For the Relief of Unbearable Urges: Stories Read Online Free PDF Page A

the corner should I want to stand,” said the rabbi. “Yes, it would seem I’m in heaven.” He patted Mendel on the shoulder. “I must thank you for rushing over to tell me.” The rabbi shook Mendel’s hand and nodded good-naturedly, already searching for his place in the text. “Did you come for some other reason?”
“I did,” said Mendel, trying to find a space between the books where once there was a door. “I wanted to know”—and here his voice began to quiver—“which one of us is to say the prayer?”
    Bretzky stood. “Bravo,” he said, clapping his hands. “It’s like a shooting star. A tale to be extinguished along with the teller.” He stepped forward to meet the agent in charge at the door. “No, the meaning, it was not lost on me.”
    Korinsky pulled his knees into his chest, hugged them. “No,” he admitted, “it was not lost.”
    Pinchas did not blush or bow his head. He stared at Zunser, wondered what the noble Zunser was thinking, as they were driven from the cell.
    Outside all the others were being assembled. There were Horiansky and Lubovitch, Lev and Soltzky. All those great voices with the greatest stories of their lives to tell, and forced to take them to the grave. Pinchas, having increased his readership threefold, had a smile on his face.
    Pinchas Pelovits was the twenty-seventh, or the fourteenth from either end, if you wanted to count his place in line. Bretzky supported Pinchas by holding up his right side, for his equilibrium had not returned. Zunser supported him on the left, but was in bad shape himself.
    “Did you like it?” Pinchas asked.
    “Very much,” Zunser said. “You’re a talented boy.”
    Pinchas smiled again, then fell, his head landing on the stockingless calves of Zunser. One of his borrowed shoes flew forward, though his feet slid backward in the dirt. Bretzky fell atop the other two. He was shot five or six times, but being such a big man and such a strong man, he lived long enough to recognize the crack of the guns and know that he was dead.

The Tumblers

W ho would have thought that a war of such proportions would bother to turn its fury against the fools of Chelm? Never before, not by smallpox or tax collectors, was the city intruded upon by the troubles of the outside world.
    The Wise Men had seen to this when the town council was first founded. They drew up a law on a length of parchment, signed it, stamped on their seal, and nailed it, with much fanfare, to a tree: Not a wind, not a whistle, not the shadow from a cloud floating outside city limits, was welcome in the place called Chelm.
    These were simple people with simple beliefs, who simply wanted to be left to themselves. And they were for generations, no one going in and only stories coming out, as good stories somehow always do. Tales of the Wise Men’s logic, most notably of Mendel’s grandfather, Gronam the Ox, spread, as the war later would, to the far corners of the earth.
    In the Fulton Street Fish Market the dockworkers laughed with Yiddish good humor upon hearing how Gronam had tried to drown a carp. At a dairy restaurant in Buenos Aires, a customer was overcome with hiccups as his waiter recounted the events of the great sour cream shortage, explaining how Gronam had declared that water was sour cream and sour cream water, single-handedly saving the Feast of Weeks from complete and total ruin.
    How the stories escaped is no great mystery, for though outsiders were unwelcome, every few years someone wouldpass through. There had been, among the trespassers, one vagrant and one vamp, one troubadour lost in a blizzard and one horse trader on a mule. A gypsy tinker with a friendly face stayed a week. He put new hinges on all the doors while his wife told fortunes to the superstitious in the shade of the square. Of course, the most famous visit of all was made by the circus troupe that planted a tent and put on for three days show after show. Aside from these few that came through the