The Collected Stories

here), and I paid sixteen dollars a month for it. Mrs. Berger, the landlady, gave me breakfast at cost.
    Until they deported me to Poland, I was enjoying American comfort. I took a bath in the bathroom down the hall (at that time of day, it was not occupied), and I could see a huge boat arriving from Europe—either the
Queen Mary
or the
Normandie.
What a luxury to look out my bathroom window and see the Atlantic Ocean and one of the newest and fastest ships in the world! While shaving, I made a decision: I would not let them deport me to Poland. I would not fall into Hitler’s paws. I would stay illegally. I had been told that if war broke out I had a good chance of becoming a citizen automatically. I grimaced at my reflection in the mirror. Already, my red hair was gone. I had watery blue eyes, inflamed eyelids, sunken cheeks, a protruding Adam’s apple. Although people came from Manhattan to Sea Gate to get sunburned, my skin remained sickly white. My nose was thin and pale, my chin pointed, my chest flat. I often thought that I looked not unlike the imps I described in my stories. I stuck out my tongue and called myself a crazy
batlan,
which means an unworldly ne’er-do-well.
    I expected Mrs. Berger’s kitchen to be empty so late in the morning, but they were all there: Mr. Chaikowitz; his third wife; the old writer Lemkin, who used to be an anarchist; and Sylvia, who had taken me to a movie on Mermaid Avenue a few days before (until five o’clock the price of a ticket was only ten cents) and translated for me in broken Yiddish what the gangsters in the film were saying. In the darkness, she had taken my hand, which made me feel guilty. First, I had vowed to myself to keep the Ten Commandments. Second, I was betraying Esther. Third, I had a bad conscience about Anna, who still wrote me from Warsaw. But I didn’t want to insult Sylvia.
    When I entered the kitchen, Mrs. Berger cried out, “Here’s our writer! How can a man sleep so long? I’ve been on my feet since six this morning.” I looked at her thick legs, at her crooked toes and protruding bunions. Everyone teased me. Old Chaikowitz said, “Do you realize that you’ve missed the hour of morning prayer? You must be one of the Kotzker Hasids who pray late.” His face was white and so was his goatee. His third wife, a fat woman with a thick nose and fleshy lips, joined in. “I bet this greenhorn hasn’t even got phylacteries.” As for Lemkin, he said, “If you ask me, he was up writing a best-seller the whole night.”
    “I’m hungry for the second time,” Sylvia announced.
    “What are you going to eat today?” Mrs. Berger asked me. “Two rolls with one egg, or two eggs with one roll?”
    “Whatever you give me.”
    “I’m ready to give you the moon on a plate. I’m scared of what you may write about me in your Yiddish paper.”
    She brought me a large roll with two scrambled eggs and a big cup of coffee. The price of the breakfast was a quarter, but I owed Mrs. Berger six weeks’ rent and for six weeks of breakfasts.
    While I ate, Mrs. Chaikowitz talked about her oldest daughter, who had been widowed a year ago and was now remarried. “Have you ever heard of a thing like this?” she said. “He hiccupped once and dropped dead. It seems something ruptured in his brain. God forbid the misfortunes that can happen. He left her over $50,000 insurance. How long can a young woman wait? The other one was a doctor, this one is a lawyer—the biggest lawyer in America. He took one look at her and said, ‘This is the woman I’ve been waiting for.’ After six weeks they got married and went to Bermuda on the honeymoon. He bought her a ring for $10,000.”
    “Was he a bachelor?” Sylvia asked.
    “He had a wife before, but she was not his type and he divorced her. She gets plenty of alimony from him—$200 a week. May she spend it all on medicine.”
    I ate my breakfast quickly and left. Outside, I looked in the letter box, but there was nothing for me. Only two blocks away I could see the house Esther had rented the winter before last. She let rooms to people who wanted to spend their vacations near New York. I couldn’t visit her during the daytime; I used to steal over late at night. A lot of Yiddish writers and journalists lived there that summer, and they were not to know about my love affair with Esther. Since I didn’t intend to marry her, why jeopardize her reputation? Esther was almost ten years older than I. She had divorced