The Collected Stories

a frightened virgin, it’s both comical and tragic. We climbed up the three flights of stairs and a few times she stopped to rest. She had brought me a present, a suit of woolen underwear. I made tea. I tried to cheer her up with a glass of cognac. But she refused to drink. After much hesitation, many apologies, and quotations from Faust and Heine’s
Buch der Lieder,
she went to bed with me. I was sure that I wouldn’t have the slightest desire for her but sex is full of caprices. After a while we both fell asleep. I had already decided that this night was the end of our miserable affair. Even she had hinted that we shouldn’t make fools of ourselves any more.
    “I was tired and fell asleep soundly. I awoke with an uncanny feeling. At first I did not remember with whom I was in bed. For a moment I thought it was Nina. I stretched out my hand and touched her. At that instant I knew the truth: Theresa was dead. To this day I don’t know if she became sick and tried to wake me, or simply died in her sleep. I have gone through many tragedies, but what I experienced that night was sheer terror. My first impulse was to call an ambulance, but all Warsaw would immediately have known that Theresa Stein had died in Max Persky’s bed. If the Pope had been caught stealing from an attic in Krochmalna Street, it would not have created a greater sensation. A man fears nothing as much as ridicule. Half of Warsaw would have cursed me, and the other half jeered. When I lit the lamp and looked at her face, I was frozen with horror. She appeared not sixty but ninety. I wanted to run to the end of the earth so that no one would ever learn what had happened to me. But I had spent all my money in the restaurant and for the droshky. I realized that coming home with me and walking up all those steps had killed her. I had actually committed a murder and I had done it out of pity.
    “I lit all the lamps, covered the corpse with a blanket, and began to look for a way to end my own idiotic life. To die near her would create the impression that it was a double suicide. One is ashamed of what people will say and think even after one has gone. Prestige, not love, is stronger than death. I looked at my watch and it was ten minutes after three. As I stood there bewildered, cursing the day of my birth, the doorbell rang. I was sure it was the police. They could easily have accused me of murder. I did not answer, but the ringing soon became insistent and loud. I was sure that the next step would be breaking down the door. I did not ask who it was and opened. It was Nina.
    “She had missed her train. Nina was an expert at being late for trains, theaters, rendezvous. She said there was no other train that night and she had gone home. But in the middle of the night she was assailed by the desire to be with me. Or perhaps she thought she would catch me with someone else and scratch out her eyes. How strange that I felt overjoyed to see Nina. To be alone with a corpse in such circumstances is so painful that all other suffering and shame is pallid by comparison. Nina said, ‘Why are all the lamps burning?’ She looked at the bed and exclaimed, ‘There is no use hiding her!’ She ran to the bed and wanted to tear off the blanket, but I held her hands and said, ‘Nina, a corpse is lying there.’ She saw from my face that I was not lying. I expected her to make a terrible rumpus and to wake the neighbors. Nina could be thrown into a panic at the sight of a little mouse or a beetle. But at this moment she became calm and seemed cured of all her madness. She said, ‘A corpse? Who is it?’ When I told her it was Theresa Stein, she began to laugh, not hysterically but in the way a healthy person would break out laughing at a good joke. I said, ‘Nina, this is no joke. Theresa Stein died in my bed.’
    “Nina knew Theresa Stein. The whole of intellectual Warsaw knew her. She still did not believe it, until I opened Theresa’s pocketbook and showed Nina her passport. With the Russians everyone had to carry a passport, even women.”
    “How does it happen that you never wrote about this?” I asked Max Persky.
    “No one has heard the truth until now. There are still too many people who knew Theresa Stein.”
    He lit another cigarette. It was now night. The moon was as yellow as brass.
    “What a story it would make,” I said.
    “Perhaps I will write it someday, but only in my old age, when no one in Warsaw remembers Theresa Stein. It’s still