The Collected Stories

lost souls. Elizabeth Abigail happened to resemble my sister slightly. Since she came from Klendev and was a rabbi’s grandchild, she might have been my relative. Klendev isn’t far from the towns where generations of my ancestors lived.
    I asked, “How is it that Bibi is with her father, not her mother?”
    Elizabeth replied, “The mother committed suicide.”
    The telephone rang and I heard the same stammering and throat clearing I had heard earlier. I immediately called Elizabeth, who approached slowly and with the reluctance of one who knows what’s coming. I heard her tell her husband where the drops were and order him sharply not to annoy her again. He spoke at length and she responded with an occasional brief phrase. “What? Well, no.” Finally she said, “That I don’t know,” in a tone of impatience. She came back into the room and resumed her seat on the sofa.
    “It’s become a system with them—the moment I go somewhere, Bibi gets these chest spasms and her father calls to alarm me. He can never find the drops, which don’t help in any case, because her asthma is deliberately brought on by him. This time I didn’t even tell him where I was going, but he eavesdrops on me. I wanted to ask you a number of questions, but he has driven them from my mind. Yes, where in heaven’s name is this Klendev? I couldn’t find it on any map.”
    “It’s a village in the Lublin area.”
    “Were you ever there?”
    “It just so happens that I was. I had left home and someone recommended me for a teaching position there. I gave a single lesson, and the school authorities and I agreed at once that I am no teacher. The very next day I left.”
    “When was this?”
    “In the twenties.”
    “Oh, my grandfather was no longer living then. He died in 1913.”
    Although what my visitor had to say held no special interest for me, I listened closely. It was hard for me to believe that only one generation separated her and the Klendev rabbi, his milieu, and his way of life. Her face had in a mysterious fashion molded itself to that of the Anglo-Saxons whose culture she had absorbed. I detected within her traces of other lands, other climates. Could it be that Lysenko was right after all?
    The clock showed twelve-thirty and I invited my guest to go downstairs with me for lunch. She said that she didn’t eat lunch. The most she might have was some tea, but if I wanted to have lunch, she’d go along with me. After a while we went into the kitchen and I brewed tea. I put cookies on a plate for her and for myself fixed bread with cottage cheese. We sat at a card table, facing each other like a married couple. A cockroach crawled across the table, but neither Elizabeth nor I made any effort to disturb it. The cockroaches in my apartment apparently knew that I was a vegetarian and that I felt no hatred for their species, which is a few hundred million years older than man and which will survive him. Elizabeth had strong tea, with milk, and I had mine weak, with lemon. When I drank, I held a cube of sugar between my teeth as had been the custom in Bilgoray and Klendev. She didn’t touch the cookies, and gradually I finished them off. There had evolved between us a familiarity that requires no preliminaries.
    I heard myself ask, “How long is it since you’ve stopped sleeping with him?”
    Elizabeth began to blush, but when the blood had colored half her face it receded. “I’ll tell you something, though you won’t believe it.”
    “I’ll believe anything you say.”
    “I’m physically a virgin.” She blurted out the words and seemed astonished to have said them.
    To show that she had not shocked me, I said casually, “I thought this was an extinct breed already.”
    “There is always a Last Mohican.”
    “You never asked a doctor about the situation?”
    “Never.”
    “What about psychoanalysis?”
    “Neither Leslie nor I believe in it.”
    “Don’t you need a man?” I asked, bewildered by my daring.
    She raised her glass and took a sip of tea. “Very much so, but I’ve never met a man I wanted to be with. That’s how it was before I met Leslie and that’s how it’s been since. When I first knew him, I figured that Leslie would be a man to me, but he said that he wanted to wait for marriage. This seemed foolish to me, but we waited. When we were married we made several attempts, but they didn’t work out. At times I imagined that the Klendev rabbi wouldn’t let it happen because Leslie was