The Collected Stories

mine, a young man from Warsaw who went to America in 1932. He knew English and other languages as well. You can’t imagine the power Americans wielded in those days. I could easily have obtained a visa to America through him, but Dora took it into her head that I had a sweetheart there. In Paris, the Joint—actually, that same young man—got us a small apartment, which was no easy task. We received a monthly stipend from this same organization.
    “I know what you’re about to ask me—have a little patience. Yes, I lived with them both. I married Dora officially in Germany—she wanted to stand under a canopy and she did—but, in actuality, I had two wives, two sisters, just like the patriarch Jacob. All I lacked was a Bilhah and a Zilpah. What would stop the likes of me? Not the Jewish and certainly not the Gentile laws. In the war, the whole human culture crumbled like a ruin. In the camps—not only in Germany but in Russia and later in the DP camps where the refugees lived for years—all shame vanished. I knew of one case where a woman had her husband on one side and her lover on the other and all three of them lived together. I’ve witnessed so many wild things that to me they’ve become normal. A Schicklgruber or a Dzhugashvili comes along and moves the clock back ten thousand years. Not completely, mind you. There were also instances of rare piety and of self-sacrifice for a minor law in the
Shulchan Aruch,
or even for some custom. This itself may be a bit of wildness, too.
    “I didn’t want all this. It’s one thing to have an adventure—it’s quite another to make a permanent institution out of it. But it was out of my hands. From the moment the two sisters met, I was no longer a free man. They enslaved me with their love for me, their love toward each other, and their jealousy. One minute they would be kissing and crying from great devotion and suddenly they would begin to slug away, pull hair, and curse each other with words you wouldn’t hear in the underworld. I had never before seen such hysteria or heard such screams. Every few days one of the sisters, or sometimes both, tried to commit suicide. One moment it would be quiet. The three of us might be sitting eating or discussing a book or picture—all of a sudden a horrible shriek and both sisters would be rolling on the floor, tearing pieces from each other. I’d run up, trying to separate them, but I’d catch a slam in the face or a bite and the blood would be dripping from me. Why they were fighting I would never know. Fortunately, we lived on the upper story, a garret, and we had no neighbors on our floor. One of the sisters would run to the window and try to throw herself out, while the other seized a knife and went for her own throat. I’d grab one by the leg and take the knife away from the other. They’d howl at me and at each other. I’d try to find out what caused the outburst, but I learned in time that they didn’t know the reason themselves. At the same time, I want you to know that both of them were intelligent in their own fashion. Dora had excellent taste in literature. She’d offer an opinion about a book and it was accurate to the dot. Ytta was musically inclined. She could sing whole symphonies. When they had the energy, they displayed great capability. They had picked up a sewing machine somewhere and from scraps and pieces they sewed dresses of which the most elegant ladies would be proud. One thing both sisters shared, a complete lack of common sense. Actually, they shared many traits. At times it even seemed to me that they were two bodies with one soul. If there had been a tape recorder to take down the things they said, particularly at night, it would make Dostoevsky seem trite. Complaints against God poured out of them, along with laments for the Holocaust that no pen could transcribe. What a person really is comes out only at night, in the dark. I know now that both of them were born crazy, not the victims of any circumstances. The circumstances, naturally, made everything worse. I myself became a psychopath living with them. Insanity is no less contagious than typhus.
    “Besides squabbling, brawling, telling endless stories of the camps and of their home in Warsaw, and chattering about clothes, fashions, and whatnot, the sisters had one favorite topic: my treachery. They forged an indictment against me that made the Moscow trials seem like pure logic by comparison. Even as they sat on the sofa, kissed