Dear Lord … here she was—she also lived with a husband!

Miriam rose, gave the baby to the elderly Gentile wet nurse, and set off home. All the way to the streetcar stop, the mother-in-law, who was accompanying her, expatiated on her complaints:

—And another thing: what does she want of Shmulik? Does she want a divorce? If she wants a divorce, let her say so …

Outdoors was cloudy and drizzling. Alone, Mirel stood in the window with a shawl over her head watching the two of them with sadness in her eyes.

Suddenly they stopped and saw:

Descending from the streetcar that had just arrived from the city was Montchik Zaydenovski. Preoccupied, carrying two large bundles of books under his arms, he passed by without noticing them. One book fell from under his left arm, and an unknown woman walking behind him shouted out loudly after him:

—Listen! … Excuse me! … You’ve dropped something!

But without turning round he strode rapidly on, straight to Mirel’s wing of the house.

On her way back, the mother-in-law called in at the same wing and saw:

The house was quiet and drowsy and Big Montchik was no longer there. In his white shirtsleeves Shmulik was sleeping on the sofa in his study, and in the bedroom, with many books both old and new scattered all around her, Mirel was lying on the bed which hadn’t been made since very early that morning.

From then on, the mother-in-law viewed Montchik with great disfavor and began harboring suspicions against him.

She found herself unable to look him straight in the face.

She had no idea how to share her suspicions with her family but if he had, broadly speaking, gone over to Mirel’s side and had no desire to tell anyone what he discussed with her, she felt justified in accosting him as he came in on one occasion and asking him sarcastically:

—Perhaps he could explain to her what Mirel wanted from Shmulik? Word had it that he, Montchik, knew all Mirel’s secrets.

Montchik stared at her with his huge round eyes and made no answer. He spent a short while in his uncle’s study where he had money matters to discuss, left immediately to return home, stopped before the front door of Shmulik’s wing without going in, and then made his way rapidly to the streetcar stop, thinking that he needed to discipline himself:

—What kind of conduct was this? People might justifiably think that he wanted to rob Shmulik of his wife.

He stopped coming down to the suburb.

3.9

Meanwhile, at sunset one ordinary weekday evening Shmulik returned from the stables at Libedin where, over two days, he’d made an inventory of the new oxen, and found Mirel’s door locked from within.

For a while he stood there, knocking on the door, paused a little and then knocked again. No one inside responded. He began pacing across the dining room and the study, stopping every now and then to stare through the window at the overcast scene outdoors. He remembered that Mirel hadn’t spoken to him for the past two weeks; that his underwear was now very dirty and that several days before he’d needed to get to the closet in Mirel’s room; that the relationship between him and Mirel was worsening all the time; and that he was powerless and could find no solution for all these problems.

That night, walking round his house, he came to that part of the garden on which the windows of Mirel’s room looked out. The place was sodden. An autumn shower, driven by a gust of wind, streamed down diagonally while the cherry trees shuddered, were soaked, and protested faintly against something. A row of old poplar trees standing at one end of the orchard all bowed their crowns in the same direction, gesturing despondently to the heavily overcast corner of the sky from which the wind was driving the clouds:

—From over there … That’s where the misfortune’s coming from.

The shutters of Mirel’s room were fastened from within, but the glow of a burning lamp striking through their cracks indicated that she was still awake.

Shmulik returned to his study and lay down on the sofa, unable to sleep, not knowing what to do, scratching on the oilcloth next to him:

—His life was hopeless, it seemed … hopeless.

Eventually he dozed off in his clothes, waking with a start once, about one o’clock in the morning, when Mirel’s room seemed flooded with light, and a second time very early, when the servant girl was still washing the floors and the first light of a new rainy, overcast day had started to peer through the windows.

Now Mirel’s room was dark. She was sleeping.

He went outside, roused his coachman, bade him harness his britzka, and went off to the distillery.

Once arrived, however, he felt that he needed to be not here but there, in his own home. He could busy himself with nothing. His office was located among the ceaselessly boiling copper vats in the largest set of buildings where the heat was intense and the air pungent with the stench of malt, distilled alcohol, and scorched barley. Around two o’clock in the afternoon, the sun struck though the cloudy skies to reveal the frightful ugliness of everything in the distillery courtyard on which its sickly silvery light fell. Many wagons loaded with iron barrels, drawn up near the open cellar next to the stream that flowed past the distillery, were receiving bellowed instructions in Russian from the perpetually drunk, perpetually bad-tempered cellar-master:

—Stoi! Stop!

—Podavay! Give it here!

—Kuda poliez? Where the devil are you going?

From somewhere in the rear, from the valley behind the largest set of buildings, wafted the foul-smelling vapor of the fresh beer must that was being offloaded in the oxen stable, and the vats were being heated for the night shift.

Then Shmulik again ordered the britzka harnessed and drove back home.

Though it was not raining, the weather had turned cloudy and cold again. The sky was as gloomy as dusk, and the sodden fields all around reeked of damp, ploughed earth, of fresh horse manure, and of rotting pumpkins from a partially cultivated bed nearby. Both his big bay horses trotted along with confident energy, merrily bowing their heads and responding instantly to every sweep of the coachman’s whip with either a contented forward bound or a healthy equine sneeze. The wellsprung britzka swayed as it effortlessly followed after them, and Shmulik sat deep within it, reflecting all the while that it was he, Shmulik Zaydenovski, who was traveling along in this way, he who already possessed his own capital of more than thirty thousand rubles, was no longer dependent on anyone, not on a single soul, not even on his own father, and was now hurrying home. There he had a wife who’d been lying locked up in her own room for nearly two weeks. Now he needed to go in and ask her:

—Mirel—he ought to ask her—do you perhaps find my presence oppressive? I can rent two or three rooms for you in the center of the city where you can live apart from me. Do you understand, Mirel? I demand nothing of you.

Thinking of these things, he took so much pity on himself that tears sprang to his eyes, yet it seemed to him that what he was about to say to her was beautiful and that he would please Mirel with it.

He wanted to get home all the more quickly.

As soon as he drove into his father’s courtyard, however, he suddenly felt as bad as he had the previous restless night, and was starkly conscious of the burdensome, lonely hours that lay before him this day, the next day, and all the days thereafter … Outdoors it was already dark as the evening drew on. Inside his father’s big house, almost all the windows that overlooked the courtyard were illuminated, whereas those of his own house were all dark. Light was visible only in the two windows of Mirel’s room at the very end of the wing, but the shutters were bolted from within.

She was evidently still locked up in there.

Climbing down from the britzka, he remembered the dirty underclothing he was wearing and started making his way straight toward his home.

He was suddenly stopped, though, by his father’s maid, who’d hurried over to him from the big house:

—He was being summoned—she shouted after him—he was being summoned to his father’s study. They were insisting that he come in immediately.

—Immediately?

He couldn’t understand what had suddenly possessed them over there, and went over, only to find his father’s study hot and thick with cigarette smoke. Everything suggested that an earnest discussion about him and Mirel had been going on in there for hours.

At the desk opposite his father sat his mother, Miriam Lyubashits, and the younger Lyubashits, the student Shoylik, all of whom had the flushed faces of people who’d been airing their views and conferring together for a long time. As soon as Shmulik entered, the younger Lyubashits left the room. He was embarrassed, apparently, and went over to speak to Rikl in the dining room.