The Collected Stories

me, waged a playful competition over me, and indulged in a game that was both childish and animalistic and therefore indefinable, they kept abusing me. It boiled down to the fact that I had only one urge—to betray them and carry on with other women. Each time the concierge called me to the telephone, they ran to listen in. When I received a letter, they promptly opened it. No dictator could have enforced such a strict censorship as these sisters did over me. They left no doubt that the mailman, the concierge, the Joint Committee, and I were all part of a conspiracy against them, although what kind of conspiracy this was and what was its purpose was something even their twisted minds couldn’t establish. Lombroso contended that genius is insanity. He forgot to say that insanity is genius. Their helplessness was genius too. I sometimes had the feeling that getting through the war had drained them of that specific power for survival that every human and animal possesses. The fact that Ytta hadn’t been able to find another job in Russia besides that of a maid and mistress to that old shoemaker only accented her lack of initiative. They often toyed with the notion of becoming maids in Paris, governesses, or something in that vein, but it was clear both to me and to them that they couldn’t hold any kind of job for more than a few hours. They were also the laziest creatures I had ever met, although from time to time they were seized by a burst of effort and energy that was as exaggerated as their usual laziness. Two women should have been able to keep house, but our apartment was always a mess. They would prepare a meal and argue as to who should wash the dishes until it came time to cook again. Sometimes days and even weeks went by and we ate only dry food. The bedding was often dirty, and we had cockroaches and other vermin. The sisters weren’t physically dirty. They boiled pots of water at night and turned the apartment into a bathhouse. The water dripped down below, and the downstairs tenant, an old French cavalier, banged on our door and threatened us with the police. Paris was starving, but in my house food was thrown out in the garbage. The apartment was piled with rags. They hardly ever wore the dresses that they sewed or received from the Joint Committee, but they went around half naked and barefoot.
    “As alike as the sisters were, so were they also different. Ytta possessed a brutality that was completely foreign to a girl from a Hasidic home. Many of her stories dealt with beatings and I knew that bloodshed and violence of any kind roused her sexually. She told me that, while she was still a girl in her father’s house, she once sharpened a knife and slaughtered three ducks that her mother kept in a shed. Her father beat her for this severely and Dora used to throw this up to her when they quarreled. Ytta was unusually strong, but each time she tried to do something, she managed to hurt herself. She walked around covered with bandages and plasters. She often hinted that she would take revenge on me, even though I had rescued her from slavery and want. I suspected that somewhere inside her she would have been glad to remain with the old shoemaker; maybe because this would have allowed her to forget her family and especially Dora, with whom she maintained a love-hate relationship. This hostility used to come out in every quarrel. Dora was the one who screamed, wept, and scolded, while Ytta resorted to blows. I was often afraid that she might kill Dora in a rage.
    “Dora was better educated, more refined, and possessed of a sick imagination. She slept fitfully and kept telling me her dreams, which were sexual, diabolical, tangled. She awoke quoting verses from the Bible. She tried to write poems in Polish and in Yiddish. She had formulated a sort of personal mythology. I often said that she was possessed by the dybbuk of a follower of Sabbatai Zevi or Jacob Frank.
    “I had always felt a curiosity about the institution of polygamy. Could jealousy be rooted out? Could you share someone you loved? In a sense, the three of us were taking part in an experiment whose results we all awaited. The longer the situation lasted, the more obvious it became to us all that things couldn’t remain the way they were. Something had to happen and we knew that it would be evil, a catastrophe. Each day posed a new crisis, each night carried the threat of some scandal or impotence. Although our neighbors on the lower