The Collected Stories

breakfast. Then she went to sleep and when she awoke she began to drink in earnest. Once in a while, when the whim seized her, she would open the window and throw out some coins. The little ones almost killed themselves trying to pick them up. As they groped on the ground for the money, she would empty the slops over them. The rabbi sent for her but he might just as well have saved his breath. Everyone was sure that she would drink herself to death. Something entirely different happened.
    As a rule, Henne would come out of her house in the morning. Sometimes she would go to the well for a pail of water. There were stray dogs in Butcher Alley and occasionally she would throw them a bone. There were no outhouses and the villagers attended to their needs in the open. A few days passed and nobody saw Henne. The neighbors tried to peer into her window, but the curtains were drawn. They knocked on her door and no one opened it. Finally they broke it open and what they saw should never be seen again. Some time before, Henne had bought an upholstered chair from a widow. It was an old piece of furniture. She used to sit in it drinking and babbling to herself. When they got the door open, sitting in the chair was a skeleton as black as coal.
    My dear people, Henne had been burned to a crisp. But how? The chair itself was almost intact, only the material at the back was singed. For a person to be so totally consumed, you’d need a fire bigger than the one in the bathhouse on Fridays. Even to roast a goose, a lot of wood is needed. But the chair was untouched. Nor had the linen on the bed caught fire. She had bought a chest of drawers, a table, a wardrobe, and everything was undamaged. Yet Henne was one piece of coal. There was no body to be laid out, to be cleansed, or dressed in a shroud. The officials hurried to Henne’s house and they could not believe their own eyes. Nobody had seen a fire, nobody had smelled smoke. Where could such a hell fire have come from? No ashes were to be found in the stove or under the tripod. Henne seldom cooked. The town’s doctor, Chapinski, arrived. His eyes popped out of his head and there he stood like a figure of clay.
    “How is it possible?” the chief of police asked.
    “It’s impossible,” the doctor replied. “If someone were to tell me such a thing, I would call him a filthy liar.”
    “But it has happened,” the chief of police interrupted.
    Chapinski shrugged his shoulders and murmured, “I just don’t understand.”
    Someone suggested that it might have been lightning. But there had been no lightning and thunder for weeks.
    The neighboring squires heard of the event and arrived on the scene. Butcher Alley filled with carriages, britskas, and phaetons. The crowd stood and gaped. Everyone tried to find an explanation. It was beyond reason. The upholstery of the chair was filled with flax, dry as pepper.
    A rumor spread that the vodka had ignited in Henne’s stomach. But who ever heard of a fire in the guts? The doctor shook his head. “It’s a riddle.”
    There was no point in preparing Henne for burial. They put her bones in a sack, carried it to the cemetery, and buried her. The gravedigger recited the Kaddish. Later her daughters came from Lublin, but what could they learn? Fires ran after Henne and a fire had finished her. In her curses she had often used the word “fire”: fire in the head, fire in the belly. She would say, “You should burn like a candle.” “You should burn in fever.” “You should burn like kindling wood.” Words have power. The proverb says: “A blow passes, but a word remains.”
    My dear people, Henne continued to cause trouble even after her death. Kopel the coachman bought her house from her daughters and turned it into a stable. But the horses sweated in the night and caught cold. When a horse catches cold that way, it’s the end. Several times the straw caught fire. A neighbor who had quarreled with Henne about the washing swore that Henne’s ghost tore the sheets from the line and threw them into the mud. The ghost also overturned a washtub. I wasn’t there, but of a person such as Henne anything can be believed. I see her to this day, black, lean, with a flat chest like a man and the wild eyes of a hunted beast. Something was smouldering within her. She must have suffered. I remember my grandmother saying, “A good life never made anyone knock his head against the wall.” However, no matter what misfortunes strike I say,