The Collected Stories

of speech. And her orations! Pitch and sulphur, that’s what they were full of, and yet somehow also full of charm. I adored her every word. She gave me bloody wounds though.
    In the evening I brought her a white loaf as well as a dark one, and also poppyseed rolls I baked myself. I thieved because of her and swiped everything I could lay hands on: macaroons, raisins, almonds, cakes. I hope I may be forgiven for stealing from the Saturday pots the women left to warm in the baker’s oven. I would take out scraps of meat, a chunk of pudding, a chicken leg or head, a piece of tripe, whatever I could nip quickly. She ate and became fat and handsome.
    I had to sleep away from home all during the week, at the bakery. On Friday nights when I got home she always made an excuse of some sort. Either she had heartburn, or a stitch in the side, or hiccups, or headaches. You know what women’s excuses are. I had a bitter time of it. It was rough. To add to it, this little brother of hers, the bastard, was growing bigger. He’d put lumps on me, and when I wanted to hit back she’d open her mouth and curse so powerfully I saw a green haze floating before my eyes. Ten times a day she threatened to divorce me. Another man in my place would have taken French leave and disappeared. But I’m the type that bears it and says nothing. What’s one to do? Shoulders are from God, and burdens too.
    One night there was a calamity in the bakery; the oven burst, and we almost had a fire. There was nothing to do but go home, so I went home. Let me, I thought, also taste the joy of sleeping in bed in midweek. I didn’t want to wake the sleeping mite and tiptoed into the house. Coming in, it seemed to me that I heard not the snoring of one but, as it were, a double snore, one a thin enough snore and the other like the snoring of a slaughtered ox. Oh, I didn’t like that! I didn’t like it at all. I went up to the bed, and things suddenly turned black. Next to Elka lay a man’s form. Another in my place would have made an uproar, and enough noise to rouse the whole town, but the thought occurred to me that I might wake the child. A little thing like that—why frighten a little swallow, I thought. All right then, I went back to the bakery and stretched out on a sack of flour and till morning I never shut an eye. I shivered as if I had had malaria. “Enough of being a donkey,” I said to myself. “Gimpel isn’t going to be a sucker all his life. There’s a limit even to the foolishness of a fool like Gimpel.”
    In the morning I went to the rabbi to get advice, and it made a great commotion in the town. They sent the beadle for Elka right away. She came, carrying the child. And what do you think she did? She denied it, denied everything, bone and stone! “He’s out of his head,” she said. “I know nothing of dreams or divinations.” They yelled at her, warned her, hammered on the table, but she stuck to her guns: it was a false accusation, she said.
    The butchers and the horse-traders took her part. One of the lads from the slaughterhouse came by and said to me, “We’ve got our eye on you, you’re a marked man.” Meanwhile, the child started to bear down and soiled itself. In the rabbinical court there was an Ark of the Covenant, and they couldn’t allow that, so they sent Elka away.
    I said to the rabbi, “What shall I do?”
    “You must divorce her at once,” said he.
    “And what if she refuses?” I asked.
    He said, “You must serve the divorce. That’s all you’ll have to do.”
    I said, “Well, all right, Rabbi. Let me think about it.”
    “There’s nothing to think about,” said he. “You mustn’t remain under the same roof with her.”
    “And if I want to see the child?” I asked.
    “Let her go, the harlot,” said he, “and her brood of bastards with her.”
    The verdict he gave was that I mustn’t even cross her threshold—never again, as long as I should live.
    During the day it didn’t bother me so much. I thought: It was bound to happen, the abscess had to burst. But at night when I stretched out upon the sacks I felt it all very bitterly. A longing took me, for her and for the child. I wanted to be angry, but that’s my misfortune exactly, I don’t have it in me to be really angry. In the first place—this was how my thoughts went—there’s bound to be a slip sometimes. You can’t live without errors. Probably that lad who was with her led her on and gave her presents and what not, and