The Collected Stories

on concrete form. Feelings put on bodies or are themselves bodies. Those are your dybbuks, the sprites, the hobgoblins.
    “I walked out into the corridor on wobbly knees and found the toilet, but I literally had nothing to urinate with. I read somewhere that in the Arab lands such things happen to men, especially to those who keep harems. Strange, but during the whole excitement I remained calm. Tragedy sometimes brings a kind of brooding resignation that comes from no one knows where.
    “I turned back to the apartment, but neither of the sisters made a rustle. They lay there quiet, tense, barely breathing. Had they cast a spell over me? Were they themselves bewitched? I began to dress slowly. I put on my drawers, my pants, my jacket, and my summer coat. I packed some shirts, socks, and manuscripts in the dark. I gave the two sisters enough time to ask me what I was doing and where I was going, but they didn’t utter a peep. I took my satchel and left in the middle of the night. Those are the bare facts.”
    “Where did you go?”
    “What’s the difference? I went to a cheap hotel and took a room. Gradually everything began to return to normal and I was able to function again. I somehow managed to overcome the nightmarish night and the next morning I caught a plane to London. I had an old friend there, a journalist on the local Yiddish newspaper, who had invited me to come a few times. The editorial office consisted of a single room and the whole paper went under soon afterward, but in the meantime I got some work and lodgings. From there, I left for Buenos Aires in 1950. Here I met Lena, my present wife.”
    “What became of the two sisters?”
    “Do
you
know? That’s as much as I know.”
    “Didn’t you ever hear from them?”
    “Never.”
    “Did you look for them?”
    “Such things you try to forget. I hypnotized myself into thinking that the whole thing had been only a dream, but it really happened. It’s as real as the fact that I’m sitting here with you right now.”
    “How do you explain it?” I asked.
    “I don’t.”
    “Maybe they were dead when you left.”
    “No, they were awake and listening. You can differentiate between the living and the dead.”
    “Aren’t you curious to know what happened to them?”
    “And if I am curious, what of it? They’re probably alive. The witches are somewhere—maybe they’ve married. I was in Paris three years ago, but the house where we lived no longer exists. They put up a garage there.”
    We sat there silently; then I said, “If mass consisted of emotion, every stone in the street would be a skein of misery.”
    “Maybe they are. Of one thing I’m sure—everything lives, everything suffers, struggles, desires. There is no such thing as death.”
    “If that’s true, then Hitler and Stalin didn’t kill anyone,” I said.
    “You have no right to kill an illusion, either. Drink your coffee.”
    For a long while neither of us spoke; then I asked half in jest, “What can you learn from this story?”
    Haim Leib smiled. “If Nietzsche’s crazy theory about the exhaustion of all atomic combinations and the eternal return is true, and if there’ll be another Hitler, another Stalin, and another Holocaust, and if in a trillion years you’ll meet a female in Stettin—don’t go with her to look for her sister.”
    “According to this theory, I will have no choice but to go and to experience everything that you did,” I said.
    “In that case, you’ll know how I felt.”
    Translated by Joseph Singer

Three Encounters

    I

    I LEFT home at seventeen. I told my parents the truth: I didn’t believe in the Gemara or that every law in the
Shulchan Aruch
had been given to Moses on Mount Sinai; I didn’t wish to become a rabbi; I didn’t want a marriage arranged by a matchmaker; I was no longer willing to wear a long gaberdine or grow earlocks. I went to Warsaw, where my parents had once lived, to seek an academic education and a profession. My older brother, Joshua, lived in Warsaw and had become a writer, but he wasn’t able to help me. At twenty I came back home with congested lungs, a chronic cough, no formal education, no profession, and no way that I could see of supporting myself in the city. During the time I was away, my father had been appointed rabbi of Old-Stikov in Eastern Galicia—a village of a few dozen crooked shacks, with straw-covered roofs, built around a swamp. At least, in the fall of 1924 that’s how Old-Stikov