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

that came slowly from her mouth in a cloud of cigarette smoke.
    —So Mirel wanted to know whether Herz corresponded with her? Firstly, he was far too clever for that sort of thing and disliked doing foolish things, and secondly …
    Drawing so deeply on her cigarette that its glowing tip illuminated her face, she exhaled the smoke from her mouth, adding with a grimace of aggrieved incredulity:
    —One might think that she really missed not receiving letters from him …
    Lipkis pulled a mocking face:
    —Quite true: evidently the midwife never missed what she’d never had and would never have.
    This was seemingly the way in which he wanted to pay her back for her earlier remark: “Too bad for you, Lipkis! Too bad for you!” but he restrained himself, glanced at her agitated features with hostility, and held his peace.
    This single illuminated room in the midwife’s cottage was remarkably quiet. Since it was evidently very late, the silence itself seemed audible. Through the calm of deep night that lingered in all the dimly lit corners, the only thing that could be heard was the way Lipkis leaned his head against the bedstead, and the dying fall of the carefully considered words about her acquaintance that the midwife Schatz tossed into the stillness:
    —Two years ago he’d poked fun at himself and told her: To write during the day was a disgrace to him personally as well as to the entire Jewish population of the shtetl who had no need of it, so he wrote only at night, when people were asleep. At night, he said, everyone’s sense of shame was diminished. And then he’d smiled and held his peace. Nothing else was left to him, he said, except this smiling silence.
    The wandering shadow of this homeless young man seemed to hover in the very air of the room, creating the strong impression that somewhere in a nearby corner behind them he himself was standing at his full sturdy, somewhat stooped height. With blond, freshly barbered hair and equally fair, close-cut mustache and sideburns, he was placidly glancing in this direction with smiling eyes, listening to what the midwife Schatz was saying about him:
    This winter, too, this rootless wanderer was doubtless drifting about in that tiny, desolate Lithuanian shtetl, passing his days rambling for great distances over the snow-covered fields.
    Mirel broodingly called to mind her own situation every time the midwife related that he never spoke with any intellectuals over there, and even kept his distance from ordinary townsfolk. But if somewhere far, far away from the shtetl he encountered a peasant striding along somewhere, he’d stop and engage in a lengthy conversation with him.
    —From what village did he come? Did he have a wife and children? And whose was the land he tilled: his own or a stranger’s?
    Then Mirel looked at the midwife again, listening as she disclosed more of the same:
    —There, Herz would say, between the silent, craggy mountains and the tranquil lakes of Switzerland, the conviction grew in him that human beings would soon cease their hurly-burly and would encounter life and death alike with the same smile.
    —He certainly regarded life with dread—she added in passing—yet this didn’t prevent him from composing one of his loveliest pieces there in Switzerland.
    Embarrassed to look directly at Mirele and Lipkis, the midwife turned her head away.
    With shining eyes that flickered on the brink of a smile, she stared up into the topmost reaches of the wall opposite and slowly and quietly began reciting from memory this little piece of his:
    “And I, the exiled vagabond, wandering thus all alone over the earth for years on end, less and less frequently encountered a human settlement anywhere, and in time I have forgotten how to compute the difference between weekday and Sabbath. One by one I have cast away the objects in the heavy pack I bore on my shoulders and have told myself:
    Neither I nor anyone else has need of these things. Why then should