The house was very dark and quiet. Somewhere in the kitchen at the other end of the corridor the maid, who’d fallen into a deep sleep still fully dressed, began snoring loudly, and the cat began tumbling a cube of sugar over the floor, with the result that Mirel was unable to drift off into forgetfulness. The end of her last thought kept repeating itself in her drowsy mind:

—When they failed to find it, they eventually took their own lives, leaving behind half-foolish, half-perceptive notes.

She couldn’t recall how long this restless dream lasted.

Half-asleep she suddenly felt a cold hand brush against her bare back. Her whole body shuddered and she opened her eyes.

The bedroom was brightly lit by the study lamp that had been carried in, and next to the bed, in his underwear, stood Shmulik, hunched over, trembling and smiling. He’d been aroused by the suggestive tales he’d been hearing all evening about the pregnant little newlywed from Kursk.

For a while Mirel stared at him in fright.

—What do you need here, Shmulik?

Very soon the reason he was standing here next to her bed became clear to her, and a flame of stubbornness and resentment instantly kindled in her eyes:

—Shmulik, take a pillow and lie down in the study at once.

A pause.

—Do you hear what I say, Shmulik?

Without moving, hunched over and half-naked, Shmulik still stood there, trembling and grinning foolishly. But now Mirel had the button of the electric bell in her hand and was ringing without pause for the snoring maid in the kitchen. The shrilling bell seemed set to shatter the whole house to smithereens before the maid’s bare feet could be heard slapping over the floor. Then in discomfited embarrassment Shmulik took up a pillow and went off to his study. The maid carried the lamp out of the bedroom and extinguished it, and darkness and desolation once again descended on the house. Someone, it seemed, was weeping with suppressed sobs torn from the very depths of the heart. But for anyone who might have sat up in bed and listened attentively, all that could be heard was the cat tumbling the cube of sugar over the floor and the regular breathing of the snoring maid.

3.4

The next day Mirel rose late, at about eleven o’clock in the morning.

From the kitchen came the sound of rapid chopping, and in the courtyard the britzka that had conveyed Shmulik to the distillery as dawn was breaking had already been unharnessed. The father-in-law’s most trusted servant, his coachman, spent a long time fussing over the returned britzka, shouted at Shmulik’s little brother for getting under the horse’s feet and at the mother-in-law’s Gentile maid for throwing dirty kitchen water into the freshly swept courtyard. The mother-in-law herself stood there wondering why Shmulik had taken himself off to the distillery so early and inquiring after a letter from the yelling coachman. A short while later, when Mirel passed through the courtyard, no one was there. By then the quiet of the working week rested over all the locked stables, the coachman was sitting somewhere in the kitchen and for some reason only the unharnessed, well-sprung britzka, with its shaft still in place, stood in the middle of the freshly swept courtyard wordlessly calling to mind Shmulik, who’d gone away:

—The night before he’d stood next to her bed in his underwear and for a long time had been unwilling to move away … Now he was ashamed to look her in the face and would therefore be in no haste to return from the distillery.

Presently she returned to the dining room, wrapped herself in her shawl, and lay down on the sofa. So much heaviness and disgust on her soul left her feeling as though her heart had been snatched out and steeped in filth. From under the overcast skies outdoors a bleak new Sunday stared in, spreading its single tedious thought all around:

—A new week … a bleak week … a dreary week.

A dull ache gripped the back of her head all the way down her neck in consequence of the agitated, sleepless night she’d passed. The pain was weak and ill-defined, as with the onset of typhus, her eyelids drooped of their own accord, and in her drowsy, fuddled consciousness confused thoughts came and went, merging the sound of the chopper that echoed from the kitchen with reflections on her own lost life, the dull pain in the back of her head, and an awareness that she’d lie here on the sofa for a long, long time:

—She’d lie dozing here all day.

Drifting in and out of sleep on the sofa there, she started awake, noticed the table laid, rose, and attempted to eat something, but finding herself unable to do so, lay down and dozed off again, opening her eyes only toward sunset to see:

An ill wind had blown in a young man, a synagogue cantor who was passing through, a tall, thin fellow in a short, worn little surtout with a dirty paper collar and a tuning fork in his pouch. Speaking with a nasal drawl, he inquired after Shmulik as after an influential trustee of a synagogue:

—In general, did Madame know when the Master would return?

—Ponimayete-li, was it Madame’s understanding that the Master would return for the Sabbath?

She felt not the slightest obligation to spend time being bored in his company, to inhale the stench of rotting salted fish that he diffused around himself, or to keep answering him in exactly the same way she’d answered him before:

—I don’t know.

—No.

—I don’t know.

Earlier, under his very eyes, she’d attempted to air the room and had opened all the windows in the hope that this hint would help. But since he still refused to budge, she finally left him on his own there, went outdoors, and seated herself on the steps of the verandah.

Slowly, very slowly, the darkness of early evening drew on, spreading silence over the scattered houses on the sandy outskirts of the suburb. By now there were no longer any passersby, and the air was utterly still. Somewhere far away, near the barn stacked with bales of straw situated opposite the church’s large courtyard, a threshing machine worked on the priest’s dried-out grain as night fell. To the left, between the father-in-law’s trees where a little earlier a horde of relatives had appeared to see Sholem Zaydenovski on his way, the mother-in-law could be heard thrashing one of her little boys. The child could be heard struggling and screaming, and as she struck the blows the mother-in-law went on and on repeating in her hoarse, dull-witted voice:

—One dared not speak about a mother that way … One dared not speak about a mother that way … That wasn’t the way to speak about a mother.

The screams of the weeping child evoked a clear picture of the way she was holding the boy bent over her knee and peering shortsightedly at the place she was beating. This prompted the thought that this tall, stupid woman was utterly without understanding, had no idea of how to treat children, and ruined them as a result; that in exactly the same way some fifteen or sixteen years before she’d thrashed Shmulik, the man who was currently her husband, and had yelled at him too, exactly as she was doing now:

—One dared not speak to a mother that way … One dared not speak to a mother that way …

For this reason, because there was now no doubt that Shmulik basically needed a wife who would thrash his children just as his mother had thrashed him, she suddenly felt relieved of a heavy burden, and her light heart was suddenly filled with the half-forgotten hope:

—Wait! … Nothing at all bound her to him, to Shmulik, or to this house, and she, Mirel … she could leave whenever she chose.

Now all she needed was to devise a plan.

An event that had taken place in the provincial capital some years before came to mind:

A stubborn, uncommunicative young wife, a daughter-in-law of the wealthy Dizhur family, had left her accustomed place early one morning, had spoken no word either to her husband or to her parents-in-law before her departure, and had never returned again.

This was soon known all over the city, and in well-to-do homes jokes were made:

—Never mind, she’ll come back … With God’s help, she’ll show up for a meal one Sabbath or another.

But the young wife did not return, and to this day no trace of her could be found … No one knew what had become of her … But knowing this had now become an absolute necessity for her, Mirel … She’d work it out:

—Where might this young wife have got to?

Sending not the slightest information about himself, Shmulik stayed on at the distillery from which he was preparing to travel to Warsaw with the herd of oxen he’d acquired before Passover. In this connection, the overseer of the oxen stables, Reb Bunem, came to town. He was a short, stocky little man with a very red neck whose clothes were always greasy: he wore a long caftan in summer, and made it a habit never to forget what his employer had told him. He’d brought along a number of stable lanterns for repair, and purchased a great many short lengths of rope together with several pood* of rock salt for the oxen to lick on the road. Carrying in with him the smell of the distillery’s fermenting mash, he also called at the house, found Mirel lying alone on the sofa, and delivered the message with which he’d been charged:

—The young master said to give him the ledger from before Pesach, that’s what he said.

Mirel heard him out without making the slightest movement from her place, and sent him o. to the kitchen.

There the maid, apparently under the impression that what was wanted was some sort of vessel used only for Passover preparations, stared at him wide-eyed:

—How was she supposed to know, since she hadn’t been in service here before Passover? … He’d better ask the coachman Theodor in the courtyard.

The little man wandered up and down in the courtyard for so long that he was finally summoned to the old master in the big house who demanded to know:

—What? Hadn’t the young mistress handed over the ledger yet?

With her shawl over her shoulders, the mother-in-law finally went over in person to Mirel’s house, rummaged about among the books in the study closet until she found the one she was looking for, peered into it with her shortsighted eyes, and read over the first line, which was written in Hebrew, with the delivery of someone reading from the Women’s Bible:†

—Statement of account for oxen purchased during the months of Shevat, Adar, and Nisan.†

—Here, take it—she said to the overseer in a deliberately loud voice, and left without turning to Mirel.