Attempts were made to support her and assist her into the sleigh but she refused to permit them, freed herself, ascended the steps of the verandah once more, and kissed the mezuzah.*

In town, word had it that Velvl Burnes had been at the railway station that day, that he’d gone up to Gitele and said to her:

—Be well.

And Gitele had risen from her bench in the second-class and replied:

—God might yet help him.

On the last warm Sabbath before Passover, some five local tailors’ apprentices were walking along the freshly trodden pathway that led down into the shtetl. Pleased that the mud was drying and that the tranquility of Passover was approaching, they cracked jokes and from some distance away denied free passage to all the well-rested servant girls who passed.

Conceiving a liking for the verandah of Reb Gedalye’s abandoned house, they sat down there to warm themselves in the sunshine, started indulging in horseplay, and unintentionally smashed a few panes of the front windows.

This was noticed by one of the town’s householders, an elderly Jew who was passing on his way to afternoon prayers. He stopped and yelled at the apprentices:

—Get off the verandah, you hooligans! … The devil take the lot of you, have you no respect?

The apprentices did as they were bidden and left the verandah. The panes, however, remained smashed, and blindly called to mind the suburb of the distant metropolis and Reb Gedalye’s daughter who hadn’t come down even to look around after her father’s death. Passersby stared gloomily at this house, which stood empty and had no heir:

—Reb Gedalye’s well and truly dead, eh? There’s nothing left.

Meanwhile, Avreml the rabbi drew on community funds somewhere and used them to erect a small mausoleum over Reb Gedalye’s grave. He quarreled with those shtetl householders who thought this inappropriate, and insisted on having his way:

—It’s fine, it’s fine … It’s entirely fitting and proper: Reb Gedalye bequeathed thirteen hundred rubles to the community, and the community erected a mausoleum over his grave—the one thing has nothing to do with the other.

Thereafter the rabbi didn’t leave his house for days on end, spending his time studying the Mishnah in Reb Gedalye’s memory.* When the mausoleum over the grave was finally completed, the rabbi had almost reached the end of one of the tractates, so he went down to the cemetery with some twenty men, completed his study of the last chapters at Reb Gedalye’s graveside, and recited Kaddish there. Later that morning, after Avreml the rabbi and his study group had returned, the noonday hour in the old Husyatin study house seemed to drag on much longer than usual; all felt faint with hunger, and took a drop of whiskey for the ascent of Reb Gedalye’s soul.

Everything in the study house was quiet and routinely commonplace. The first dust of the approaching spring lay on the lecterns and the benches, and the caretaker had already breakfasted at home somewhere. Discussion focused on the white shirt in which Reb Gedalye had asked to be clothed before his death:

—That shirt was probably inherited from a great-great-grandfather.

Holding his glass of whiskey, the rabbi spoke to those assembled about Reb Gedalye of blessed memory:

—This is what happened … Right at the end, this is what happened: he said to me, Avreml, he said to me, why are you weeping? … Foolish fellow: if I felt I were leaving anyone behind me, I’d make the journey there as readily as going to a dance.

All those who stood round heard and were silent. Only one man, an emaciated, timid sycophant who was unemployed, edged unobtrusively closer to someone at the back and smiled foolishly in consequence of the liquor he’d drunk. Wanting to make some allusion to the many young men whom Mirel had always dragged around with her as she wandered over the shtetl and to the fact that she’d not come down to the shtetl here after her father’s death, he remarked snidely:

—Evidently Reb Gedalye knew his own daughter, eh? Evidently he knew very well what she was.

Only during the intermediate days of Passover did Tarabay’s children come down to the village, bringing with them Heler’s friend, the student at the polytechnic. He encountered the midwife Schatz, who was now living near the sugar factory, and on Heler’s behalf related to her the exact nature of the illness Mirel had suffered there in the city at precisely the time Reb Gedalye had been lying on his deathbed here in the shtetl.

At the same time, those in Avrom-Moyshe Burnes’s house were made aware that Mirel no longer lived with her husband but apart, in a hotel with the midwife’s friend Herz; that she was somehow both divorced and not divorced; that she refused to receive any of her husband’s relatives except one, a cousin who was still a bachelor and was, so the rumor went, an immensely wealthy businessman. One Sunday afternoon all this became the subject of discussion in the dining room:

—What’s there to think about? Velvl can certainly praise and thank God that he escaped.

But when Velvl suddenly came out of his father’s study into the dining room, silence fell, and in the general discomfiture no one was able to look him in the face. Both daughters slipped out of the dining room one by one, and only his mother put her feet up and settled herself more comfortably on the sofa.

All was quiet.

—Velvl—his mother asked—when will all this come to an end, Velvl? … When will you make us all happy?

Scowling, Velvl turned to her:

—What?

He crossed angrily to the window and gazed out. He couldn’t understand what they wanted from him or why they kept on nagging him, so he stared at the house of Reb Gedalye’s relative, the bookkeeper, and at the furniture that was being carried out and piled into two heavily laden wagons:

—Now Reb Gedalye’s relative was also moving to the provincial capital, and soon no one would be left here in the shtetl …

Here in the shtetl, the long hot days would soon stretch out endlessly with all the tedium of summer. The place would be deserted, and there’d be no one left to respect. And he, Velvl Burnes … Yes, there were the three hundred desyatins of rich, loamy earth near the river on Miratov’s land that he was now being offered:

—He should certainly lease them, these three hundred desyatins.

4.3

Shortly after Shavuot a letter arrived from the crippled student Lipkis:

He’d undergone a successful operation on his leg.

On Friday night, after the Sabbath service, this was discussed in the Husyatin study house:

—What’s special about this news? The tendons in his leg had grown together, so it’s very likely he’ll now start walking straight like everyone else.

People were also standing around a prosperous householder whose seat was against the eastern wall* and who’d only that evening returned from the provincial capital, listening as he discussed the Zaydenovkis, who lived in a suburb over there, and one of their relatives, with whom he’d spoken personally:

—Mirel’s still living in a hotel, and it’s a lie that her husband’s supposed to have divorced her.

Then with infinite tedium the summer week stretched out over the shtetl, and a humid and boring Friday arrived, as purposeless as the solitary peasant wagon which had unloaded all its produce and been left in the deserted marketplace from early morning on.

By noon, the memory was still vivid of the many housewives who’d shoved and jostled around several carts loaded with vegetables as soon as the sun was up, and from various places, through open doors and windows, came the delayed but rapid pounding of choppers preparing fish on wooden boards, merging with the words shouted by one neighbor to another from inside the houses. A Jewish shopkeeper was carrying an interest-free loan* to someone, and the pharmacist’s assistant Safyan, returning to the pharmacy from elsewhere, couldn’t bear the smoke that belched from household chimneys and hung low and heavy in the air; he was furious at the shtetl:

—The devil only knew what kind of filth they used to heat their tsholnt over there.

Suddenly the tinkling of bridle bells on an out-of-town hackney carriage could be heard, and a driver fresh from the railway station sped through the shtetl terrifying a cock and several hens, turned, and came to a halt before the steps of Avreml the rabbi’s house.

This was very strange:

Alone in the carriage sat Mirel Hurvits, her head with its straw hat swathed in white tulle, nodding and smiling affably at the rabbi’s wife who’d just appeared in the doorway.

For appearances’ sake, Libke the rabbi’s wife received her with flattering courtesy:

—What a question … She’d take her daughter Hanke into her own bedroom, and Mirel could have Hanke’s room to herself.

And hand in hand, she and Mirel went into the house, with Mirel taking everything she said at face value:

—Yes, she’d known before she asked that she’d be able to live here for a few weeks—in any case, not more than a few weeks.

Returning from their walk that Sabbath afternoon, some smartly dressed young women made a detour and deliberately strolled down the side alley that ran past the windows of Avreml the rabbi’s house.

The alley was clean and quiet. Houses there threw their Sabbath shadows before them in friendly rivalry:

—My shadow’s bigger.

—And mine bigger still.

Through the open door floated the comically enthusiastic chant with which Avreml the rabbi was reading those passages from the Talmud he was studying. In her red ritual wig, Libke the rabbi’s wife sat on the front steps yawning, her face puffy with sleep, and without looking around called out to her eleven-year-old daughter who was inside the house:

—Hanke, bring the fruit out here, Hanke!* There’s a plate in the dresser, Hanke!

And at her side, leaning her head against her hand, sat Mirel, staring bleakly out into the alleyway.

—Yes—she said—she greatly regretted the fact that even their relative and former bookkeeper had also moved from the shtetl to the provincial capital.

The shtetl soon knew that some sort of scandalous scene had taken place between her and her husband in the corridor of the hotel, with the result that she’d been forced to flee from the metropolis.

By this time Nosn Heler, the young man with whom she’d once spent her time wandering all over the shtetl, had squandered his entire inheritance on his penny newspaper. He now worked somewhere in the vicinity for sixty rubles a month and was again speaking all manner of ill about her. On one occasion he’d buttonholed the photographer Royzenboym there and shown him a very distasteful note that Mirel had sent him by city messenger the previous winter. And the photographer Royzenboym, a lean, powerfully built young man with the sunburned face and wide embroidered shirt of a Gentile, had subsequently returned home to the shtetl here and had tickled the infuriated Safyan under both armpits every evening:

—Turns out no one can know whose child Mirel was carrying, Safyantshik! …

Once, wholly without warning, Montchik suddenly came down from the provincial capital to visit her, but stayed no longer than the interval between one train and the next.

In the shtetl it was soon common knowledge that although Montchik himself was by no means indifferent to Mirel, he’d come down not on his own behalf but on that of her husband, his cousin, who was begging her to return to him; that Montchik was a rich young bachelor and that in general, so people said:

—He was a person of refinement, this Montchik.

While he was in private discussion with Mirel in one of the rooms, Libke the rabbi’s wife stood eavesdropping behind the door and heard Mirel give him a categorical answer:

—That’ll never happen … Do you hear, Montchik? … Never!

Afterward they both sat in the dining room. Preoccupied, Montchik stared in front of him with huge round eyes, every now and then making a dismissive gesture:

—He’d say no more … He wouldn’t speak another word about this again.

A spark of deeply wistful sorrow flared in Mirel’s eyes; her face was flushed and she bit her lower lip. All at once she recalled that Montchik had spent eighteen hours traveling on the train, refused to believe that he wasn’t hungry, and, smiling, began frying eggs for him here at the table.

At the same time Libke the rabbi’s wife set out to demonstrate that she too was quite capable of entertaining worldly people. She sat politely at the table and affectedly addressed Montchik in the diction used in Warsaw:*

—Did he have any desire at all to inspect their shtetl?

Glancing at Mirel, Montchik rose distractedly from his chair:

—Yes, certainly … This would be the first time in his life that he’d seen a Jewish shtetl.

In the shtetl, people stood in their doorways watching him and Mirel walk down the street: he in a new light-colored suit and the gleaming white collar and cuffs of a big-city sophisticate, and she in a simple white, elegantly tailored dress with her head uncovered. From a distance she pointed out to him where Avrom-Moyshe Burnes lived, led him to her father’s deserted house, and showed him:

—This was my room.

They paused on the verandah and peered inside through the broken window panes. Mirel raised both her hands to her head to prevent a little comb slipping from her hair, but it fell to the ground nevertheless, and when Montchik restored it to her, she very slowly took it from his hand. For a while they stood smiling at each other.

Darkness was falling, yet she continued to lead him along the side streets. It grew chilly.