The End of Everything (New Yiddish Library Series) by David Bergelson Page A

Smiling broadly, she’d merely plumped up the pillows behind the little old woman, and still smiling, had yelled into her ear:
    —I remember, bobenyu , * I remember.
    The midwife chattered on without cessation all evening, telling many anecdotes about herself and one of her uncles, an observant, good-natured Jew:
    This uncle would regularly call on her and say:
    —Really, Malkele? Will you really never get married? A pity … a great pity.
    And Mirel sat on a chair opposite her, heard without listening, thinking about herself and the promenade on which she’d wandered about that evening, and lingered on here for an inordinately long time recalling only a hushed, unhappy tale that had been hers from childhood on:
    —She’d grown up as an only child in the house of Reb Gedalye Hurvits … Some undefined longing had filled her, so at the age of seventeen she’d betrothed herself to Velvl Burnes … This hadn’t been enough—so she’d taken herself o. to the provincial capital to pursue her studies like everyone else … But this hadn’t helped either, so she’d returned home and, as she imagined, had fallen in love with Nosn Heler here in the shtetl … But this too had proved insufficient, and she continued to believe that her future life ought to be entirely different. Once she’d told Nosn openly: “Nothing would come of this; he might as well leave the shtetl.” She’d broken off her engagement and returned the betrothal contract … Now she was free once more, and was again filled with vague, undefined longings … so she wandered aimlessly about the shtetl for days on end, with Lipkis limping after her … And at present she was sitting with the midwife Schatz who for almost two years past had been living in her rented cottage at the farthest end of the peasant village.
    No exceptional misfortune, it seemed, had marked either her life or the life of the midwife Schatz, but then no exceptional happiness had distinguished their lives either, which was why she reflected with such sadness about herself, and about the undefined formative years that the midwife had left behind together with her anonymous family somewhere in Lithuania, and something in her wanted to say:
    —Do you know what, Schatz? You’re a strange person. Are you aware of this, Schatz? In the end you’ll be laid in your grave, still with an ironic smile on your lips.
    But now the midwife Schatz had rolled herself another cigarette at her box of tissue papers. Lighting it from the lamp, she cast a sidelong glance at the infuriated Lipkis, and smiled with the air of a prankster wanting to make peace:
    —Everyone’s odd, in one way or another.
    It seemed as though she were preparing to talk about someone or other whose whole life was odd. Quite possibly she’d now talk about her acquaintance, the sturdy and solitary young Hebrew writer Herz, who took himself off every summer to a quiet Swiss village and every winter went back to the little Lithuanian shtetl where a granite tombstone had long since been erected at community expense over the grave of his deceased grandfather, the rabbi.
    Yet there was good reason to suspect that the midwife had been thwarted in love, particularly for this young man, who now believed in nothing; that something unpleasant had occurred between them two years before as a result of which the midwife had unwillingly been forced to leave her shtetl and move to this bleak end of the village.
    Mirel drew her chair closer to the bed on which the midwife had comfortably settled herself, while Lipkis’s mind was still preoccupied with his ongoing everyday problems:
    —Every day his mother nagged him to have a half-dozen sets of fresh underwear made … Given all his expenses, in the end he wouldn’t have enough to get to the city next winter.
    By the time this thought had ceased to bedevil him, Mirel, her eyes alive with interest, was leaning intently toward the midwife and listening with great absorption to every word