The End of Everything (New Yiddish Library Series) by David Bergelson

bookkeeper, eagerly perused. Gitele did so with the wordlessly venomous resentment of a woman obdurately determined not to speak, and the bookkeeper, standing silently next to her, wore a deeply furrowed brow, lifted his nose and snorted far too pensively, delaying his intention to discuss this with Mirele so long that one day she herself stopped him outside the house to say:
    —Would he please be so good as to inform her mother: she could rest assured that nothing would come of this …
    She was greatly agitated when she told him this, yet a few days later, after she’d taken herself off to the provincial capital on the spur of the moment, someone from the city came down and spread new rumors about her over the whole shtetl:
    —Yes, she’d been seen walking out with Shmuel Zaydenovski.
    She’d been seen in the Ukrainian theater with him and near the prison on the outskirts of the city as well.
    Whether in traveling to the provincial capital Mirel had known she’d meet him there, or whether, even as far as Gitele and the bookkeeper knew, their meeting had been accidental and unplanned, no one could say.
    A few days later, she returned pale and cheerless from the provincial capital. It was about two o’clock in the afternoon, and in the dining room the white cloth laid for lunch was still spread on the round table. Gitele still sat in her usual place opposite her relative the bookkeeper, picking her teeth with a matchstick. Passing through, Mirele spoke not a single word to anyone and for perhaps fully half an hour shut herself in her isolated room. During all that time, Gitele kept urging her relative the bookkeeper:
    —Why couldn’t he just go into to her room and ask her? She couldn’t begin to understand why not …
    But the preoccupied young bookkeeper was in no hurry, furrowed his brow, raised his nose and snorted. In her room, meanwhile, Mirel changed, put on her black jacket and scarf and started making her way out into the street. Only then did he rise from his chair, follow her out into the hallway, and stop her there:
    —Yes, he wanted to ask her … He wanted …
    He instantly received an answer, one displeased and peculiarly harsh:
    —She’d already told him once that nothing would come of this.
    For a time he hovered in the hallway, uncertain of whether or not to go back into the house, while with dispassionate cheerlessness she calmly descended the steps of the verandah and made her way slowly up into the shtetl somewhere. The dark melancholy day was in the grip of the light yielding frost that follows a sunny fair. The dirty snow was slippery underfoot, and Gentile pigs and Jewish cows thrust their snouts into such muddily filthy straw as lay scattered about. Here and there, swathed in furs and tightly bundled up, young wives stood near the doors of the small flour shops they ran, following her with curious glances:
    —Is it true what they say—that Mirel’s about to become a bride?
    She turned left into the back street at the very end of the town, entered Lipkis’s home through the front door and inquired:
    —Isn’t Lipkis at home?
    His widowed mother saw her out with great respect, repeating several times:
    —He’s teaching somewhere at the moment … He’s giving lessons to his pupils somewhere.
    Leaving, she took herself off along the well-worn footpath that led out of the shtetl to the home of the midwife Schatz, found a lock hanging on the door there, and learned from her Gentile neighbor:
    —She’d been called out to a woman in childbirth in Kashperivke yesterday evening.
    Deeply depressed, Mirel returned to town, paused in front of the pharmacy but, appearing to think better of it, walked on, passing close by the house of her former fiancé’s father with its unusual blue shutters; stealing a glance in that direction she saw:
    Not a single conveyance was stationed in front of the verandah and no one was to be seen there. Only a tall farmer, a szlachticz * who’d apparently