The Collected Stories

by Isaac Bashevis Singer

  Gutsha wiped off her face with a handkerchief. “She should spit blood and pus.”

  “Really, I cannot understand,” my mother said to the women and to herself. Then she added, “Perhaps he could be ordered to pay for the children by the law of the Gentiles.”

  “Rebbetzin,” Gutsha said, “if a man has a heart for his children, he doesn’t need to be forced. This one came every week with a different excuse. He doled out the few guldens like alms. Today the policemen came to the hospital and took me away as if I were a lawbreaker. My enemies rejoiced at my downfall. I left my children with a nurse who must leave at four o’clock and then they will be alone.”

  “In that case, go home at once,” my mother said. “Something will be done. There is still a remnant of order in the world.”

  “No order whatsoever. I dug my own grave. I must have been insane. I deserve all the blows I’m getting. I’m ready to die, but who will take care of my darlings? It is not their fault.”

  “She’s as much of a mother as I’m a countess,” Trina Leah hollered. “Bitch, leper, hoodlum!”

  I had great compassion for Gutsha; nevertheless, I was curious about the men, and I ran back to the room where they were arguing. I heard Shmuel Smetena say, “Listen to me, Koppel. No matter what you say, the children should not be the victims. You will have to provide for them, and if not the Russians will put you into the cage for three years and no one would bat an eyelid. No lawyer would take a case like this. If you fall into a rage and stab someone, the judge may be lenient. But what you did day in and day out was not the act of a human being.”

  “I will pay, I will pay—don’t be so holier-than-thou,” Koppel said. “These are my children, and they will not have to go begging. Rabbi, if you permit me, I will swear on the Holy Scroll.” And Koppel pointed to the Ark.

  “Swear? God forbid!” Father replied. “First you have to sign a paper that you will obey my judgment and fulfill your obligations to your children. Woe is me!” My father changed his tone. “How long does a man live altogether? Is it worth losing the world to come because of such evil passions? What becomes of the body after death? It’s eaten up by the worms. As long as one breathes, one can still repent. In the grave there is no longer free choice.”

  “Rabbi, I’m ready to fast and to do penances. I have one explanation: I lost my senses. A demon or evil spirit entered me. I got entangled like a fly in a spider’s web. I’m afraid people will take revenge on me and no one will enter my store any more.”

  “Jews have mercy,” my father said. “If you repent with all your heart, no one will persecute you.”

  “Absolutely true,” Shmuel Smetena agreed.

  I left the men and went back to the kitchen. The old woman, Naomi’s mother, was saying, “Rebbetzin, I didn’t like him from the very beginning. I took one look at him and I said, ‘Naomi, run from him like from the pest. He’s not going to divorce his wife. First let him divorce her,’ I said, ‘then we will see.’ My dear lady, we are not just people from the gutter. My late husband, Naomi’s father, was a Hasid. Naomi was an honest girl. She became a seamstress to support me. But he has a quick tongue that spouts sweet words. The more he tried to please me with his flattery, the more I recognized what a serpent he was. But my daughter is a fool. If you tell her that there is a horse fair in Heaven, she wants to go up and buy a horse there. She had bad luck in addition. She was married and became a widow after three months. Her husband, a giant of a man, fell down like a tree. Woe what I have lived to see in my old age. I wish I had died a long time ago. Who needs me? I just spoil bread.”

  “Don’t say this. When God tells us to live, we must live,” my mother said.

  “What for? People sneer at us. When she told me that she was pregnant from that mooncalf I grabbed her hair and … People, I’m dying!”

  That day, all three women agreed to divorce Koppel Mitzner. The divorce proceedings were to take place in our house. Koppel signed a paper and gave my father an advance of five rubles. Father had already written down the names of the three women. The name Naomi was a good Jewish name. Gutsha was a diminutive of Gutte, which used to be Tovah. But what kind of name was Pola? My father looked the name up in a book with the title People’s Names, but there was no Pola there. He asked me to bring Isaiah the scribe and they talked it over. Isaiah had much experience in such matters. He told my father that he drew a circle in a notebook each time he wrote a divorce paper and recently his son counted over eight hundred such circles. “According to the law,” Isaiah said, “a Gentile name is acceptable in a divorce paper.”

  Naomi was supposed to be divorced first. The ritual ceremony was to take place on Sunday. But that Sunday neither Koppel nor his wives showed up. The news spread on Krochmalna Street that Koppel Mitzner had vanished together with his youngest wife, Pola. He deserted the three other wives, and they would never be permitted to remarry. Where he and Pola went, no one knew, but it was believed that they had run away to Paris or to New York. “Where else,” Mother said, “would charlatans like these run to?”

  She gave me an angry look as if suspecting that I envied Koppel his journey, and, who knows, perhaps even his companion. “What are you doing in the kitchen?” she cried. “Go back to your book. Such depravities are not for you!”

  The Psychic Journey

  I

  IT happened like this. I stood one hot day uptown on Broadway before a fenced-in plot of grass and began to throw food to the pigeons. The pigeons knew me, and ordinarily when they saw me with my bag of seed they surrounded me. The police had told me it was forbidden to feed pigeons outdoors, but that was as far as they went. One time a huge cop even came up to me and said, “Why is it everybody brings food for the pigeons and no one stops to think that they might need a drink? It hasn’t rained in New York for weeks, and pigeons are dying of thirst.” To hear this from a policeman was quite an experience! I went straight home and brought out a bowl of water, but half of it spilled in the elevator and the pigeons spilled the rest.

  This day, on my way to the fenced-in plot I noticed the new issue of The Unknown at a newspaper stand and I bought a copy, since the magazine was snatched up in my neighborhood almost as soon as it appeared. For some reason, many readers on uptown Broadway are interested in telepathy, clairvoyance, psychokinesis, and the immortality of the soul.

  For once, the pigeons did not crowd around me. I looked up and saw that a few steps away stood a woman who was also throwing out handfuls of grain. I started to laugh—under her arm she carried a copy of the new issue of The Unknown. Despite the hot summer day, she was wearing a black dress and a black, broad-brimmed hat. Her shoes and stockings were black. She must be a foreigner, I thought; no American would dress in such clothes in this weather, not even to attend a funeral. She raised her head and I saw a face that seemed young—or, at least, not old. She was lean and swarthy, with a narrow nose, a long chin, and thin lips.

  I said, “Competition, eh?”

  She smiled, showing long false teeth, but her black eyes remained stern. She said, “Don’t worry, sir. There will be more pigeons. Enough for us both. Here they are now!” She pointed prophetically to the sky.

  Yes, a whole flock was flying in from downtown. The plot grew so full that the birds hopped and fluttered to force their way to the food. Pigeons, like Hasidim, enjoy jostling each other.

  When our bags were emptied, we walked over to the litter can. “After you,” I said, and I added, “I see we read the same magazine.”

  She replied in a deep voice and a foreign accent, “I’ve seen you often feeding the pigeons, and I want you to know that those who feed pigeons never know need. The few cents you spend on these lovely birds will bring you lots of luck.”

  “How can you be sure of that?”

  She began to explain, and we walked away together. I invited her to have a drink with me and she said, “Gladly, but I don’t drink alcoholic beverages, only fruit juices and vegetable juices.”

  “Come.
Since you read The Unknown, you’re one of my people.”

  “Yes, my greatest interest is in the occult. I read similar publications from England, Canada, Australia, India. I used to read them back in Hungary, where I come from, but today for believing in the higher powers over there you go to jail. Is there such a magazine in Hebrew?”

  “Are you Jewish?”

  “On my mother’s side, but for me separate races and religions don’t exist, only the one species of man. We lost the sources of our spiritual energy, and this has given rise to a disharmony in our psychic evolution. The divisions are the result. When we emit waves of brotherliness, reciprocal help, and peace, these vibrations create a sense of identification among all of God’s creatures. You saw how the pigeons flew in. They congregate around the Central Savings Bank on Broadway and Seventy-third Street, which is too far for pigeons to see what’s happening in the Eighties. But the cosmic consciousness within them is in perfect balance and therefore …”

  We had gone into a coffee shop that was air-conditioned, and we sat down in a booth. She introduced herself as Margaret Fugazy.

  “It’s remarkable,” she said. “I’ve observed that you always feed the pigeons at one o’clock when you go out for lunch, while I feed them in the mornings. I fed them as usual this morning. All of a sudden a voice ordered me to feed them again. Now, at six o’clock pigeons aren’t particularly eager to eat. They’re starting to adjust to their nightly rhythm. The days are growing shorter and we’re in another constellation of the solar cycle. But when a voice repeats the same admonition over and over, this is a message from the world powers. I came out and found you too about to feed the pigeons. How is it you were late?”

  “I also heard a voice.”

  “Are you psychic?”

  “I was only fooling.”

  “You mustn’t fool about such things!”

  After three-quarters of an hour, I had heard a lot of particulars. Margaret Fugazy had come to the United States in the nineteen-fifties. Her father had been a doctor; her parents were no longer living. Here in New York she had grown close to a woman who was past ninety, a medium, and half blind. They had lived together for a time. The old lady had died at the age of a hundred and two, and now Margaret supported herself by giving courses in Yoga, concentration, mind stimulation, biorhythm, awareness, and the I Am.

  She said, “I watched you feeding the pigeons a long time before I learned that you’re a writer and a vegetarian. I started reading you. This led to a telepathic communication between us, even if it has been one-sided. I went so far as to visit you at home several times—not physically but in astral form. I would have liked to catch your attention, but you were sound asleep. I leave my body usually around dawn. I found you awake only once and you spoke to me about the mysteries of the Cabala. When I had to go back I gave you a kiss.”

  “You know my address?”

  “The astral body has no need of addresses!”

  Neither of us spoke for a time. Then Margaret said, “You might give me your phone number. These astral visits involve terrible dangers. If the silver cord should break, then—”

  She didn’t finish, apparently in fear of her own words.

  II

  On my way home at one o’clock that morning, I told myself I could not risk getting mixed up with Margaret Fugazy. My stomach hurt from the soybeans, raw carrots, molasses, sunflower seeds, and celery juice she had served me for supper. My head ached from her advice on how to avoid spiritual tension, how to control dreams, and how to send out alpha rays of relaxation and beta rays of intellectual activity and theta rays of trance. It’s all Dora’s fault, I brooded. If she hadn’t left me and run off to the kibbutz where her daughter Sandra was having her first baby, I’d be together with her now in a hotel in pollen-free Bethlehem, New Hampshire, instead of suffering from hay fever in polluted New York. True, Dora had begged me to accompany her to Israel, but I had no intention of sitting in some forsaken kibbutz near the Syrian border waiting for Sandra to give birth.

  I was afraid walking the few blocks from Columbus Avenue and Ninety-sixth Street to my studio apartment in the West Eighties, but no taxi would stop for me. Riding up in the elevator, I was assailed by fears. Maybe I had been burglarized while I was away? Maybe out of spite for not finding any money or jewelry the thieves had torn up my manuscripts? I opened the door and was struck by a wave of heat. I had neglected to lower the venetian blinds and the sun had baked the apartment all day. No one had cleaned here since Dora left, and the dust started me sneezing. I undressed and lay down, but I couldn’t fall asleep. My nose was stuffed up, my throat scratchy, and my ears felt full of water. My anger at Dora grew, and in fantasy I worked out all kinds of revenges against her. Maybe marry this Hungarian miracle worker and send Dora a cable announcing the good tidings.

  Day was dawning by the time I dropped off. I was wakened by the phone ringing. The clock on the bedside table showed twenty past ten. I picked up the receiver and grunted, “Nu?”

  I heard a deep female voice. “I woke you, eh? It’s Margaret, Margaret Fugazy. Morris—may I call you Morris?”

  “You can even call me Potiphar.”

  “Oh, listen to him! What I want to say is that this morning a sign has been given that our meeting yesterday wasn’t simply some coincidence but an act of fate, ordained and executed by the hand of Providence. First let me tell you that after you left me I was deeply worried about you. You promised me to take a cab but I knew—don’t ask me how—that you didn’t. Just before daybreak I found myself in your apartment again. What a mess. The dust! And when I saw your pale face and heard your choked breathing I decided that you absolutely cannot remain in the city. On the other hand, it would not be good that our relationship should start off with a long separation. Well, early this morning an old friend of mine called—Lily Wolfner, also a Hungarian. I hadn’t heard from her in over a year, but last night before going to sleep I suddenly thought about her and this to me is always a signal I will soon be hearing from that individual. Precisely at nine my phone rang, and I was so sure I answered with ‘Hello, Lily.’ Lily Wolfner is a travel agent. She arranges tours to Europe, Africa, Japan, and Israel, too. Her tours always have a cultural program. The guides are psychologists, psychiatrists, writers, artists, rabbis. I was twice the guide of such tours interested in psychic research, and some other time I’ll tell you of my remarkable experiences with them.

  “I said, ‘Lily, what made you think of me?’ and she told me she had a group that wanted to combine a visit to the State of Israel on the High Holidays with an advanced course in awareness. She offered me the job as guide. I don’t remember how, but I mentioned your name to her and the fact that you had promised to give me an esoteric insight into the Cabala. I beg you, don’t interrupt me. As soon as she heard your name, she became simply hysterical. ‘What? He really exists? He lives right here in New York City and you had supper with him?’ I’ll cut it short—she proposed that we both be guides for this tour. She’ll accede to your every demand. These are rich women, many of them probably your readers. I told her I’d speak with you, but first she had to check with the women. A half hour didn’t go by when she called me back. She had already reached her clients and they were as excited by the idea as she was. My dear, one would have to be blind not to see the hand of destiny in all this. Lily is a businesswoman, not some mystic, but she told me that you and I together would make a fantastic pair! I want you to know that in the past months I’ve faced deep crises in my life—spiritual, physical, financial. I was closer to suicide than you can imagine. When I came up next to you yesterday, I knew somehow that my life was in your hands, strange as this may sound. I beg you therefore and plead on my knees—don’t say no, because this would be my death sentence. Literally.”

  Margaret had not let me get a word in edgewise. I wanted to tell her that I wasn’t a specialist in the Cabala and that I had no urge to wander around Israel with a flock of women who would try to combine sightseein
g with mysticism, but somehow I hesitated, bewildered by my own weakness.

  Margaret exclaimed, “Morris, wait for me. I’m coming to you!”

  “Astrally?” I asked.

  “Cynic! With my body and soul!”

  III

  Who said it—perhaps no one: every person’s drama is a melodrama. I both performed in this melodrama and observed it as a spectator.

  I sat in an air-conditioned bus speeding from Haifa to Tel Aviv. We had spent Rosh Hashanah in Jerusalem. We had visited Sodom, Elath, Safad, the occupied regions around the Suez Canal and the Golan Heights, a number of kibbutzim. Wherever we stopped, I lectured about the Cabala and Margaret gave advice on love, health, and business; on how to use the subconscious for buying stocks, betting on horses, finding jobs, husbands; on how to meditate. She spoke about the delta of the brain waves and the resonance of the Tantrist personality, the dimensions of the Shambala and the panorama of cybertronic evocations. She conducted astrochemical analyses, showed how to locate the third eye, the pineal eye, revealed the mysteries of Lemuria and Mt. Shasta. I attended séances at which she hypnotized the ladies, most of whom went to sleep—or at least pretended to. She swore that my mother had revealed herself to her and urged her to keep an eye on me; I had been born a Sagittarian and a Scorpio might start a fatal conflict with me.

  I was enmeshed in a situation that made me ashamed of myself. Thank God, until now I hadn’t met Dora or anyone else I knew, but the tour was to be in Israel almost another full week. It could easily happen that someone might recognize me. Also, the group had become quarrelsome—disappointed in the hotels, the meals, the merchandise for sale in the gift shops—and increasingly critical of its guides. Many had turned cool toward Margaret and her lessons, and their enthusiasm for the Cabala had diminished. One woman suggested that my interpretation of the Cabala was too subjective and was actually a kind of poetic hodgepodge.