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

whose sake the drapes had been hung up, the velvet runners spread out, and the chilly salon heated.
    Unable to remain calmly in her room, Mirele donned her jacket and coat again, swathed her head in her scarf, and paused for a moment in the dining room to observe to her mother:
    —The salon doesn’t need to be heated any longer, it seems to me; it makes no difference … and on the whole, I think it’s high time to clear away all this festive decor.
    On the sofa, the uncommunicative Gitele made not the slightest move, not even turning to glance at her daughter. Only an inflexibly stubborn smile played around her tight mouth as she remarked, coldly and quietly, looking away toward the big window above and behind the rabbi’s wife:
    —Whom does it bother that the house is festively decorated?
    Provoked, Mirel left the house and disappeared alone for the rest of the evening. Meeting their relative the bookkeeper not far from the house, she stopped him to comment:
    —Could he explain what kind of oddity her mother was?
    And more:
    —Essentially, her mother went on smiling without speaking as though to spite someone … Presumably, one was supposed to think that she actually had a great deal to say and kept silent only because she was too clever.
    This pattern subsequently repeated itself for several days in succession: without a word to anyone she left home in the early evening and returned well past midnight, by which time the lamps had been extinguished all over the shtetl, and her own home was sunk in deep and heavy sleep. Where she disappeared to, no one could guess.
    After all, for the past five days the midwife Schatz had been away in a neighboring village at the bedside of a landowner’s wife who was in labor, and a huge padlock hung on the door of her cottage at the remotest end of the shtetl.
    Once, coming into town on the landowner’s cart to make some purchase at the pharmacy, the midwife Schatz drove up to their house and inquired for Mirel. Gitele flushed a little and replied quietly:
    —Mirel’s gone visiting … She’s undoubtedly gone off to Royzenboym the photographer’s wife.
    But when the midwife Schatz called there, she found no one except the two sisters of Mirel’s former fiancé, who were sitting in a small room with a low ceiling and a bright red floor filled with flower pots and the smell of Gentile cooking, listening to Royzenboym the photographer’s wife playing a guitar.
    —Hasn’t Mirel been here?—she asked, coming into the room.
    At which the sisters smiled oddly and exchanged glances, and the photographer Royzenboym’s wife raised her head from her guitar and answered in astonishment:
    —When did Mirel Hurvits ever come here?
    What a totally Christian appearance this Royzenboym woman had! Not without reason was the whole shtetl alive with rumors that before she’d married the photographer Royzenboym she’d lived with an officer somewhere in a big town.
    On one of these evenings, when, as always, Mirel was not at home, an unfamiliar hired conveyance stopped in the darkness next to Reb Gedalye Hurvits’s house, and an out-of-town Jew of average height muffled up in furs alighted from it and made his way into the illuminated hallway, where he stood smiling and twinkling his little eyes:
    —He’d been sent here … sent here from Yankev-Yosl Zaydenovski.
    Gitele and their young relative the bookkeeper received him, saw him slowly disencumber himself of his fur overcoat and his sheepskin undercoat, and watched as, equally slowly, he hung them both up on the coat rack. Then they sat with him at the dining room table, listening to him relate in a deliberate and leisurely manner:
    —He was, to be sure, no professional matchmaker … and, thank God, he had no need to depend on that kind of work for his livelihood …
    He ran a warehouse of sacks in a large shtetl near the metropolis, and was a close, long-standing friend of Yankev-Yosl and his household.
    He had a substantial