Collected Stories (19 page)

But Mendel the coachman wasn’t only a sleeper. It was well known that he chased the women. One thing, however, could be said for him: he didn’t go after the Kreshev maidens. His escapades were always with young peasant girls from the neighboring villages. The attraction that he had for these women seemed almost unnatural. The beer drinkers at the local tavern maintained that Mendel had only to gaze at one of these girls and she would immediately come to him. It was known that more than one had visited him in his attic. Naturally the peasants didn’t like this and Mendel had been warned that one of these days they would chop off his head, but he ignored these threats and wallowed deeper and deeper in carnality. There wasn’t a village that he had visited with Reb Bunim where he didn’t have his “wives” and families. It almost seemed true that a whistle from him was sufficient sorcery to bring some girl flying to his side. Mendel, however, didn’t discuss his power over women. He drank no whiskey, avoided fights, and stayed away from the shoemakers, tailors, hoopers and brushmakers that comprised the poorer population of Kreshev. Nor did they regard him as one of them. He didn’t even bother much about money. Reb Bunim, it was said, supplied him with room and board only. But when a Kreshev teamster wanted to hire him and pay him real wages, Mendel remained loyal to the house of Reb Bunim. He apparently did not mind being a slave. His horses and his boots, his pigeons and his girls were the only things that concerned him. So the townspeople gave up on Mendel the coachman.

“A lost soul,” they commented. “A Jewish Gentile.”

And gradually they became accustomed to him and then forgot him.

III
The Articles of Engagement

As soon as Lise turned fifteen, conjecture began about whom she would marry. Shifrah Tammar was sick, and relations between her and Reb Bunim were strained, so Reb Bunim decided to discuss the matter with his daughter. When the subject was mentioned, Lise became shy and would reply that she would do what her father thought best.

“You have two possibilities,” Reb Bunim said during one of these conversations. “The first is a young man from Lublin who comes of a very wealthy family but is no scholar. The other is from Warsaw and a real prodigy. But I must warn you that he doesn’t have a cent. Now speak up, girl. The decision is up to you. Which would you prefer?”

“Oh, money,” Lise said scornfully. “What value does it have? Money can be lost, but not knowledge.” And she turned her gaze downward.

“Then, if I understand you correctly, you prefer the boy from Warsaw?” Reb Bunim said, stroking his long, black beard.

“You know best, Father,” Lise whispered.

“One thing in addition that I should mention,” he went on, “is that the rich man is very handsome—tall and with blond hair. The scholar is extremely short—a full head shorter than you.”

Lise grasped both of her braids and her face turned red and then quickly lost all color. She bit her lip.

“Well, what have you decided, daughter?” Reb Bunim demanded. “You mustn’t be ashamed to speak.”

Lise began to stammer and her knees trembled from shame. “Where is he?” she asked. “I mean, what does he do?” Where is he studying?”

“The Warsaw boy? He is, may God preserve us, an orphan, and he is at present studying at the Zusmir yeshiva. I am told that he knows the entire Talmud by heart and that he is also a philosopher and a student of the Cabala. He has already written a commentary on Maimonides, I believe.”

“Yes,” Lise mumbled.

“Does that mean that you want him?”

“Only if you approve, Father.”

And she covered her face with both of her hands and ran from the room. Reb Bunim followed her with his eyes. She delighted him—her beauty, chastity, intelligence. She was closer to him than to her mother, and although almost fully grown, would cuddle close to him and run her fingers through his beard. Fridays before he went off to the bathhouse she would have a clean shirt ready for him and on his return before the lighting of the candles she would serve him freshly baked cake and plum stew. He never heard her laughing raucously as did the other young girls nor did she ever go barefoot in his presence. After the Sabbath meal, when he napped, she would walk on tiptoe so as not to wake him. When he was ill, she would put her hand on his forehead to see whether he had fever and would bring all sorts of medicine and tidbits. On more than one occasion Reb Bunim had envied the happy young man who would have her as a wife.

Some days later the people of Kreshev learned that Lise’s prospective husband had arrived in town. The young man came in a wagon by himself and he stayed at the house of Rabbi Ozer. Everyone was surprised to see what a scrawny fellow he was, small and thin, with black tousled sidelocks, a pale face and a pointed chin which was barely covered by a few sparse whiskers. His long gaberdine reached to below the ankles. His back was bent and he walked rapidly and as if he didn’t know where he was going. The young girls crowded to the windows and watched him pass by. When he arrived at the study house, the men came up to greet him and he immediately began to expatiate in the cleverest possible way. There was no mistaking that this man was a born city dweller.

“Well, you really have some metropolis here,” the young man observed.

“No one’s claiming that it’s Warsaw,” one of the town boys commented.

The young cosmopolitan smiled. “One place is pretty much like another,” he pointed out. “If they’re on the face of the earth, they’re all the same.”

This said, he began to quote literally from the Babylonian Talmud and the Talmud of Jerusalem, and when he was finished with that, he entertained everyone with news about what was going on in the great world beyond Kreshev. He wasn’t himself personally acquainted with Radziwill but he had seen him and he did know a follower of Sabbatai Zevi, the false Messiah. He also had met a Jew who came from Shushan, which was the ancient capital of Persia, and another Jew who had become a convert and studied the Talmud in secret. As if this weren’t enough, he began to ask those assembled the most difficult of riddles and, when he tired of that, amused himself by repeating anecdotes of Rabbi Heshl. Somehow or other he managed to convey the additional information that he knew how to play chess, could paint murals employing the twelve signs of the zodiac, and write Hebrew verse which could be read either backwards or forwards and said exactly the same thing no matter how you read it. Nor was this all. This young prodigy, in addition, had studied philosophy and the Cabala, and was an adept in mystical mathematics, being able even to work out the fractions which are to be found in the treatise of Kilaim. It goes without saying that he had had a look at the Zohar and
The Tree of Life
and he knew
The Guide to the Perplexed
as well as his own first name.

He had come to Kreshev looking ragged, but several days after his arrival Reb Bunim outfitted him in a new gaberdine, new shoes, and white stockings, and presented him with a gold watch. And now the young man began to comb his beard and curl his sidelocks. It was not until the signing of the contract that Lise saw the bridegroom, but she had received reports of how learned he was and she was happy that she had chosen him and not the rich young man from Lublin.

The festivities to celebrate the signing of the engagement contract were as noisy as a wedding. Half the town had been invited. As always, the men and women were seated separately and Shloimele, the groom-to-be, made an extremely clever speech and then signed his name with a brilliant flourish. Several of the town’s most learned men tried to converse with him on weighty subjects, but his rhetoric and wisdom were too much for them. While the celebration was still going on, and before the serving of the banquet, Reb Bunim broke the usual custom that the bride and groom must not meet before the marriage and let Shloimele into Lise’s chamber since the true interpretation of the law is that a man not take a wife unless he has seen her. The young man’s gaberdine was unbuttoned, exposing his silk vest and gold watch chain. He appeared a man of the world with his brightly polished shoes and velvet skullcap perched on the top of his head. There was moisture on his high forehead and his cheeks were flushed. Inquisitively, bashfully, he gazed about him with his dark eyes, and his index finger kept twining itself nervously around a fringe of his sash. Lise turned a deep red when she saw him. She had been told that he was not at all good-looking but to her he seemed handsome. And this was the view of the other girls who were present. Somehow or other Shloimele had become much more attractive.

“This is the girl you are to marry,” Reb Bunim said. “There’s no need for you to be bashful.”

Lise had on a black silk dress and around her neck was a string of pearls, which was the present she had been given for this occasion. Her hair appeared almost red under the glow of candlelight, and on the finger of her left hand she wore a ring with the letter “M” inscribed upon it, the first letter of the words
mazel tov
. At the moment of Shloimele’s entrance she had been holding an embroidered handkerchief in her hand but upon seeing him it had fallen from her fingers. One of the girls in the room walked over and picked it up.

“It’s a very fine evening,” Shloimele said to Lise.

“And an excellent summer,” answered the bride and her two attendants.

“Perhaps it’s a trifle hot,” Shloimele observed.

“Yes, it is hot,” the three girls answered again in unison.

“Do you think the fault is mine?” Shloimele asked in a sort of singsong. “It is said in the Talmud …”

But Shloimele didn’t get any further as Lise interrupted him. “I know very well what the Talmud says. ‘A donkey is cold even in the month of Tammuz.’ ”

“Oh, a Talmudic scholar!” Shloimele exclaimed in surprise, and the tips of his ears reddened.

Very soon after that, the conversation ended and everyone began to crowd into the room. But Rabbi Ozer did not approve of the bride and groom meeting before the wedding, and he ordered them to be separated. So Shloimele was once more surrounded only by men and the celebration continued until daybreak.

IV
Love

From the very first moment that she saw him Lise loved Shloimele deeply. At times she believed that his face had been shown to her in a dream before the marriage. At other times she was certain that they had been married before in some other existence. The truth was that I, the Evil Spirit, required so great a love for the furtherance of my schemes.

At night when Lise slept I sought out his spirit and brought it to her and the two of them spoke and kissed and exchanged love tokens. All of her waking thoughts were of him. She held his image within her and addressed it, and this fiction within her replied to her words. She bared her soul to it, and it consoled her and uttered the words of love that she longed to hear. When she put on a dress or a nightgown she imagined that Shloimele was present, and she felt shy and was pleased that her skin was pale and smooth. Occasionally she would ask this apparition those questions which had baffled her since childhood: “Shloimele, what is the sky? How deep is the earth? Why is it hot in summer and cold in the winter? Why do corpses gather at night to pray in the synagogue? How can one see a demon? Why does one see one’s reflection in a mirror?”

And she even imagined that Shloimele answered each of these questions. There was one other question that she asked the shadow in her mind: “Shloimele, do you really love me?”

Shloimele reassured her that no other girl was equal to her in beauty. And in her daydreams she saw herself drowning in the river San and Shloimele rescued her. She was abducted by evil spirits and he saved her. Indeed, her mind was all daydreams, so confused had love made her.

But as it happened, Reb Bunim postponed the wedding until the Sabbath after Pentecost and so Lise was forced to wait nearly three-quarters of a year longer. Now, through her impatience, she understood what misery Jacob had undergone when he had been forced to wait seven years before marrying Rachel. Shloimele remained at the rabbi’s house and would not be able to visit Lise again until Hanukkah. The young girl often stood at the window in a vain attempt to catch a glimpse of him, for the path from the rabbi’s to the study house did not pass Reb Bunim’s. The only news that Lise received of him was from the girls who came to see her. One reported that he had grown slightly taller and another said that he was studying the Talmud with the other young men at the study house. A third girl observed that obviously the rabbi’s wife was not feeding Shloimele properly, as he had become quite thin. But out of modesty Lise refrained from questioning her friends too closely; nevertheless, she blushed each time her beloved’s name was mentioned. In order to make the winter pass more quickly, she began to embroider for her husband-to-be a phylactery bag and a cloth to cover the Sabbath loaf. The bag was of black velvet, upon which she sewed in gold thread a star of David along with Shloimele’s name and the date of the month and year. She took even greater pains with the tablecloth, on which were stitched two loaves of bread and a goblet. The words “Holy Sabbath” were done in silver thread, and in the four corners the heads of a stag, a lion, a leopard, and an eagle were embroidered. Nor did she forget to line the seams of the cloth with beads of various colors and she decorated the edges with fringes and tassels. The girls of Kreshev were overwhelmed by her skill and begged to copy the pattern she had used.

Her engagement had altered Lise: she had become even more beautiful. Her skin was white and delicate; her eyes gazed off into space. She moved through the house with the silent step of a somnambulist. From time to time she would smile for no reason at all, and she would stand in front of the mirror for hours on end, arranging her hair and speaking to her reflection as though she had been bewitched. Now if a beggar came to the house she received him graciously and gladly offered him alms. After every meal she went to the poorhouse, bringing soup and meat to the ill and indigent. The poor unfortunates would smile and bless her: “May God grant that you soon eat soup at your wedding.”