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

graying beard and, curving right down to his mouth, a long nose under the skin of which stretched a network of blue-brown veins; he looked oddly respectable in his long, black frock coat, and his small gray eyes never stopped twinkling with great urbanity.
    —He’d been sent here, to be sure … sent by Yankev-Yosl Zaydenovski.
    The lamp hanging from the ceiling in Reb Gedalye Hurvits’s dining room burned late into that night.
    At length Gitele retired to her bedroom and lay down to sleep. Someone prepared a fresh bed in Reb Gedalye’s study for this emissary who was their guest, and also went to bed. Only then did their out-of-town visitor draw from his bag Lippert’s Kulturgeschichte * in its Hebrew translation and sit down at the dining room table, apologetically explaining to the departing bookkeeper as he did so:
    —He’d once owned a Jewish bookshop … From that time on he’d retained the habit of reading late into the night.
    The relative took his leave and went home to bed. The maid locked the front door behind him and soon began snoring loudly in the unoccupied pantry. And the guest went on sitting over his book at the table, drawing the hanging lamp on its pulley farther and farther down toward him. When Mirel’s knocking finally made itself heard from one of the outer shutters farthest away, he rose from his book and went to open the door for her, poking out his head with its twinkling gray, kindly eyes and, overcome with peculiar sensitivity and confusion like an embarrassed child, began stammering:
    —Hm … A pleasure … A pleasure.
    As soon as she saw this unknown face thrust out at her, Mirel trembled all over, and instantly and violently drew back, clutching at her beating heart:
    —Oh! … How frightening this was!
    Coming into the house, she kept edging ever farther away from him as though afraid he’d make a move toward her.
    Clad as she was from head to foot in black, her figure appeared more slender and lissome than usual, and she emanated a barely perceptible fragrance all around her, all of which so agitated the out-of-town Jew that he found himself unable to stop smiling and stammering:
    —Hmm … hm … frightened? How could this be? A pleasure … a great pleasure.
    His childlike sensitivity and the fact that he decorously refrained from offering her his hand * made him appear thoroughly respectable, yet for a long time afterward she was unable to compose herself, waiting until he’d lain down to sleep before going to wake the soundly snoring servant girl:
    —Who was this person?
    —At any rate, at least she knew he certainly wasn’t a thief.
    And the stranger, their guest, could still hear her voice as he lay in his bed, and either from good nature or from tension smiled to himself in embarrassment:
    —A thief ? How could this be? … A good child … A very good child.
    The emissary lingered on in the house for several days, and every morning when Mirel awoke she heard them slowly drinking tea with milk in the dining room opposite the quiet salon, and knew there was no one there except the stranger who was assuring both the genteelly uncommunicative Gitele and her devoted relative, the bookkeeper:
    —To be sure, they naturally want Mirele wholeheartedly … What a question …
    —The young man himself, Shmulik, to be sure, desires it … and Yankev-Yosl himself … and Mindel, his wife.
    And what else?
    —They ask no money of you, not even a promise of money … They specifically bade him say so.
    Hearing all this as she lay in bed, Mirele was revolted to her very soul. And the quiet, truncated conversation continued to reach her from the dining room:
    —And as people, he was obliged to say, the Zaydenovskis were unusually highly regarded … genial …
    —And the young man himself … a fine young man … truly, a very fine young man.
    The emissary eventually left and began sending frequent letters and urgent telegrams which Gitele and that tall young man, their devoted