The Collected Stories

was small, broadish, with a high bosom. She appeared to have been in her underwear. Dr. Kalisher stood there hypnotized. He wanted to cry out, “Enough, it’s all so obvious,” but his tongue was numb. His heart pounded and he could hear his own breathing.
    After a while he began to retrace his steps, but he was dazed with blindness. He bumped into a clothes tree and hit a wall, striking his head. He stepped backwards. Something fell and broke. Perhaps one of Mrs. Kopitzky’s otherworldly sculptures! At that moment the telephone began to ring, the sound unusually loud and menacing. Dr. Kalisher shivered. He suddenly felt a warmth in his underwear. He had wet himself like a child.
    IV

    “Well, I’ve reached the bottom,” Dr. Kalisher muttered to himself. “I’m ready for the junkyard.” He walked toward the bedroom. Not only his underwear, his pants also had become wet. He expected Mrs. Kopitzky to answer the telephone; it happened more than once that she awakened from her trance to discuss stocks, bonds, and dividends. But the telephone kept on ringing. Only now he realized what he had done—he had closed the living-room door, shutting out the red glow which helped him find his way. “I’m going home,” he resolved. He turned toward the street door but found he had lost all sense of direction in that labyrinth of an apartment. He touched a knob and turned it. He heard a muffled scream. He had wandered into the bathroom again. There seemed to be no hook or chain inside. Again he saw the woman in a corset, but this time with her face half in the light. In that split second he knew she was middle-aged.
    “Forgive, please.” And he moved back.
    The telephone stopped ringing, then began anew. Suddenly Dr. Kalisher glimpsed a shaft of red light and heard Mrs. Kopitzky walking toward the telephone. He stopped and said, half statement, half question: “Mrs. Kopitzky!”
    Mrs. Kopitzky started. “Already finished?”
    “I’m not well, I must go home.”
    “Not well? Where do you want to go? What’s the matter? Your heart?”
    “Everything.”
    “Wait a second.”
    Mrs. Kopitzky, having approached him, took his arm and led him back to the living room. The telephone continued to ring and then finally fell silent. “Did you get a pressure in your heart, huh?” Mrs. Kopitzky asked. “Lie down on the sofa, I’ll get a doctor.”
    “No, no, not necessary.”
    “I’ll massage you.”
    “My bladder is not in order, my prostate gland.”
    “What? I’ll put on the light.”
    He wanted to ask her not to do so, but she had already turned on a number of lamps. The light glared in his eyes. She stood looking at him and at his wet pants. Her head shook from side to side. Then she said, “This is what comes from living alone.”
    “Really, I’m ashamed of myself.”
    “What’s the shame? We all get older. Nobody gets younger. Were you in the bathroom?”
    Dr. Kalisher didn’t answer.
    “Wait a moment, I still have
his
clothes. I had a premonition I would need them someday.”
    Mrs. Kopitzky left the room. Dr. Kalisher sat down on the edge of a chair, placing his handkerchief beneath him. He sat there stiff, wet, childishly guilty and helpless, and yet with that inner quiet that comes from illness. For years he had been afraid of doctors, hospitals, and especially nurses, who deny their feminine shyness and treat grownup men like babies. Now he was prepared for the last degradations of the body. “Well, I’m finished,
kaput
.” He made a swift summation of his existence. “Philosophy? what philosophy? Eroticism? whose eroticism?” He had played with phrases for years, had come to no conclusions. What had happened to him, in him, all that had taken place in Poland, in Russia, on the planets, on the faraway galaxies, could not be reduced either to Schopenhauer’s blind will or to his, Kalisher’s, eroticism. It was explained neither by Spinoza’s substance, Leibnitz’s monads, Hegel’s dialectic, or Heckel’s monism. “They all just juggle words like Mrs. Kopitzky. It’s better that I didn’t publish all that scribbling of mine. What’s the good of all these preposterous hypotheses? They don’t help at all …” He looked up at Mrs. Kopitzky’s pictures on the wall, and in the blazing light they resembled the smearings of school children. From the street came the honking of cars, the screams of boys, the thundering echo of the subway as a train passed. The door opened and Mrs. Kopitzky