The Collected Stories

Rolland, and I spent half my nights working on it. I rented a room from an old physician, a onetime friend of Dr. Zamenhof, the creator of Esperanto. The street was named after him.
    That night I had worked until three o’clock. Then I lay down on the bed in my clothes. Every time I fell asleep I woke up with a start. My dreams had become strangely vivid. Voices spoke to me from all sides, bells rang, choirs sang. When I opened my eyes I could still hear their reverberations. My heart palpitated, my hair pricked my skull like wires. My hypochondria had returned. My lungs felt compressed and about to collapse. The day was rainy. Whenever I looked out the window I saw a Catholic funeral cortege on its way to Powązek Cemetery. When I finally sat down to work on the translation, Yadzia, the maid, knocked on my door and announced that a young woman was asking for me.
    My caller turned out to be Rivkele. I didn’t recognize her immediately. She was smartly dressed in a coat with a fur collar, and a modish hat. She carried a purse and an umbrella. Her hair was cut
à la garçon,
and her dress was stylishly short; it came just to her knees. I felt so addled I forgot to be surprised. Rivkele told me what had happened to her. An American had come on a visit to Old-Stikov. He was a former tailor who said he had become a ladies’-clothing manufacturer in New York. He was a distant relative of her father’s. He assured the family that he had divorced his wife in America and began to court Rivkele. She broke her engagement to Yantche. The visitor from America bought her a diamond ring, went with her to Lemberg, took her to the Yiddish theater, to the Polish theater, to restaurants, and generally behaved like a prospective bridegroom. Together they visited Crakow and Zakopane. Her parents demanded that he marry her, but he came up with all kinds of excuses. He had divorced his wife according to Jewish law, he said, but he still needed a civil decree. On the road, Rivkele began to live with him. Rivkele talked and cried. He had seduced and deceived her. He owned no factory; he worked for someone else. He had not divorced his wife. He was the father of five children. All this came out when his wife suddenly arrived in Old-Stikov and made a scandal. She had family in Jaroslaw and Przemyśl—butchers, draymen, tough fellows. They warned Morris—that was his name—that they would break his neck. They turned him in to the police. They threatened to report him to the American consul. The result was that he went back to his wife and they sailed together to America.
    Rivkele’s face was drenched with tears. She trembled, convulsed by hiccuplike sobs. Soon the truth came out. He had made her pregnant; she was in her fifth month. Rivkele moaned. “Nothing is left me but to hang myself!”
    “Do your parents know that—”
    “No, they don’t know. They’d die of shame.”
    This was another Rivkele. She bent down to take a draw on my cigarette. She had to go to the bathroom, and I took her through the living room. The doctor’s wife—a small, thin woman with a pointed face, many warts, and popping eyes that were yellow as if from jaundice—glared at her. Rivkele lingered in the bathroom for such a long time that I feared she had taken poison.
    “Who is that creature?” the doctor’s wife demanded. “I don’t like the looks of her. This is a respectable house.”
    “Madam, you have no reason to be suspicious.”
    “I wasn’t born yesterday. Be so good as to find lodgings somewhere else.”
    After a while Rivkele came back to my room. She had washed her face and powdered it. She had put on lipstick.
    “You are responsible for my misfortune,” she said.
    “
I
am?”
    “If it weren’t for you, I wouldn’t have let myself go with him. Your words stuck in my mind. You spoke in such a way that I wanted to leave home right then and there. When he came, I was—as they say—already ripe.”
    I had the urge to scold her and tell her to be on her way, but she started to cry again. Then she began to sing a tune as old as the female sex: “Where do I go now and what do I do? He has slaughtered me without a knife …”
    “Did he leave you some money at least?” I asked.
    “There is a little left.”
    “Maybe something can still be done.”
    “Too late.”
    We sat without speaking, and the lessons of the moral primers came back to me. No word goes astray. Evil words lead to iniquitous deeds. Utterings of slander,