The Collected Stories

pointed to her throat.
    She proposed that I join her, and she served as my interpreter to order a vegetarian meal. She seemed more sane and subdued than I had seen her before. She even appeared younger in her black dress. She said, “You ran away, eh? You did right. You would have been caught in a trap you would never have freed yourself from. She suited you as much as Dr. Weyerhofer suited me.”
    “Why did you keep the bus waiting in every city?” I asked.
    She pondered. “I don’t know,” she said at last. “I don’t know myself. Demons were after me. They misled me with their tricks.”
    The waiter brought my vegetables. I chewed and looked out the window as night fell over the harvested fields. The sun set, small and glowing. It rolled down quickly, like a coal from some heavenly conflagration. A nocturnal gloom hovered above the landscape, an eternity that was weary of being eternal. Good God, my father and my grandfather were right to avoid looking at women! Every encounter between a man and a woman leads to sin, disappointment, humiliation. A dread fell upon me that Mark would try to find me and exact revenge.
    As if Celina had read my mind, she said, “Don’t worry. She’ll soon comfort herself. What was the reason for your taking this trip? Just to see Spain?”
    “I wanted to forget someone who wouldn’t let herself be forgotten.”
    “Where is she? In Europe?”
    “In America.”
    “You can’t forget anything.”
    We sat until late, and Mrs. Weyerhofer unfolded to me her fatalistic theory: everything was determined or fixed—every deed, every word, every thought. She herself would die shortly and no doctor or conjurer could help her. She said, “Before you came in here I fantasized that I was arranging a suicide pact with someone. After a night of pleasure, he stuck a knife in my breast.”
    “Why a knife, of all things?” I asked. “That’s not a Jewish fantasy. I couldn’t do this even to Hitler.”
    “If the woman wants it, it can be an act of love.”
    The waiter came back and mumbled something.
    Mrs. Weyerhofer explained, “We’re the only ones in the dining car. They want to close up.”
    “I’m finished,” I said. “Gastronomically and otherwise.”
    “Don’t rush,” she said. “Unlike the driver of our ill-starred bus, the forces that drive us mad have all the time in the world.”
    Translated by Joseph Singer

A Night in the Poorhouse

    I

    A T nine in the evening the poorhouse attendant extinguished the kerosene lamp. He left burning a single tallow candle, which soon began to flicker. Outside, the frost glistened, but inside the poorhouse it was warm. The gravely ill lay in beds. The others slept on straw pallets on the floor.
    Next to the over lay Zeinvel the thief, whom peasants had crippled when they caught him stealing a horse, and Mottke the beadle, who for a long time had served as beadle to a bogus rabbi named Yontche, a cobbler who donned a Hasidic rabbi’s attire and traveled through the Polish towns allegedly performing miracles. They had gone as far as Lithuania together. Yontche was subsequently caught in the act with a servant girl and fled to America. Mottke, too, tried to escape to America, but he was detained on Ellis Island and then deported because of trachoma. Later he became half blind. Both Mottke the beadle and Zeinvel the thief had lived in the poorhouse for years, although in separate rooms most of the time.
    Zeinvel was tall, and as black as a gypsy, with slanted eyes, a head of black hair, and a mouth full of white teeth. Besides being lame, he suffered from consumption. As a young man he had had the reputation of being a dandy. He managed to trim his beard even in the poorhouse. Mottke was small, round like a barrel, with tufts of flax-blond hair around his scabby skull and with a yellow beard that grew on one cheek only. His eyes were always swollen and half closed. He was something of a scholar, and it was said that he and Yontche used to switch roles. One month Yontche would be the rabbi and Mottke the beadle; the next month it was the other way around.
    After a while the tallow candle went out. A full moon was shining outside and its light reflected up from the snow upon the poorhouse walls. Zeinvel and Mottke never went to sleep before midnight. They chatted and told stories.
    Mottke was saying, “Cold outside, eh? It’s going to get even colder. Here in Poland the cold is still bearable, but when a frost comes up in