Shosha

by Isaac Bashevis Singer

  ‘That’s what I am.’

  ‘How is that possible? You’re fooling!’

  She became still and I put my cheek against hers. She shivered from the cold, but her cheek felt hot. I was cold, too, yet at the same time I was overcome by a desire different from any I had felt before – passion without association, without thought, as if the body, the corporeal stuff, were acting on its own. I listened to my desire and it struck me that if metal could feel, my feeling was that of a needle drawn to a magnet.

  Shosha must have read my mind, because she said, ‘Oh, your beard pricks like needles!’

  I started to answer her, but the wheels made a scraping sound, then came to a halt. We were somewhere between Wawer and Miedzeszyn. A white wasteland stretched beyond the other side of the pane. It had stopped snowing and the sky reflected the snow. For all the frost, it seemed to glow of an other-worldly summer.

  The conductor came by and announced hastily that the rails were iced over.

  ‘Arele, I’m afraid!’

  ‘Afraid of what?’

  ‘Your mother has grown so old. She looks near death.’

  ‘She’s not that old.’

  ‘Arele, I want to go home.’

  ‘Don’t you want to be with me?’

  ‘Yes, with you and with my mommy.’

  ‘In a week, not before.’

  ‘I want it now!’

  I didn’t answer. She laid her head on my shoulder. A feeling of despair settled over me, together with the comfort brought about by the awareness that I was not responsible for this entanglement. In the half darkness I winked to my other self, my mad dictator, and congratulated him on his droll victory. I closed my eyes and felt the warmth flowing from Shosha’s head to my face. What did I have to lose? Nothing more than what everyone loses anyway.

  3

  We were the only passengers to get off in Otwock. There was no one from whom to ask the way to the hotel, and we wandered into a wooded area. I must have been half asleep. I started to address someone – it turned out to be a tree. Shosha had become strangely silent. All of a sudden a man materialized as if from the ground and conducted us to the hotel. A servant had been sent to meet us at the station but had missed us. He mumbled who he was and remained mute all the way. He walked so quickly that Shosha could barely follow him. Every few minutes he became lost among the trees and then emerged again in a midnight game of hide-and-seek.

  The room they gave us was in the attic and was large and cold. It had one big brass bed and a narrow cot, each with huge pillows and heavy blankets. It smelled of pine and lavender. Through a pane that was not frosted over one could see pines laden with snow-covered cones and draped with icicles like the Christmas trees of the Gentiles. Shosha was ashamed to undress before me, and I had to stand facing the window while she got ready for bed. I had assumed that wandering astray through the cold woods would put Shosha in a panic, but the real danger seemed to have left her indifferent. I saw her reflection in the clean part of the windowpane as she took off her camisole and put on her nightgown. After fussing a long time with buttons and hooks, she got into bed. ‘Arele, it’s cold as ice!’ she exclaimed.

  Shosha demanded that I lie on the cot, but I lay down beside her. Her body was warm, while mine was half frozen. In my cold arms she fluttered like a sacrificial chicken. Except for her little breasts, which were those of a girl just starting to mature, she was skin and bones. We lay together quietly and waited for the bedding to warm up. Cold came in through the window frame, and the panes rattled. From time to time the wind whistled and dropped to a drawn-out moan like that of a woman giving birth. Sometimes a wailing of different voices could be heard, as if packs of wolves were roaming the Otwock forests.

  ‘Arele, it aches.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘You’re sticking me with your knees.’

  I pulled my knees away.

  ‘My stomach is rumbling.’

  ‘It’s my stomach, not yours.’

  ‘No, it’s mine. Do you hear? Like the crying of a baby.’

  I felt her abdomen. She shook. ‘Cold fingers!’

  ‘I’ll warm myself on you.’

  ‘Oh, Arele, you’re not allowed to do this to a female.’

  ‘Shoshele, you’re my wife.’

  ‘Arele, I’m ashamed. Oh, you’re tickling me!’ Shosha began to laugh, but abruptly the laughter turned into a sob.

  ‘Why are you crying, Shoshele?’

  ‘It’s all so strange. When Leizer the watchmaker came to read what you wrote in the newspaper, I thought, How can this be? Is he actually there? I took out the papers you had painted with the colors and they had dried out. We went to look for you at the newspaper and an old man, the one who serves the tea, yelled, “Not here!” We didn’t go back. One evening I played with a shadow on the wall and suddenly it jumped down and slapped me. Oh, you have hair on your chest! I lay sick all year and Dr Kniaster said I would die.’

  ‘When was this?’

  She didn’t answer. Even as she was talking, she fell asleep. Her breath came quick and soft. I pulled her closer, and in her sleep she cuddled up to me with such force it was as if she were trying to bore inside my guts. How can such a weak creature give off so much heat? I wondered. Is there a physiological reason for it? Or does it have to do with the mind?

  I closed my eyes. The tremendous urge for Shosha that had seized me in the train had dissipated. Was I suddenly impotent? I fell asleep and dreamed. Someone shrieked wildly. Animals with long teats dragged me, tore chunks from me with fang and claw. I was wandering through a cellar that was also a slaughterhouse and a cemetery strewn with unburied corpses. I awoke excited. I grabbed Shosha, and before she could even wake up, I mounted her. She choked and resisted. A stream of hot blood burned my thigh. I tried to pacify her, but she broke out in a wail. I was sure she had awakened everyone in the hotel. Had I injured her? I got out of bed and searched for the light switch, but I couldn’t find it. I tapped around and bumped into the stove. In my distress I prayed to God to protect her.

  ‘Shoshele, don’t cry! People will come running! It was all out of love.’

  ‘Where are you?’

  I found the switch and turned on the light. For a moment I couldn’t see. There was a washstand here with a pitcher of water and two towels hanging at the side. Shosha was sitting up in the bed, no longer crying.

  ‘Arele, am I a wife now?’

  4

  On our third day in Otwock, while I was sitting with Shosha in the hotel dining room eating lunch, I was summoned to the telephone. The call was from Warsaw. I was sure it would be Celia, but it turned out to be Feitelzohn.

  ‘Tsutsik, I have good news for you.’

  ‘Good news for me? That’s something I hear for the first time.’

  ‘Yes, good news. But first tell me how things are going with the honeymoon.’

  ‘Fine, thanks.’

  ‘No crises?’

  ‘Yes, but—’

  ‘Your Shosha didn’t die of fright?’

  ‘Nearly. But now she is happy again.’

  ‘I like her. With her at your side, your talent will grow.’

  ‘From your mouth to God’s ears.’

  ‘Tsutsik, I told Shapiro, the editor of the evening paper – what’s it called? – that you’re writing a novel about Jacob Frank, and he wants you to write Frank’s biography for him. He wants to print it in six installments a week and pay you three hundred zlotys a month. I told him that was too little and he may up it a few zlotys.’

  ‘Three hundred zlotys is too little? That’s a fortune!’

  ‘Some fortune! Tsutsik, you’re made! He told me you’ll be able to drag the thing through a year, or as long as your imagination holds out.’

  ‘That really is a stroke of fortune!’

  ‘Are you still moving in with the Chentshiners?’

  ‘Now I won’t do it. Shosha will pine away without her mother.’

  ‘Don’t do it,
Tsutsik. You know I’m not jealous of you. Just the opposite. But to live there wouldn’t be a good idea. Tsutsik, I’ll go bankrupt from this call. We’ll celebrate when you come back. Regards to Shosha. Adieu.’

  I wanted to tell Feitelzohn how grateful I was and that I would pay for the call, but he had already hung up. I went back to the table. ‘Shoshele, you’ve brought me luck. I have a job on a newspaper. We won’t be moving in with Celia!’

  ‘Oh, Arele, God has answered me. I didn’t want to be there. I prayed. She tries to take you away from me. What will you do on the paper?’

  ‘Write the life of a false Messiah who preached that God wants people to sin. The false Messiah himself slept with his own daughter and with the wives of his disciples.’

  ‘He had such a wide bed?’

  ‘Not all at the same time – or maybe all together, too. He was rich enough to afford a bed as wide as all Otwock.’

  ‘You knew him?’

  ‘He died some hundred and fifty years ago.’

  ‘Arele, I pray to God, and everything I ask for He does. When you went to the post office, a blind man came up and I gave him ten groschen, and that’s the reason God did all this. Arele, I love you so terribly! I’d like to be with you every minute, every second. When you go to the toilet I start to worry that you may have gotten lost or fallen. I miss Mommy, too. I haven’t seen her for so long. I would like to be with you and with her day and night for a myriad of years.’

  ‘Shoshele, your mother will be divorced soon and she may remarry. And it will be impossible for me to be with you every minute. In Warsaw I’ll have to go to the editorial office, to the library. Sometimes I’ll have to meet Feitelzohn. It was he who got me the job.’

  ‘He has no wife?’

  ‘He has many women, but not one wife.’

  ‘Is he the false Messiah?’

  ‘In a way, Shoshele – that’s not a bad comparison.’

  ‘Arele, I want to tell you something, but I’m ashamed.’

  ‘You have nothing to be ashamed of before me. I’ve already seen you naked.’

  ‘I want more.’

  ‘More what?’

  ‘I want to lie in bed. You know what.’

  ‘When? Now?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Wait, the waitress hasn’t brought us our tea yet.’

  ‘I’m not thirsty.’

  The waitress came with two glasses of tea and two slices of sugar cake on a tray. We were the only guests in the hotel. Another couple was expected but not until the next day.

  It had stopped snowing and the sun shone. I had been planning to take a walk with Shosha, maybe as far as Swider. I wanted to see if the river was frozen over and how the waterfall looked with its huge icicles gleaming in the sun, but Shosha’s words changed everything. The waitress, a short woman with a broad face, high cheekbones, and liquid black eyes, didn’t turn back to the kitchen right away. She said, ‘Mr Greidinger, you eat everything up, but your wife leaves everything. That’s why she’s so thin. She barely touched the appetizer, the soup, the meat, the vegetables. It’s not good to eat so little. People come here to gain weight, not to lose.’

  Shosha made a face. ‘I can’t eat so much. I have a small stomach.’

  ‘It’s not the stomach, Mrs Greidinger. My grandmother used to say, “The intestine has no bottom.” It’s the appetite. My boss here lost her appetite and she went to a Dr Schmaltzbaum. He gave her a prescription for iron and she gained back ten pounds.’

  ‘Iron?’ Shosha asked. ‘Can you eat iron?’

  The waitress laughed, exposing a mouthful of gold teeth. Her eyes contracted to the size of two berries. ‘Iron is a medicine. No one is told to eat nails.’ She walked away, scraping her large shoes across the floor. When she reached the kitchen door, she cast an amused glance back toward us.

  Shosha said, ‘I don’t like her. I like only you and Mommy. I like Teibele too, but not as much as you two. I would like to be with you a thousand years.’

  5

  The night was long. We went to sleep before nine and at twelve we both awoke. Shosha asked, ‘Arele, you don’t sleep any more?’

  ‘No, Shoshele.’

  ‘Neither do I. Every time I wake up I think it was all a fairy tale – you, the wedding, everything. But I touch you and I see you are here.’

  ‘Once there was a philosopher and he believed that everything was a dream. God is dreaming and the world is His dream.’

  ‘Is this written in the books?’ Shosha asked.

  ‘Yes, in the books.’

  ‘Yesterday – no, the day before yesterday – I dreamed that I was home and you came in. After you closed the door you came in again. There was not one Arele, but two, three, four, five, ten – a whole row of Areles. What is a dream?’

  ‘No one knows.’

  ‘What do the books say?’

  ‘The books don’t know, either.’

  ‘How can this be? Arele, Leizer the watchmaker said that you are an unbeliever – is this true?’

  ‘No, Shoshele, I believe in God, but I don’t believe that He revealed Himself and told the rabbis all the little laws that they added through generations.’

  ‘Where is God? In heaven?’

  ‘He must be somewhere.’

  ‘Why doesn’t He punish Hitler?’

  ‘Oh, He doesn’t punish anybody. He created the cat and the mouse. The cat cannot eat grass, she must eat flesh. It’s not her fault that she kills mice. The mice are certainly not guilty. He created the wolves and the sheep, the slaughterers and the chickens, the feet and the worms on which they step.’

  ‘God is no good?’

  ‘Not as we see it.’

  ‘He has no pity?’

  ‘Not as we understand it.’

  ‘Arele, I’m afraid.’

  ‘I’m afraid too, but Hitler won’t come tonight. Move over to me. So.’

  ‘Arele, I want to have a child with you, a little baby with blue eyes and red hair. The doctor said that if they cut up my belly a living child would come out.’

  ‘And you would want that?’

  ‘Yes, Arele. Your child. If it should be a boy, he would read the same books as you.’

  ‘It isn’t worth cutting up a belly to read books.’

  ‘It’s worth it. I would suckle him and my breasts would grow bigger.’

  ‘They are big enough for me.’

  ‘What else is written in the books?’

  ‘Oh, all kinds of things. They found out that the stars run away with us. Myriads of miles every day.’

  ‘Where do they run?’

  ‘Into empty space far away.’

  ‘They will never come back?’

  ‘They will be extinguished and get cold first, and then they will fall back with such might they will grow hot, and the whole swinish business will begin all over again.’

  ‘Where do the books say Yppe is?’

  ‘If there is a soul, she is somewhere. And if there isn’t any, then—’

  ‘Arele, she was here. She knows about us. She came to wish me mazel tov.’

  ‘When? Where?’

  ‘Here. Yesterday. No, the day before yesterday. How does she know that we are in Otwock? She stood at the door, near the mezuzah, and she smiled. She wore a white dress, not a shroud. When she was alive, two of her front teeth were missing. Now she has a full mouth of teeth.’

  ‘There must be good dentists in the hereafter.’

  ‘Arele, are you making fun of me?’

  ‘No, I’m not.’

  ‘She came to me in Warsaw, too. It was before you visited us for the first time – I sat on my stool and she came in. The door was bolted. Mother was out, and she told me to bolt the door because of the hoodlums. Suddenly Yppe was there. How could she do it? She spoke to me, like one sister to another. I had undone my hair, and she braided it. She played cat’s cradle with me, but without string. And then that day before Yom Kippur I saw her in the chicken soup. She had a wreath of
flowers on her head, like a Gentile bride, and I knew that something was going to happen. You were there, but I didn’t want to say anything. When I mention Yppe, Mother screams. She says that I’m crazy.’

  ‘You are not crazy.’

  ‘What am I?’

  ‘A sweet soul.’

  ‘What do you make of it?’

  ‘You might have dreamed it.’

  ‘In the middle of the day?’

  ‘Sometimes one dreams in the daytime.’

  ‘Arele, I am afraid.’

  ‘What are you afraid of this time?’

  ‘The sky, the stars, the books. Tell me the story about the giant. I forget his name.’

  ‘Og, the king of Bashan.’

  ‘Yes, about him. Is it true that he could not get a wife because he was so big?’

  ‘That is the story. When the flood came and Noah and his sons and all the animals and fowl went into the Ark, Og could not enter because he was so big, and he sat on the roof. Forty days and forty nights it rained on him, but he didn’t drown.’

  ‘Was he naked?’

  ‘What tailor could sew a pair of pants big enough for him?’

  ‘Oy, Arele, it is good to be with you. What will we do when the Nazis come?’

  ‘We will die.’

  ‘Together?’

  ‘Yes, Shoshele.’

  ‘The Messiah isn’t coming?’

  ‘Not so quickly.’

  ‘Arele, I just remembered a song.’

  ‘What song?’

  Shosha began to sing in a thin voice.

  ‘He was called Beans,

  Noodles was her name,

  They married on Friday

  And nobody came.’

  She cuddled up to me and said, ‘Oy, Arele, it’s good to lie with you even if we die.’

  Thirteen

  1

  In the afternoon paper where the biography of Jacob Frank – it was actually a blend of biography and fantasy – had already been dragging on for months, the news worsened. Hitler and Mussolini had met at the Brenner Pass and no doubt reached decisions regarding the destruction of Poland and the Jews, but a large part of the Polish press kept attacking the Jewish minority as if it were the nation’s greatest danger. Representatives of the Hitler Government came to Poland and were received by the dictator, General Rydz-S´migly, and his ministers. In the Soviet Union the purges, mass arrests, and trials of Trotskyites, old Bolsheviks, right- and left-wing dissidents, Zionists, and Hebrewists became a permanent terror. In Polish cities, unemployment grew. In the villages, particularly where Ukrainians and White Russians lived, the peasants starved. Many Volksdeutschen, as the Germans in Poland called themselves, proclaimed themselves Nazis. The Comintern had dissolved the Polish Communist Party. The charging of Bukharin, Kamenev, Zinoviev, and Rykov with sabotage and espionage and the designation of them as Fascist lackeys and agents of Hitler evoked protests even from sworn Stalinists. But circulation did not drop in the Yiddish newspapers in Warsaw, including the afternoon daily for which I worked. On the contrary, more newspapers were read now than before. The story of the false Messiah Jacob Frank and his disciples had to end, but I was ready with a list of other false Messiahs – Reuveyni, Shlomo Mulkho, Sabbatai Zevi.