Clearly, she’d come to him for the last time. His whole body trembled. Had he attempted to speak, his teeth might have chattered in his mouth. He looked not at her but opposite, at the closed post office. Its roof still glowed in the last of the sunshine; a missing pane from one of its windows had been patched from within by a sheet of blue paper. Only now did he look at Mirel again, noticing that in the last few days she’d grown very haggard and that there were dark shadows under her eyes; she’d almost certainly locked herself away indoors all that time, and had been tormented by thoughts wholly unrelated to him, Heler. Since this pained him, he said:

—What else could be expected? He was nothing to her, after all …

Mirel made no reply.

They turned left and walked downhill following the wide, crooked street with the cobblestones, which were bigger here than elsewhere to control the rush of water during the rainy season. Presently they reached the end of this winding road, which marked also the city’s farthest extremity, and at this terminal point they sat down on a bench opposite the many windows of an elongated, one-storied foundry. The red fire of the distant setting sun was reflected in its electrically illuminated windowpanes, and, to the right, the high green hills and the clay pits that prevented any further extension of the city steeped themselves in it. There on a knoll near a deserted windmill a tethered horse grazed on the reddened grass, and a Gentile boy in white canvas trousers stood on its crest gazing down at the city. All at once Nosn, sensing that he was growing more agitated from moment to moment, began speaking well before his mind knew what words it wanted his mouth to utter:

—He knew … One thing he knew for certain. He actually wanted to ask her …

Mirel stared at him in astonishment, not knowing what he wanted.

He was still unable to gather the thread of his thoughts. Fancying that Mirel was looking at him as though he were a babbling idiot, he grew even more agitated; he was overcome with a powerful resentment against her that helped him to pull himself together and quite unexpectedly to say what he wanted without fully anticipating it himself.

—This was what he wanted to know: did Mirel love him? She couldn’t deny it. So he asked only one thing of her: why didn’t she want to divorce her husband and marry him, Heler?

Mirel heard him out, shrugged her shoulders, and glanced down at the lines she’d scratched out on the ground with the tip of her parasol:

—Well, and afterward, after the wedding … ?

—Afterward?

Heler did not understand what she meant by this.

—Afterward they’d go abroad … afterward …

Mirel again shrugged her shoulders and rose from the bench.

Heler wanted to make some other affrmation, but she anticipated what he was going to say. She found it distasteful to listen and stopped him coldly:

—She disliked talking too much.

But Heler was now beside himself:

—How on earth had she managed to live for four whole months with her foolish husband? He was ridiculed in town … People openly laughed in his face …

He stopped talking only because Mirel turned to face him with an expression of even greater alienation from him; he regarded it sadly and a shudder seemed to pass though him.

She responded:

—She’d asked him several times not to speak of her husband and to leave him in peace … Her husband was a good man … At least he harmed no one.

She was annoyed at herself. It seemed to her that a great many young wives had spoken the selfsame words about their foolish husbands to the young men with whom they wandered the quiet streets.

—All events he, Heler, wasn’t someone for whom it was worth changing her opinion of her husband.

She had no wish to think about these words, the last she’d spoken in anger before parting from him. Without looking back, she tried hard to put him out of her mind. Walking on at a brisk, regular pace, she wore her customary sorrowful expression as she tried to shake off her agitation and clarify her thoughts:

—Now she’d broken with him, with Heler. And now … Wait … She had to break with someone else, it seemed to her … Yes. With them, with the Zaydenovskis. She had to bring all that to an end very quickly.

Now she had to get home and put this task in hand.

3.3

Late in the evening, after several more hours of aimless wandering, she returned to her little house on the outskirts of the suburb. From its unlighted windows a wave of desolation suddenly swept over her, and she no longer had any desire to ring for the sleeping maid and pass through its darkened rooms. Across the way, festively illuminated this Sabbath evening, the windows of her father-in-law’s big house looked out over the shadowy orchard. She was overcome by an urge to call in, to observe things again in order to convince herself once more of the truth of what she was thinking:

—She derived absolutely no benefit from not yet having left Zaydenovski’s house.

In the end she did go in, and sat for long time desperately bored in the dining room without taking off the jacket she’d worn in the street and without speaking a word to anyone.

As always, virtually the entire extended family had gathered here on this Sabbath evening. They sat on chairs both old and new ranged round the long, spread table and next to the big sideboard, stood in groups beside the glass-fronted heritage chest fitted high up on the wall, or lolled about on the huge, wide sofa over which the room’s sole embroidered picture hung low.

Young and old alike, all these relatives loved Shmulik, regarded him as exceptionally good and tenderhearted, and played games with him as though he were a clever child. All of them knew that Mirel was beautiful and refined, yet none was completely satisfied with her and kept her at a distance, repeatedly remarking among themselves that she wasn’t the one for whom both they and Shmulik had waited these last few years, and continually recalling a very rich local girl, Ita Moreynes, who to this day continued to pine for Shmulik.

—It’s remarkable that only the other day old Moreynes himself specifically said that he’d intended to settle twenty thousand rubles on Shmulik.

Among the relatives that evening was the somewhat disaffected former university student Miriam, tall, handsome, and big-boned, who had a past as a canny, confirmed revolutionary. As recently as eighteen months earlier she’d married a party comrade, the engineer Lyubashits, had a child with him, and immediately after her first lying-in had started putting on weight, smiling excessively, and once more calling regularly at Uncle Yankev-Yoysef’s house. Like all the others, she too said that she’d never been indifferent to Shmulik, smiled at him far too warmly, and kept on remarking on one of his good-natured idiosyncrasies:

—Three weeks before she’d bumped into Shmulik at the main railway station and had introduced him there to his relative, Naum Kluger. Naum was traveling from Kharkov, where only this year he’d just qualified as a doctor …

This particular idiosyncrasy sprang from the fact that good-natured Shmulik was as naïve as a child. This was the first time he’d met this young doctor, a relative whom he’d never so much as seen in his life before, yet he was immediately on familiar terms with him and in all seriousness insisted:

—Naum, come and spend the Sabbath with me, please do, Naum! Have your ticket stamped to show that you’ve interrupted your forward journey, Naum!

From the master’s study, with one of the master’s cigarettes in his mouth, now emerged a middle-aged man, a tall, partially observant matchmaker wearing a surtout too wide for him, a narrow oblong beard, and an expression of Sabbath contentment on his face; he had a predilection for making himself appear more idiotic than he really was.