The End of Everything (New Yiddish Library Series) Read Online Free PDF Page A

night conferring in secret. Both men stayed locked up all night deliberating in private, oblivious to the passing of the third watch, * at length threw back a shutter, opened a window, and noticed:
    The dark beginning of the Elul day † approaching silently and sadly from the northeast corner of the sky, slowly but steadily drawing closer, mutely driving away the final moments of the pale, lingering night. All around, everything had now turned gray; cows still confined in the courtyards of sleepy households lowed longingly for their penned-up calves and for the damp grass of the fields; and in various corners of the shtetl and the adjoining peasant village, cocks awakened for the third time. They crowed from close by and from farther off, one interrupting the other in haste to utter the first protracted blessing for the coming of day:
    —Ku-ku-ri-ku-u!
    His intimate, the considerate and deeply devoted bookkeeper, was still lost in thought, slowly tapping his nose with a finger while, as always, the perpetually preoccupied Reb Gedalye bombarded him with new, wide-ranging plans, continually leaning ever closer to his pondering adviser as though wanting to draw him over to his own side of his gold-rimmed spectacles and hurriedly demand of him:
    —What do you think? Not so?
    At this time, his soft Galician accent * was more than commonly evident in his speech, and when seated he’d throw the entire top half of his body forward whenever people called on him at home, as though someone had suddenly pressed an electric button concealed between his shoulder blades, abruptly compelling him to honor his guest with a bow and the sudden articulation of the few customary words:
    —Please sit down, dear sir!
    The entire household was afraid of some undefined menace, terrified that it might burst into the house at any moment; this state of fear lasted until well into the winter when for entirely specious reasons these business affairs became even more tangled, and disturbing rumors spread over virtually the entire district:
    A rumor involving Reb Gedalye Hurvits’s long-standing enemy in the provincial capital, who’d laid an accusation against him in a bank there.
    A rumor involving the old director of the same bank, previously a consistently good friend to Hurvits, who personally served notice that all should be strictly on their guard and no longer extend a single kopeck’s credit to him.
    Far too often at this time Reb Gedalye would hurry off to the provincial capital in his own buggy.
    For the most part he traveled there on Sunday, almost always returning just before the lighting of the Sabbath candles the following Friday evening when he’d rush into the house in great haste and notice:
    His wife, Gitele, wearing her black silk jacket, the ritual wig * she reserved for the Sabbath, and her diamond earrings, already seated near the silver candlesticks and the covered Sabbath loaves arranged on the dining room table which was now spread with its fresh white cloth, examining her red, freshly scrubbed fingernails and waiting for the first little fire of Friday evening to be kindled in the window of the rabbi’s house in the row of whitewashed dwellings on the opposite side of the street.
    At such times, as had become habitual, Reb Gedalye was extremely busy and preoccupied, gulping tea from a saucer at this table, unaware that the peak of his silk skullcap was slightly askew. Between one gulp and another, he rapidly responded to Gitele’s inquiries:
    —He’d hurried off to see that member of the board whose opinion, according to what the director had told him, carried most weight when decisions were reached …
    —From that board member he’d hurried back to the director … To all intents and purposes he’d now persuaded both of them …
    —Now there remained only the third member, an old general, and the fourth, a Polish nobleman … With God’s help he’d win their support this coming week … There was no doubt he’d