The End of Everything (New Yiddish Library Series) by David Bergelson Read Free Book Online

shutters blue? That was so garish to look at. *
    Or:
    —All of them: Avrom-Moyshe Burnes, Brokhe and Feyge, her former fiancé’s sisters … they were all such refined people … she’d once loved them very much. Even now she sometimes had a strong desire to see them.
    Lipkis was outraged and could no longer restrain himself:
    —He had absolutely no idea to whom she was referring in such exalted terms.
    —And anyway, creatures were generally divided into only two categories: human beings and animals.
    Thus, the next question followed logically:
    —If these pigs were human beings, then what was he, Lipkis? …
    Mirele turned to him with a strange look:
    — Milostivi gosudar , most gracious sir, would you be so kind as to keep your philosophical speculations in check until tomorrow?
    After this, he did not speak again the whole way, walked beside her in great anger, and tormented himself:
    —What was there to say? … If every serious thought he had seemed foolish to her …
    She didn’t turn to look at him, even after they’d left the long main street behind and had stopped on the deserted, snow-covered promenade outside the town.
    Gazing somewhere along the road that even a short distance ahead disappeared into the mist and led to the farm of her former fiancé, she merely remarked, softly and pensively:
    —Listen, Lipkis, if I were as nasty as you, I’d certainly strangle myself with my own hands.
    And she stood like that for a long time, unable to tear her mournful eyes from the road.
    Was she waiting for that speck, the sleigh that had pulled out of the distant mist and was making its way along the road in this direction, and was she curious to know who was seated in it?
    Or perhaps at that moment she was simply dispirited and overcome by the vanity of all things and was unwilling to leave this deserted, snow-covered place?
    Yet in town, several women still continued to maintain that her heart still yearned for her former fiancé, that handsome young man who had the patience to pass the long winter months on his productive but now fallow farm, and that there was nothing more to it:
    —She’d always been pampered at home, and couldn’t bring herself to marry such an ordinary young man.
    Often the two of them, Mirel and Lipkis, wandered for long distances over the snow-covered fields, looked behind them, and noticed:
    Far in the distance, the entire shtetl had sunk down into the valley between the two bare mountains, and had left no trace of itself in the misty air.
    Lipkis was delighted that he was all alone with her here in the wintry silence of the deserted fields, that the uncommunicative Gitele was nowhere near him, and that Libke, the rabbi’s young wife, wasn’t scratching her wig with the blunt end of a knitting needle thinking about him. For sheer joy, clever philosophical thoughts even came flooding into his mind one after another, and he was ready at any moment to pose such clever questions as, for example:
    —He couldn’t begin to understand why human beings had built houses for themselves instead of wandering about in couples over this huge frozen world?
    But Mirel looked sad and abstracted, and was quite capable of regarding every one of his thoughts as foolishness, so he thought better of speaking and walked on in silence at her side. They skirted the knoll with its heavily wooded copse and crossed the low, narrow wooden bridge under which, from the time of the first frosts, a silent frozen brook had lain in repose as though passing a long, wintry Sabbath. From there they ascended the easy incline of another hill and finally reached the level railway lines bordered by telegraph poles that stretched out into the distance like a long black stripe and divided the snowy whiteness of the fields in two. At this place every day three long passenger trains crept out of the distant horizon in the east, carried their great noisy clamor swiftly past as they disappeared into the misty remoteness of the