The Collected Stories

Menashe? I mean physically?”
    She remained silent. Then she said, “I could give you a Warsaw answer: ‘It’s none of your leprous business.’ But since you are Loshikl, I will tell you the truth. No.”
    “Why did you do it, since you loved Menashe so much?”
    “Loshikl, I don’t know. Neither do I know why I burned his manuscript. He had betrayed me with scores of women and I never as much as reproached him. I had made up my mind long ago that you can love one person and sleep with someone else; but when I saw this monstrosity in our bed, the actress in me awoke for the last time and I had to do something dramatic. He could have stopped me easily; instead, he just watched me doing it.”
    We were both silent again. Then she said, “You should never sacrifice yourself for the person you love. Once you risk your life the way I did, then there is nothing more to give.”
    “In novels the young man always marries the girl he saves,” I said.
    She tensed but did not answer. She suddenly appeared tired, haggard, wrinkled, as if old age had caught up with her at that very moment. I did not expect her to utter another word about it, when she said, “Together with his manuscript, I burned my power to love.”

The Power of Darkness

    T HE doctors all agreed that Henia Dvosha suffered from nerves, not heart disease, but her mother, Tzeitel, the wife of Selig the tailor, confided to my mother that Henia Dvosha was making herself die because she wanted her husband, Issur Godel, to marry her sister Dunia.
    When my mother heard this strange story she exclaimed, “What’s going on at your house? Why should a young woman, the mother of two little children, want to die? And why would she want her husband to marry her sister, of all people? One mustn’t even think such thoughts!”
    As usual when she became excited, my mother’s blond wig grew disheveled as if a strong wind had suddenly blown up.
    I, a boy of ten, heard what Tzeitel said with astonishment, yet somehow I felt that she spoke the truth, wild as it sounded. I pretended to read a storybook but I cocked my ears to listen to the conversation.
    Tzeitel, a dark, wide woman in a wide wig, a wide dress with many folds, and men’s shoes, went on, “My dear friend, I’m not talking just to hear myself talk. This is a kind of madness with her. Woe is me, what I’ve come to in my old age. I ask but one favor of God—that He take me before He takes her.”
    “But what sense does it make?”
    “No sense whatever. She started talking about it two years ago. She convinced herself that her sister was in love with Issur Godel, or he with her. As the saying goes—‘A delusion is worse than a sickness.’ Rebbetzin, I have to tell someone: Sick as she is, she’s sewing a wedding dress for Dunia.”
    Mother suddenly noticed me listening and cried, “Get out of the kitchen and go in the other room. The kitchen is for women, not for men!”
    I started to go down to the courtyard, and as I was passing the open door to Selig the tailor’s shop I glanced inside. Selig was our next-door neighbor at No. 10 Krochmalna Street, and his shop was in the same apartment where he lived with his family. Selig sat at a sewing machine stitching the lining of a gaberdine. As wide as his wife was, so narrow was he. He had narrow shoulders, a narrow nose, and a narrow gray beard. His hands were narrow too, and with long fingers. His glasses, with brass rims and half lenses, were pushed up onto his narrow forehead. Across from him, before another sewing machine, sat Issur Godel, Henia Dvosha’s husband. He had a tiny yellow beard ending in two points.
    Selig was a men’s tailor. Issur Godel made clothes for women. At that moment, he was ripping a seam. It was said that he had golden hands, and that if he had his own shop in the fancy streets he would make a fortune, but his wife didn’t want to move out of her parents’ apartment. When she got pains in the chest and couldn’t breathe, her mother was there to take care of her. It was her mother—and occasionally her sister Dunia—who eased her with drops of valerian and rubbed her temples with vinegar when she grew faint. Dunia worked in a dress shop on Mead Street, wore fashionable clothes, and avoided the pious girls of the neighborhood. Tzeitel also watched over Henia Dvosha’s two small children—Elkele and Yankele. I often went into Selig the tailor’s shop. I liked to watch the machines stitch, and I collected the