The Collected Stories

without lips—a gash revealing a large set of false teeth. He said he was descended from rabbis and merchants, and he must have studied the Talmud in his youth, because his conversation was filled with quotations from it. Yiddish was his language, but he also spoke a broken English, faulty Polish, and the kind of Yiddish-German that was used at Zionist congresses. Slowly, I managed to dig out some truths from his exaggerations. In Poland he had been engaged to the daughter of a rabbi; she died of typhoid fever a week before the wedding. He had studied in Hildesheimer’s rabbinical seminary in Berlin but never graduated. He attended lectures on philosophy at a university in Switzerland. He had published a few poems in a Yiddish collection and some articles in the Hebrew newspaper the
Morning Star
. Of his mistresses I knew only one—the widow of a Hebrew teacher. I met her at a New Year’s party, and after a few drinks she told me that she had been involved with Morris Terkeltoyb for years. He suffered from insomnia and had periods of impotence. She made fun of his boasting. He had bragged to her that he had had an affair with Isadora Duncan.
    The other neighbor, Margit Levy, seemed not to be a liar, but the events of her life were so strange and complicated that I could never figure her out. Her father was a Jew; her mother belonged to the Hungarian aristocracy. Her father was supposed to have committed suicide when he learned that his wife was having an affair with a member of the Esterhazy nobility—a relative of the Esterhazy who was a major figure in the Dreyfus affair. Her mother’s lover committed suicide when he lost his fortune at Monte Carlo. After his death, Margit’s mother became insane and remained in a clinic in Vienna for twenty years. Margit was brought up by her father’s sister, who was the paramour of the Brazilian owner of a coffee plantation. Margit Levy spoke a dozen languages. She had valises filled with photographs, letters, all kinds of documents that testified to the truth of her stories. She used to tell me, “From my life one could write not one book but a whole literature. Hollywood movies are child’s play compared to what happened to me.”
    Now Margit Levy lived in a single room as the boarder of an old maid and survived on Social Security. She suffered from rheumatism and could barely walk. She took mincing steps, supporting herself on two canes. Though she claimed to be in her sixties, I calculated that she was well over seventy. Margit Levy existed in a state of confusion. Each time she visited me, she forgot something—her pocketbook, her gloves, her glasses, even one of her canes. Sometimes she dyed her hair red, sometimes black. She rouged her wrinkled face and used too much mascara. There were black bags under her dark eyes. The nails of her crooked fingers were painted bright red. Her neck made me think of a plucked chicken. I told her that I was poor at languages, but she tried again and again to talk to me in French, Italian, Hungarian. Though her name was Jewish, I noticed that she wore a little cross beneath her blouse, and I suspected that she had been converted. Margit Levy had one time borrowed a book of mine from the public library, and after that she became a reader of whatever I wrote. She assured me that she possessed all the powers I described in my stories—telepathy, clairvoyance, premonition, the ability to communicate with the dead. She owned a Ouija board and a small table without nails. Poor as she was, she subscribed to a number of occult magazines. After her first visit to me, she took my hand and said in a trembling voice, “I knew that you would come into my life. This will be my last great friendship.”
    And she brought me as a gift a pair of cuff-links that she had inherited from Count Esterhazy—the same Esterhazy who lost eighty thousand crowns in one night and then put a bullet through his head.
    It didn’t occur to me to bring my two neighbors together. The truth is that I didn’t invite either one of them. They used to knock on my door, and if I wasn’t too busy I would ask whoever it was to come in, and I would treat him or her to coffee and cookies. Morris Terkeltoyb received Hebrew newspapers from Tel Aviv. When he found a review of a book of mine or even an advertisement, he brought it to me. From time to time, Margit Levy would bake a cake in the oven of the old maid where she boarded, and she would insist on stopping by to