The Collected Stories

lived—tiny houses and huge dogs. I walked by and they attacked me like a pack of wolves. With one dog you can manage, but with fifty you don’t stand a chance. Besides, when the Gentiles hear their dogs bark, they come running outside with cudgels. I thought I was going to be martyred, but somehow I made it to the cemetery. I tapped, feeling my way like a blind man. I was still a believer then, and in my mind I donated eighteen groschen to charity. I stretched out my arms and there she was, as if she had emerged from the ground. When you’re scared, all desire leaves you, but the moment I touched her she burned me like a hot coal. She whispered a secret in my ear. There was no need for talk. How can such a firebrand grow up in a pious teacher’s house?”
    “She satisfied you, eh?” Mottke asked.
    “That’s not the word,” Zeinvel said. “We fell on each other and we couldn’t break apart. I took it for granted she was a virgin, but that would be the day!”
    “A tasty piece, eh?”
    “We lay for hours among the headstones and I couldn’t get enough. As hot as fire and as sharp as a dagger. Whenever I began to cool off she said something so spicy that I shuddered and the game started all over again. Where she had learned such talk in our little village I’ll never know.”
    “How is it you didn’t marry her?” Mottke asked.
    “Eh? I wanted a respectable girl, not a slut. She spoke frankly: one man to her was like an appetizer. She needed many, always new ones. I’m no saint, but I wished a wife like my mother. In my trade, you’ve got to be ready to do time. To sit in prison and worry that your wife is running around with every bum is scant pleasure. Even as I fondled and kissed her and promised her the moon and the stars, I longed for my Malkele, may she rest in peace. I already knew her by then. She was a friend of my sister Zirel. I wasn’t planning to remain a thief. I wanted to amass a stake and become a horse dealer. But man proposes and God disposes.”
    “That means you
do
believe in God,” Mottke said.
    “It only sounds this way. What is God? Who is He? No one has gone up to Heaven and come to an understanding with Him. It’s all written in the Torah, but what’s the Torah? Parchment and ink. Whoever holds the pen writes what pleases him. For nearly two thousand years Jews have been waiting for the Messiah, but he’s in no hurry to show up.”
    “So the world is lawless, eh?”
    “Whoever can, grabs. And whoever can’t lies six feet under.”
    “Still, if good people didn’t send us groats and soup here we would long since have been flat on our backs,” Mottke said.
    “They don’t do it for us,” Zeinvel said. “They think this will reserve them golden chairs in Paradise and large portions of the Leviathan.”
    “You once said yourself that you believe in fate,” Mottke argued. “You said that the last time you went to steal a horse you knew in advance that you would come a cropper and that it was fated this way. Those were your very words.”
    “God is God and fate is fate. I had stolen a half-dozen nags within a few weeks, and the peasants had started sleeping in the stables. They stood guard with axes and rattles. My Malkele begged me: ‘Zeinvel, enough!’ She knelt before me and warned me to stay home. She spoke about opening a store or, if worst came to worst, of going to America. She demanded that I swear on the Pentateuch that I would begin a new life. But even as I took the holy oath I knew that it wasn’t worth a pinch of snuff. It’s not in me to stand in a store and weigh out two ounces of almonds or cream of tartar. I don’t have the patience for such drivel. Nor was I drawn to the land of Columbus. Everyone who went there ended up pressing pants or peddling from door to door. Letters came telling of a depression in New York, of workers picking food out of garbage cans. I loved Malkele, but she wasn’t Mindle. I was faithful to her, God is my witness, but to sit with her days and nights and have her chip away at me didn’t appeal to me. She had miscarried twice. She was constantly bewailing her lot and mine, too. I wanted once and for all to test my luck.”
    “You believe in luck?”
    “Yes. In good luck and bad luck.”
    “There is a God, there is!” Mottke said.
    “And if there is, what of it? He sits in the seventh Heaven, the angels flatter Him with their hymns, and He cares as much about us as about last year’s frost.”
    “What