A Simple Story

by S. Y. Agnon

  “May my drinking hand wither,” said Mottshi Shaynbart, “if I didn’t think of suggesting that long ago.”

  “Then why didn’t you?” asked Eisy Heller.

  “Because his glass wasn’t empty,” said Leibush. “A toast calls for a new drink, and he never finished his old one.”

  The guests quickly emptied their glasses and drank to the health of the bride.

  Sophia felt in a dither. After the first rush of it, her excitement had cooled. Yet the more she asked herself why, the less she was able to say. “And now let’s drink to the groom,” she declared, raising her glass. Although her voice trembled, she gripped the glass bravely, downed it in one gulp, banged it on the table, and turned it bottoms-up.

  “O woman of valor!” sang out Leibush Tshortkover.

  “And now let’s drink to the groom’s father,” said Bertha Ziemlich, raising her glass.

  “And now to the bride’s mother,” said Boruch Meir.

  “And now to the bride’s father,” said Gildenhorn.

  “And now to Jews everywhere,” said Leibush.

  “And now to the whole world,” said Eisy.

  “And now to whoever made the world,” said Leibush.

  “To God’s health! Ai, ai, ai. L’hayyim, l’hayyim, l’hayyim!”

  It was an hour after midnight when Hirshl walked home with his parents. He had to halt once or twice on the way. His legs felt as heavy as stones. He himself had not drunk a drop, but the smell of all the liquor and food had left him feeling groggy and shaky.

  “The snow is melting,” said Tsirl.

  Hirshl looked up at the cloudy sky.

  Tsirl yawned. “Thank God we’re home,” she said. “I’m sleepy.”

  “Raising children has its trying moments,” said Boruch Meir with a smile.

  “Why don’t you take out your key and open the door,” said Tsirl.

  Boruch Meir stuck his key in the door. “What’s this?” he said. “It doesn’t open.”

  “What do you mean it doesn’t open?” said Tsirl.

  He peered into the keyhole. “There’s a key on the other side.”

  “Who on earth could have put a key there?” Tsirl asked.

  “I imagine,” said Boruch Meir, “that the girl must have locked up without realizing that we weren’t home.”

  “What girl?” asked Tsirl.

  “The new maid.”

  Tsirl knocked on the door and shouted angrily, “Open up there!”

  “Who is it?” asked the maid, coming downstairs.

  Tsirl knocked even louder and yelled, “Will you stop giving speeches and open up!”

  “Is that the missus?” asked the girl, groping her way to the door. “I’ll open in a jiffy.”

  “It’s the missus and the mister and the young master,” said Boruch Meir, “and they’d like to be let into their house. Will you kindly open the door?”

  “Just a minute while I put a dress on,” said the maid.

  Tsirl pounded on the door in a rage. “Just listen to her! A dress she wants to put on! You might think this were a formal visit.”

  “How did Leibush Tshortkover put it?” asked Boruch Meir. “May your crutch rot in hell, Mottshi, if that door doesn’t open at once.”

  “I have to sleep,” Tsirl moaned, “and the man stands here making jokes.”

  “Look, it’s opened,” said Boruch Meir, rubbing his hands.

  The little night lamp flickered feebly inside. Tsirl inspected the house before undressing. Boruch Meir wound his watch and placed it beside him. Taking a deep breath, Hirshl stretched out in bed. Tsirl sleepily put out the lamp and got into bed too. After a while she turned toward her husband’s bed and asked:

  “Are you asleep?”

  “No,” said Boruch Meir. “I’m not.”

  “Neither am I,” said Tsirl.

  “I know,” said Boruch Meir.

  “How?” Tsirl asked.

  “Because,” said Boruch Meir, “you wouldn’t be talking if you were.”

  “It amazes me how people can drink,” said Tsirl. “What are you laughing at?”

  “At a joke I just thought of,” said Boruch Meir.

  “Who thinks of jokes in the middle of the night?”

  “It’s about a man who does nothing but drink. Once his wife decides to see how he spends his time. She goes to the tavern and finds him sitting there with his friends. They buy her a drink, and then another. Pretty soon she’s so potted she falls off her chair and rolls right under the table. ‘So, my darling,’ says her husband, ‘now you can see for yourself that I haven’t had an easy life.’”

  “You may be in fine fettle, Boruch Meir,” said Tsirl, “but I feel that my nerves are all shot. I’m too sleepy to even fall asleep.”

  “I promise you,” said Boruch Meir, “that you’ll sleep very well. Good night, Tsirl.”

  “Who’s that snoring?” asked Tsirl. “It’s keeping me up.”

  Boruch Meir strained to hear. “I don’t hear a thing.”

  “It sounds like a stuck pig.”

  “I imagine,” said Boruch Meir, “that the maid is in a deep sleep.”

  “A minute ago,” Tsirl said, “she wanted to try on all her dresses, and now she’s in a deep sleep. I wish I were. Blume never snored like that. Just look at me, I’m yawning my head off and still it stays wide awake. It must be two o’clock by now. Oy, am I tired. I must sleep.”

  Chapter eleven

  Hirshl slept well that night. His mood on awakening in the morning was mixed. Though it was not an especially bad one, there was nothing terribly good about it either. What’s done is done, he thought, recalling what had happened. I’ll just have to forget about Blume and start thinking about Mina.

  Resignedly he reviewed the events leading up to his engagement to a girl who meant nothing to him: the party at the Gildenhorns’, the crowd of guests, Balaban’s cigarette, his relief when Mina arrived and there was someone to talk to at last. It would never have happened, thought Hirshl, had Blume let our love bloom. As though in a vision he saw the curve of her face that was full without being round and the wordless look of her blue, blue eyes that were neither happy nor sad. He would have given anything to be allowed once more to smell the fragrance of her that had suffused his whole being that day in her room.

  Hirshl was a responsible young man and knew that there was no turning back. He had to put Blume out of his mind and make room there for Mina, his fiancée. Yet was she truly? Once, as a boy, having asked someone how marriage was proposed, Hirshl was told that one went down on one’s knees and kissed one’s true love’s hand. He had been a child at the time and should have known better by now; yet the description had stuck with him, so that, it having been otherwise with Mina, their betrothal did not seem quite real to him.

  Whereas until now Hirshl had tried thinking of everyone but Mina, now he could think of no one else. As detached as he felt from her, there was no escaping her existence. And yet—though he did not, God forbid, wish her any harm—to escape it was what he most wanted. He prayed for something to save him, such as his family losing its fortune overnight, which would force Ziemlich to call off the wedding and himself to go to work as a shopboy in another town. One night, without knowing how Mirl’s dead parents, Blume’s grandparents, had sat reading Boruch Meir’s letters to them before Boruch Meir became engaged to Tsirl, Hirshl dreamed that he had written them. If worse comes to worse, he thought, I can always run away to America. Though he knew that an only child like himself could do nothing of the sort, imagining it kept him from despair.

  Indeed, there were sons of Szybusz who really had gone to America—workmen looking to better themselves, for instance, or bankrupt merchants fleeing the law. Boruch Meir’s own shopboy, Getzel Stein, had two brothers there. Some of these emigrants sent home letters and magazines, while a few even returned to visit with wondrous tales about steamships, weeks of navigating icebergs bigger than cities, and huge propellers that shredded sea monsters cap
able of swallowing whole boatloads in one bite. Strutting around Szybusz with gold chains on their vests and gold teeth in their mouths, their speech larded with English words, they poked fun at their former fellow townsmen for wallowing in poverty when they too could be living it up in the New World, where everyone got to be president, which was a kind of king for four years. Just how one managed to live it up there, however, was a subject they were a bit vague about. Perhaps they had yet to reflect on their own experience, or perhaps they would just as soon not have had to. Meanwhile they made the rounds of the town and ate dinner at house after house, where they put away the kasha cakes that Szybusz was famed for and no end of other good things while telling their hosts about the mountains of gold that anyone owning a pickax could chip away as much of as he wanted. The problem was that these mountains were far from New York, which was where most Americans lived, and that it took several months to reach them. In New York itself, though, there were long green bills called dollars, each one of which was worth two and a half Austrian gulden. It fired imaginations in Szybusz to hear of such things, and some people even pinched and scraped in order to buy a ticket to America too.

  Yet the food of Szybusz was oddly habit-forming, so that ultimately few of these visitors ever went back to America themselves. This had nothing to do with the sea monsters, which were in any case beheaded by the propellers, nor with the fear of icebergs, which was more than offset by the lure of the solid gold mountains; it was simply a matter of being too full of good food ever to want to go to sea again. Those who still had a few dollars left exchanged them with the locals, who liked to save foreign currency for wedding presents, while those who did not sold their gold chains and opened some business in town, where they proceeded to wallow in poverty like everyone else. If a gold tooth broke and he could not afford a new one, it being a well-known fact that the curse of Columbus rested on the renegade who had abandoned America’s shores, its owner swore roundly at the day of his homecoming and quickly got over it, admitting with the next breath he drew, “On the other hand, I must say that the air in America is nothing compared to that here.”

  And if something as insubstantial as air could keep a man from leaving Szybusz, a weightier substance like a blanket or a pillow had an even more powerful effect. No matter how often Hirshl thought of running away, each time he laid his head on his pillow and pulled his blanket up over him he knew that he would never go anywhere.

  Chapter twelve

  That Saturday night, after the Sabbath was over, Gedalia Ziemlich’s carriage arrived to fetch the Hurvitzes to dinner in Malikrowik.

  Although Boruch Meir and Tsirl had received the invitation on Friday, they managed to look as surprised when the carriage drew up as if they knew nothing about it.

  Hirshl had been sitting with an unbound book, its pages freshly cut and arranged before him on the table, that he was in the middle of reading. He put it down, took out some cigarette paper, rolled himself a cigarette, lit it, and eyed the leather thong of the whip in the hand of the Ziemlichs’ coachman.

  Boruch Meir produced a bottle of brandy and poured Stach a glass. Stach put down his whip and swallowed it.

  “How about another?” Boruch Meir asked.

  Stach studied the empty glass. “Well, perhaps just one more wee one to your health, sir.”

  Tsirl surveyed her son’s clothes, smoothed out her own, and said, “It’s a lucky thing that I’m still in my Sabbath outfit and needn’t keep you waiting while I change.”

  Boruch Meir put on his weekday hat and said, “Hirshl and I are still in our Sabbath clothes too.” Then, like a man who has kept his share of a bargain, he folded his arms and waited.

  Tsirl inspected the table, locked the pantry, put away the key, and asked, “Are you ready?”

  “Ready as can be,” said Boruch Meir.

  Stach went out, came back with three fur wraps, helped the Hurvitzes into them, seated them in the carriage, and spread bearskins over their knees.

  Tsirl glanced at the house. “You there!” she shouted at the open door. “Lock up and don’t forget to take the key out. Did you hear me?”

  The maid gave a nod. Then, uncertain whether it had been seen, she stepped outside and said, “Don’t you worry, ma’am. I won’t leave that key in for a second.”

  Tsirl stretched her legs out comfortably in the carriage and turned up her fur collar. “We’re off,” she said.

  “So we are,” said Boruch Meir, tucking his hands into his wrap.

  “Are you covered, Hirshl?” asked Tsirl. “Turn up your collar.”

  Hirshl bundled up in Ziemlich’s wrap until it tickled his neck, grunted as if something hurt him, reached into his pocket, took out a handkerchief, and placed it over his mouth.

  Tsirl looked at her husband and whispered, “I do believe that our driver is rather high in spirits.”

  Boruch Meir regarded the whip in Stach’s hand. “I daresay he’s waving that palm branch of his as though he were saying hosannas.”

  Tsirl approved of Boruch Meir’s witty rejoinder every bit as much as Boruch Meir approved of Tsirl’s deft double entendre.

  Stach let out a whistle and the carriage started out with a lurch.

  The road was easily traveled. The snow on the ground made the night pleasantly frosty, and the horses trotted gently. After an hour or so they made out what looked like a necklace of lights and heard the barking of dogs.

  Stach twirled his whip until the thong was wrapped around the handle, pulled on the reins, and cried, “Whoaaa!”

  The horses took a few more halting steps and the carriage stood still.

  “What are we stopping for?” Tsirl asked Boruch Meir.

  “We’re stopping,” said Boruch Meir, “because we’ve come to a place called Malikrowik.”

  “Already?” asked Tsirl in amazement.

  “Already,” Boruch Meir said proudly, as if he had accomplished something rare.

  “It’s so short a trip?” asked Tsirl, a note of gladness creeping into her surprise.

  “Try walking it sometime,” said Boruch Meir, “and you’ll see how short it is.”

  “You’re very sporting with my feet,” Tsirl said. “Hirshl, we’re here.”

  Hirshl picked up his handkerchief, which had fallen on the bearskin, and put it back in his pocket.

  Gedalia Ziemlich’s house stood amid trees and shrubbery, surrounded by barns and stables that were half covered with snow and half projecting like loose beams of lumber. As soon as the carriage swung into the courtyard the dogs began to bark in harmony, the tenors for the returning Stach and the altos for his passengers.

  Stach clambered down from his seat, crouched low, drew back a foot, and booted one of the dogs in the belly, sending it flying into the snow. Then he kicked it again head over heels into the other dogs. The cur shook the snow off and stared back imperturbably as if to say, Well now, that wasn’t half bad for a knucklehead like you. “Knucklehead” was the dogs’ pet name for Stach because of the iron studs like knuckle-dusters that he wore on the soles of his boots.

  Boruch Meir jumped out of the carriage and gave his hand to Tsirl, who gave her hand to Hirshl and helped him to the ground. Hirshl rubbed his eyes with a wet glove and looked at the brightly lit house. Out here in the country, he thought, there’s not a care in the world. Yet as soon as he remembered the reason he was there, the house lost all its splendor and he his envy of it.

  Gedalia and Bertha came gaily out to greet their guests and sought to relieve them of their wraps. Boruch Meir, however, pulled his more tightly around him and growled, “Look out for the bears,” which made the servant girls giggle, while Tsirl struck a statuesque pose in her fur. When Mina came to the doorway Boruch Meir shook her hand and said merrily, “The bears have brought you a little deer from the forest.” He was referring to Hirshl, whose name meant “little deer” in Yiddish.

  The house was all lit up. A fire burned in the fireplace. An agreeable odor of sappy wood and roast meat
pervaded the rooms. Both the guests and their hosts were wearing their best. All faces shone. Even the servants were jolly.

  The Hurvitzes split up upon arriving, Boruch Meir and Tsirl going off with Gedalia and Bertha and leaving Hirshl and Mina in a room by themselves. Mina was wearing a long black satin dress that was wide in the whalebone-stayed skirt and—apart from the rounded bust—narrow from the waist to the collar, which was trimmed with two fingers of lace. The chandelier on the ceiling made her face glow and brought out the color in her cheeks. Her uncertainly shaded hair was braided in a circle at the neck. She seemed different from the way she had looked that summer or even from the night of their engagement. Suddenly Hirshl no longer knew what to think of her. An unfamiliar feeling of respect combined with another, less easily definable emotion gave her new stature in his eyes.

  They talked little, however, for Hirshl could hardly put a sentence together. Indeed, anyone seeing him who had been at the Gildenhorns’ party might well have wondered if he was observing the same person, for now words failed him completely. Yet though she could not help noticing this, Mina did not find it peculiar. After all, she thought, what do I expect him to do, recite Schiller and Lessing for me? (This was because it was the custom in those days for a boy and girl getting together to recite poems to each other, such as Schiller’s “The Bell” or “The Lad at the Fountain,” taking turns saying each line by heart. It might take them a long while, but then this was precisely the point—and although it was easy to joke about such things, the jokers themselves had behaved no differently when young.)

  How odd, Hirshl thought: just a few days ago she rescued me at a party, and now I need to be rescued from her. He had not felt so uncomfortably self-conscious since the day he walked into the unused room in the hope of finding Blume and discovered Mina instead. All I need do, he thought, is say something beastly and I’ll be rid of her for good. Being too much of a gentleman for this, however, he rather broke out in a torrent of uncontrolled speech. Things that he did not even know he knew came tumbling out of him. Mina looked at him wide-eyed, her large earrings glittering.