It could last no longer than a few minutes more. All that was needed was for her to utter a few words and he would again be profoundly miserable, frozen in his seat like a mourner who’d suffered yet another blow.

For a while she stood opposite, looking at him. And then, not responding to his question, she left the study and went back through the disarranged rooms. She postponed the matter for a while, was angry at someone, and consoled herself:

—The wedding will never take place, no matter what. The engagement contract will certainly be annulled very soon.

That evening, she sat among familiar guests in the midwife Schatz’s well-lighted cottage, and there, for the first time, she felt alone and alien.

Apart from the teacher Poliye and the midwife herself, also present was the Hebrew teacher Isak Shabad, as swarthy as a Gypsy, and Esther Finkel, the daughter of that local Jew who remained arrogant despite being unemployed and having come down in the world. She was a tall young woman with a long, sad face, who was now in her third year of study in Paris.

Burdened with a wife, the Hebrew teacher had for a long time enjoyed no social contact with anyone apart from his young pupils and, worn out after a full day’s work, he seemed to be quietly dozing to one side; this was the third time he’d waited for the midwife’s guest, the Hebrew poet, who’d left the house well before sundown and was expected back at any moment.

The young women paid him no attention. All three of them sat disconsolately next to Mirel on the little sofa next to the unheated stove, and all of them ignored her. None of them wanted to insult her, but on the other hand none of them had anything to say to her.

Esther Finkel spoke of the profession for which the Parisian university would qualify her in eight months’ time:

—In general, she could hope that one way or another she’d push on through life, and as for happiness … in Paris one grew out of the habit of thinking about excessive happiness.

Esther Finkel’s last words seemed to have some connection with Mirel. No one knew for certain exactly how, but the all-pervasive silence around the burning lamp evoked memories of some quiet, lonely event, one that had taken place on a Saturday evening two weeks before when the prospective groom and in-laws had been guests in Reb Gedalye’s house and the Husiatyn Hasidim had sung table hymns in the twilight during the third meal of the Sabbath.* At that time, these three young women had been strolling abreast in the fiery sunset outside the shtetl. Each was oppressed by a yearning sorrow, but together they’d all come to the same decision about Mirel:

—A young woman who was now capable of finding herself at sundown in a house where Hasidim were singing table hymns around a fiancé whom she’d met through a matchmaker … Basically, what could possibly be worth thinking about such a person?

The midwife’s guest, the Hebrew poet Herz, returned only around nine o’clock that evening. In his dark blue suit he sat at the head of the table looking down at his glass of tea. Smiling in concert with his expression was the green glint in his small, deeply set eyes, and this smile revealed something about him:

—You see, I’m a particularly clever person and believe very little in sentimentality and even less in my own talent. But now you see me at the very moment at which I’ve done something foolish: in the course of making a trip abroad, I’ve come down to visit a perfectly commonplace young woman who interests me perhaps even less than you do.

Because of his arrival, the silence in the room grew heavy and oppressive. The young women kept silent, and as a result appeared more serious and refined than they actually were. Esther Finkel had already risen to her feet, donned her overcoat, and made preparations to go home. Yesterday the midwife had informed her that Herz strongly disliked female university students, so now she was furious at leaving, especially as she recalled:

—In Paris she was personally acquainted with some of the Yiddish and Russian poets there, and none of them was as arrogant as this tall fellow with his short, fair hair.

Meanwhile the Hebrew teacher had suddenly grown excessively alert and voluble, holding forth in what he took to be a serious discussion, and expressed himself wholly unable to comprehend:

—Why should Herz be so indifferent to his own poems, many of which had been published in various anthologies?

Since Herz paid absolutely no attention to what he said, the Hebrew teacher was rendered pitiable, something he himself was quite unaware of as he went on arguing instead that what he was saying was literal truth:

—He could bring some ten or fifteen boys from his Talmud Torah* here tomorrow, all of whom could recite by heart Herz’s poem, “On the Approach of Dawn.”

Herz rose to his full height from behind the table and began pacing about the room. The twinkling green glint in his eyes had vanished. Now he wanted to do something entirely different and couldn’t because Shabad and Mirel, neither of whom interested him, were still in the room. He started whispering in the midwife’s ear, asking her to rid him of Shabad who was boring him. Then Mirel reacted: something seemed to irk her, and she rose abruptly, cutting the teacher short:

—Would Shabad be willing to see her home soon?

As things turned out, in the end it was not the teacher Shabad but the midwife’s guest Herz who accompanied her home, and he had nothing to say to her. In the darkness enveloping the shtetl as it awaited the coming of Passover, the air was chilly and silent so that the last words Shabad had addressed to Mirel went on reverberating too loudly in her ears:

—Take her fiancé, for instance … Her fiancé, it’s said, knew Hebrew very well.

The darkness erased both the long, well-worn pathway and Mirel’s lissome figure, at which Herz continually stole glances: the figure of a well-to-do young woman who was engaged to be married, who was tightly sheathed in a black autumn overcoat, said nothing, avoided glancing at him, and bore within her the secret of her unknown, solitary life.

Eventually he asked:

—It would seem that she was very shortly to be married?

Then the congeries of Mirel’s despondency deepened, and depressing thoughts began filling her mind:

—The wedding … It’s still uncertain … on the whole, there’s still some doubt …

With no wish to articulate these words she did not look round at him, but he repeated his question. Resentment suddenly flared up in her; provoked, she responded somewhat truculently:

—She wanted to ask something of him … He could surely do her this small kindness and keep quiet for a little while; there wasn’t much farther to go now before they reached the first of the town’s houses, so very soon she’d no longer be afraid to walk on alone.

Now his curiosity about her was aroused, and once again the green glint twinkled in his eyes. He accompanied her much farther than the first of the town’s houses, right up to the verandah of her father’s house, in fact. But she no longer so much as glanced at him, and disappeared through the open gates of the verandah without even bidding him good night.

The following morning, returning from the post office at the opposite end of the town, Mirel met Herz walking there alone. His face now seemed to her as familiar as if she’d known him a long time. He stood at the side of the road, staring at a humble dwelling in which matzos were being baked and listening to the bustle that came from within.

When he caught sight of her, his eyes began smiling. He approached her and said:

—He’d thought about her the night before, and spoken of her at length with the midwife—the fact that she’d bidden him be silent the night before pleased him.

For a while she stood facing him, looking him over. The way he spoke created the impression that he was someone who unquestionably knew much more than others about people and about life; that, at least, was the way he regarded himself, and he wrote books about it. Only it never occurred to him to talk about that to her, this young woman engaged to be married whom he’d met here in the shtetl. That was why he spoke to her so superficially and always with a flippant remark.