He stretched the whole of his sleepy body and smiled at her gently and good-naturedly:

—Mirele, will you come across to Father’s, Mirele?

Without looking round at him, she immediately strode into the dining room. A few Sabbaths before, in response to the same question, she’d retorted: “He’d find his own way there without her.” He wasn’t too much of a child to remember this answer and to stop pestering her.

Later, after Shmulik and his father had gone off to Sabbath afternoon prayers, from the dining room she suddenly heard the sharp ring of the new doorbell and the rapid entry of someone making equally rapid inquiries about Shmulik:

—Not here? When will he be back? Has he gone to his father for the last meal of the Sabbath?

This was Shmulik’s cousin, Big Montchik.* In honor of the Sabbath he was wearing a brand-new gray suit and brand-new patent-leather shoes to match. All in all, with the distracted expression of a busy merchant and the energetic frame of a big-city wheeler-dealer, he was in haste to return to the center of the bustling metropolis from which he’d only just come down, as though waiting for him there was not some dishonestly acquired little profit but some entirely new and important debauchery. Indeed, his huge black preoccupied eyes now gleamed even more than usual. Yet for quite some time he sat bareheaded next to Mirel, behaved toward her as though with a newly acquired relative with whom he wished to be on comfortably familiar terms, and told lengthy stories about himself and Shmulik, about the Lithuanian melamed† with whom they’d studied in Uncle Yankev-Yosl’s house when they were children, and about the doves they used to breed in those days, in the very wing in which Mirel and Shmulik now lived.

Once they had as many as ten pairs of doves at one time, so they took a male from one pair and a female from another, locked them up in the small room that was now Shmulik’s study, and had waited to see what would come of it. Could Mirel believe that? Such scamps as they were! And he, Montchik, wasn’t yet ten years old at the time.

To be sure, the notion of locking up an unpaired male and female in the same room had been his, Montchik’s—he’d proposed it, and Shmulik had carried it out. Clearly this was the reason he exuded the air of one well versed in the sins of the big city. And many such sins, it would seem, still lay before him, which explained why he was so powerful, so energetic, and so preoccupied.

Mirel barely heard what he was telling her. Lying on the sofa, she stared at him with enormous eyes and thought that in all her life she’d never before encountered a character like this. Once, during the first days of her arrival, he’d bumped into her in the very middle of the city’s noisiest street and had accompanied her for several blocks. That was when she’d seen for herself that he had a great many acquaintances, both Christian and Jewish, that he was on familiar terms with virtually all of them, and that he shouted after some of them:

—Come and see me this evening; I need you.

—Be sure to be at home at eleven o’clock, d’you hear? At exactly eleven o’clock.

In her mother-in-law’s house they thought the world of this preoccupied young man. Every time he snatched a moment to come down from town to visit them, they surrounded him and peppered him with questions:

—Montchik, why didn’t you come last Sabbath?

—Montchik, Auntie Pearl’s sent you a gift from Warsaw—have you seen it?

—Montchik, will you come to the distillery with us on Sunday?

For some reason, all the Zaydenovskis were excessively fond of him, and since none of them ever remembered that they’d often described him in the same terms to every new member of the family, they’d all start simultaneously repeating that he was very clever, very shrewd, and had been possessed of remarkable intelligence from childhood on, and that he knew a great deal, a very great deal, even though at the age of eighteen he’d abandoned his studies at the commercial school and with his clever head had manipulated his way into some kind of prosperous merchant partnership of which he was still to this day the principal. In the metropolis he had by now acquired a reputation, considerable credit, and a wide acquaintance, and people often sought business advice from him. When he’d run out of things to say here, and, holding his hat in his hand, was ready to take his leave, he suddenly remembered one of these seekers after advice, and delayed his departure a while longer:

—This very week a young man who’d come to seek his advice mentioned that he was an acquaintance of Mirel’s; he was good-looking, this young man, very good-looking indeed; he looked like a Romanian. Wait, what was his surname? … Hel … Hel … Heler, yes, Heler. He wanted to publish a penny newspaper in Russian here, but all told he had a capital of only three thousand rubles. Well! … It wouldn’t work; it wasn’t a viable business proposition.

Mirel’s heart immediately started pounding and almost died within her.

Montchik might’ve mentioned this encounter in passing, simply by chance. But then again, he might’ve had some intention in doing so … He might’ve been sent by her mother-in-law.

For quite some time after Montchik had left, she lay where she was, so calm and detached that she surprised even herself. But quite suddenly she began to resent the fact that Heler moved in the same circles as her husband’s relatives and spoke of her, Mirel. She no longer wanted to think about him and, seemingly in anger, rapidly began dressing in order to go that quiet lane on which he was waiting for her:

—No … This had to come to an immediate end; she was disgusted by the whole sorry tale. He’d have to stop building hopes about her, Mirel.

As always Nosn Heler was waiting for her next to the closed post office located on the quiet lane, tensely overwrought and afraid that she wouldn’t come. Every now and then he screwed up his eyes and gazed intently toward the farthest end of the street on which the distant low-hanging sun still blazed down, inflaming the yellowing leaves on the surrounding trees and the roofs on the nearby houses. From time to time some gilded person emblazoned with red-gold sunshine approached from that direction—but it wasn’t Mirel. When he did finally catch sight of her coming toward him, he failed to recognize her and didn’t believe that it could really be she. He remembered that he ought to tell her something about himself, about the unendurable days he’d lived through, about the fact that he could no longer go on in this way. He was strongly attracted to her slender figure and to her face; he wanted to weep.

But coming up to her, he noticed that her expression was sad, severe, and estranged, and he instantly forgot what he wanted to tell her. For a while they stood opposite each other without speaking. While his head was bowed, Mirel glanced at him but said nothing. He heard her draw a long, quiet breath and slowly start walking. He, too, gave a sigh of sorts and followed her.