The Collected Stories

that there are no falsehoods, there are only distorted truths. A strange idea ran through my mind: perhaps among these letters I would find one from Isadora Duncan. For a moment I had forgotten that Isadora Duncan did not know Yiddish.
    A year after Margit Levy’s death, I received an invitation from the Klimontow Society to attend the unveiling of a monument to Malkah Levy—the Society had given her a Hebrew name. But that Sunday a heavy snow fell, and I was sure that the unveiling would be postponed. Besides, I woke up with a severe attack of sciatica. I took a hot bath, but there was no one for whom to shave and dress. Neither did I miss anyone. After breakfast, I took out Margit’s album, some of Morris’s letters, looked at the pictures, and read the texts. I dozed, dreamed, and forgot my dreams the moment I wakened. From time to time I looked out the window. The snow descended sparsely, peacefully, as if in contemplation of its own falling. The short day neared its end. The desolate park became a cemetery. The buildings on Central Park South towered like headstones. The sun was setting on Riverside Drive, and the water of the reservoir reflected a burning wick. The radiator near which I sat hissed and hummed: “Dust, dust, dust.” The singsong penetrated my bones together with the warmth. It repeated a truth as old as the world, as profound as sleep.
    Translated by the author and Herbert R. Lottman

Moon and Madness

    O UTSIDE , a thick snow was falling. It had begun at dawn and continued all day long and into the early evening. Then a frost set in. In the Radzymin study house it was warm. A pair of beggars with ropes around their loins sat by the oven roasting potatoes. Jeremiah, an old man, was reciting psalms. He had gone blind but had managed to learn the Book of Psalms by heart. At a long table across from the Ark of the Holy Scroll sat Zalman the glazier, Levi Yitzchok, who suffered from trachoma and wore dark glasses even at night, and Meir the eunuch, a Cabalist, who was known to be sane for half the month and insane the other half, after the moon became full. The conversation turned to pity, and Zalman the glazier said:
    “Of course, pity is virtuous, but too much of it can do damage. Not far from our town of Radoszyce lived a Polish squire, Count Jan Malecki, the owner of big estates. Long before the czar had decreed the serfs to be free, the Count called all his peasants to a meeting and said to them, ‘The earth belongs not to me but to those who work it. You’re not my slaves any more. Elect an elder and divide the grounds among yourselves.’ I can see this Malecki before my eyes—a big man, fat, with a red face and with a blond mustache that reached almost to his shoulders. He had no children, but his wife, the squiress, had five sisters and two brothers. They each had many children and Malecki provided for the whole impoverished family. It is peculiar that although he freed the peasants, Malecki himself worked the fields—plowed, sowed, and harvested. He had acquired a machine to cut straw, which he mixed with hay for feeding cattle. He could stand for hours at this machine working like a hired hand, while his brothers-in-law and sisters-in-law and their brats walked around idly, dressed up as if they were going to a ball. Once, his court Jew, Zelig, asked him what was the sense of allowing the others to behave this way and Malecki answered, ‘Every man should do what he wants. I like to carry the burden, so I carry it. They like to be idle, so they should be.’ By the way, all of Malecki’s relatives indulged in quarrels and calumny. The young ones also stole. His nephews got drunk, walked around with pistols; they went hunting in the Count’s forests and sometimes aimed at one another. The girls played the piano and went to parties. The people in Radoszyce gave the Count a nick-name—Jan Schmatte, which means ‘rag.’
    “Since he was not a rebel and never quarreled with anyone, the Russians held no grudge against him and made him the judge of Radoszyce and the whole county. He refused to take a salary. I am told that on the day he became judge the thieves held a banquet. They knew that Malecki would never put anyone in prison. And so it was. When they brought him a thief who defended himself by claiming that his boots were torn, he had a headache, he was penniless, Malecki not only let him go free but gave him a few rubles as well. He was satisfied with a promise from the