The Collected Stories

decided with the solemnity of a man taking an oath. He felt cold, and he covered himself with the blanket.
    It was ten past eight in the morning when he came out of his daze. A dream? No, the letter lay on the table. That day Harry Bendiner did not go down for his mail. He did not prepare breakfast for himself, nor did he bother to bathe and dress. He kept on dozing on the plastic chaise on the balcony and thinking about that other Sylvia—Ethel’s daughter—who was living in a tent in British Columbia. Why had she run away so far? he asked himself. Did her father’s death drive her into despair? Could she not stand her mother? Or did she already at her age realize the futility of all human efforts and decide to become a hermit? Is she endeavoring to discover herself, or God? An adventurous idea came into the old man’s mind: to fly to British Columbia, find the young woman in the wilderness, comfort her, be a father to her, and perhaps try to meditate together with her on why a man is born and why he must die.
    Translated by Joseph Singer

The Admirer

    F IRST she wrote me a long letter full of praise. Among other things, she said that my books had helped her “find” herself. Then she called and arranged a meeting. Soon afterward she called again, since it turned out she already had an engagement that day, and she proposed another. Two days later a long telegram came. It seemed that she would be visiting a paralyzed aunt on the new meeting day. I had never received such a long telegram, with such fancy English words. A call followed, and we settled on a new date. During an earlier telephone conversation I had mentioned that I admired Thomas Hardy. In a few days a messenger brought a luxuriously bound set of Thomas Hardy’s works. My admirer’s name was Elizabeth Abigail de Sollar—a remarkable name for a woman whose mother, she told me, came from the Polish town of Klendev, the daughter of the local rabbi.
    On the day of the visit I cleaned my apartment and put all my manuscripts and unanswered letters in the laundry hamper. My guest was due at eleven. At twenty-five past eleven the phone rang and Elizabeth Abigail de Sollar shrieked, “You gave me a phony address! There is no such building!”
    It seemed she had mistaken East Side for West. I now told her precisely how to find me. Once she got to my street on the West Side, she should enter a gate bearing the number she had. The gate opened onto a courtyard. There she would find an entrance with a different number, which I gave her, and I explained that I lived on the eleventh floor. The passenger elevator happened not to be working and she would have to use the service elevator. Elizabeth Abigail de Sollar repeated all my directions and tried to find a pencil and a notebook in her handbag to write them down, but at that moment the operator demanded a nickel. Elizabeth Abigail de Sollar didn’t have a nickel, and breathlessly she uttered the number of the phone booth from which she was calling. I called her at once, but no one answered. I must have dialed the wrong number. I picked up a book and began to read from where I opened it in the middle. Since she had my address and phone number, she would show up sooner or later. I hadn’t managed to get to the end of the paragraph when the telephone rang. I picked up the receiver and heard a man cough, stammer, and clear his throat. After a while he regained his voice and said, “My name is Oliver Leslie de Sollar. May I speak to my wife?”
    “Your wife made a mistake and went to a wrong address. She should be here soon.”
    “Excuse me for disturbing you, but our child has suddenly got sick. She started coughing violently and choking, and I don’t know what to do. She suffers from asthma, Elizabeth has drops for these emergencies, but I can’t find them. I’m distraught.”
    “Call a doctor! Call an ambulance!” I shouted into the mouthpiece.
    “Our doctor isn’t in his office. One second, excuse me …”
    I waited a few minutes, but Oliver Leslie de Sollar didn’t come back and I hung up the receiver. “That’s what happens when you deal with people—right away complications arise,” I said to myself. “The deed itself is a sin,” I mentally quoted an Indian sacred book—but which one? Was it the Bhagavad Gita or the Dhammapada? If the child choked to death, God forbid, I would be indirectly responsible.
    My doorbell rang in a long and insistent summons. I hurried to open it and saw a