The whole time her mother was speaking, Elizabeth stood apart and looked at me sidelong, inquisitively, half frightened and half ashamed. She made a gesture as if to come closer, but I motioned her away with my left hand. She made me think of a schoolgirl listening to a teacher or principal accuse her in front of her parents and unable to restrain herself from denying the charges. Her mother’s voice was so loud she must have heard every word. Just when I was about to make some reply, Elizabeth jumped forward, tore the receiver from my hand, and exclaimed in a wailing voice, “Mother, I’ll never forgive you! Never! Never! You’re no longer my mother and I’m no longer your child! You sold me to a psychopath, a capon … I don’t need your money and I don’t need you! Whenever I might snatch a moment’s happiness you spoil it all for me. You’re my worst enemy. I’ll kill you! I’ll leave you a corpse for what you’re doing to me … Bitch! Whore! Thief! Criminal! You sleep with an eighty-year-old gangster for money! I spit on you! I spit, spit, spit, spit!”
I stood there and watched foam bubble from her mouth. She bent over and writhed in pain. She clutched at the wall. I reached out to help her, but at that moment she fell with a crash, dragging the telephone down with her. She lay cramped and tossing, while one hand beat rapidly against the floor as if she were trying to signal the tenant below. Her mouth twisted and I heard a gasping growl. I knew what was happening—Elizabeth had suffered an epileptic fit. I lifted the phone and yelled into the mouthpiece, “Mrs. Lemkin, your daughter is having a seizure!” But the connection was broken. Should I call an ambulance? How did one go about doing that? My telephone had apparently stopped working. I wanted to open the window and call for help, but in the clamor and clang of Broadway no one would hear me from the eleventh floor. Instead, I ran into the kitchen, filled a glass with water, and poured it on Elizabeth’s face. This caused her to bellow weirdly, and saliva sprayed my forehead. I rushed out into the corridor and began to pound on my neighbor’s door, but no one answered. Only now did I notice that a stack of magazines and envelopes lay on his threshold. I turned to go back to my apartment and to my consternation saw that I had let the door slam shut. I didn’t have the key on me. I pushed the door with all my might, but I’m not one of those bruisers who can break down a door.
In all my desperation I remembered that a duplicate key to my apartment hung in the office in the courtyard. I could also ask there that an ambulance be called. I realized full well what charges Elizabeth’s husband and mother could bring against me in the event she died in my apartment. They might even accuse me of murder … I pressed the button for the service elevator and the pointer showed that it was standing on the seventeenth floor. I ran down the stairs, and in my mind—perhaps even aloud—I cursed the day I was born. As I ran, I heard the service elevator descending. I reached the lobby, and two moving men had the exit blocked with a sofa. Someone on the seventeenth floor was moving out. The lobby was filled with furniture, flower urns, stacks of books. I asked the men to let me pass, but they pretended not to hear. Well, I thought, this visit will be the death of me. Then I remembered that on the sixth floor lived a typesetter from the newspaper of which I was a staff member. If anyone in the family was home, he would help me call an ambulance and phone the office about a duplicate key. I started to run up the stairs to the sixth floor. My heart pounded and I broke out in a sweat. I rang the doorbell of the typesetter’s apartment, but no one answered. I was prepared to run downstairs again when the door parted the length of the chain. I saw an eye, and a female voice asked, “What do you want?”
I began to explain to the woman what had happened. I spoke in clipped sentences and with the frenzy of one in mortal danger. The woman’s single eye bored through me. “I’m not the lady of the house. They’re abroad. I’m a cousin.”
“I beg you to help me. Believe me that I’m no thief or robber. Your cousin sets all my manuscripts. Maybe you’ve heard my name?”
I mentioned the name of the newspaper, I even cited the titles of several of my books, but she had never heard of me. After some hesitation she said, “I can’t let you in. You know how it is these days. Wait here, I’ll call the office on the house phone. Tell me your name again.”
I repeated my name for her, gave her the number of my apartment, and thanked her profusely. She closed the door. I expected that any minute she would inform me she had called the office and help was on the way, but seven minutes went by and the door didn’t open. I stood there, tense and miserable, and took a quick reckoning of man and his existence. He is completely dependent, a slave to circumstance. The slightest mishap and everything goes to pieces. There is one solution—to free oneself totally from making for oneself the Sabbath that is called life and turn back to the indifference of causality, to death, which is the substance of the universe.
Five more minutes passed and still the door didn’t open. I began to skip down the stairs again, my mind churning with images of how I would punish this heartless woman if I possessed unlimited power. I reached the lobby and the sofa was standing outside. I saw Mr. Brown, the superintendent, and frantically told him my predicament. He gazed at me in astonishment. “No one called. Come. I’ll give you the key.”
The service elevator was free, and I rode up to the eleventh floor, opened the door, and found Elizabeth Abigail de Sollar lying on the sofa in the living room, her hair wet and disheveled, her face pale, her shoes off. I barely recognized her. She seemed to me much older—almost middle-aged. She had placed a towel under her head. She looked at me with the silent reproof of a wife whose husband has left her sick and alone and gone off somewhere for his own pleasure. I half shouted, “My dear Elizabeth, you must go home to your husband! I’m too old for such goings on.”
She considered my words; then she said in a dull tone, “If you order me to go, I will go, but not back to him. I’m finished with him and with my mother, too. From now on, I am alone in the world.”
“Where will you go?”
“To a hotel.”
“They won’t let you into a hotel without luggage. If you don’t have any money, I can—”
“I have my checkbook with me, but why can’t I stay here with you? I’m not altogether well, but it’s nothing organic—only functional. It’s they who made me sick. I can type. I know a little stenography, too. Oh, I forgot that you write in Yiddish. This I don’t know, but I would learn it in time. My mother used to speak Yiddish with my grandmother when she didn’t want me to understand what they were saying, and I picked up quite a number of words. I once bought a vegetarian cookbook, and I’d cook vegetarian meals for you.”
I looked at her in silence. Yes, she was my relative—the genes of our ancestors reached out directly to both of us. The notion that it might be incest for us to be together flashed through my mind—one of those uninvited ideas that emerge, God knows from where, and shock with their ridiculous irrelevance.
“That sounds like paradise, but unfortunately it cannot be,” I said.
“Why not? You probably have someone else. Yes, I understand. But is there any reason you can’t have a maid? I’ll be everything to you—a maid and a cook as well. Your apartment is neglected. You probably eat in cafeterias. I do nothing in my own house because I have no interest in it, but my mother made me take a course in housekeeping. I would work for you and you wouldn’t have to pay me anything. My parents are both filthy rich and I’m their only daughter. I’m not interested in your money …”
Before I could answer her, I heard a sharp ring at the door. At the same time the telephone rang. I grabbed the receiver, told whoever was calling that there was someone at the door, and ran to open it. I saw a man who could have been no one but Oliver Leslie de Sollar—tall, lean, with a long face and neck, a ruff of faded blond hair around a bald skull, wearing a checked suit, a stiff collar, and a narrow tie with a still narrower knot of the type that reminded me of the Warsaw dandies. I nodded and returned to the telephone. I was sure that it was Elizabeth’s mother calling, but a rough mas
culine voice spoke my name and demanded acknowledgement that it was really I. Then the caller said slowly and with the tone of an official, “My name is Howard William Moonlight and I represent Mrs. Harvey Lemkin, the mother of Mrs. Elizabeth de Sollar. I am sure that you know whom—”
I interrupted him to shout, “Mr. de Sollar is here! He’ll talk to you!”
I dashed to the door, where my visitor still stood erectly, politely, waiting to be invited inside. I cried out, “Mr. de Sollar, it’s not two hours since your wife came to visit me and hell is loose here! I’ve already received threatening calls from you, from your mother-in-law, and now from a lawyer. Your wife has managed to have an epileptic fit and only God knows what else. I’m sorry to say this, but I’m not interested in your wife, your mother-in-law, her lawyer, or in the whole crazy affair. Do me a favor and take her home. If not, I will …”
I was left momentarily speechless. I was about to say that I would call the police, but the words didn’t come out. I glanced at the telephone and saw to my amazement that Elizabeth was mumbling into the mouthpiece with her eyes fixed on me and my visitor. He said in a thin voice that didn’t match his stature, “I’m afraid there’s been some misunderstanding. I’m not the person who called you. My name is Dr. Jeffrey Lifshitz. I’m an assistant professor of literature at the University of California and a great admirer of your writing. I have a friend in this building who also happens to be a devoted reader of yours, and when I visited him today we got to talking about you and he told me that you are his neighbor. I wanted to phone you, but I couldn’t find your name in the directory and I thought I’d ring your doorbell. Forgive me for disturbing you.”
“You haven’t disturbed me. I’m pleased to have you as a reader, but there has been a considerable commotion going on in my house. Will you be staying in the city for long?”
“I’ll be here the whole week.”
“Would it be convenient for you to come to see me tomorrow?”
“Certainly.”
“Let us say tomorrow at 11 a.m.?”
“It will be a pleasure and an honor. Again, excuse me for dropping in on you in such a—”
I assured Professor Lifshitz that I would be happy to meet with him, and he left.
Elizabeth had put down the receiver. She stood by the telephone as if waiting for me to come to her. I stopped a few paces away and said, “I’m sorry. You’re a great woman, I understand your plight, but I can’t get into a battle with your husband, your mother, and now with a lawyer, too. What did he want? Why did he call?”
“Oh, they’re all mad. But I heard what you told your guest you mistook for my husband, and I swear I’ll trouble you no more. What happened today proves to me that only one way remains for me to set myself free. I just want to point out that your diagnosis was incorrect. I’m not an epileptic.”
“Then what is it?”
“The doctors themselves don’t know. A kind of hypersensitivity that I inherited from who knows where, maybe from our common ancestor. What was his book?”
“The Revealer of Profundities.”
“What kind of profundities did he reveal?”
“That no love of any kind is lost,” I said, although I had never read a word by this ancestor of mine.
“Does he say where all the loves, all the dreams, all the desires go?”
“They’re somewhere.”
“Where? In the profundities?”
“In a celestial archive.”
“Even heaven would be too small for such an archive. I will go. Oh, it’s ringing again! Please don’t answer! Don’t answer!”
I picked up the receiver, but there was no one on the line. I hung up and Elizabeth said, “That’s Leslie. That’s one of his antics. What did the Revealer of Profundities say about madness? I must go! If I don’t lose my mind, you’ll hear from me. Maybe today, from the hotel.”
Elizabeth de Sollar never called or wrote me again. She left behind and never claimed her ornate umbrella and her grandfather’s book, The Outcry of Mordechai, which was supposed to be the only existing copy, so precious to her, and this has remained a mystery to me. But another mystery connected with her visit was soon unraveled. I met my neighbor the typesetter and told him about his cousin who promised to call the office and never showed herself again.
He smiled, shook his head, and said, “You knocked on the wrong door. I live on the fifth floor, not on the sixth.”
Translated by Joseph Singer
The Yearning Heifer
I
IN those days I could find great bargains in the small advertisements in my Yiddish press newspaper. I was in need of them because I earned less than twelve dollars a week—my royalties for a weekly column of “facts” gleaned from magazines. For example: a turtle can live five hundred years; a Harvard professor published a dictionary of the language spoken by chimpanzees; Columbus was not trying to discover a route to the Indies but to find the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel.
It was during the summer of 1938. I lived in a furnished room on the fourth floor of a walk-up building. My window faced a blank wall. This particular advertisement read: “A room on a farm with food, ten dollars weekly.” After having broken with my girl friend Dosha “forever,” I had no reason to spend the summer in New York. I packed a large valise with my meager belongings, many pencils as well as the books and magazines from which I extracted my information, and took the Catskill Mountain bus to Mountaindale. From there I was supposed to phone the farm. My valise would not close and I had bound it together with many shoelaces which I had purchased from blind beggars. I took the 8 a.m. bus and arrived in the village at three o’clock in the afternoon. In the local stationery store I tried to make the phone call but could not get connected and lost three dimes. The first time I got the wrong number; the second time the phone began to whistle and kept on whistling for minutes. The third time I may have gotten the right number but no one answered. The dimes did not come back. I decided to take a taxi.
When I showed the driver the address, he knitted his brows and shook his head. After a while he said, “I think I know where it is.” And he immediately began to drive with angry speed over the narrow road full of ditches and holes. According to the advertisement, the farm was situated five miles from the village, but he kept on driving for half an hour and it became clear to me that he was lost. There was no one to ask. I had never imagined that New York State had such uninhabited areas. Here and there we passed a burned-down house, a silo which appeared unused for many years. A hotel with boarded windows emerged from nowhere and vanished like a phantom. The grass and brambles grew wild. Bevies of crows flew around croaking. The taxi meter ticked loudly and with feverish rapidity. Every few seconds I touched the trouser pocket where I kept my money. I wanted to tell the driver that I could not afford to drive around without an aim over heather and through deserts, but I knew that he would scold me. He might even drop me off in the middle of the wilderness. He kept on grumbling and every few minutes I heard him say, “Sonofabitch.”
When, after long twisting and turning, the taxi did arrive at the correct address, I knew that I had made a bad mistake. There was no sign of a farm, just an old ruined wooden house. I paid four dollars and seventy cents for the trip and I tipped him thirty cents. The driver cast a murderous look at me. I barely had time to remove my valise before he started up and shot away with suicidal speed. No one came out to meet me. I heard a cow bellowing. As a rule, a cow bellows a few times and then becomes silent, but this cow bellowed without ceasing and in the tone of a creature which has fallen into an insufferable trap. I opened a door into a room with an iron stove, an unmade bed with dirty linen, a torn sofa. Against a peeling wall stood sacks of hay and feed. On the table were a few reddish eggs with hen’s dirt still stuck to them. From another room came a dark-skinned girl with a long nose, a fleshy mouth, and angry black eyes beneath thick brows. A faint black fuzz grew on her upper lip. Her hair was cut short. If she hadn’t been wearing a shabby ski
rt, I would have taken her for a man.
“What do you want?” she asked me in a harsh voice.
I showed her the advertisement. She gave a single glance at the newspaper and said, “My father is crazy. We don’t have any rooms and board, and not for this price either.”
“What is the price?”
“We don’t need any boarders. There is no one to cook for them.”
“Why does the cow keep on screaming?” I asked.
The girl appraised me from head to foot. “That is none of your business.”
A woman entered who could have been fifty-five, sixty, or sixty-five years old. She was small, broad, one shoulder higher than the other, with a huge bosom which reached to her belly. She wore tattered men’s slippers, her head was wrapped in a kerchief. Below her uneven skirt I could see legs with varicose veins. Even though it was a hot summer day she had a torn sweater on. Her slanted eyes were those of a Tartar. She gazed at me with sly satisfaction as if my coming there was the result of a practical joke. “From the paper, huh, aren’t you?”
The Collected Stories Page 60