Free Tevye the Dairyman and the Railroad Stories by Sholem Aleichem

you an opportunity that comes a man’s way once in a hundred years, and you forget to clinch the deal in advance, so that you don’t even know what’s in it for you! Any way you look at it—as a favor or a duty, as a service or an obligation, as an act of human kindness or something even worse than that—it’s certainly no crime to make a little profit on the side. When a soup bone is stuck in somebody’s face, who doesn’t give it a lick? Stop your horse right now, you imbecile, and spell it out for them in capital letters: “Look, ladies, if it’s worth such-and-such to you to get home, it’s worth such-and-such to me to take you; if it isn’t, I’m afraid we’ll have to part ways.” Onsecond thought, though, I thought again: Tevye, you’re an imbecile to call yourself an imbecile! Supposing they promised you the moon, what good would it do you? Don’t you know that you can skin the bear in the forest, but you can’t sell its hide there?
    “Why don’t you go a little faster?” the two women asked, poking me from behind.
    “What’s the matter?” I said, “are you in some sort of hurry? You should know that haste makes waste.” From the corner of my eye I stole a look at my passengers. They were women, all right, no doubt of it: one wearing a silk kerchief and the other a wig. They sat there looking at each other and whispering back and forth.
    “Is it still a long way off?” one of them asked me.
    “No longer off than we are from there,” I said. “Up ahead there’s an uphill and a downhill. After that there’s another uphill and a downhill. After that comes the real uphill and the downhill, and after that it’s straight as the crow flies to Boiberik …”
    “The man’s some kind of nut for sure!” whispered one of the women to the other.
    “I told you he was bad news,” says the second.
    “He’s all we needed,” says the first.
    “He’s crazy as a loon,” says the second.
    I certainly must be crazy, I thought, to let these two characters treat me like this. “Excuse me,” I said to them, “but where would you ladies like to be dumped?”
    “Dumped!” they say. “What kind of language is that? You can go dump yourself if you like!”
    “Oh, that’s just coachman’s talk,” I say. “In ordinary parlance we would say, ‘When we get to Boiberik safe and sound, with God’s help, where do I drop
mesdames
off?’ ”
    “If that’s what it means,” they say, “you can drop us off at the green dacha by the pond at the far end of the woods. Do you know where it is?”
    “Do I know where it is?” I say. “Why, I know my way around Boiberik the way you do around your own home! I wish I had a thousand rubles for every log I’ve carried there. Just last summer, in fact, I brought a couple of loads of wood to the very dacha you’re talking about. There was a rich Jew from Yehupetz living there, a real millionaire. He must have been worth a hundred grand, if not twice that.”
    “He’s still living there,” said both women at once, whispering and laughing to each other.
    “Well,” I said, “seeing as the ride you’ve taken was no short haul, and as you may have some connection with him, would it be too much for me to request of you, if you don’t mind my asking, to put in a good word for me with him? Maybe he’s got an opening, a position of some sort. Really, anything would do … You never know how things will turn out. I know a young man named Yisro’eyl, for instance, who comes from a town not far from here. He’s a real nothing, believe me, a zero with a hole in it. So what happens to him? Somehow, don’t ask me how or why, he lands this swell job, and today he’s a big shot clearing twenty rubles a week, or maybe it’s forty, who knows … Some people have all the luck! Do you by any chance happen to know what happened to our slaughterer’s son-in-law, all because he picked himself up one fine day and went to Yehupetz? The first few years there, I