The Collected Stories

supposed to be in love.”
    And Esther Malka replied, “Rebbetzin, they
can’t
be together. They say Henia Dvosha comes each night and gets into bed between them.”
    “Jealous even in the grave?”
    “So it seems.”
    Mother turned white and said words I’ve never forgotten: “The living die so that the dead may live.”
    Translated by Joseph Singer

The Bus

    W HY I undertook that particular tour in 1956 is something I haven’t figured out to this day—dragging around in a bus through Spain for twelve days with a group of tourists. We left from Geneva. I got on the bus around three in the afternoon and found the seats nearly all taken. The driver collected my ticket and pointed out a place next to a woman who was wearing a conspicuous black cross on her breast. Her hair was dyed red, her face was thickly rouged, the lids of her brown eyes were smeared with blue eyeshadow, and from beneath all this dye and paint emerged deep wrinkles. She had a hooked nose, lips red as a cinder, and yellowish teeth.
    She began speaking to me in French, but I told her I didn’t understand the language and she switched over to German. It struck me that her German wasn’t that of a real German or even a Swiss. Her accent was similar to mine and she made the same mistakes. From time to time she interjected a word that sounded Yiddish. I soon found out that she was a refugee from the concentration camps. In 1946, she arrived at a DP camp near Landsberg and there by chance she struck up a friendship with a Swiss bank director from Zurich. He fell in love with her and proposed marriage but under the condition that she accept Protestantism. Her name at home had been Celina Pultusker. She was now Celina Weyerhofer.
    Suddenly she began speaking to me in Polish, then went over into Yiddish. She said, “Since I don’t believe in God anyway, what’s the difference if it’s Moses or Jesus? He wanted me to convert, so I converted a bit.”
    “So why do you wear a cross?”
    “Not out of anything to do with religion. It was given to me by someone dying whom I’ll never forget till I close my eyes.”
    “A man, eh?”
    “What else—a woman?”
    “Your husband has nothing against this?”
    “I don’t ask him. There he is.”
    Mrs. Weyerhofer pointed out a man sitting across the way. He looked younger than she, with a fair, smooth face, blue eyes, and a straight nose. To me he appeared the typical banker—sober, amiable, his trousers neatly pressed and pulled up to preserve the crease, shoes freshly polished. He was wearing a panama hat. His manner expressed order, discipline. Across his knee lay the
Neue Zürcher Zeitung,
and I noticed it was open to the financial section. From his breast pocket he took a piece of cloth with which he polished his glasses. That done, he glanced at his gold wristwatch.
    I asked Mrs. Weyerhofer why they weren’t sitting together.
    “Because he hates me,” she said in Polish.
    Her answer surprised me, but not overly so. The man glanced at me sidelong, then averted his face. He began to converse with a lady sitting in the window seat beside him. He removed his hat, revealing a shining bald pate surrounded by a ruff of pale-blond hair. “What could it have been that this Swiss saw in the person next to me?” I asked myself, but such things one could not really question.
    Mrs. Weyerhofer said, “So far as I can tell, you are the only Jew on the bus. My husband doesn’t like Jews. He doesn’t like Gentiles, either. He has a million prejudices. Whatever I say displeases him. If he had the power, he’d kill off most of mankind and leave only his dogs and the few bankers with whom he’s chummy. I’m ready to give him a divorce but he’s too stingy to pay alimony. As it is, he barely gives me enough to keep alive. Yet he’s highly intelligent, one of the best-read people I’ve ever met. He speaks six languages perfectly, but, thank God, Polish isn’t one of them.”
    She turned toward the window and I lost any urge to talk to her further. I had slept poorly the night before, and when I leaned back I dozed off, though my mind went on thinking wakeful thoughts. I had broken up with a woman I loved—or at least desired. I had just spent three weeks alone in a hotel in Zakopane.
    I was awakened by the driver. We had come to the hotel where we would eat dinner and sleep. I couldn’t orient myself to the point of deciding whether we were still in Switzerland or had reached France. I didn’t