Free The End of Everything (New Yiddish Library Series) by David Bergelson

her, asked in a tense, trembling voice:
    —Of course this was none of his business, and she wasn’t obliged to answer him … He merely wanted to ask why she didn’t prepare herself for some public examinations and so equip herself for some kind of cultivated profession. He’d heard that she was only twenty-two years old.
    And for some reason Mirel stopped and began looking down at where she’d dug into the snow with the tip of one of her galoshes:
    —Yes, many people had already asked her the same question.
    The misty gray air all around was still; in the vicinity, not even black ravens flew past now, and no living soul appeared in this wintry desolation. Mirel gave something like a sigh, glanced slowly and pensively to one side, and equally slowly and pensively began relating how one wintry Friday evening their maid had complained to her:
    —How would she be able to survive until eleven o’clock without any sunflower seeds to chew? She’d go mad here.
    A short time after that, strolling in the provincial capital, she’d overheard a young woman student complaining to a friend:
    —Dear God! She had absolutely nothing to read at home. She’d lose her mind sitting there all alone.
    Only now did she turn to look at Safyan, walked on with him, and asked:
    —Do you understand, Safyan? One person needs sunflower seeds and another person needs a book to drive it away, but it’s exactly the same desolation. Do you understand?
    The pharmacist’s assistant Safyan’s bulging, colorless eyes widened even more and one side of his nose began twitching from nervous enthusiasm for abstract speculation.
    — Delo v tom —here’s the thing—Mirel had just confused two quite discrete ideas …
    But Mirel interrupted him to point out some footprints in the snow:
    —Did he recognize them, these male footprints? She and Lipkis had wandered about in the same place here not long before.
    Did she simply wish to cut him short with this remark? Or did she actually want him to repeat it to Lipkis later on and so awaken in him a chagrined yearning for these footprints in the snow?
    For a long, long time afterward she wandered about over the snow-covered fields with Safyan, continually asking him whether he found it pleasant to walk with her, and whether his employer, the priest’s son-in-law, would be angry with him.
    She returned to the shtetl with him when it had already begun to grow dark outside and the enveloping mists had started descending ever closer to the snow, thickening as night drew on. She stopped in front of her house in order to thank him once more:
    —She was deeply gratified that he found it as pleasant to be with her as she with him … After all, she’d taken up so much of his time.
    But on the threshold of a store situated in the row of houses opposite, a smiling relative of her former fiancé’s mother appeared, called the attention of someone there to Mirel and Safyan and, it seemed, took pleasure in doing so:
    —She’s found another fish to fry, thank God.
    So Mirel deliberately turned round to the departing Safyan once more and shouted out loudly after him:
    —If he wished, she’d call him out of the pharmacy tomorrow as well.
    Turning toward him yet again, she shouted out even more loudly:
    —She’d call for him at the pharmacy at the same time as today.
    Afterward, the whole evening in her isolated room was vacuous: vacuous because of the few hours she’d spent strolling about with the pharmacist’s assistant Safyan, vacuous because of her former fiancé’s relative, and vacuous because in the dining room a disgruntled Gitele was seated on the sofa listening in uncommunicative silence to the chatter of the rabbi’s young wife, examining her fingernails with a little smile, and never for a moment forgetting about Mirel, in respect of whom she’d been implementing a policy of obdurate silence for the past two weeks, and because of whom the long-awaited guest still hadn’t arrived, that guest for