The Collected Stories

has she, God forbid, been overcome by grief?”
    He wanted to call her name, but he was unable to. He tried to tear free of the grave, but his limbs were powerless. All of a sudden he awoke.
    “What a horrible nightmare!” he thought. “I hope I come out of it all right.”
    At that moment Shoshe also awoke. When he related his dream to her, she did not speak for a while. Then she said, “Woe is me. I had the very same dream.”
    “Really? You too?” asked Shmul-Leibele, now frightened. “This I don’t like.”
    He tried to sit up, but he could not. It was as if he had been shorn of all his strength. He looked toward the window to see if it were day already, but there was no window visible, nor any windowpane. Darkness loomed everywhere. He cocked his ears. Usually he would be able to hear the chirping of a cricket, the scurrying of a mouse, but this time only a dead silence prevailed. He wanted to reach out to Shoshe, but his hand seemed lifeless.
    “Shoshe,” he said quietly, “I’ve grown paralyzed.”
    “Woe is me, so have I,” she said. “I cannot move a limb.”
    They lay there for a long while, silently, feeling their numbness. Then Shoshe spoke: “I fear that we are already in our graves for good.”
    “I’m afraid you’re right,” Shmul-Leibele replied in a voice that was not of the living.
    “Pity me, when did it happen? How?” Shoshe asked. “After all, we went to sleep hale and hearty.”
    “We must have been asphyxiated by the fumes from the stove,” Shmul-Leibele said.
    “But I said I wanted to open the flue.”
    “Well, it’s too late for that now.”
    “God have mercy upon us, what do we do now? We were still young people …”
    “It’s no use. Apparently it was fated.”
    “Why? We arranged a proper Sabbath. I prepared such a tasty meal. An entire chicken neck and tripe.”
    “We have no further need of food.”
    Shoshe did not immediately reply. She was trying to sense her own entrails. No, she felt no appetite. Not even for a chicken neck and tripe. She wanted to weep, but she could not.
    “Shmul-Leibele, they’ve buried us already. It’s all over.”
    “Yes, Shoshe, praised be the true Judge! We are in God’s hands.”
    “Will you be able to recite the passage attributed to your name before the Angel Dumah?”
    “Yes.”
    “It’s good that we are lying side by side,” she muttered.
    “Yes, Shoshe,” he said, recalling a verse:
Lovely and pleasant in their lives, and in their death they were not divided
.
    “And what will become of our hut? You did not even leave a will.”
    “It will undoubtedly go to your sister.”
    Shoshe wished to ask something else, but she was ashamed. She was curious about the Sabbath meal. Had it been removed from the oven? Who had eaten it? But she felt that such a query would not be fitting of a corpse. She was no longer Shoshe the dough-kneader, but a pure, shrouded corpse with shards covering her eyes, a cowl over her head, and myrtle twigs between her fingers. The Angel Dumah would appear at any moment with his fiery staff, and she would have to be ready to give an account of herself.
    Yes, the brief years of turmoil and temptation had come to an end. Shmul-Leibele and Shoshe had reached the true world. Man and wife grew silent. In the stillness they heard the flapping of wings, a quiet singing. An angel of God had come to guide Shmul-Leibele the tailor and his wife, Shoshe, into Paradise.
    Translated by Joseph Singer and Roger Klein

The Séance

    I

    I T was during the summer of 1946, in the living room of Mrs. Kopitzky on Central Park West. A single red bulb burned behind a shade adorned with one of Mrs. Kopitzky’s automatic drawings—circles with eyes, flowers with mouths, goblets with fingers. The walls were all hung with Lotte Kopitzky’s paintings, which she did in a state of trance and at the direction of her control—Bhaghavar Krishna, a Hindu sage supposed to have lived in the fourth century. It was he, Bhaghavar Krishna, who had painted the peacock with the golden tail, in the middle of which appeared the image of Buddha; the otherworldly trees hung with elflocks and fantastic fruits; the young women of the planet Venus with their branch-like arms and their ears from which stretched silver nets—organs of telepathy. Over the pictures, the old furniture, the shelves with books, there hovered reddish shadows. The windows were covered with heavy drapes.
    At the round table on which lay a Ouija board, a