The Collected Stories

widow?”
    “No one else will have me.”
    “That’s not true. Someone will turn up for you.”
    “Never.”
    Anshel told Avigdor such a match was bad. Peshe was neither goodlooking nor clever, only a cow with a pair of eyes. Besides, she was bad luck, for her husband died in the first year of their marriage. Such women were husband-killers. But Avigdor did not answer. He lit a cigarette, took a deep puff, and blew out smoke rings. His face had turned green.
    “I need a woman. I can’t sleep at night.”
    Anshel was startled. “Why can’t you wait until the right one comes along?”
    “Hadass was my destined one.”
    And Avigdor’s eyes grew moist. Abruptly he got to his feet. “Enough lying around. Let’s go.”
    After that, everything happened quickly. One day Avigdor was confiding his problem to Anshel, two days later he became engaged to Peshe, and brought honey cake and brandy to the yeshiva. An early wedding date was set. When the bride-to-be is a widow, there’s no need to wait for a trousseau. Everything is ready. The groom, moreover, was an orphan and no one’s advice had to be asked. The yeshiva students drank the brandy and offered their congratulations. Anshel also took a sip, but promptly choked on it.
    “Oy, it burns!”
    “You’re not much of a man,” Avigdor teased.
    After the celebration, Avigdor and Anshel sat down with a volume of the Gemara, but they made little progress, and their conversation was equally slow. Avigdor rocked back and forth, pulled at his beard, muttered under his breath.
    “I’m lost,” he said abruptly.
    “If you don’t like her, why are you getting married?”
    “I’d marry a she-goat.”
    The following day Avigdor did not appear at the study house. Feitl the leather dealer belonged to the Hasidim and he wanted his prospective son-in-law to continue his studies at the Hasidic prayer house. The yeshiva students said privately that though there was no denying the widow was short and round as a barrel, her mother the daughter of a dairyman, her father half an ignoramus, still the whole family was filthy with money. Feitl was part-owner of a tannery; Peshe had invested her dowry in a shop that sold herring, tar, pots and pans, and was always crowded with peasants. Father and daughter were outfitting Avigdor and had placed orders for a fur coat, a cloth coat, a silk kapote, and two pair of boots. In addition, he had received many gifts immediately, things that had belonged to Peshe’s first husband: the Vilna edition of the Talmud, a gold watch, a Hanukkah candelabra, a spice box. Anshel sat alone at the lectern.
    On Tuesday when Anshel arrived for dinner at Alter Vishkower’s house, Hadass remarked: “What do you say about your partner—back in clover, isn’t he?”
    “What did you expect—that no one else would want him?”
    Hadass reddened. “It wasn’t my fault. My father was against it.”
    “Why?”
    “Because they found out a brother of his had hanged himself.”
    Anshel looked at her as she stood there—tall, blond, with a long neck, hollow cheeks, and blue eyes, wearing a cotton dress and a calico apron. Her hair, fixed in two braids, was flung back over her shoulders. A pity I’m not a man, Anshel thought.
    “Do you regret it now?” Anshel asked.
    “Oh, yes!”
    Hadass fled from the room. The rest of the food, meat dumplings and tea, was brought in by the servant girl. Not until Anshel had finished eating and was washing her hands for the Final Blessings did Hadass reappear.
    She came up to the table and said in a smothered voice: “Swear to me you won’t tell him anything. Why should he know what goes on in my heart!”
    Then she fled once more, nearly falling over the threshold.
    III

    The head of the yeshiva asked Anshel to choose another study partner, but weeks went by and still Anshel studied alone. There was no one in the yeshiva who could take Avigdor’s place. All the others were small, in body and in spirit. They talked nonsense, bragged about trifles, grinned oafishly, behaved like shnorrers. Without Avigdor the study house seemed empty. At night Anshel lay on her bench at the widow’s, unable to sleep. Stripped of gaberdine and trousers, she was once more Yentl, a girl of marriageable age, in love with a young man who was betrothed to another. Perhaps I should have told him the truth, Anshel thought. But it was too late for that. Anshel could not go back to being a girl, could never again do without books and a