The Collected Stories

entered with a bundle of clothes: a jacket, pants, and shirt, and underwear. The clothes smelled of mothballs and dust. She said to him, “Have you been in the bedroom?”
    “What? No.”
    “Nella didn’t materialize?”
    “No, she didn’t materialize.”
    “Well, change your clothes. Don’t let me embarrass you.”
    She put the bundle on the sofa and bent over Dr. Kalisher with the devotion of a relative. She said, “You’ll stay here. Tomorrow I’ll send for your things.”
    “No, that’s senseless.”
    “I knew that this would happen the moment we were introduced on Second Avenue.”
    “How so? Well, it’s all the same.”
    “
They
tell me things in advance. I look at someone, and I know what will happen to him.”
    “So? When am I going to go?”
    “You still have to live many years. You’re needed here. You have to finish your work.”
    “My work has the same value as your ghosts.”
    “There
are
ghosts, there are! Don’t be so cynical. They watch over us from above, they lead us by the hand, they measure our steps. We are much more important to the Cyclic Revival of the Universe than you imagine.”
    He wanted to ask her: “Why then, did you have to hire a woman to deceive me?” but he remained silent. Mrs. Kopitzky went out again. Dr. Kalisher took off his pants and underwear and dried himself with his handkerchief. For a while he stood with his upper part fully dressed and his pants off like some mad jester. Then he stepped into a pair of loose drawers that were as cool as shrouds. He pulled on a pair of striped pants that were too wide and too long for him. He had to draw the pants up until the hem reached his knees. He gasped and snorted, had to stop every few seconds to rest. Suddenly he remembered! This was exactly how as a boy he had dressed himself in his father’s clothes when his father napped after the Sabbath pudding: the old man’s white trousers, his satin robe, his fringed garment, his fur hat. Now his father had become a pile of ashes somewhere in Poland, and he, Zorach, put on the musty clothes of a dentist. He walked to the mirror and looked at himself, even stuck out his tongue like a child. Then he lay down on the sofa. The telephone rang again, and Mrs. Kopitzky apparently answered it, because this time the ringing stopped immediately. Dr. Kalisher closed his eyes and lay quietly. He had nothing to hope for. There was not even anything to think about.
    He dozed off and found himself in the cafeteria on Forty-second Street, near the Public Library. He was breaking off pieces of an egg cookie. A refugee was telling him how to save relatives in Poland by dressing them up in Nazi uniforms. Later they would be led by ship to the North Pole, the South Pole, and across the Pacific. Agents were prepared to take charge of them in Tierra del Fuego, in Honolulu and Yokohama … How strange, but that smuggling had something to do with his, Zorach Kalisher’s, philosophic system, not with his former version but with a new one, which blended eroticism with memory. While he was combining all these images, he asked himself in astonishment: “What kind of relationship can there be between sex, memory, and the redemption of the ego? And how will it work in infinite time? It’s nothing but casuistry, casuistry. It’s a way of explaining my own impotence. And how can I bring over Nella when she has already perished? Unless death itself is nothing but a sexual amnesia.” He awoke and saw Mrs. Kopitzky bending over him with a pillow which she was about to put behind his head.
    “How do you feel?”
    “Has Nella left?” he asked, amazed at his own words. He must still be half asleep.
    Mrs. Kopitzky winced. Her double chin shook and trembled. Her dark eyes were filled with motherly reproach.
    “You’re laughing, huh? There is no death, there isn’t any. We live forever, and we love forever. This is the pure truth.”
    Translated by Roger H. Klein and Cecil Hemley

The Slaughterer

    I

    Y OINEH M EIR should have become the Kolomir rabbi. His father and his grandfather had both sat in the rabbinical chair in Kolomir. However, the followers of the Kuzmir court had set up a stubborn opposition: this time they would not allow a Hasid from Trisk to become the town’s rabbi. They bribed the district official and sent a petition to the governor. After long wrangling, the Kuzmir Hasidim finally had their way and installed a rabbi of their own. In order not to leave Yoineh Meir without