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

her father needed to save himself. Quite possibly she knew also that had she not broken off her engagement to Velvl Burnes, his father, Avrom-Moyshe, would readily have supplied this sum. Quite possibly she’d given this matter much thought, which was why she could now say, so easily and simply:
    —Well, lend him twelve thousand rubles and he’ll free himself from his difficulties.
    These words abruptly reminded the crippled student Lipkis of his widowed mother whom he and his elder brother supported, and of the old overcoat that she’d carried out after him that time when, traveling to the provincial capital with Mirele, he’d hastily hobbled out to the conveyance in which she was waiting for him.
    At the time it seemed that Mirel, seated on the phaeton, had smiled and glanced aside.
    Why had she glanced aside then? Was it because at that moment her former fiancé had come driving up from town in his buggy? Or merely because every Sabbath Lipkis’s mother used that same old overcoat to wrap around her tsholnt * in the oven?
    In reality, though, this spoiled and self-centered young woman was incapable of thinking seriously about anyone who lived outside the confines of a soul like her own, shrunken by the solipsism inevitable in an only child.
    Lipkis began to understand this clearly only some time later and subsequently even reproached her for it in the many letters he failed to send her.
    —He wondered—he protested in one of these unsent letters—whether her egoistic little heart was even capable of empathizing with the predicament of her own hard-pressed father, distracted by misfortune as he was, whom she, an adult woman, had felt no embarrassment in kissing before a room full of people?
    The moderately cold air froze into unhearing silence, and the first snows settled over the dispirited shtetl and over the vacant, wintry district all around.
    Unable any longer to endure her father’s house even for a single minute, Mirel wandered aimlessly about the surrounding windswept fields as long as the short periods of daylight lasted, leaving her footprints and those of Lipkis behind everywhere. At such times they looked odd in the chill, distant air between the dirty skies and the snow-white earth, two people wandering in silence across the vast encircling fields and rarely speaking to each other. The silence of bereavement was all around them, from a solitary peasant hut under a white-blanketed roof right down to a frozen stream somewhere in a nearby valley; dozing here and there in scattered corners of the horizon, those whitened coppices that had buried themselves deep in the snow appeared pristine and unfamiliar from where they stood, deceiving the eye of anyone who might on a rare occasion pass through on a swiftly moving sleigh:
    —Look! The little oak coppices should be there, shouldn’t they?
    No one noticed that by then she was on familiar terms with Lipkis and had started addressing him by his first name.
    —Normally—Mirel remarked to him on one occasion, meandering aimlessly over these windswept fields—she had not the remotest feeling of love for him, but at times, for no reason, she felt pleased that he was walking by her side. Could Lipkis understand this or not?
    And biting her lower lip, she began filliping his nose to help him understand, in this way forcing him to start grinning foolishly.
    The sorrow in her blue eyes intensified, and from time to time it would gaze out with a melancholy glint; then she’d stare pensively into the partially blurred winter distance for a long, long time, and unpredictably pose bizarre questions:
    —Lipkis, can you hear the way the world keeps silent?
    Lipkis felt that he ought to say something about this silent world, made drawn-out preparations to do so in his throat and with his shoulders, and finally began:
    —Yes, it would hardly be inappropriate if the two of them were to set off across these fields and never turn back again.
    Paying not the slightest