The End of Everything (New Yiddish Library Series) by David Bergelson

Author:David Bergelson [Bergelson, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300110678
Amazon: 0300110677
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2008-05-28T04:00:00+00:00

2.12

For the last two days of Passover, Shmulik came down.

He arrived suddenly, virtually uninvited, attended services in the Sadagura prayer house with Reb Gedalye, and felt relaxed and at home in the house, like a newly minted son-in-law in the first month of being supported by his wife’s father.*

In the shtetl he was regarded as a fine young man. Women smartly dressed in honor of the holy days discussed him:

—He’s so good-natured … He’s totally without malice.

Mirel, however, did not even find him sexually attractive, and already regarded him with apathy and indifference. His big face had grown more familiar and sallower in color than before, his small, soft, evenly trimmed beard redder, his mustache scantier and longer, and his fleshy nose made uglier by the fact that it broadened out stupidly around the nostrils and had retained from childhood a barely noticeable but ineradicable sniff.

It was soon evident that he spoke Russian badly, yet insisted on speaking it to the midwife Schatz; that he enjoyed taking naps during the day; and was fond of telling long, tedious worldly stories that made his listeners break into cold sweats.

In the salon on one occasion he was recounting one such long-winded story yet again to the midwife when he suddenly noticed a barely concealed smile flit across her face, lost the thread of what he was saying, and didn’t know how to end his narrative. Sitting to one side, Mirel was revolted by him, by his shallow, one-dimensional soul, and by the rambling, wearisome tale he was now repeating for the second time. Unwilling to go on listening to it, she began inquiring about Herz from the midwife:

—What did the midwife think? Would Herz really never come back here?

But hearing this name, well known in literary circles, Shmulik joined in the conversation:

—Ah, yes: he’d read his books; he even knew his cousin, a rabbi who’d lost his faith.

Mirel was incensed by his participation. She wanted to tell him that he was lying, that he hadn’t understood a word of what he’d read, but she restrained herself, went over to the window and, filled with suppressed rage, stood there until she’d calmed herself.

She thought:

—Velvl Burnes—he was certainly more ignorant than Shmulik, yet all the same … he certainly didn’t inspire the same disgust.

A few days later, when Shmulik was dogging her footsteps on a walk through the shtetl, she saw Velvl’s buggy waiting in front of Avrom-Moyshe Burnes’s house. She stopped, and without looking at Shmulik, remarked:

—Was her former fiancé really back in the shtetl at present? If his parents weren’t so repellent, she’d call on him with great pleasure.

This was extremely exasperating.

Nothing of her remark made the slightest impression on Shmulik—so insipid was he, possessed of such a cold, one-dimensional soul. Sniffling slightly, he soon went on explaining that he and Mirel wouldn’t be living with his father in the big old house, but in the smaller, newly completed wing at the end of the orchard, the front windows of which overlooked the quiet street of the suburb.

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