The Collected Stories

white teeth without a blemish. There was a watch on her wrist and earrings dangled from the small lobes of her ears. She wore a fancy shawl with fringe and boots with high heels. She glanced at me shyly and said, “You are invited!”
    We both blushed.
    The next day I went with my parents to the party. Lazar the shoemaker’s house had a bedroom and a big room where the family cooked, ate, and worked. Scattered on the floor around the worktable were shoes, boots, heels. Rivkele’s fiancé, Yantche, was short, broad, and dark, with two gold front teeth. The nail of his right index finger was deformed. For the party he had put on a paper collar and dickey. He passed cigarettes to the male guests. I heard him say, “Marry and die are two things you must do.”
    Warsaw was in no rush to send me train fare. Snow had fallen and a frost gripped Old-Stikov. Father had gone to the house of prayer to study and warm himself at the stove. Mother went to pay a call on a woman who had slipped on the ice near the well and broken a leg. I sat alone at home, going over my manuscripts. Although it was daytime, a cricket chirped, telling of a story as old as time. It stopped, listening to its own silence, then commenced again. The upper panes of the window were covered with frost flowers, but through the lower panes I could see a water carrier with icicles in his beard carrying two pails of water on a wooden yoke. A peasant in a sheepskin hat, his feet wrapped in rags, followed a sledge loaded with logs and pulled by an emaciated horse. I could hear the tinkling of the bell on its neck.
    The door opened and Rivkele entered. “Your mother isn’t here?” she asked me.
    “She went to pay a sick call on somebody.”
    “I borrowed a glass of salt from her yesterday and I’m giving it back.” She put a glass of salt on the table, then looked at me with a bashful smile.
    “I didn’t get the chance to wish you good luck at the engagement party, so I’m doing it now,” I said.
    “Thank you kindly. God willing, the same to you.” After a pause, she added, “When it’s your turn.”
    We talked, and I told her that I was going back to Warsaw. This was supposed to remain a secret, but I boasted to her that I was a writer and had just been made a staff member on a periodical. I showed her the magazine, and she gazed at me in astonishment. “You must have some brain!”
    “To write, what you need most is an eye.”
    “What do you write—your thoughts?”
    “I tell stories. They call it literature.”
    “Oh yes, things happen in the big cities,” Rivkele said, nodding. “Here time stands still. There used to be a fellow here who read novels, but the Hasidim broke in on him and tore them all to shreds. He ran away to Brody.”
    She sat down on the edge of the bench and glanced toward the door, ready to spring up the moment anyone might come in. She said, “In other towns they put on plays, hold meetings, and whatnot, but here everyone is old-fashioned. They eat and they sleep, and that’s how the years go by.”
    I realized that I was doing wrong to say this, but I said it anyway: “Why didn’t you arrange to marry someone from a city?”
    Rivkele thought it over. “Do they care around here what a girl wants? They marry you off and that’s that.”
    “So it wasn’t a love match?”
    “Love? In Old-Stikov? They don’t know the meaning of the word.”
    I am not an agitator by nature, and I had no reason to praise the Enlightenment that had disenchanted me, but somehow, as if against my will, I began to tell Rivkele that we lived in the twentieth century, not in the Middle Ages; that the world had awakened and that villages like Old-Stikov weren’t merely physical quagmires but spiritual ones as well. I told her about Warsaw, Zionism, socialism, Yiddish literature, and the Writers’ Club, where my brother was a member and to which I held a guest pass. I showed her pictures in the magazine of Einstein, Chagall, the dancer Nijinsky, and of my brother.
    Rivkele clapped her hands. “Oy, he resembles you like two drops of water!”
    I told Rivkele that she was the prettiest girl I had ever met. What would become of her here in Old-Stikov? She would soon begin bearing children. She would go around like the rest of the women in coarse boots and a dirty kerchief over a shaved head and take old age upon herself. The men here all visited the Belzer rabbi’s court and he was said to perform miracles, but I heard that every few