The Collected Stories

then? A soul?”
    “Really, I don’t know what to tell you,” Max Greitzer said. “Do you feel any hunger?”
    “Hunger? No.”
    “Thirst?”
    “No. No. What do you say to all this?”
    “The unbelievable, the absurd, the most vulgar superstitions are proving to be true,” Max Greitzer said.
    “Perhaps we will find there is even a Hell and a Paradise.”
    “Anything is possible at this point.”
    “Perhaps we will be summoned to the Court on High after the burial and asked to account for our deeds?”
    “Even this can be.”
    “How does it come about that we are together?”
    “Please, don’t ask any more questions. I know as little as you.”
    “Does this mean that all the philosophic works you read and wrote were one big lie?”
    “Worse—they were sheer nonsense.”
    At that moment, four pallbearers carried out the coffin holding Liza’s body. A wreath lay on top, with an inscription in gold letters: “To the unforgettable Liza in loving memory.”
    “Whose wreath is that?” Liza asked, and she answered herself, “For this he’s not stingy.”
    “Would you like to go with them to the cemetery?” Max Greitzer asked.
    “No—what for? That phony cantor may recite a whining Kaddish after me.”
    “What do you want to do?”
    Liza listened to herself. She wanted nothing. What a peculiar state, not to have a single wish. In all the years she could remember, her will, her yearnings, her fears, tormented her without letting up. Her dreams were full of desperation, ecstasy, wild passions. More than any other catastrophe, she dreaded the final day, when all that has been is extinguished and the darkness of the grave begins. But here she was, remembering the past, and Max Greitzer was again with her. She said to him, “I imagined that the end would be much more dramatic.”
    “I don’t believe this is the end,” he said. “Perhaps a transition between two modes of existence.”
    “If so, how long will it last?”
    “Since time has no validity, duration has no meaning.”
    “Well, you’ve remained the same with your puzzles and paradoxes. Come, we cannot just stay here if you want to avoid seeing your mourners,” Liza said. “Where should we go?”
    “You lead.”
    Max Greitzer took her astral arm and they began to rise without purpose, without a destination. As they might have done from an airplane, they looked down at the earth and saw cities, rivers, fields, lakes—everything but human beings.
    “Did you say something?” Liza asked.
    And Max Greitzer answered. “Of all my disenchantments, immortality is the greatest.”

Neighbors

    T HEY both lived in my building on Central Park West—he two floors below me, she one above. Greater contrast than those two would be hard to imagine. Morris Terkeltoyb, as I will call him, was a writer of “true stories” for the Yiddish newspaper to which I also contributed. Margit Levy was the former lover of an Italian count. One quality was common to the two of them: I could never learn the truth about either. Morris Terkeltoyb assured me that his stories were invented, but when I read them I realized they couldn’t be all fantasy. They contained details and odd incidents that only life itself could devise. Besides, I often saw him with elderly people who looked like the characters out of his tales. Morris Terkeltoyb was far from being a man of literary skill. His style teemed with clichés. I once saw a manuscript of his at the newspaper. He had no notion of syntax. He used commas and hyphens indiscriminately. Each sentence ended with three dashes. But Morris Terkeltoyb wanted me to believe that he was a creative writer, not a reporter.
    In the years I knew him, he told me many lies. Countless women threw themselves into his arms—socialites, stars of the Metropolitan Opera, famous authoresses, ballet dancers, actresses. Each time Morris Terkeltoyb traveled to Europe on vacation, he returned with a list of fresh amorous adventures. Once, he showed me a love letter in handwriting I recognized as his own. He wasn’t even ashamed to include in his stories scenes taken from world literature. Actually, he was a lonesome old bachelor with a sick heart and one kidney. He himself seemed unaware of the missing kidney; I knew about it from a relative of his.
    Morris Terkeltoyb was short, broad-shouldered, with remnants of white hair that he combed into a bridge spanning his skull. He had large yellow eyes, a nose like a beak, and a mouth almost