The Collected Stories

with a slap again. She died in 1918.”
    “She never tried to appear to you?” I asked.
    “You mean Nina or Theresa? Both had promised, but neither kept her word. Even if such an entity as a soul exists, I don’t believe it cares to come down with messages from the other world. I really hope that death is the end of all our nonsense.
    “I forgot to add one fact. It has no real connection with my story but it is interesting just the same. During all these years Nina had threatened her uncle, the Biala Rabbi, with conversion. The rabbi was terribly afraid of having a convert in his family and sent her money. After her death, when the family was going to bury her and documents were necessary, they learned that she had been a Catholic for years. It created a commotion among the Hasidim. Warsaw was already under German occupation. They bribed the authorities and buried her in the Jewish cemetery. As a matter of fact, she is lying not too far from Theresa Stein, in the first row. Why she converted I will never know. She often spoke about the Jewish God and mentioned her holy ancestors.”
    Max Persky became silent. The night grew cool. Around the lamp above the door flies, moths, butterflies, and all kinds of gnats had a summer night’s orgy. Max Persky nodded his head over a truth that hung on his lips. “In love you don’t do favors,” he said. “You have to be an egotist or else you destroy yourself and your lover.”
    He hesitated awhile and then he looked at the waitress. She came to the table at once. “More coffee?”
    “Yes, Helena. Tell me, how late are you working today?”
    “As usual we close at twelve.”
    “I will wait for you outside.”
    Translated by the author and Dorothea Straus

A Dance and a Hop

    H OUSES sometimes bear a strange resemblance to those who inhabit them. Leizer, my uncle Jekhiel’s former brother-in-law, owned such a house. Beila, Leizer’s sister, was Uncle Jekhiel’s second wife. She was no longer alive and my uncle had married for the third time after my parents brought me to Shebrin.
    A man in his sixties, Leizer was tall and broad-boned. In his youth he was a giant, but in his later years he became bent and broken from troubles. His wife was dead. He was plagued by a hernia, and a bad leg caused him to walk with a limp. The granary he possessed had burned down and his grain business was gone. His two older daughters baked bread and flatcakes, and from their meager earnings he maintained himself. Actually, all his misfortunes stemmed from his three daughters, Rachel, Leah, and Feigel, who remained spinsters. How was it possible for three girls in a Jewish village not to be married? Everyone in Shebrin asked the same question, and I think that Leizer and his daughters were as baffled as the others, perhaps more so.
    But let us go back to the house. Its brick walls were unusually thick, its roof green from moss, and the chimney, no matter how often it was swept, always spewed forth a mixture of smoke and flames. Grzymak, the chimney sweep, swore that he once saw an imp in the chimney: a creature black as soot, hunched both in front and in back, with an elflock in the middle of his skull and a nose that reached to his belly. He seemed to live there. A neighbor’s daughter had also seen this monster. In the middle of the night, when she went to pour out the slops, she heard him giggling. As she glanced up at Leizer’s roof, the creature, crouching on the tip of the chimney, beckoned her to come to him and stretched out his tongue that was the length of a shovel.
    Why did the builder who constructed this house make the walls almost a yard thick, with no windows facing the front and with a long entranceway that was dark even in broad daylight? Why were the ceilings low and heavily beamed and the attic unproportionately high? No one knew the answer, as the building was about two hundred years old. The small, crooked windows looked out over a swamp which led to the river. On murky summer nights, mysterious lights hovered over the swamp and it was said that those who went toward the lights never returned.
    Leizer’s rupture caused his intestines to drop and there was one woman in Shebrin who could manipulate them back. If not for her, people said, Leizer would have died long ago. It was a disgrace for Leizer that a strange female should touch his private parts, but when it’s a question of saving a life, such things must be overlooked. This woman refused payment. It was