The Collected Stories

became of Mindle?” Mottke asked.
    “Oh, her father married her off to some dummy, a son of a rich Hasid, a follower of his rabbi’s. My little kitten stood with him under the canopy pure and veiled as if she had never been touched. Why she would allow herself to be used this way is a riddle to me. Such females sometimes marry a fool so that they’ll have someone to dupe easily. There is a great thrill in cheating—almost as much as in stealing. But you pay for everything. She died two years later in childbirth.”
    “So that’s how it turned out?”
    “Yes. Her husband, the lummox, had gone to his rabbi’s and he lingered there for months. I was doing time in the Janov jail. Later, they transferred me to Lublin. That time I was innocent. I had been falsely accused. When I finally got out, Mindle was already in the other world.”
    “It was surely a punishment from God,” Mottke said.
    “No.”
    It grew silent. Even the cricket had ceased its chirping. After a while Zeinvel said, “I haven’t forgotten her. If there is a Gehenna, I want to lie next to her on one bed of nails.”
    Translated by Joseph Singer

Escape from Civilization

    I BEGAN to plan my escape from civilization not long after learning the meaning of the word. But the village of Bilgoray, where I lived until I was eighteen, didn’t have enough civilization to run away from. Later, when I went to Warsaw, all I could do was run back to Bilgoray. The idea took on substance only after I arrived in New York. It was here that I started to suffer from some kind of allergy—rose fever, hay fever, dust, who knows? I took pills by the bottleful, but they didn’t do much good. The heat that early spring was as intense as in August. The furnished room where I lived on the West Side was stifling. I am not one to consult with doctors, but I paid a visit to Dr. Gnizdatka, whom I knew from Warsaw and who faithfully read anything that I managed to get published in the Yiddish press.
    Dr. Gnizdatka inserted a speculum into my nostrils and a tongue depressor into my mouth and said,
“Paskudno.”
(“Bad.”)
    “What should I do?”
    “Move somewhere near the ocean.”
    “Where is the ocean?”
    “Go to Sea Gate.”
    The moment Dr. Gnizdatka spoke the name, I realized that the time had finally come to escape from civilization, and that Sea Gate could serve the same purpose as Haiti or Madagascar. The following morning, I went to the bank and withdrew my savings of seventy-eight dollars, checked out of my room, packed all my belongings into a large cardboard suitcase, and walked to the subway. In a cafeteria on East Broadway, someone had told me that it was easy to get a furnished room in Sea Gate. I carried a few books to be my spiritual mainstay while away from civilization: the Bible, Spinoza’s
Ethics
, Schopenhauer’s
The World as Will and Idea
, as well as a textbook with mathematical formulas. I was then an ardent Spinozist and, according to Spinoza, one can reach immortality only if one meditates upon adequate ideas, which means mathematics.
    Because of the heat in New York City, I expected Coney Island to be crowded and the beach lined with bathers. But at Stillwell Avenue, where I got off the train, it was winter. How surprising that in the hour it took me to get from Manhattan to the Island the weather had changed. The sky was overcast, a cold wind blew, and a needle-like rain had begun to fall. The Surf Avenue trolley was empty. At the entrance to Sea Gate there was actually a gate to keep the area private. Two policemen stationed there stopped me and asked who I was and what business I had in Sea Gate. I almost said, “I am running away from civilization,” but I answered, “I came to rent a room.”
    “And you brought your baggage along?”
    These interrogations in a country that is supposed to be free insulted me, and I asked, “Is that forbidden?”
    One policeman whispered something to the other, and both of them laughed. I received permission to cross the frontier.
    The rain intensified. I would have liked to ask someone where I could get a room, but there was no one to ask. Sea Gate looked desolate, still deeply sunk in its winter sleep. For courage I reminded myself of Sven Hedin, Nansen, Captain Scott, Amundsen, and other explorers who left the comforts of the cities to discover the mysteries of the world. The rain pounded on my cardboard suitcase like hail. Perhaps it
was
hailing. The wind tore the hat off my head, and