The Collected Stories

but I can’t make up my mind. All the women want is your rubles. I was sitting with one right here in the tavern and she asked me, ‘How much money do you have?’ She was an old hag and ugly as sin. I said to her that how much money I had saved up was none of her business. If for one ruble I can get a girl who is young and pretty, why do I need such an old bag? Do you follow me? Here’s our beer. What’s the matter? You’re as pale as death.”
    VIII

    Three weeks had passed, but the rabbi still wandered about in Warsaw. He slept at the coal dealer’s. The coal dealer had taken him to the Yiddish theater after the Sabbath meal. He had also taken the rabbi with him to the races at Vilanov.
    Every day except Saturday, the rabbi visited Bresler’s library. He stood at the bookshelves and browsed. Then there was a table where one could sit and read. The rabbi came in the morning and stayed until closing time. In the afternoon he went out and bought a roll, a bagel, or a piece of potato kugel from a market woman. He ate without a benediction. He read books in Hebrew, in Yiddish. He even tried to read German. In the library he found the book that he had first seen in the shop window,
How the Universe Came into Being.
“Yes, how was it created without a creator?” the rabbi asked himself. He had developed the habit of talking to himself. He tugged at his beard, winced, and shook as he used to in the study house. He muttered, “Yes, a fog, but who made the fog? How did it arise? When did it begin?”
    The earth was torn away from the sun, he read—but who formed the sun? Man descended from an ape—but where did the ape come from? And since the author wasn’t present when all this happened, how could he be so sure? Their science explained everything away in distance of time and space. The first cell appeared hundreds of millions of years ago, in the slime at the edge of the ocean. The sun will be extinguished billions of years hence. Millions of stars, planets, comets, move in a space with no beginning and no end, without a plan or purpose. In the future all people will be alike, there will be a Kingdom of Freedom without competition, crises, wars, jealousy, or hatred. As the Talmud says, anyone who wants to lie will tell of things that happen far away. In an old copy of the Hebrew magazine,
Haasif,
the rabbi read about Spinoza, Kant, Leibnitz, Schopenhauer. They called God substance, monad, hypothesis, blind will, nature.
    The rabbi clutched at one of his sidelocks. Who is this nature? Where did it get so much skill and power? It took care of the most distant star, of a rock in the bottom of the ocean, of the slightest speck of dust, of the food in a fly’s stomach. In him, Rabbi Nechemia of Bechev, nature did everything at once. It gave him abdominal cramps, it stuffed his nose, it made his skull tingle, it gnawed at his brain like the gnat that plagued Titus. The rabbi blasphemed God and apologized to Him. One moment he wished death upon himself and the next he feared sickness. He needed to urinate, went to the toilet but couldn’t function. As he read, he saw green and golden spots before his eyes and the lines merged, diverged, bent, and passed over one another. “Am I going blind? Is it the end? Have the demons already got hold of me? No, Father of the Universe, I will not recite my confession. I’m ready for all your Gehennas. If you can be silent for an eternity, I at least will remain dumb until I give up my soul. You are not the only man of war,” the rabbi spoke to the Almighty. “If I am your son, I too can put up a fight.”
    The rabbi stopped reading in an orderly fashion. He would take out a book, open it at the middle, run through a few lines, and replace it on the shelf. No matter where he opened, he encountered a lie. All books had one thing in common: they avoided the essential, spoke vaguely, and gave different names to the same object. They knew neither how grass grew nor what light was, how heredity worked, the stomach digested, the brain thought, how weak nations grew strong, nor how the strong perished. Even though these scholars wrote thick books about the distant galaxies, they hadn’t yet discovered what went on a mile beneath the crust of the earth.
    The rabbi turned pages and gaped. He would lay his forehead on the edge of the table and nap for an instant. “Woe to me, I have no more strength.” Every night, the coal dealer tried to persuade the rabbi to return to his own