The Collected Stories

where she had been a barmaid in a tavern and had later become a whore.
    Beyle Tslove spoke differently from Getsl the fiddler, with the flat accents of her region and a mixture of Germanized words unknown in Shidlovtse. Beyle Tslove’s language made even the butchers and the combers of pigs’ bristles blush. She sang ribald songs and soldiers’ ditties. She said she had wandered for eighty years in waste places. She had been reincarnated as a cat, a turkey, a snake, and a locust. For a long time her soul resided in a turtle. When someone mentioned Getsl the fiddler and asked whether she knew him and whether she knew that he was also lodged in the same woman, she answered, “I neither know him nor want to know him.”
    “Why not? Have you turned virtuous all of a sudden?” Zeinvl the butcher asked her.
    “Who wants a dead fiddler?”
    The people began to call to Getsl the fiddler, urging him to speak up. They wanted to hear the two dybbuks talk to each other. But Getsl the fiddler was silent.
    Beyle Tslove said, “I see no Getsl here.”
    “Maybe he’s hiding?” someone said.
    “Where? I can smell a man a mile away.”
    In the midst of this excitement, Reb Sheftel returned. He looked older and even smaller than before. His beard was streaked with gray. He had brought talismans and amulets from Radzymin, to hang in the corners of the room and around his daughter’s neck.
    People expected the dybbuk to resist and fight the amulets, as evil spirits do when touched by a sacred object. But Beyle Tslove was silent while the amulets were hung around Liebe Yentl’s neck. Then she asked, “What’s this? Sacred toilet paper?”
    “These are Holy Names from the Radzymin rabbi!” Reb Sheftel cried out. “If you do not leave my daughter at once, not a spur shall be left of you!”
    “Tell the Radzymin rabbi that I spit at his amulets,” the woman said brazenly.
    “Harlot! Fiend! Harridan!” Reb Sheftel screamed.
    “What’s he bellowing for, that Short Friday? Some man—nothing but bone and beard!”
    Reb Sheftel had brought with him blessed six-groschen coins, a piece of charmed amber, and several other magical objects that the Evil Host is known to shun. But Beyle Tslove, it seemed, was afraid of nothing. She mocked Reb Sheftel and told him she would come at night and tie an elflock in his beard.
    That night Reb Sheftel recited the Shema of the Holy Isaac Luria. He slept in his fringed garment with
The Book of Creation
and a knife under his pillow—like a woman in childbirth. But in the middle of the night he woke and felt invisible fingers on his face. An unseen hand was burrowing in his beard. Reb Sheftel wanted to scream, but the hand covered his mouth. In the morning Reb Sheftel got up with his whole beard full of tangled braids, gummy as if stuck together with glue.
    Although it was a fearful matter, the Worka Hasidim, who were bitter opponents of the Radzymin rabbi, celebrated that day with honey cake and brandy in their study house. Now they had proof that the Radzymin rabbi did not know the Cabala. The followers of the Worka rabbi had advised Reb Sheftel to make a journey to Worka, but he ignored them, and now they had their revenge.
    IV

    One evening, as Beyle Tslove was boasting of her former beauty and of all the men who had run after her, the fiddler of Pinchev suddenly raised his voice. “What were they so steamed up about?” he asked her mockingly. “Were you the only female in Plock?”
    For a while all was quiet. It looked as though Beyle Tslove had lost her tongue. Then she gave a hoarse laugh. “So he’s here—the scraper! Where were you hiding? In the gall?”
    “If you’re blind, I can be dumb. Go on, Grandma, keep jabbering. Your story had a gray beard when I was still in my diapers. In your place, I’d take such tall tales to the fools of Chelm. In Shidlovtse there are two or three clever men, too.”
    “A wise guy, eh?” Beyle Tslove said. “Let me tell you something. A live fiddle-scraper’s no prize—and when it comes to a dead one! Go back, if you forgive me, to your resting place. They miss you in the Pinchev cemetery. The corpses who pray at night need another skeleton to make up their quorum.”
    The people who heard the two dybbuks quarrel were so stunned that they forgot to laugh. Now a man’s voice came from Liebe Yentl, now a woman’s. The Pinchev fiddler’s “r”s were soft, the Plock harlot’s hard.
    Liebe Yentl herself rested against two pillows,