She had a fleeting image of how the train carrying Shmulik and her prospective in-laws was being borne far, far away through those familiar stations that passed on mute greetings from the distant provincial capital. Extraordinary, the way matters had transpired: that she’d actually been engaged to marry Shmulik, that the whole shtetl knew this, and that on the very next Sabbath her prospective in-laws would make a special Kiddush* in their home where her name would be mentioned when the toasts were proposed.

Rising from her bed, she remembered that she had something to do: she had to write a letter to Shmulik in the provincial capital, giving him clearly to understand that nothing would come of the betrothal. But she felt so at peace, and such a pleasant languor overcame her at the thought that Shmulik was no longer here in the house. Yawning, she soon returned to her bed, reflecting that the chief menace had now passed, and that there was ample time in which to annul the engagement contract.

—There was still quite enough time before the Sabbath after Shavuot.

That evening Gitele came to her in her room, holding out a letter:

—It came in the post, addressed to her, to Mirele.

The letter was from Nosn Heler, and began with those words, it seemed to her, with which so many letters had already begun:

—He understood that she, Mirel, was now a bride.

From its very first words the letter disgusted her, so she put it down next to her, and then tried reading it again:

—She’d been made to listen to a great deal of slander about him, Heler.

Having no patience to go on, however, she laid it down again and never finished reading it.

Subsequently the letter was left lying open on the chair next to her bed, and once, coming in from outside, she noticed:

Gitele suddenly jerk away from her bed and quickly leave the room—and the letter … the letter lay no longer on the chair as it had before, but a little farther away, on the floor. She could have sworn that the prying Gitele had read it.

Later Gitele certainly spent far too much time furtively discussing this with Reb Gedalye who’d arrived home one night.

—She’d read the letter herself, and he continued to address her in the familiar manner of close acquaintances.

Unwilling to hear anything of this, Reb Gedalye was annoyed with Gitele:

—He didn’t know what she was bothering him with all this for—what for? … She was imagining all kinds of ridiculous things!

He was now wholly preoccupied with, and devoting all his time to, the plan that had been proposed to him by the Count’s son-in-law, who’d come down from abroad and redeemed Kashperivke from the bank:

—For a mere eight thousand rubles he was prepared to take Reb Gedalye on as a partner in the ownership of the big wood, would entrust its management to him, and would charge him the price paid by merchants in the provincial capital. Perhaps in this way, Reb Gedalye might be saved financially …

But Gitele still refused to leave him in peace:

—He was apparently under the impression that he’d settled everything with this daughter of his … Well, let him judge for himself: she was now saying that she wouldn’t travel to the provincial capital to have her wedding clothes made. Under no circumstances, she said, would she travel there.

One Sabbath two weeks before Passover a fresh spring breeze sprang up.

The snowdrifts that poked up here and there amid the mud dried out and turned gray, and there was no clarity about what festival the church bells were ringing to honor just before sunset.

Wrapped in her mother’s black shawl, Avrom-Moyshe Burnes’s reclusive daughter stood for hours on the verandah in front of her father’s house watching the peasants making their way from their village at one end of the town to the church at the other end. They walked slowly, keeping close to the Jewish houses in the long main street, seeking well-worn pathways and keeping their feet dry.

Meanwhile the yawning emptiness of approaching summer made itself increasingly felt everywhere. Constantly restless in the deserted pharmacy, the assistant Safyan set o. on a walk through the shtetl, but kept stopping with the desire to turn back. Eventually he met Avrom-Moyshe Burnes’s daughter, and kept her company in a stroll over the freshly trodden pathways to the peasant cottages, avoided looking at her, yet spoke as ponderously as though he were addressing an intellectual.

—Lipkis—he said maliciously—is no longer here; eventually he came to his senses and went back to serious study in the metropolis. And Mirel Hurvits … Mirel has now been in the provincial capital for over a week, having her wedding clothes made. Kak eto shmeshno—it’s so ridiculous.

Avrom-Moyshe Burnes’s daughter felt uncomfortable walking with him, and made no reply. She knew—wrinkling up her nose in distaste behind his back—and the whole town remarked on it, that he was in love with the midwife at whose home her acquaintance, the Hebrew poet, was spending a few days.

But he continued to stare neurotically somewhere far in front of him and went on pursuing the same subject:

—Whom did Mirel think she was fooling: herself or the whole town?

Suddenly they saw a tall, broad-shouldered young man striding in their direction from the peasant cottages. They stopped and stared at him from a distance:

He looked like a young, well-to-do doctor who’d only recently completed his university studies but hadn’t yet started to practice.

Quite evidently this was the midwife’s guest, and it was impossible to surmise where he was going now.

Mirel, after all, hadn’t been at home for over a week. And on the outskirts of the town, which he was now approaching, there was no one to be seen, apart from a small group of Jews waiting outdoors for the Sabbath afternoon service to begin. He glanced at them from some way off, and they glanced back at him. All were silent, but when he’d passed, the men, their faces wreathed in smiles, followed his retreating figure with their eyes and started talking about him:

—What does he write, you say?

—Leaflets.

—Well, and why not? For my part, let him go on writing.

2.11

Just before sunset on an altogether dry, somewhat chilly day, Mirel unexpectedly returned from the provincial capital and found her father’s house in the disorder that always attended preparations for Passover. All the furniture had been moved from its accustomed place to one central location and covered with sheets. Gitele was negotiating their pay with the old house painter who’d whitewashed the ceilings, and with the two peasant women who’d spent the whole day washing the windows and the doors, and she’d engaged these two women to come on the following day as well. At home, meanwhile, there was news:

Very early that morning Reb Gedalye had returned from the capital, where he’d succeeded in entering into partnership with the Count’s son-in-law to run the extensive Kashperivke woods. Several times that day he’d told Gitele about this auspicious new business venture, and now, because of it, he’d closeted himself with the bookkeeper in his study, where the cleansing had been completed. There his confidant sat at the desk deep in thought and Reb Gedalye paced up and down next to him in his fur-lined slippers, repeatedly stopping with his back to the unheated stove to peer over the tops of his gold-rimmed glasses at his bookkeeper:

—Not so? A fortune could be made from the profits of these woods.

And more:

—Could he imagine how much raw material could be extracted from the three hundred desyatins* in the center!

Because Reb Gedalye had succeeded in calming the household and bringing his affairs back into order, because he was now wholly engrossed in these affairs and thought about nothing else, Mirel grew steadily convinced that being engaged to be married and suffering because of it served no purpose for anyone here in the house, that everyone cared about this as little as she herself had cared about it some few weeks before, and that the wedding clothes she’d just ordered in the provincial capital were thus all as superfluous as the fact that she’d traveled there at all and lingered on for a full eight days:

—She hadn’t needed this contrived trip to the capital; from the very beginning she ought to have said that the betrothal party was foolish and that there would never be a wedding.

The bookkeeper was no longer in the study, where a lamp had now been lit. All alone in the silence there, Reb Gedalye sat at the desk, poring over the balance sheets of his new woods, and she was still pacing about in her own room, which now seemed oddly unfamiliar after the eight days she’d spent away from home. Unable either to lie down or to sit at the little table, she thought about what she would soon do:

—She’d go to Reb Gedalye in his study and tell him: “Of course no one needs this foolish betrothal any longer. The wedding will never take place no matter what, so let there be an end to it.”

She thought about this for a long time, pacing about in her room, and finally went to see Reb Gedalye in his study. She even had her opening words prepared:

—I need to speak to you about something.

But there, in Reb Gedalye’s study, something overcame her and she unexpectedly found it difficult to utter another word. At first Reb Gedalye did not look round at her, clumsily manipulating the beads on the abacus and repeating the sums aloud. When he did finally interrupt his work and turn to face her, she was suddenly struck by the tranquility that had returned to him in the last few days. Now the continuation of this tranquility depended solely on her.