The Collected Stories

can’t go to Palestine,’ she said.
    “ ‘Why not? Where, then?’
    “ ‘I must go to Kuibyshev.’
    “I couldn’t believe my own ears. Imagine, a trip in those days from Stettin back to the Bolsheviks—and to Kuibyshev. The road was rife with danger.
    “ ‘What business have you in Kuibyshev?’ I asked her and she told me a story that, if I hadn’t confirmed it myself later, I would have called the ravings of a sick mind. Her sister, Ytta, had jumped from the train taking her to the concentration camp and made her way through the fields and forests to Russia. There she lived with a Jewish engineer who had attained a high rank in the Red Army. This officer was later killed in the war and Ytta lost her mind. She was confined in an insane asylum in that area. Through wild chance, actually a miracle, Dora found out that her sister was still alive. I asked her, ‘How can you help your sister when she is insane? There she at least gets medical care. What can you do for a deranged woman without money, an apartment, or a groschen to your name? You’ll both die.’
    “And she said, ‘You are perfectly right, but she is the only one left of my family and I can’t leave her to waste her years away in a Soviet asylum. It’s possible that she’ll get well when she sees me.’
    “It’s usually not my way to mix into other people’s business. The war taught me that you can’t help anybody. In essence, we were all walking on graves. When you spend years in camps and prisons and stare death in the face ten times a day, you lose all compassion. But when I heard what this girl proposed to do, I was filled with a kind of pity that I had never felt before. I tried to talk her out of it time and again. I offered a thousand arguments.
    “She said, ‘I know that you are right, but I must go back.’
    “ ‘How will you get there?’ I asked her, and she said, ‘I’m ready to go even on foot.’
    “I said, ‘I’m afraid you’re no less crazy than your sister.’
    “And she replied, ‘I fear that you’re right.’
    “After all his wanderings and tribulations, the person sitting here next to you gave up the chance to go to Israel, which was to me at that time the most beautiful dream, and I went off with a strange girl to Kuibyshev. It was actually an act of suicide. One thing I found out then was that pity is a form of love and, actually, its highest expression. I won’t describe the trip to you—it was not a trip but an odyssey. I can only tell you that the Reds detained us twice along the way and it failed by a whisker that we didn’t both end up in prison or in a slave camp. Dora behaved in a strangely heroic fashion during the trip, but I sensed that this was more resignation than bravery. I forgot to tell you—she was a virgin and underneath all that despair lay a passionate woman. I was used to women loving me, but this was different from anything I had ever known. She clung to me in a mixture of love and desperation that frightened me. She had an education and in the cellar where she had hidden for two years she had read a whole library in Polish, French, and German, but she lacked all experience. Every little thing frightened her. In her hiding place she had read many Christian books as well as the works of Madame Blavatsky, and occult and theosophic writings that had been left to Miss Dolanska by an aunt. Dora babbled on about Jesus and ghosts, but I had no patience for such things, even though I myself had become a mystic, or at least a fatalist, during the Holocaust. Oddly enough, she combined all this with the Jewishness of her home.
    “There was no particular hardship in crossing the border into Russia, but the trains were jammed. In the middle of everything, the locomotive was uncoupled, hooked on to some other wagons, and we were left standing there for days on end. In the cars, the passengers fought constantly. A brawl would erupt and everyone would be shoved out of the wagons. Corpses lay scattered along the tracks. The cold inside the cars was frightful. Some people even rode on flatcars while the snow fell on them. In the closed cars you had to carry a chamber pot or a bottle in which to relieve yourself. A peasant sat on the roof of a car, and when the train entered a tunnel, he lost his head. And that’s how we got to Kuibyshev. All the way there, I couldn’t stop wondering at myself over what I had done. This thing with Dora was no simple affair. I had actually bound myself up