The Collected Stories

floors had their own troubles and were accustomed to wild doings from the time of the German Occupation, they began to look at us suspiciously, to nose around, and to shake their heads in disapproval. As sinful as was our behavior, our religious upbringing soon began to make demands on our Jewishness. Dora made the benediction over the Sabbath candles every Friday and then sat around smoking cigarettes. She had formulated her own version of the
Shulchan Aruch
in which pork was forbidden but horsemeat was kosher, in which there was no God but you had to fast on Yom Kippur and eat matzo on Passover. Ytta had become an atheist in Russia, or so she said, but every night before going to sleep she mumbled a nightly prayer or some incantation. When I gave her a coin, she spat on it to ward off the evil eye. She would get up in the morning and announce, ‘Today will be an unlucky day … something bad is going to happen …’ Inevitably, what happened was that she hurt herself, or broke a dish, or a stocking tore on her.
    “Dora kept the funds in our household. I always gave her more than she needed, since I received stipends from a few institutions and later money from relatives in America as well. After a while I noticed that she had accumulated a nest egg. Her sister apparently knew of this and received her share of the loot. I often heard them whispering and arguing about money.
    “I forgot the main thing—children. Both sisters wanted a child by me and many arguments erupted because of this. But I was dead set against it. We were living on charity. Each time the conversation came around to children, I came up with the same answer: ‘For what? So the next Hitler would have someone to burn?’ I don’t have a child to this day. As far as I’m concerned, I want to put an end to the human tragedy. I suspect that neither Dora nor Ytta was even capable of bearing children. Such females are like mules. I’ll never understand how a Hasidic Jew came to have two such daughters. We carry stray genes going back to the time of Genghis Khan, or the devil knows when.
    “The calamity that we anticipated came in a quiet fashion. The arguments gradually subsided to be replaced by a depression that consumed the three of us. It began with Dora’s getting sick. Exactly what was wrong with her, I never found out. She lost weight and coughed a lot. I suspected consumption and took her to a doctor, but he found no evidence of illness. He prescribed vitamins and iron, which didn’t help. Dora became frigid, too. She no longer wanted to join in our nightly games and idle chatter. She even got herself a cot and set it up in the kitchen. Without Dora, Ytta soon lost interest in our sex triangle. She had never been the one to take the initiative; in fact, she did only what Dora told her. Ytta was a big eater and a heavy sleeper. She snored and snorted in her sleep. A situation soon developed in which, instead of having two women, I had none. Not only were we silent at night but during the day too; we became steeped in moroseness. Before, I used to get weary from all the babbling, endless wrangling, and extravagant praises the sisters heaped on me, but now I longed for those days. I talked the situation over with the sisters and we decided to put an end to the alienation that lay between us, but such things can’t be changed with decisions. I often had the feeling that some invisible being lurked among us, a phantom who sealed our lips and burdened our spirits. Each time I started to say something, the words stuck in my throat. When I did say it, the words that came out required no answer. I looked on with amazement as the two chatterbox sisters became close-mouthed. All the speech seemed to have been drained from them. I became as taciturn as they. Before, I could babble on for hours without any thought or reflection, but suddenly I became diplomatic and careful to weigh every word, afraid that no matter what I said it would cause a commotion. I used to laugh when I read your stories about dybbuks, but I now actually felt myself possessed. When I wanted to pay Dora a compliment, it came out an insult. Oddly enough, the three of us couldn’t stop yawning. We sat there, yawned, and looked at one another with moist eyes in astonishment, partners in a tragedy we could neither understand nor control.
    “I became impotent too. I lost the urge for the two sisters. I lay in bed nights, and instead of lust, I felt something that can only be