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

center of town, there was also, always, no matter what some say, a black market thriving on the outskirts of Chelm. For where else did the stores come up with their delicacies? Even the biggest deniers of its existence could be seen eating a banana now and then.
    Gronam’s logic was still employed when the invaders built the walls around a corner of the city, creating the Ghetto of Chelm. There were so many good things lacking and so many bad in abundance that the people of the ghetto renamed almost all that they had: they called their aches “mother’s milk,” and darkness became “freedom”; filth they referred to as “hope”—and felt for a while, looking at each other’s hands and faces and soot-blackened clothes, fortunate. It was only death that they could not rename, for they had nothing to put in its place. This is when they became sad and felt their hunger and when some began to lose their faith in God. This is when the Mahmir Rebbe, the most pious of them all, sent Mendel outside the walls.
    It was no great shock to Mendel, for the streets outside the cramped ghetto were the streets of their town, the homes their homes, even if others now lived in them. The black market was the same except that it had been made that much more clandestine and greedy by the war. Mendel was happy to find that his grandfather’s wisdom had been adopted among the peasants with whom he dealt. Potatoes were treated as gold, and a sack of gold might as well have been potatoes. Mendel traded away riches’ worth of the latter (now the former)for as much as he could conceal on his person of the former (now the latter). He took the whole business to be a positive sign, thinking that people were beginning to regain their good sense.
    The successful transaction gave Mendel a touch of real confidence. Instead of sneaking back the way he came, he ventured past the front of the icehouse and ignored the first signs of a rising sun. He ran through the alley behind Cross-eyed Bilha’s store and skirted around the town square, keeping on until he arrived at his house. It was insanity—or suicide—for him to be out there. All anyone would need was a glimpse of him to know, less than that even, their senses had become so sharp. And what of the fate of the potatoes? They surely wouldn’t make it to the ghetto if Mendel were caught and strung up from the declaration tree with a sign that said SMUGGLER hung around his neck. Those precious potatoes that filled his pockets and lined his long underwear from ankles to elbows would all go to waste, softening up and sprouting eyes. But Mendel needed to see his front gate and strip of lawn and the shingles he had painted himself only two summers before. It was then that the shutters flew open on his very own bedroom window. Mendel turned and ran with all his might, having seen no more of the new resident than a fog of breath. On the next street he found a sewer grate and, with considerable force, yanked it free. A rooster crowed and Mendel heard it at first as a call for help and a siren and the screeching of a bullet. Lowering himself underground and replacing the grate, he heard the rooster’s call again and understood what it was—nature functioning as it should. He took it to be another positive sign.
    Raising himself from the sewer, Mendel was unsure onto which side of the wall he had emerged. The Ghetto of Chelm was alive with hustle and bustle. Were it not for the raggedappearance of each individual Jew, the crowd could have belonged to any cosmopolitan street.
    “What is this? Has the circus returned to Chelm? Have they restocked all the sweetshops with licorice?” Mendel addressed the orphan Yocheved, grabbing hold of her arm and cradling in his palm a tiny potato, which she snatched away. She looked up at him, her eyes wet from the wind.
    “We are all going to live on a farm and must hurry not to miss the train.”
    “A farm you say.” He pulled at his beard and bent until his face