Someone brought Mirel’s picture into the room and held it up behind Avreml the rabbi, but the rabbi made an angry gesture of dismissal:

—It’s not necessary. It’s not necessary.

Apparently Reb Gedalye had asked after his daughter.

Once more they bent down to hear what he was saying. Evidently it moved them greatly. His sister turned aside, suppressing her sobs and wiping her eyes. Suddenly Velvl noticed the feldsher whispering something into the rabbi’s ear, and the rabbi shaking his head and leaving the room. He moved from the window to the verandah where he found a courier looking out for a buggy to drive him to the nearby village in search of more leeches. Taking the man by the sleeve, Velvl led him toward his father’s house:

—Here’s my buggy. It’s harnessed and ready to go … Tell the driver to hurry.

Around midnight, commotion and shouting from outside filled the Burnes’s dining room. Seated at the table, both the daughters of the house turned pale with shock: one clutched her heart and the other peered out through the double-glazed windows, noticed a number of people milling about in the pale gloom of night, and turned back to the table in fright:

—God help us! … Reb Gedalye’s just passed away, it seems.

One of the two children who were sleeping fully dressed on the sofa started awake with a frightened wail; although the daughters were afraid to stay in the house on their own, Velvl swiftly threw on his fur coat and with a pounding heart rushed outside once more. This time he didn’t steal round the back but went straight along the broad main street where lights were still burning in most of the houses. A number of Jews were standing in a huddle in the marketplace, all talking at the same time as though participating in the Blessing of the New Moon.* One of them shouted out:

—What about pallbearers?

—Have patience!

The entire shtetl was awake. People from all ends of the town kept going up into Reb Gedalye’s house, and Velvl followed them, pushing his way from one overcrowded room to another. In the crush of the dining room, he recognized his tall father; sundered from everyone else, he was leaning against a cupboard and gloomily smoking a cigarette from his silver holder. The congestion at the entrance to the third room was very great: numerous candles were burning in there and much weeping could be heard. Velvl found himself shoved from all sides. Behind him, someone pointed out Reb Gedalye’s son-in-law who’d only just arrived from the railway station. By the time Velvl had reminded himself that he need go no farther, it was too late and he found himself deep in the house, in the room with its numerous burning candles, and no one around him was shoving any longer. To his left, alongside Gitele and the sister from abroad, the newly arrived son-in-law was bent over the corpse, while opposite, his face contorted, was Avreml the rabbi, who looked at Velvl in a peculiar way. He wanted Velvl to be aware that he’d truly been a close friend of Reb Gedalye’s, and that tears were now flowing from his rabbinical eyes.

As the gray dawn broke, the corpse was carried out on a bier so narrow and short it seemed to have been made for a child. Running with it on their shoulders, as though carrying something that ought to be hidden from sight as quickly as possible, were the rabbi and the rabbinical judge, both the shtetl’s two ritual slaughterers, the son-in-law, and one other, an ordinary young man who used to buy two small wagonloads of flour every week from Reb Gedalye’s mill. Someone drew Velvl closer to the bier and pushed the young man aside:

—Stand back, stand back, it’s Velvl Burnes.

And Velvl put his shoulder beneath the burden and together with the son-in-law carried it a long, long distance, right to the cemetery. When he lowered the bier, he found himself greatly confused and dazed. Because he’d yielded place to him, the ordinary young man felt drawn to Velvl, approached him and said:

—He’s light, Reb Gedalye, eh? Completely emaciated …

And Velvl stared at this young man, unable to recall his name or remember where he’d seen him.

4.2

Gitele and Reb Gedalye’s sister observed the mandatory Seven Days of Mourning* in the house, and Avreml the rabbi arranged a prayer quorum twice a day† by calling in passers-by from the street. No one was allowed to evade this duty:

—Never mind … Reb Gedalye deserved it and you owe it to him.

Doing as they were asked and joining the prayers, people noticed the stillness and emptiness of the house, and the way Gitele sat on the floor in the salon next to Reb Gedalye’s sister, looked down at the boards, and was silent.

Reb Gedalye’s sister wanted Gitele to return with her to her home abroad. When there was no one else in the house, seated on the floor next to Gitele she argued her case with their relative the bookkeeper and with Avreml the rabbi:

—After all, whom does Gitele have here? … I mean to say, why should she stay here all on her own?

—And for a little while … For a little while, at least, she could certainly come to stay with me.

Neither the rabbi nor the bookkeeper made any response, and the sister herself seemed scarcely to believe in the earnestness of her own tone. Gitele did not raise her head, the room was filled with silence, and the desolation that follows when everything has ended clung to the walls and ceiling, calling again to mind that Reb Gedalye was now dead and that Gitele had now no single place on earth.

A buyer was sought for Reb Gedalye’s house, but none was found. The furniture was sold covertly, without Gitele’s knowledge, and on the day of her departure, a carpenter was engaged to board up the windows from outside.

To bid her farewell came Avreml the rabbi, the former bookkeeper and his wife, Libke the rabbi’s wife, and an elderly, querulous widow who used to collect a Sabbath loaf from Gitele every Friday to provide for a poor shoemaker burdened with a great many children. Now this widow kept sighing even more frequently than usual and for some reason went on and on about her elder daughter who’d died:

—She’d continually pleaded with the Master of the Universe: Dear Lord, what use is my daughter to you? Take me instead …

So heavily swathed in furs and scarves that her face was barely visible, Gitele seemed to have been turned to stone, neither speaking nor moving from where she sat. She was the last to leave the house, but at the very moment she wanted to seat herself in the sleigh, something overcame her. Her head jerked round and she seemed on the point of collapse.