Recognizing him, she actually trembled and pressed herself close to Montchik as though in fear:

—Could Montchik understand why that man over there was staring so?

For a moment Montchik roused himself from his commercial cogitations but failed to understand her question. He glanced around abstractedly but noticed nothing. Walking at her side, he soon lost himself in thought over the molasses factory in Kuropoliye, which was doing badly and was about to be sold:

—The week before he’d succeeded in bringing together the Kuropoliye shareholders and the buyers … If their director weren’t such a swine and bribe-taker, something positive might come out of all this the following week.

Suddenly he stopped and pressed two fingers to his frowning forehead:

—Just a moment … For the life of him, he couldn’t remember whether or not he’d signed the telegram he’d sent to the director earlier that day!

He felt distinctly uneasy and glanced at Mirel with an expression of great pleading, as though he desperately needed her compassion:

—Mirel had to excuse him. He had to slip into the nearby telegraph office for a moment to make an inquiry.

Mirel led him to the telegraph office herself, and there roundly rebuked him for his unwillingness to leave her outside on her own:

—What was Montchik making a performance for? … He was to go into the telegraph office that instant. She’d find her way home without him.

All the time she was talking to Montchik, and subsequently when she was left alone on the deserted sidewalk looking around her, she was drawn to Nosn Heler. The man himself was still standing at the intersection following her with his eyes. He wanted nothing; he was simply unhappy—and he followed her with his eyes.

Suddenly she turned in the direction of the suburb in which she lived and swiftly seated herself in a droshky.*

She was annoyed at the sentiment that drew her to him, at herself for continuing to drift about in the Zaydenovskis’ house, and at the fact that not a single useful thing had come from anything she’d ever done in her life.

—She needed some means of freeing herself from Shmulik and couldn’t find it.

—She’d been wandering about all over town with Montchik for several days now and had been considering asking him about such means, yet this was totally uncalled for and stupid … Because Montchik … Montchik was Shmulik’s near relation and loved him. And apart from that …

—What could he possibly tell her about this?

Unaware that she’d crossed the bridge leading to her suburb and had reached the farthermost street on which she lived, she suddenly noticed that all the windows of her house, except those of the bedroom, were brightly lit, boasting to the midnight darkness outdoors:

—We have guests, guests, guests.

Astonished, she peered in through these illuminated windows:

—Perhaps her father or her mother … She’d not written them a single letter since her marriage.

But while she was still in the passageway, after the maid had locked the front door behind her, she soon noticed that nothing untoward had occurred and that there were no guests: only Shmulik, after a month of tiring travel from Warsaw, had returned home. By coming back so oddly unannounced and somewhat self-consciously, he showed that he knew: no particular pleasure awaited him here.

His hair and beard had been newly and closely cut, as though the next day were the eve of Passover. The new light-colored suit he wore had been made in Warsaw; his new shoes squeaked. All in all, he looked as pristine, animated, and fresh as though he’d only just come from the bathhouse, as though during the time he’d spent in his distillery and in Warsaw he’d taken pains with himself and curbed many of his boyish mannerisms.

Mirel passed through the dining room without glancing at him, shaming him in the eyes of their oxen buyer, a grizzled, grimy old man who sat at the table with stick in hand and eyes inflamed and damaged, exuding the pungent stench of snuff and goat flesh. Mortified, Shmulik looked down and began chewing on a matchstick. Tears sprang to his eyes.

Mirel was now in the brightly lit salon, where she took off her jacket, not knowing why she hadn’t gone directly from the dining room to her unlit bedroom. She tried without success to recall something but remembered only that Shmulik was next door. For some reason she started putting on her jacket again, but immediately removed it and once more passed straight through the dining room to her dark bedroom. There, without taking off her close-fitting silk blouse or tightly laced corset, she immediately lay down on the bed. Hiding her face in both her hands, she began preparing herself for what would soon take place:

—An end … Now an end must come …

Through the silence that reigned in all the surrounding rooms came the sounds of Shmulik pacing slowly across the dining room, the dirty oxen dealer expressing his pleasure at the few thousand rubles’ profit that would now accrue to him as his small commission, and his continued amazement at the extraordinarily buoyant market Shmulik had found:

—The like of such a market, he might venture to say, hadn’t been seen since Napoleon’s time … Could Shmulik believe it? Seven rubles a pood! …

His diseased eyes watered under their inflamed lids. Oblivious of the tears running down his cheeks and in places into his grizzled, dirty, yellowing beard, he stuffed tobacco into his nose and raised his smiling face somewhat higher, like a blind man in a daydream. He was visualizing another such profitable market:

—So if Shmulik really wanted to go to Warsaw again straight after Sukkot,* the eighteen heifers from Popivke would have to be left in the Stolin stables … Also the seven from Yelizavet that were housed near the door … Yes, and the frisky one as well, the one with the big horns … Here was a funny thing: three of them had been there for nearly three and a half months but they hadn’t put on any weight … He’d taken a feel of them there the other week … Yes … No weight to speak of … He disliked oxen like that.

The old man finally left, and Shmulik locked the door behind him. The silence was now total, as in the dead of night. All that could be heard was Shmulik pacing slowly across the dining room, the squeaking of his new shoes disclosing something about their owner’s great heaviness of heart, about the fact that he was now thinking of Mirel lying in bed in her darkened room, that he loved her, wanted to go to her, but couldn’t and didn’t know how; that he felt unhappy, and that this unhappiness would never ever leave him:

—For example here he was, home after an absence of four weeks …

He’d earned a considerable sum of money … He was becoming a very wealthy man … He’d bought and brought home for Mirel blouses and other gifts, thinking they would please her … And his thoughts had taken him even further:

—When he returned home after having been away for six weeks, she’d start speaking to him again …

He was still chewing the matchstick, and there were still tears in his eyes:

—Mirel considered him a fool.

He saw her fresh, sweet-smelling face vividly before him. Now she was lying on her bed in the dark adjoining room with her eyes shut. Perhaps she was already asleep in there, or perhaps not. He knew:

Were he to approach her now, he’d have nothing to say. Yet he went in all the same, slowly, step by step, stopping every few moments, never raising his bowed head, always bearing in mind:

—Mirel considered him a fool.

He crossed the threshold of the darkened room and stopped. The glow from the lights in the dining room reached in here; on the bed opposite, her figure took shape, a slender, lissome figure tightly sheathed in its narrow black dress. Slowly, infinitely slowly, with his head bowed, he went up to her: first one step, then stopping, then another step. Now he saw her face: positioned a little downward, high on the pillow, eyelids shut. For a while he stood beside the bed, his own eyes downcast.

Knowing that he ought to turn back, he nevertheless moved still closer, noticed her partially outstretched hand drooping over the side of the bed, and quietly took hold of it.

Quietly, very quietly, he stood holding her hand, and just as quietly began to weep.

She did not take her hand from his. He heard her speak.