Beside herself with indignation, she went back to her own house and began casting infuriated glances at her husband’s study, where he was dealing with some businessmen. She restrained herself from speaking during the midday meal, waiting until Yankev-Yoysef went off to lie down in their bedroom, whereupon she sat down next to him near the bed and began whispering to him as quietly as though someone were strangling her:

—Do you understand? I mean, what kind of wife is she for Shmulik, for pity’s sake?

—Yes, and all the things she does … And all her trips to that fine cousin of hers, God help us … And the fact that I have to run her house for her, and try to remember that her ceilings have to be repainted … What’s the meaning of it? I even have to send out her chickens to be slaughtered.

The powerful, dark-haired master of the house, who had the crafty eyes of a thief, lay on the bed in his white shirtsleeves smoking his cigarette in silence, frequently glancing warily at the door as though afraid that someone was eavesdropping. He made her no reply. He’d apparently resolved long before that Shmulik had chosen badly and wished to bring all discussion about it to an end as soon as possible. But she, that shortsighted dolt, was still quite unable to calm herself, continually blinked her eyes and whisperingly came to a decision:

—Nothing makes any impression on her … It’s clear enough what would’ve happened if she’d made her match with other people … But she’s made it with us … And Shmulik’s as peace-loving as a dove … So there’s nothing to do … We have to grin and bear it! Keep quiet … as though we’ve seen nothing.

A few days later the mother-in-law went into Mirel’s house with two house painters whom she’d engaged. Paying no attention to Mirel, who was lying on the sofa, she took the workmen from one room to another, pointing out the ceilings to them:

—D’you see? After the furniture’s been moved out into the dining room, the ceiling in the study must be painted first; then the dining room furniture must be moved into the study and the dining room ceiling attended to.

Without turning round, the mother-in-law took herself off and the artisans immediately carried all the study furniture into the dining room and set to work.

Very soon the house began to stink of oil paint and a mixture of ochre and English lamp-black.* The disorder grew from day to day. The disarranged rooms were cleaned neither during the day nor at night while the house painters went on doing their jobs, slowly covering one ceiling after another.

They were by no means old men, these two Jewish workmen. They wore embroidered shirts under their paint-stained overalls, and the devil made sure that girls were still beguiled by them and by the work they did. All day the two of them stood on their makeshift scaffolding drawing lines with their rulers, applying paint with their brushes, deriving pleasure from their labor and whistling sad journeyman melodies to accompany it.

A while later, one of the painters had occasion to pass through the adjoining room to collect some necessary piece of equipment and noticed something. Returning to his work fairly excited, he looked round carefully to make sure no one but his companion was there, and asked him with a suggestive wink:

—The mistress of the house isn’t bad-looking, eh?

He kept her in mind all the time he was seated on the high scaffolding, smoking cigarettes and sharing one of his schoolboy stories with his companion:

—When was this? … It must’ve been about eight years ago … At the time we were working in the administrative village† of Kloki and the master of the house had a young daughter-in-law, a sly, frisky little thing she was.

In the disarranged room next door, Mirel went on lying on the sofa in her wide, low-cut dressing-gown with its bell-shaped sleeves, wrapped herself in her thin shawl, and conjured up images of various places to which she might travel once she’d left this house:

—Wherever that might be, nowhere could be worse than here.

All around her stood the beds, both wardrobes with their mirrored doors and the armchairs from the salon together with the huge washtub from which the sodden floor-rag hadn’t been removed for days on end. Everything here resembled a bizarre Passover eve that had fallen in the middle of the month of Elul.* All that afternoon the surrounding air had been gloomy and overcast, the thoughts in her mind hazy and confused, and this day seemed to be taking place not in the present but five or six years earlier.

On top of all this came the episode with the book: the arrival in the post of Herz’s new book in Hebrew which reeked of new paper, of fresh printers’ ink, and of the unknown young man himself.

One day the postman had delivered it to the in-laws’ house with the rest of the mail. Everyone there had clustered around it, as afraid as if it were a living thing. Someone noticed something in the firm masculine hand in which the address had been written:

—Just a minute … Shmulik’s name’s been deliberately omitted from the address.

And more:

—What else could be expected? Didn’t they all know well enough that, from girlhood on, young women like Mirel always had to have young male admirers?

Regarded by everyone as the surreptitiously discarded, living fruit of a sin Mirel and someone else had committed together, the book lay on the table for a long time without anyone knowing what to do with it:

—Shouldn’t we send it to Mirel before Yankev-Yosl comes home?

When they did eventually send it to her, she became strangely agitated and confused. She dressed quickly and set off to the telegraph office but almost immediately turned back and sent her maid over to her mother-in-law’s house with clear instructions:

—She was to ask for a letter over there, did she understand? A letter ought to have come, she was to say, together with the book.

From then on there was much putting of heads together at secret meetings in the mother-in-law’s house.

—There was nothing else to be done. In the end they’d have to discuss this with Shmulik and convince him that this was no life for him.

All understood:

No one dared tell him outright that what had taken place between himself and Mirel that Saturday night was common knowledge; everyone understood this. Hence a suitably diplomatic intermediary was sought who could be sent to the distillery, and great reliance was placed on the advice of the former student Miriam:

—Perhaps Miriam’s right … Perhaps the best person is young Lyubashits, the student?

One evening, just before sunset, the young student Lyubashits returned from the distillery covered with dust. He wore the smile of one who out of the goodness of his heart had discharged an errand that was improper for him, and he related, in the private room into which he was led:

—Yes, he’d discussed the matter with Shmulik there.

Almost all the adult members of the household, with the mother-in-law and the former student Miriam at their head, were gathered around. Care was taken to prevent eavesdropping, all the little children were chased away, and everyone hung on his every word:

—Was he saying that Shmulik’s eyes had filled with tears when he recognized Lyubashits?

Like all members of his family, the young student Lyubashits was a tall, strapping, big-boned blond fellow. With his broad shoulders pressed against the safe, he looked tired from his journey. In sum, he was a bit of a poet, shaved closely in consequence of having published some of his verses in a student journal, was given to excessive theorizing about every subject under the sun, and had independent views about Tolstoy. But when he spoke about Shmulik, his face relaxed into the same childlike smile it took on when he was drunk, and it seemed as though soon, very soon, tears would gather in his own enormous blue eyes:

As soon as he’d recognized Lyubashits, Shmulik had apparently said:

—Just look—it’s Shoylik!* What brings you here, Shoylik?

Shmulik appeared to believe that everyone already knew why he didn’t come home and was embarrassed, even with Shoylik. But later, while they’d been strolling over the distillery and Lyubashits had mentioned Mirel’s name, Shmulik had taken him by the arm and begun speaking so quietly and strangely that it wrung Lyubashits’s heart:

—You understand, Shoylik?—he’d remarked—Mirel is a torment … Unquestionably a torment, but if she wants to, she can be good.

Then with tears in his eyes, Shmulik had fallen silent. Yes … and then he’d taken Lyubashits by the arm once more and said:

—Don’t think there are many such Mirels in the world, Shoylik … It’s only that she considers me a fool … A complete fool.

3.5

Shmulik did indeed not return home; he went straight from the distillery to Warsaw with the oxen.

Frequent telegrams from him arrived at the father-in-law’s house reporting on the unusually lively state of the sizable market. Like an experienced merchant, he’d abruptly raised the price, decided to stay on with his oxen for a second week, and asked that the heaviest beasts from all their oxen stalls, both those in the vicinity and those farther away, be sent to him as soon as possible.

This matter was discussed several times a day in the father-in-law’s study. Even the little children had been allowed to come in, and an opinion was jokingly sought even from the youngest, a freckle-faced six-year-old lad who reeked of the stables and whose little backside the mother-in-law frequently thrashed:

—What do you say, little rascal? Shall we send the oxen?

Everyone was genuinely in high spirits:

—No question—when God helps and the market is favorable, one can earn a fortune.

The mother-in-law devised a pretext on which to enter Mirel’s little house, ostensibly to check that the ceilings weren’t being painted too dark. She found Mirel lying on the sofa in the disarranged dining room, told her that Shmulik was in Warsaw and that a letter was presently being written to him:

—Yes, so what message should be added from her, from Mirel?

Mirel shrugged her shoulders with indifference.

—Nothing … She had nothing to write to him.

Since she was now standing with her face to the window, she didn’t see the expression on her mother-in-law’s face as the woman left the house. Instead, as Mirel returned to the sofa, the sense that this house was repulsive to her returned as well, together with the recollection that she ought to do something:

—She had to find a way of leaving this house.

Overcome with restlessness, she found herself unable to stay in one place. For several successive days she kept going into town, wandering about on her own for long periods of time, and finally, as evening drew on, making her way to the quiet street with its long central island of trees where her cousin Ida Shpolianski lived. She felt she ought to tell Ida, who paid no attention to the derisive rumors that were circulating about her in town:

—Listen, Ida, you’ve certainly thrown off all conventional restraints, but what would you say were you to be told: Mirel’s cast Shmulik off and no longer wishes to live with him?

As it happened, most evenings Ida was never to be found in her luxurious home, but was freely and openly taking her pleasure somewhere with the young, enormously wealthy officer whom Mirel had once met here at sundown, and neither of the two housemaids knew where she’d gone or when she’d be back.

All five rooms were dark and quiet. Almost everywhere lay large new carpets on which fashionable soft furniture was arranged throughout, and all of it seemed pensive, as though possessed of many secrets about the mistress of the house, that well-known woman about town who was unfaithful to her husband while he was earning huge sums of money in the distant provinces of the Russian empire; about the fact that he, the master of the house, would eventually be made aware of this, and this home would be destroyed.

After some hours of waiting and lazing about on the silk chaise longue in Ida’s bedroom, she finally left her cousin’s apartment feeling like some kind of vagabond idler.