Eh? … In the distillery? Yes, in the distillery as well.

Lying undressed in bed, Montchik had waited for his mother until three in the morning. His head throbbed, and deep within himself he felt the full weight of the panic in the Zaydenovskis’ house. He said nothing, but he had some idea of what was taking place there, and he knew that all his relatives over there suspected him, something that was ridiculous … Now he was quite unable to call there.

His mother returned about four in the morning. In his underwear he opened the door for her himself and then sat on her bed with her for a long time. All the while his distracted mind was racing wildly, but his mother took her time … By now she too apparently knew about the suspicion that had fallen on him as she very slowly imparted the melancholy tidings:

—Well, what more is there to say? … Shmulik’s not there and they’re all afraid that something’s happened to him.

… . When that woman does the kind of thing she does:

Very soon after “that woman’s” departure, Shmulik had posted a notice outside announcing that his house was to let and that he was selling his furniture; people said that he’d also left a letter addressed to his parents. Very likely they were too ashamed to make this letter public …

—Ida Shpolianski’s brother-in-law reported that he’d seen Shmulik skulking near Kromowski’s pharmacy the evening before. Now someone had read in the evening newspaper that a hanged body had been in the coppice around the hospital, and everyone had instantly rushed off to the morgue.

As dawn broke, Montchik dozed off and dreamed that he was living in the same hotel as Mirel, in the room adjacent to hers, and from the window noticed Shmulik wandering up and down on the sidewalk opposite.

Now, after a half-day’s work, he was extremely tired and preoccupied. He remembered the foolishness of thinking, as he awoke that morning, that he had to call on Mirel at her hotel that very day, and that Mirel would be very pleased he’d come. He still had business in the banks and several people to see at the stock exchange, so he hastily locked his scattered papers in the safe and snatched up his overcoat. Outside his front door, however, he suddenly froze and turned deathly pale, as though he’d seen a wandering corpse: on the sidewalk opposite stood Shmulik, his dull features the color of clay. He was unwilling to say where he’d spent the past two nights, and had now come to Montchik to ask a favor:

—Two days before—he related—Mirel had left the house and had refused to take any money from him … He’d begged her but she’d refused and gone away … And now … Perhaps Montchik might be willing to call on her in her hotel and entreat her to take some money? …

3.16

Some weeks later, a tall young man in a black autumn cloak and a very broad-brimmed, foreign-looking hat left a house that rented furnished rooms on the central avenue and strolled slowly down to the chain bridge leading into the suburb. This was Herz, the midwife’s acquaintance Herz.

For six consecutive weeks in the godforsaken shtetl in which he lived, he’d smiled at the letter in which Mirel pleaded with him to come, and now he’d finally done as she asked, seemingly in jest and on the spur of the moment. Around noon, when he awoke in his furnished room here in town, he suddenly reminded himself that he was still a bachelor; that he was now thirty-two years old, and that at times very few of the pieces he’d written pleased him; that here in this city Mirel, whom he’d thought of all the time he’d spent traveling down, had a husband, a home, and an entire family of relatives. And he’d been given his just deserts, after all … He fully deserved the self-mocking laughter that often broke from him as he was dressing.

Smiling good-humoredly, he’d wandered about the streets for a few days.

—What was he doing in this city?

Nothing in particular: since this was the first time in his life he’d been here, there was some value in admiring the architecture of the apartment buildings and the theater, in strolling down to the chain bridge, stopping near the Gentile lads who were chewing sunflower seeds, and observing, as they did, how the sheet ice on the wide river below had now split into chunks and was waiting in great silence for some message from afar.

On one occasion, however, he crossed the chain bridge and strolled farther into the suburb, smiling again over Mirel’s letter which lay in his pocket.

The festival of Purim was approaching, and the bright day spun its warmth from pure sunshine and clear spring air. The wheels of rapidly passing droshkies clattered more noisily than normal over the newly exposed cobblestones, and toward dusk the sunshine dissolved into a rivulet of molten silver that flowed over both near and distant hills on the outskirts of the city.

—Most important for the coming spring were the bare patches of earth that were steadily being exposed through the melting snow.

On the branches of the trees lining the streets, birds lost themselves in twittering delirium as governesses led their charges home. The air was filled with the scent of light frost, of young women, and of the joy of small-town children who’d soon no longer be obliged to go to school in the dark.

Finding Shmulik’s wing locked and empty, Herz stopped. A passerby directed him to the Zaydenovskis in the big house, so he went across, and in the entrance hall enquired for Mirel.

In the dining room, dough was being kneaded for Purim pastries and honey balls. All the members of the Zaydenovski household, including children and female relatives, were crowded round the long table, irritated by the small freckled lad who kept thrusting his hands into the warm honey-dough until someone shouted at him:

—Feh, you! … What are you licking your fingers for?

The maid was the first to receive Herz in the entrance hall. Not knowing how to answer him herself, she carried his inquiry into the dining room, and almost at once more than a dozen people rushed in, darkening the brightness of the little room as they inquisitively surrounded this unfamiliar young man whose features were ready at any moment to break into a smile.

Looking him over, one young woman was especially anxious to know who he was, so she called out the name of the hotel in which Mirel was staying:

—She was living in two rooms over there.

Someone else knew that all this time Mirel had been waiting there for someone who was supposed to join her here in the city. She made passing reference to Shmulik, who’d been to that hotel a few days earlier and had been wholly unable to gain access to her:

—Mirel was unwell in some way, it seemed … Apparently she’d been confined to her bed for some days now.

Suddenly, blinking her nearsighted eyes, the mother-in-law herself appeared on the threshold of the room:

—Sha! … What were they all standing about here for?

The unknown young man who was asking for Mirel was pointed out to her, so she went right up to him. For a while she peered at him with her eyes screwed up. Then she stretched out her hand to her little boy and very cautiously drew him away from this unfamiliar young man as though she were afraid the child might touch this stranger and so defile himself. She spat to one side the way superstitious folk spit when mentioning someone’s dreadful illness, and forced herself to remark, with the mien of one who wanted absolutely nothing to do with this young man:

—Yes, well … She lives there … in the hotel … that’s where she lives.

*As this is the month of Elul, the houses too seem figuratively to be observing the period of penitential prayers in preparation for the coming High Holy Days.

†Known by the Hebrew phrase as melave-malkah, “escorting the queen,” this final meal—held after the ritual conclusion of the Sabbath—is prolonged late into the night, especially among Hasidim, so as to extend the beauty and holiness of the Sabbath, metaphorically personified in the Jewish tradition as a queen.

*The name Montchik is a Russian diminutive of Monia, which is in turn a diminutive of Solomon.

†A melamed was a Hebrew teacher who instructed the smallest children—boys between the ages of three and four—in basic knowledge of the Pentateuch.

*In the Imperial Russian system of weights and measures, a pood was equivalent to 36.1 pounds, or 16.38 kilograms.

†The so-called Women’s Bible, known in Yiddish as the Taytsh-khumesh, is a rendering in Yiddish of the Pentateuch. It is not a direct translation, but a paraphrase interspersed with passages from the great commentators and interwoven with homilies and legends that aimed to impart ethical instruction to women. Prepared by Rabbi Yitskhok ben Shimshon ha-Kohen (d. 1624), it was first published in Prague in 1608 and was in continual use until the mid-twentieth century.

†These are all months of the Hebrew calendar, roughly corresponding to the secular months of February, March, and April.

*All of these are pigments formerly used in oil-based paint.

†One of the network of smaller units of local self-government through which tsarist Russia controlled each of its fifty provinces.

*That is, six months after it normally occurs. Nisan is the month of Passover; Elul is the month of the High Holy Days.

*A Russianized diminutive of the Hebrew name Shoyl, Saul.

*A droshky is a low four-wheeled, horse-drawn Russian hackney carriage in which passengers sit astride a narrow bench, their feet resting on bars near the ground.

*Sukkot, known in English as the Feast of Tabernacles, is a seven-day festival that follows five days after Yom Kippur and commemorates God’s benevolence in providing for all the needs of the People of Israel during their forty years of wandering in the desert.

*The Fast of Gedalye, a minor fast day observed immediately after the second day of Rosh Hashanah, commemorates the assassination of the Babylonian-appointed official charged with administering that remnant of the Jewish population left in Judah following Nebuchadnezzar’s destruction of the First Temple and the start of the Babylonian exile in 586 BCE. Gedalye’s death, recounted in 2 Kings 25:25–26, deprived Judah of all trace of Jewish rule.

*Orthodox Jewish law forbids a married couple from sleeping in the same bed.

*During the intermediate weekdays of the Festival of Sukkot the usual restrictions that apply to Jewish holy days are relaxed but not entirely lifted.

*The Jewish National Fund (JNF) was founded at the Fifth Zionist Congress in Basel in 1901 to buy and develop land for Jewish settlement in what was then Ottoman Palestine.

*The novella to which Mirel is referring is A House of Gentlefolk (Dvorianskoe gnezdo), by Ivan Turgenev (1818–1883), first published in 1859. Liza, the heroine of this novella, retreats to a convent to escape the pressures of a world she cannot cope with.

*Every Jewish bill of divorcement must specify the name of the nearest river.