The Collected Stories

that had it not been for the United States Hitler would have overrun all of Russia. He told how prisoners tricked the guards to get an extra piece of bread or a double portion of watery soup, and what methods were used in picking lice.
    Esther called out, “Father, enough!”
    “What’s the matter—am I lying?”
    “One can have enough even of kreplaech.”
    “Daughter, you did it yourself.”
    When Esther went to the kitchen to make tea, I learned from her father that she had had a husband in Russia—a Polish Jew who had volunteered in the Red Army and perished in the war. Here in New York she was courted by a refugee, a former smuggler in Germany who had opened a bookbinding factory and become rich. “Persuade her to marry him,” Boris Merkin said to me. “It would be good for me, too.”
    “Maybe she doesn’t love him.”
    “There is no such thing as love. Give me a cigarette. In the camp, people climbed on one another like worms.”
    II

    I had invited Esther to supper, but she called to say she had the grippe and must remain in bed. Then in a few days’ time a situation arose that made me leave for Israel. On the way back, I stopped over in London and Paris. I wanted to write to Esther, but I had lost her address. When I returned to New York, I tried to call her, but there was no telephone listing for Boris Merkin or Esther Merkin—father and daughter must have been boarders in somebody else’s apartment. Weeks passed and she did not show up in the cafeteria. I asked the group about her; nobody knew where she was. “She has most probably married that bookbinder,” I said to myself. One evening, I went to the cafeteria with the premonition that I would find Esther there. I saw a black wall and boarded windows—the cafeteria had burned. The old bachelors were no doubt meeting in another cafeteria, or an Automat. But where? To search is not in my nature. I had plenty of complications without Esther.
    The summer passed; it was winter. Late one day, I walked by the cafeteria and again saw lights, a counter, guests. The owners had rebuilt. I entered, took a check, and saw Esther sitting alone at a table reading a Yiddish newspaper. She did not notice me, and I observed her for a while. She wore a man’s fur fez and a jacket trimmed with a faded fur collar. She looked pale, as though recuperating from a sickness. Could that grippe have been the start of a serious illness? I went over to her table and asked, “What’s new in buttons?”
    She started and smiled. Then she called out, “Miracles do happen!”
    “Where have you been?”
    “Where did you disappear to?” she replied. “I thought you were still abroad.”
    “Where are our cafeterianiks?”
    “They now go to the cafeteria on Fifty-seventh Street and Eighth Avenue. They only reopened this place yesterday.”
    “May I bring you a cup of coffee?”
    “I drink too much coffee. All right.”
    I went to get her coffee and a large egg cookie. While I stood at the counter, I turned my head and looked at her. Esther had taken off her mannish fur hat and smoothed her hair. She folded the newspaper, which meant that she was ready to talk. She got up and tilted the other chair against the table as a sign that the seat was taken. When I sat down, Esther said, “You left without saying goodbye, and there I was about to knock at the pearly gates of heaven.”
    “What happened?”
    “Oh, the grippe became pneumonia. They gave me penicillin, and I am one of those who cannot take it. I got a rash all over my body. My father, too, is not well.”
    “What’s the matter with your father?”
    “High blood pressure. He had a kind of stroke and his mouth became all crooked.”
    “Oh, I’m sorry. Do you still work with buttons?”
    “Yes, with buttons. At least I don’t have to use my head, only my hands. I can think my own thoughts.”
    “What do you think about?”
    “What not. The other workers are all Puerto Ricans. They rattle away in Spanish from morning to night.”
    “Who takes care of your father?”
    “Who? Nobody. I come home in the evening to make supper. He has one desire—to marry me off for my own good and, perhaps, for his comfort, but I can’t marry a man I don’t love.”
    “What is love?”
    “You ask me! You write novels about it. But you’re a man—I assume you really don’t know what it is. A woman is a piece of merchandise to you. To me a man who talks nonsense or smiles like an idiot is repulsive. I would