The Collected Stories

lesson to me to keep my mouth shut.
    “I could tell you a hundred things like that about my childhood, but I’ll add just one. Across the street from our home there was a store that sold dairy products. In those years, you went to the store to buy boiled milk. They boiled it on a gas range. One morning my mother gave me a pan and told me, ‘Go to Zelda across the street and buy a quart of boiled milk.’ I went over to the store and there was only one customer—a girl who was buying a few ounces of butter. In Warsaw they used to slice the butter from a big chunk with a bow, like the ones children carried at the Feast of Omer when they went picnicking in the Praga forest. I looked up and saw a strange thing: a light was burning over Zelda’s head, as if there were a Hanukkah lamp in her wig. I stood and gaped—how was it possible? Nearby, at the counter, the girl spoke to Zelda as though there was nothing out of the way. After Zelda weighed the butter on the scale and the girl left, Zelda said, ‘Come in, come in. Why are you standing there on the threshold?’ I wanted to ask her, ‘Why does a light burn over your head?’ But I already had a hunch that I was the only one who saw it.
    “The next day, when I came home from cheder, my mother said to me, ‘Did you hear what happened? Zelda from the dairy store dropped dead.’ You can imagine my fright. I was only about eight. Since then I’ve seen the same kind of light many times over the heads of those who were about to die. Thank God, I haven’t seen it for the last twenty years. At my age, and among those I spend my days with, I could see those lights all the time.”
    II

    “A while ago, you wrote that in every great love there is an element of telepathy. I was struck by this and decided that I had to see you. In my own life this happened not once, not ten times, but over and over again. In my young years I was romantic. I would see a woman and fall in love with her at first sight. In those days you couldn’t just approach a woman and tell her you were in love with her. Girls were delicate creatures. A mere word was considered an insult. Also, in my own way, I was shy. Proud, too. It’s not in my nature to run after women. To make it short, instead of talking to a girl, I would think about her—day and night. I fancied all kinds of impossible encounters and adventures. Then I began to notice that my thoughts took effect. The girl I had been thinking about so hard would actually come to me. Once, I deliberately waited for a woman on a crowded street in Warsaw until she appeared. I’m no mathematician, but I know the odds that this woman might cross that street at that very time were about one in twenty million. But she came, as though attracted by an invisible magnet.
    “I’m not too credulous; even today I have my doubts. We want to believe that everything happens in a rational way and according to order. We’re afraid of mysteries—if there are good powers, it’s likely there are also evil ones, and who knows what they might do! But so many irrational things happened to me I would have to be an idiot to ignore them.
    “Perhaps because I had this kind of magnetism, I never married. Anyway, I’m not the kind of man who is satisfied with one woman. I had other powers, too, but those I’m not going to boast about. I lived, as they say, in a Turkish paradise—often with as many as five or six lovers at the same time. In the drawing rooms where I used to fix furniture, I often made the acquaintance of beautiful women—mostly Gentiles. And I always heard the same song from them—I was different from other Jews, and all that kind of chatter. I had a room with a separate entrance, and that’s all a bachelor needs. I kept brandy and liquors and a good supply of delicacies in my cupboard. If I were to tell you what took place in this room on my sofa, you could make a book out of it—but who cares? The older I grew, the clearer it became to me that for modern man marriage is sheer insanity. Without religion, the whole institution is absurd. Naturally, your mother and my mother were faithful women. For them there was one God and one husband.
    “Now I come to the main point. In spite of all the women I had in those years, there was one I stayed with for almost thirty years—actually, until the day the Nazis bombed Warsaw. That day thousands of men crossed the bridge to Praga. I wanted to take Manya with me—Manya was her name—but she had the