Have I Got a Story for You

by Ezra Glinter

  The woman’s heart pounded in her chest, but she did not agree to it, although if it hadn’t been for her child she might have given it a try. But for the sake of her child, who must be raised with a strict sense of order, she must remain a respectable widow or legally marry a husband who could be a father to the child.

  The first few days after she made this decision she suffered greatly. Then the pain of it started to ease. A few weeks later she was entirely at peace with her choice and her haggard face wore a smile, as do the faces of all idealists who go through a trial and come out triumphant. The heat exhausted her and she impatiently awaited her few weeks of rest. She needed them now for her body and for her spirit.

  ON THE FIRST night of her vacation she slept soundly and easily. When she awoke, the sun did not smile down on her because it was a rainy day. The gray air, filled with moisture and heat, brought with it discomfort and unrest. She remained in bed. Against her will her eyes wandered over the furniture and walls. The wallpaper was dusty and cracked, the dresser and its chair had long lost their color, and the mirror was full of specks that had accumulated after years of hanging on the wall. She felt she should put up new wallpaper and install new furniture. She had been thinking about it for several weeks already but there was nothing to be done about it, as it wasn’t really her house.

  Her house? Did she need to have her own house? She began to go over in her mind the words of her former lover, and before she was able to recall her own responses to that conversation, she had fallen asleep. She did not have good dreams. Real-life events spun around her in a gray whirlwind: her husband, his sickness, his death . . . Something scared her and she started to run. Her legs did not follow her commands, but she still felt she had to run because something dangerous was behind her. Suddenly she saw herself at the top of a tall mountain. She looked into a valley and her heart clenched in fear . . . What was this? In the valley she saw piles of eggs and on them sat hens. No, they weren’t hens! It was her sister birds, Aunt Deborah, the proprietress for whom she worked, the woman from whom she rented her room . . . Why were they looking at her so sorrowfully? With so much longing? With tear-streaked faces? . . . They called out to her . . . but how could she go to them, when the mountain’s side was so smooth and so tall? She bent down to tell them something and lost her balance, and her limbs froze in fear. Her heart skipped a beat. She fell down like a stone and woke up.

  She was afraid to go back to sleep. She got dressed. It was quiet in the house. The landlady had traveled to the mountains and the landlady’s husband was at work at the shop. She gathered together a bundle of work, but the warm gray air made her hands moist and her arms heavy and her sad thoughts grew like mushrooms in damp air.

  She left the house and went into the street. She decided to go to the department store to buy some things for her child. She had left it all for her free time. But she was unable to go. She walked around the house and into a nearby park. She went to a picture house, but they were showing a long film and she didn’t have enough pennies to watch it. There was nothing interesting showing in the second picture house, but at least it was cool, so she stayed and nodded off.

  When she left her seat, she found that it was a bright day outside. The sky was clear; the sun quickly dried the rain-soaked streets. People flooded into the streets like a mighty stream that had been dammed up and was now released. It was evening, the sun was setting, and the bright light together with the masses of people made her tired. Her vision blurred, and she remembered that she had not eaten all day. She had no desire to go into a restaurant. Nearby there was a delicatessen. She went inside and bought a salty, peppery bite to eat. When she got home, it was already almost dark outside. The smell of the flavorful food whetted her appetite, and she began to eat. Her thoughts wandered far away, and she forgot herself and lost track of time. Later she awoke from her reverie when her arms and legs grew heavy and her head began to hurt and she felt a burning, tingling sensation in her mouth and neck. She drank a lot of water and only felt worse. It grew later and later. She lay down but could not sleep. The more sleep grew unattainable, the more tightly she felt bound by the desperation of her family life. It had been torn apart, and she could not see how it could ever be made whole again.

  She Waits

  (JANUARY 9, 1922)

  Translated by Jessica Kirzane

  SHE WAITS FOR him. Night after night she looks outside, teary-eyed, lying in wait in the darkness, following every shadow. At the slightest noise her heart pounds: he is here! But he is not here. He does not hurry, and she waits. All day she looks out the window and thinks only of him. She has a lot of time. There is a rocking chair by the window in her bedroom. She sits and looks out the window. She sees many other windows of tenement houses with fire escapes that connect one apartment to the other with narrow iron stairs. The window looks out onto an empty gray lot where they plan to build an open-air summer theater, though in the meantime it has stood empty for several years.

  All of the neighbors look at the empty lot with pleasure, because it allows them to freely see the blue sky flecked with sunny gold. She looks at it more than anyone else because she has a lot of time and thinks only of him.

  When will he come? What roof will he climb down from? What courtyard will he crawl out from? Surely he will come from the house across the way, because it is on a quiet street. He will come on a dark night. His tall figure will be hidden by shadows, his eyes will flash like phosphorous, he will move quietly in the darkness like a gentle wind blew him in. She will hear his breath from the other side of the building. He is inside! He will come into the room like a plume of smoke, his eyes like two spears piercing the bed where she lies, and he will go straight to her, straight to her . . .

  She is not waiting for a lover. Certainly not now. At one time she had waited; she had not believed that she would waste her whole life waiting for a man. He would come, he would be gentle and honorable. He would speak words of love to her and warm and gladden her sad and longing heart.

  But he never came. Now she is a woman over fifty with gray hair. She has an air of hard work, of a sorrowful life without a shadow of love or joy.

  Without a shadow of joy? No, she cannot say this. At first she was happy with the child she bore. Later, though, she understood more about the child: he grew up to be exactly like his father, with his attitudes, his nature. His father loved him. He took him to the theater, on walks, and later took him to work in the shop where he was a foreman. They both seem foreign to her, and she to them. Her son was married long ago. His wife is healthy, coarse and unrefined like he is. His wife’s mother, a widow, is just like her daughter. They are all the same. He—her husband—whiles away his free time. She is not friendly to her son and his wife and they never come to her home.

  Her husband is a stranger to her. She hated him from the first moment she saw him. In those days, in the village they called home, a girl had no say. Her parents told her to get married, and so she got married. Her parents rushed her into it. They saw the way she looked at the neighbor’s son, a tall, blond non-Jew, and it made them look as though they’d seen a ghost. She still smiles when she thinks about it: she even kissed him a few times and once he snuck into her room through the balcony. It was a dark night. He wanted to steal her away to a church but she didn’t go with him. No one knew about these things. How did her parents come to suspect something? How?

  She was married. It happened. Silently she braided her hair. In the early years in New York she worked very hard and she never complained. Now she has nothing to do. For years her husband has not even allowed her to do laundry. He carries it up to the Chinese laundryman and brings it back himself. She is also not permitted to cook. There are many restaurants, so why should he burden a weak woman, especially if he would also get no pleasure from the food? She won’t go to a restaurant? Then she should eat at home. It is easier to prepare food for one person than for two or three . . .

  When her son was married, her husband
freed her from another task: he made his bed in the front room on a leather sofa that served as a bed during the night. He felt comfortable and she was freed from the work. She had waited for this kind of freedom for many years. It came a little too late, but she felt relieved, as though someone had removed a clump of gluey tar from her body.

  FROM THEN ON she has had a lot of free time and has stopped sleeping at night. She isn’t upset about it; she sleeps many hours during the day. Around lunchtime tiredness steals around her like a thief. It wraps around her weak body and carries her soul away to that faraway world from which she came. She lingers for hours in that other world, and then she awakens, walks with quiet steps across the kitchen, washes her face, her hands, has a quick bite to eat, puts the few dishes back in their places, and goes back to her bedroom. She sits in the rocking chair and looks out the window.

  From there she sees many things. The neighbors in the tenement houses do not know her although she has been living in the apartment for years. But from the laundry pegged to the lines, she knows almost everything that goes on in each house: above her they are bleaching new swaddling clothes; they must have a new child. To the right, a story above, new silk dresses with blue and green stripes wave in the bright sun. There, an Irish woman moved into the house. By looking at the laundry she can tell who is coming and who is going from the homes. She also sees, hanging from the line, a housedress made of dark cloth, so she knows that the lady of the house has grown old and tired and that the happiness in her heart has faded away.

  In the evenings the laundry is taken into the homes, and the courtyard once again appears large, the sky blue, the windows aflame in the glare from the setting sun. The naked walls are covered with golden rays. Many windows are open. Mothers and children stick their heads out of the windows to enjoy God’s world.

  It is then that she leaves the window. She goes down into the street to buy something. It is already dark by the time she returns. She has something to eat again and then returns to her seat by the window. But she doesn’t stay there for long. The neighbors’ windows, lit up from within, display sorrowful portraits: a man with a gloomy face sits over his bowl of food while his wife runs from the table to the oven, from the oven to the table. A woman in glasses sits in the lamplight and darns a pair of dark-colored socks. Children pore over schoolbooks. A grown girl knits a sweater and her face is pale, sad, worried.

  She leaves the window and lies down in bed. She extinguishes the flame, tucks herself under a blanket and waits for sleep. Sleep does not arrive in a hurry. It has more deserving people to comfort. Sleep visits her during the day. She lies still and waits. Later she hears her husband unlocking the door. The floor shakes with his heavy steps. He turns on the light in his room, rustles the pages of his newspaper for a while. Later she hears the bed creak under his heavy body. In the dark he falls asleep.

  She smiles sadly. He thinks she is asleep when he does not see a light in her room. It is easier this way. What does it matter to her if she sees his red face with its huge nose? Once, when motherly love warmed her heart, she would leave the fire burning. Then his footsteps would approach her door and his gravelly voice would grind out, “Malke, are you asleep?”

  “Not yet,” she would answer weakly. He would open the door and stand in the doorway with downcast eyes and she would ask, “How is Mendel?”

  He wouldn’t tell her much about Mendel. She gathered, though, that he was all right. Her husband would go back to his room. His wife would put out the fire. Sleep would not hurry towards her. Her warm motherly heart would stir her thoughts so that they swam in her brain like little grains in a pot cooking over a low fire. Then they would congeal into a gluey paste, and she would fall asleep.

  THIS WAS HOW her quiet, sad life passed by until a short while ago. There was a crisis in the country. 37 People went hungry, without clothes, without a roof over their heads. And they started to hear about murders, robberies, thefts. Stories like these also reached her ears: in one house a thief snuck in through the dumbwaiter. It was still light outside. The lady of the house looked out the window and saw him with a knife in his hand. She fainted with fear and he escaped.

  In another house the doorbell rang in the middle of the day.

  “Who is it?”

  “A peddler selling old wares.”

  The good-hearted lady of the house opened the door and he grabbed her around the neck. In a certain house a robber snuck in through the window by the fire escape, went right to the bed where an old lady lay, and started to search under the pillows. The lady woke up. She had a weak heart and died from fear.

  She had heard these and similar stories at the grocery store and the butcher shop, and she’d smiled peacefully. She has no reason to fear thieves. She has no jewelry, and if her husband earns money, he keeps it in the bank. Nevertheless, when she got home, she tested the door to make sure it was locked well, turned the key on the dumbwaiter, and sat as always by the window. As she sat rocking there, she suddenly stood up and closed the window, locked it, and then tried with all her strength to pull it open. It did not give. She let go and sat back down. It was the first time in many years that a happy smile played on her aging face. She was happy because she was safe, secure, like someone sitting in a warm house when it is frosty outside, who doesn’t have to go out to buy food because she has everything she needs right at home.

  Before she fell asleep she tested the locks again. Then she lay down in bed and let the fire burn. Later she heard him come in as usual. She heard him close the door. The key made the right noise in the lock. When she sensed that he was standing by her door, she forgot to ask about Mendel and said right away, “Please, Berchik, before you go to sleep, check to make sure you have closed the door properly.”

  “Why now, all of a sudden?” he barked in his gravelly voice.

  “I’ve been hearing about thefts, robberies . . .” she explained with a quavering, almost young-sounding voice.

  “I know what you are worried about! Your jewelry, your clothes, your expensive butter . . .” he barked with displeasure, as he stormed away with heavy steps.

  She listened once more. He hadn’t double-checked the door. It grew dark and she heard his bed creak. “What a brutish man,” she thought. “Everything is a joke to him.” She decided to get up and try the door herself if he would not. In the meantime she began to feel tired and drifted off to sleep. Suddenly she awoke with a start. She thought she heard the rope of the dumb waiter being lowered. She listened closely. It wasn’t the rope, it was her husband turning over in his bed. How her heart was pounding! She stayed awake until her heart quieted. It took a while, and a little light had already started to shine through her windows when she finally fell asleep.

  She slept late and the day went by for her like a wooden fruit bowl emptied of its contents. She had no desire to sit by the window and she was unable to fall asleep for her midday nap. In the evening she went shopping. She again heard the horrible stories of murder and robbery.

  How would a thief know if she was rich or poor? This thought occurred to her and she started to check all of the locks. She calmed down, but soon she had second thoughts—what is a lock to a thief? One tap with a chisel and it would open. She grew cold and did not want to sit by the window, so she lay in bed long before it was night. Under the blankets she grew warmer. She could see the neighbors’ windows from her bed. The reddish rays of the sun lit up the doorways and the shadows of the night grew long. They looked like burning black tar, and she was suddenly seized by fear. Dark pieces of laundry hung from the line. Men’s trousers tangled in the wind, one trouser leg here and one trouser leg there, like witches. She wasn’t happy about this. She stopped looking and fell asleep. Later she shook herself awake when her husband came in. Her heart pounded. When his bed creaked, her heart pounded again and it took a long time for her to calm down.

  The fires went out in her neighbors’ windows. It grew late. She jumped out of bed like a young girl and ran barefoot to th
e door, to the dumbwaiter, to the window, to be sure that everything was locked tight. She tucked herself back in bed, lay with open eyes, torn entirely from her sleep, and her eyes followed another shadow dancing on the wall. Suddenly she stirred. In the house across the way, on the fire escape, she saw him. Him, the thief! He snuck in through the window. She heard a scream. He was probably already clutching his victim’s neck and choking her . . .

  As she caught her breath, she saw that it was only another man’s suit hanging out to dry, and the cry had come from a homeless cat. But a few nights later when she was half-asleep, she thought she saw him, the thief, at her own window. It was him, him! He leapt like a young deer over the ladder of the iron fire escape. He was tall, thin, with fiery eyes. His strong arms pressed against the lock, but it would not budge. Then he came in through the window like a curl of smoke and went straight to her, straight to her!

  And this is how she sees him, night after night. Him, the tall, thin, terrible, wonderful thief . . . It seems as though she is waiting for him, but he never comes because a thief is not a young lover who clambers through the windows in the dark night because of love. He goes where he can be sure that his gallantry will be rewarded with jewelry and gold.

  37 A reference to the Depression of 1920–1921.

  Lyala Kaufman

  1887–1964

  THE LITERARY CAREER of Lyala Kaufman is often overshadowed by that of her father, famed Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem, and that of her daughter, novelist Bel Kaufman. But Lyala Kaufman was an accomplished and prolific author in her own right, publishing thousands of short stories in the Forward over a period of more than thirty years.