altogether. All his years he wrote commentaries on the cabala. Before his demise, he called one of his grandchildren and told him to burn his manuscripts. Only one page was left accidentally, and those who read it maintained it was full of the mysteries of the Torah. He was so unworldly he did not know the difference between one coin and another. If your grandmother Temerl hadn’t skimped and saved, there wouldn’t have been a piece of bread in the house. She was a saint in her own right. When she went to visit the rabbi of Belz, he invited her to sit down on a chair even though she was a woman. What am I in comparison to them? I’m steeped in sin. Of course I love you, and I would like you to get a good wife, but if heaven ordains differently, I should have the power to curb my tongue. I say all this to remind you that you should remember your origin. We didn’t come to this world to indulge in our passions. Look at me and see what happens to blood and flesh. I was a beautiful girl. When I passed Lublin Street, people stopped to stare. I had the smallest feet in town and I shined my shoes every day with polish, even when it rained. I used to polish them a hundred times with the brush. I had a pleated skirt, and every second day I ironed the pleats. People denounced me to your grandfather for being vain. How old was I altogether? Fifteen years. At fifteen and a half I became engaged to your father. A year later I was led to the wedding canopy. A girl is not allowed to study Torah, but I stood behind the door and listened as your grandfather lectured to the yeshiva boys. If one of them made a mistake, I knew it. I also began to look into morality books in Hebrew. By that time, I realized that I’m hot-blooded and that I had to control my impulses. How did this come to me? I hope to God that the children will take after you, not after Shosha.’

  ‘Mother, we won’t have any children.’

  ‘Why not? Heaven wants there to be a world and Jews.’

  ‘No one knows what heaven wants. If God had wanted the Jews to live, He wouldn’t have created Hitlers.’

  ‘Woe to me that you speak such things!’

  ‘No one has ascended to heaven and spoken to God.’

  ‘One doesn’t need to ascend to heaven, one can see the truth right here on earth. Three days before Meitel’s Esther won the lottery, I saw in a dream the letter carrier handing me a paper full of numbers. I wanted to take it, but suddenly Meitel materialized – she was already dead then. Her face was yellow and she wore a white cowl. She said to me, “It’s not for you, my daughter Esther is going to win a lot of money on this.” And she handed the letter carrier a bunch of straw stalks. I was only a ten-year-old child at the time, I didn’t even know that there was such a thing as a lottery. I told the dream to everybody in our house. They shrugged their shoulders. After three days a telegram came saying Esther had won the grand prize. When I had this dream they had not yet drawn the numbers. Two years later, I witnessed a case of a haunted house. For weeks an evil spirit kept on knocking on the window frame in the house of Abraham the ritual slaughterer. Soldiers were sent to search the rooms, the cellar, the attic, but nothing could be found to account for this racket. My child, the world is full of so many mysteries that if the scholars continued to study for a million years, they could not solve even a millionth part of them.’

  ‘Mother, all this cannot give comfort to the tortured Jews in Dachau, and in other such hells.’

  ‘The comfort is that there is no death. Your own Shosha told me her dead sister was visiting her. She’s not shrewd en
ough to invent such a lie.’

  3

  Bashele intended to invite my mother and Moishe for either lunch or supper but Mother told me plainly she wouldn’t eat in Bashele’s house. Neither she nor Moishe had confidence that the food in her kitchen was strictly kosher. However, in order not to shame her, Mother and Moishe agreed to come for tea and fruit. I don’t know how they learned that the late rabbi’s wife and her two sons would be visiting Bashele’s. Around three o’clock in the afternoon when I brought them from the boardinghouse and opened Bashele’s door, I saw to my amazement a room full of people: old women in bonnets of beads and ribbons, men with white beards and sidelocks, also a few young men and girls, who, it seemed, read the literary journal. There were tea glasses, Sabbath cookies, and saucers with gooseberry jam on the table, which was covered with a holiday tablecloth. The old women had brought little gifts wrapped in handkerchiefs – gingerbread, cake, and cookies, raisins, prunes, almonds. My God, we were not completely forgotten on Krochmalna Street! The war, the epidemics, and hunger had worked with the Angel of Death, but a few of those who knew our family remained alive. Bonnets shook, shrunken mouths mumbled blessings and greetings, reminisced about former times. Tears rolled down faded cheeks. The men had all been followers of the late rabbi of Radzymin. He had passed away without an heir, and his court had disintegrated. The Hasidim said that if the rabbi had consented to go through an operation, he might still be living, but to the last day he was true to his conviction that a knife is for cutting bread, not human flesh. He gave up his sacred soul after long suffering. Rabbis from the whole of Poland came to his funeral. He was buried near the grave of his grandfather Rabbi Yankele, who waged war with the demons all his life and performed countless miracles. It was known that corpses came to him at night to confess their misdeeds while alive, and that his garret teemed with spirits.