The Collected Stories

know. A kind of hypersensitivity that I inherited from who knows where, maybe from our common ancestor. What was his book?”
    “The Revealer of Profundities.”
    “What kind of profundities did he reveal?”
    “That no love of any kind is lost,” I said, although I had never read a word by this ancestor of mine.
    “Does he say where all the loves, all the dreams, all the desires go?”
    “They’re somewhere.”
    “Where? In the profundities?”
    “In a celestial archive.”
    “Even heaven would be too small for such an archive. I will go. Oh, it’s ringing again! Please don’t answer! Don’t answer!”
    I picked up the receiver, but there was no one on the line. I hung up and Elizabeth said, “That’s Leslie. That’s one of his antics. What did the Revealer of Profundities say about madness? I must go! If I don’t lose my mind, you’ll hear from me. Maybe today, from the hotel.”
    Elizabeth de Sollar never called or wrote me again. She left behind and never claimed her ornate umbrella and her grandfather’s book,
The Outcry of Mordechai,
which was supposed to be the only existing copy, so precious to her, and this has remained a mystery to me. But another mystery connected with her visit was soon unraveled. I met my neighbor the typesetter and told him about his cousin who promised to call the office and never showed herself again.
    He smiled, shook his head, and said, “You knocked on the wrong door. I live on the fifth floor, not on the sixth.”
    Translated by Joseph Singer

The Yearning Heifer

    I

    I N those days I could find great bargains in the small advertisements in my Yiddish press newspaper. I was in need of them because I earned less than twelve dollars a week—my royalties for a weekly column of “facts” gleaned from magazines. For example: a turtle can live five hundred years; a Harvard professor published a dictionary of the language spoken by chimpanzees; Columbus was not trying to discover a route to the Indies but to find the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel.
    It was during the summer of 1938. I lived in a furnished room on the fourth floor of a walk-up building. My window faced a blank wall. This particular advertisement read: “A room on a farm with food, ten dollars weekly.” After having broken with my girl friend Dosha “forever,” I had no reason to spend the summer in New York. I packed a large valise with my meager belongings, many pencils as well as the books and magazines from which I extracted my information, and took the Catskill Mountain bus to Mountaindale. From there I was supposed to phone the farm. My valise would not close and I had bound it together with many shoelaces which I had purchased from blind beggars. I took the 8 a.m. bus and arrived in the village at three o’clock in the afternoon. In the local stationery store I tried to make the phone call but could not get connected and lost three dimes. The first time I got the wrong number; the second time the phone began to whistle and kept on whistling for minutes. The third time I may have gotten the right number but no one answered. The dimes did not come back. I decided to take a taxi.
    When I showed the driver the address, he knitted his brows and shook his head. After a while he said, “I think I know where it is.” And he immediately began to drive with angry speed over the narrow road full of ditches and holes. According to the advertisement, the farm was situated five miles from the village, but he kept on driving for half an hour and it became clear to me that he was lost. There was no one to ask. I had never imagined that New York State had such uninhabited areas. Here and there we passed a burned-down house, a silo which appeared unused for many years. A hotel with boarded windows emerged from nowhere and vanished like a phantom. The grass and brambles grew wild. Bevies of crows flew around croaking. The taxi meter ticked loudly and with feverish rapidity. Every few seconds I touched the trouser pocket where I kept my money. I wanted to tell the driver that I could not afford to drive around without an aim over heather and through deserts, but I knew that he would scold me. He might even drop me off in the middle of the wilderness. He kept on grumbling and every few minutes I heard him say, “Sonofabitch.”
    When, after long twisting and turning, the taxi did arrive at the correct address, I knew that I had made a bad mistake. There was no sign of a farm, just an old ruined wooden house. I