The Collected Stories

grandfather, a grandmother, and maybe children, too. I’m all befuddled, Mottke mused. I’m dead tired all day, but at night my brain works like a churn.
    Sometimes during the day, when Mottke wanted to show off his erudition, he forgot everything, jumbled passages like some ignoramus. But in the middle of the night his brain opened up. He recalled whole chapters of the Scripture, sections of the Gemara, even the liturgies of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. People who had died so long ago that he no longer remembered their names materialized seemingly alive before him. He remembered names of villages in which he had stayed with Yontche. Chants of cantors and songs of Hasidim came back to his mind. Mottke had been raised in a religious home. His father had taken him along to the wonder rabbi at Turisk. As a boy, he had read Hasidic books, had even dreamed of becoming a rabbi. But his father had died of typhus, his mother had married some boor, and Mottke had slipped into the confidence game with Yontche.
    Now Mottke began droning a song that he had heard in Turisk at the Sabbath meal:

I’ll sing with praise
To open the gates
Of the Heavenly orchards
For their sacred mates
.
    Zeinvel got to coughing and sat up. “Why are you singing in the middle of the night? Are you hungry?”
    “I’m not hungry.”
    “You’ve got a burr in your saddle, eh?”
    “Wasted away a life for nothing,” Mottke said, shocked at his own words.
    “You want to become a penitent like that musician who blindfolded himself so that he couldn’t look at women?”
    “Too late for that.”
    “Yes, brother, for us it might have been too late when we were born,” Zeinvel said. “That business with Freidke was all stuff and nonsense. It’s all made up—the Jewish God, the Christian God. That Chlavna was a clumsy dolt and a miserable coward. Freidke, on the other hand, was putting on an act because he deserted her. Young girls hear old wives’ tales, absorb every trifle, and then they mimic them.
    “I had a wild female once, a Talmud teacher’s daughter. Mindle was her name. She looked like a kosher virgin. I could have sworn she couldn’t count to two—a pale little face, big black eyes. It all started when I met her at the pump and filled a pail of water for her. She gave me a pretty thank you and threw in a sweet smile. I was already a thief by then and I had had more women than you have hairs on your head. At that time, it wasn’t easy to get a Jewish girl—not in our parts, anyway—but there was no shortage of shiksas. They don’t know any pretenses. They’ve got Uncle Esau’s blood in their veins. Well, but I saw fire in Mindle’s eyes. Each time I saw her going with her pail, I ran outside with my pail. I must have pumped a hundred pails for her. I began thinking that it was a waste of time. Suddenly I hand her the pail and she slips a note into my hand. I ran so fast with my own pail that I spilled half of it. I walk into the house and I read, ‘Meet me in the cemetery at midnight.’
    “One line, that’s all—fancy handwriting. I had tasted everything—girls, matrons, young, old—but I grew as rattled as a yeshiva boy. I was scared, too. In those days I still believed in the creatures of the night. What kind of girl would meet a fellow in the cemetery at midnight? It was said that corpses prayed in the synagogue at night and that if someone walked by they would call him inside to read from the Torah. Also, a carpenter’s daughter had hanged herself in our town because some tramp made her pregnant, and it was said that she climbed out of her grave in the nights and wandered among the tombstones. Just the same, I couldn’t wait for night to fall and, later, for the clock on the town hall to toll eleven-thirty. My piece of goods had figured out everything in advance. Her father, a fervent Hasid who wore two skullcaps, one in front and one in back, went to bed with the chickens. He got up before dawn to bewail the Destruction of the Temple. The mother traveled to fairs to support her older daughter, a penniless widow who lived in Krasnystaw with three children. She sold jackets that she padded herself.
    “I’ll cut it short. Mindle had scheduled our meeting for the end of the month, when the moon wasn’t shining and when the mother was off to some fair. The night was hot and dark. The road to the cemetery led through Church Street. The Jews lived close to the marketplace. Farther along, only Gentiles