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

openly to flatter Tarabay, through whose good offices he’d not long before obtained employment at the sugar refinery. Barely able to stand on his feet, he stopped every guest, whether known or unknown to him, endlessly to repeat the single witticism Tarabay had uttered, almost shaking himself to bits with mirth and drunken enthusiasm as he did so:
    — A to szelma, ten Pan Tarabay … szelma … *
    One of those guests from the sugar refinery who’d buried themselves in whist by the light of the candles on the little baize table, suddenly rose rapidly from his chair with the cards in his hand and just as rapidly shouted out to all the young people who’d crowded together in the adjoining room:
    —Champagne later! … Champagne at exactly midnight!
    And next to Mirel, as though next to the daughter of an old and valued friend, Nechama Tarabay went on sitting, scrutinizing her with her disingenuous black eyes before which even the smooth-tongued Tarabay quailed, and trying hard to engage her in worldly conversation:
    —Recently she’d tried to reason with Gitele, her mother: since you take the train so rarely to the provincial capital, why don’t you travel second class? … For Heaven’s sake, how much more expensive is second class? Sixty kopecks, perhaps?
    And more:
    —Why on earth should one go on living in utter boredom there in that desolate shtetl? Here in this village … here, there’s a sugar refinery … there are people here, one can have a social life … there are at least business opportunities here …
    All the while, at the crowded table in the center of the overcrowded room, her former fiancé sat with his back to her, not knowing what to do with his hands. Every time she deliberately raised her demanding, high-pitched voice from where she was seated, he fiddled gratuitously with the back of his collar and stared too intently into the face of a tall young merchant who kept jumping up from his chair and arguing with great intensity:
    —Quiet! Hadn’t he begged Reb Nokhem a year ago to sow as many sugar beets as possible?
    Standing a little farther on, at the very end of the room, all in deeply cut white evening waistcoats, were a few young men from the sugar refinery who knew everything that had passed between Mirel and Nosn Heler the previous summer and as a result stared at her décolletage and smiling face with drunken, lecherous eyes and whispered prurient remarks about her:
    —How’s that for a pretty piece of female, eh?
    Someone called Nechama Tarabay away for a confidential chat, and Mirel was left alone here on the suite’s low chair while the young men from the sugar refinery continued to stare at her. Casting an oddly distracted glance at her own slender figure, she rose and wandered off to a side room where she found, wearing a short, housewifely apron with hands clasped and one foot in front of her, Tarabay’s daughter Tanya, no longer as young as she’d have liked to be, with her head tilted a little to one side, hoping in this way to suggest, by looking at no one and quietly clucking her tongue:
    —She’d not expected this whole get-together, and she’d no intention of taking any part in it.
    When someone in this room addressed Mirel by name, her heart pounded, but this was only a simple, religiously observant young wife from their shtetl, who wore a headkerchief, still lived in the home and at the expense of her father, the ritual slaughterer, and was related to Tarabay through her husband:
    —What had she wanted to ask? She believed Mirel had come here in her own sleigh, and she, this young wife, now felt quite unwell here. Perhaps she might soon be able to ride home with Mirel?
    Meanwhile, a tall young man was now standing beside Tanya Tarabay, trying to convince her that living in big cities had great advantages and listening courteously as she maintained her own contrary opinion:
    —At the end of last summer she’d been in Odessa to write the qualifying matriculation