The britzka that always stood in its covered port was no longer there. The stable, too, was empty and locked.

—This could mean only that the britzka had already taken Shmulik to the station; that Reb Gedalye, too, had by now gone o. to the Kashperivke woods; and that no one but Gitele was indoors. Now Mirel was filled with longing to enter that quiet house in which no one was to be found.

In the coolness of her room she’d lie in the same place for a long time, and there in the silence she’d think about herself, about the fact that she was free again, and about the possibility that something of significance might yet happen in her life.

But as soon as she reached the dining room she realized her mistake and instantly forgot everything she’d been thinking a moment before.

The house was full of secrets and alarmed disquiet, all of which had been hidden from the town and from people who were in the habit of calling.

From behind closed doors she was summoned to the salon where everyone was seated around the weeping, despondent figure of Shmulik, urging him far too often to drink up a glass of tea that had long grown cold. The aim was to persuade her, in front of Shmulik, to change her mind, and a few tactful questions had already been prepared for her. But she refused to go in. She locked herself up in her own room feeling intensely oppressed and unwell and reflected:

—She’d actually been foolish and childishly naïve … How could she possibly have imagined that everything could be ended so quickly and easily? …

For a long time discussions went on behind the closed doors of the salon from which Shmulik seldom emerged.

Avreml the rabbi was drawn into the heart of these deliberations, the bookkeeper was not permitted to leave the house, and that good friend of the Zaydenovski family who’d been sent here the previous winter was summoned by telegram.

That evening Reb Gedalye came into Mirel’s room and demanded to know:

—What did she want? Could she actually say what she wanted?

Her expression serious and set, Mirel responded coldly and angrily:

—She wanted nothing … She wanted to be left in peace.

As he turned back to the door leading into the salon, Reb Gedalye remarked quietly, as though afraid that someone might overhear:

—He wants to send for his parents … It simply disgraces us in the eyes of the town.

And more:

—Perhaps she imagined that his business affairs had begun to prosper again? Perhaps she imagined that the fifty percent share he held in the Kashperivke woods would give him more than just enough to pay off his debts and then to live frugally and without anxiety for a few years?

He stood there a while longer, pondering the last words he would speak:

—He was obliged to tell her once again: they, he and Gitele, washed their hands of responsibility for her … She could do whatever she thought best.

All was clear: they, her parents, had done everything they could for her. Now they were insisting she become her own mistress and were saying:

—Do as you please.

After Reb Gedalye had left, the situation weighed on her even more heavily than before, and she began to fear her approaching isolation:

—Reb Gedalye and Gitele would bear witness to her never-ending lonely life; they’d never speak of it, but they’d think: “Well, what could they do about it?”

In her dreams that night she saw the angry faces of Shmulik’s parents who were spending hours packing up here in the house, refusing to speak a word to anyone. Suddenly, as dawn broke, she found herself at a window watching her parents’ buggy driving away. Seated in it were Avrom-Moyshe Burnes and his wife, with Shmulik hunched over between them. His head was bowed, his shoulders shook with suppressed sobbing, and Avrom-Moyshe Burnes and his wife were poking the little Gentile boy who was their driver, urging him to drive ever faster to the railway station.

When she awoke, unusually early, her first thought was that Shmulik’s parents were not yet here in the house. As the effects of the oppressive nightmare began to leave her, she lay in bed thinking that there was still time for her to retract … that she could reconsider and decide to marry Shmulik—not for ever, but temporarily, for a while.

Mirel made her peace with her fiancé, and the wedding was again fixed for the Sabbath after Shavuot.

There was much talk about the two brand-new clauses that Mirel had insisted her fiancé insert into her betrothal contract:

—He shouldn’t expect to live with her as a husband lives with a wife.

—And she … she retained the right to leave him and his house for good whenever she chose.

What further explanations were needed?

Even at this late stage, Shmulik Zaydenovski could without doubt still make the happiest of marriages with someone else. If he’d determined to live the rest of his life with Mirel as though every day were Yom Kippur,* it could only be because he was no less besotted with her than Velvl Burnes had been. But in and of itself the story was extremely intriguing and interesting, and gave ample reason for townsfolk to crowd at windows and doors to watch this couple strolling down the main street—a couple that intended to live not as husband and wife but in some bizarrely different way, as no couple in a shtetl had ever lived before.

For some reason Shmulik now came to seem like some kind of holy man to everyone. As before, he continued to tell long, boring stories to his acquaintances, but now his voice was lowered as though he’d come down in the world, his expression was mournful, and he gave the impression of someone who was fasting. People felt compassion for him, and deplored his luck:

—Just imagine: it’s heartbreaking for him as well … He’s also been gravely misled, and no mistake.

And strolling through the shtetl, Mirel continued to behave so harshly toward him that he dared not even take her arm.

On one occasion, in the middle of the street, she totally ignored him for perhaps half an hour as she stopped to speak with Brokhe, the shoemaker’s wife, who’d been her wet nurse for six months when she was an infant.

—Yes—she remarked very seriously to this Brokhe—your house is falling down. You must definitely rebuild it this summer.

All around, people stood on their verandahs gaping in amazement:

—Did you ever! Is this a way to behave when one goes out walking with a fiancé?

Moreover she insisted that Brokhe’s husband come to measure Shmulik for a pair of shoes, and shouted out loudly after his wife:

—It’s perfectly all right! Your husband’s a good craftsman. He certainly doesn’t stitch leather any worse than the shoemakers in the big cities.

2.14

In the end Shmulik stayed on in the shtetl for fully eight days. He constantly looked downcast and postponed his return from day to day.

When he’d finally left, the wedding’s rapid approach began to be keenly felt in the house, and in the kitchen the oven fire burned day and night. There half a dozen women and more bustled about with their arms wet and bared to the elbows, peeling almonds, beating eggs, pounding cinnamon—all under the supervision of a hoarse caterer from out of town, a woman in blue-tinted spectacles who, like a good Jewish widow, spoke little but expeditiously did much.

As before, Reb Gedalye spent weeks away in the Kashperivke woods.

Meanwhile Gitele’s needy out-of-town relative had taken charge of the domestic economy, and the front rooms were crowded with a considerable number of women’s tailors who’d come down from the provincial capital with Mirel’s half-completed clothes and were finishing the work here in the house.

In town, people still refused to believe that Mirel was truly going to be married, and the subject was still discussed in Avrom-Moyshe Burnes’s dining room:

—Wait and hope. With God’s help she’ll still return the engagement contract to Zaydenovski as well.

For some time now, neither the midwife Schatz nor the pharmacist’s assistant Safyan had called at Reb Gedalye’s house. They went strolling down to the shtetl together every day, grew ever more estranged from Mirel, and no longer found anything of interest in her.

—What could possibly be interesting about her? Had they never seen a young woman about to be married before?

And Mirel, it appeared, was fully aware that she’d recently come down a great deal in the world; was aware of it when she stood all afternoon in the stillness of a room bestrewn with linen; was aware of it when she gathered all this linen together and bent down to pack it into the open trousseau chest. All around her the wedding preparations went steadily forward, and from time to time through the stillness in the cool rooms could be heard the grating rasp of the large tailoring scissors. As he sat bowed over his sewing machine rapidly pumping its treadle with his foot, one of the young tailors’ assistants attempted to break this silence. Wholly unexpectedly, he suddenly burst into fullthroated song:

O my beloved!

On a distant road

I take my way.

Later, the solitary rattle of the rapidly stitching machine was all that could be heard—heard at length, hoarsely and angrily, until it was finally silenced. In the opposite corner, a second machine was preparing to start stitching, while through the open window a mild breeze from the town pressed its way in, blew gently on a curtain high, very high up near the ceiling, and called attention to the fact that in the late April weather outdoors the skies were somewhat overcast and that far, far away in the peasants’ little orchards the fruit trees had been in bloom for some time.

Mirel was summoned to the salon for a fitting. There some ten tailors’ apprentices, suddenly forgetting their upraised needles, stared with idiotic popping eyes at her bare shoulders and arms. And in the newly basted dress she stood before the mirror and remembered:

—She, Mirel, had once been someone and had a very strong aversion to something … and now she was nothing and had come down in the world and had absolutely no idea what would become of her in the future, and yet—absurdly enough—she went on fitting these wedding clothes of hers.

Abruptly she grew agitated and annoyed and pushed aside the tailor who’d been begging her to stand straight.

—What kind of excuses was he trying to make, this tailor? The entire shoulder puckered up, and the dress as a whole was ruined.

One afternoon, one of the young seamstresses from the provincial capital was standing on Reb Gedalye Hurvits’s verandah pressing a new silk dress. She repeatedly picked up the hot pressing iron, sprayed the garment with water from her mouth, and heard one sewing machine pick up the rhythm of stitching from another indoors. Far, far away, near the town bridge to the east, the regular beats of the blacksmith’s hammer died slowly away one after the other, and the shtetl fell silent.