“That’s enough of your kind wishes, my good woman. Why don’t you tell us why the conductors had it in for you?”
The woman looked at him with her puffy eyes.
“I only hope he gets a stroke! He was afraid I’d take his customers away, so he tried pushing ahead of me, so I elbowed him out of the way, so he grabbed my basket from behind, so I started to scream, so a policeman came along and winked to the conductors, so they threw both our baskets in the mud. God turn his blood to mud! I swear to you, may I hope to die if I’ve ever been bothered before or had a hair harmed on my head in all the years I’ve been working this line. Do you know why that is? It’s not from the milk of human kindness, believe me. He should only get a box in the ear for each free roll and hard-boiled egg I’ve handed out in that station! Everyone, from top to bottom, has to get his share of the pie. I hope to God they get all of it some day: one of them consumption, another a fever, another the cholera! The chief conductor takes what he wants, and the other conductors help themselves too to a roll, or an egg, or an orange. What can I tell you? Would you believe that even the stoker, a pox on his head, thinks he has a bite coming? I wish his ears were bitten off! He keeps threatening to rat on me to the policeman unless I give him something to eat. If only he knew, may the gout get his bones, that the policeman gets a cut too. Every Sunday I slip him a bagful of oranges to buy him off for the week. And don’t think he doesn’t choose the biggest, the sweetest, the juiciest fruit …”
“Auntie,” said the man with the blue glasses, interrupting her again, “judging by the volume of business you do, you must be making a mint.”
“What are you talking about?” the woman shot back as though her honor were impugned. “I barely manage to meet the overhead. I’ve been taking such a skinning that I’m at starvation’s door.”
“Then what do you go on for?”
“What do you want me to do, steal for a living? I have five children at home, may he get five ulcers in his stomach, and I’m a sick woman too, he should only, dear God, lie sick in the poor-house until the end of next year! Just look how he’s killed the business, buried it in the ground — it’s a pity he wasn’t buried with it. And what a good business it was, too. I couldn’t have asked for a better one.”
“A good business?”
“As good as gold! Why, I was raking it in.”
“But, Auntie, didn’t you just tell me you were starving?”
“That’s because fifty percent goes to the conductors and the Stationmaster and the policeman every Sunday. Do you take me for a gold mine? A buried treasure? A bank robber?”
The man with the blue glasses and the fleshy nose was getting exasperated. “Auntie!” he said. “You’re making me dizzy!”
“I’m making you? My troubles are making you — they should only make a corpse out of him! I hope to God he’s ruined just as he ruined me! Why, he was nothing but a tailor, a needle pusher; he didn’t earn enough to buy the water to boil his kasha in. It made him green with envy to see how well I was doing, the eyes should fall out of his head, and that I brought home enough to eat, he should only be eaten by worms, and that I was supporting five orphaned children with my basket, may he swallow a basket of salt that turns to rocks in his belly! That’s when he went, I hope he goes and drops dead, and bought a basket too, may I soon buy the shrouds for his funeral! ‘What do you call this?’ I asked him. ‘A basket,’ he says. ‘And just what do you intend to do with it?’ I asked him. ‘The same thing that you do,’ he says. ‘What are you talking about?’ I asked him. ‘What I’m talking about,’ he says, ‘is that I have five children who have to eat too, and who aren’t going to be fed by you …’ What do you say to that? And ever since then, as you’ve seen for yourselves, he follows me around with his basket, may he be followed by the Angel of Death, and takes away my customers, I wish he’d be taken by the Devil, and steals the bread from my mouth — oh, dear sweet God, You should knock the teeth out of his!”
That gave the man with the blue glasses an idea that had in fact occurred to the rest of us. “But why do you both have to work the same train?”
The woman gave him a puffy-eyed stare. “What should we do, then?”
“Split up. The line is big enough for both of you.”
“You mean leave him?”
“Leave who?”
“My second husband.”
“What second husband?”
The pockmarked red face turned even redder.
“What do you mean, what second husband? The schlimazel we’re talking about. A black day it was that I married him!”
We nearly fell out of our seats.
“That man you’re competing with is your second husband?”
“Who did you think he was, my first? Eh! If only my first, God bless him, were still alive …”
So she said, the basket woman, in a singsong voice, and started to tell us about her first husband. But who was listening? Everyone was talking, everyone was joking, everyone was making wisecracks, and everyone was laughing till his sides split …
Maybe you know what was so funny?
(1909)
THE HAPPIEST MAN IN ALL KODNY
The best time to travel by train is … shall I tell you? In autumn, right after Sukkos.
It’s neither too hot nor too cold then, and you needn’t look out all the time at a gray sky sobbing on a gloomy, sulking earth. And if it does rain and the drops strike the window and trickle down the steamy pane like tears, you can sit like a lord in the third-class car with a few other privileged souls like yourself and watch a distant wagon as it labors in the mud. On it, covered with a sack and folded nearly into three, huddles one of God’s creatures who takes out all his misery on another of God’s creatures, a poor horse, while you thank the good Lord that you’re in human company with a solid roof over your head. I don’t know about you, but autumn after Sukkos is my favorite time to travel.
The first thing I look for is a seat. If I’ve managed to find one, and better yet, if it’s by a window on the right, I tell you, I’m king. I can take out my tobacco pouch, light up as many cigarettes as I please, and look around to see who my fellow passengers are and which of them I can talk a bit of business with. Usually, I’m sorry to say, they’re packed together like herring in a barrel. Everywhere there are beards, noses, hats, stomachs, faces. But a man worth knowing behind the face? Sometimes there isn’t even one … Yet wait a minute: look at that queer fellow sitting by himself in the corner — there’s something special about him. I have a good eye for such types. Show me a hundred ordinary men and I’ll pick out the one oddball right away.
At first glance, that is, the person in question was a perfectly unremarkable-looking individual of a type that’s a dime a dozen, what we call where I come from a “three-hundred-and-sixty-five-days-a-year Jew.” The one strange thing about him was his clothes: his coat was not exactly a coat, the frock beneath it was not exactly a frock, the hat on his head was not exactly a hat, the skullcap under it was not exactly a skullcap, and the umbrella he held in his hand was not exactly an umbrella, although it was not exactly a broomstick either. A most unusual getup.
What struck me most about him, though, was not what he was wearing but rather the animation with which, unable to sit still for a minute, he took in his surroundings on all sides — and above all, the jolly, lively, radiant expression on his blissful face. Either, I thought, his winning number has come up in a lottery, or else he’s made a good match for his daughter, or else he’s just enrolled a son in the Russian high school that the boy had the luck to get into. A minute didn’t pass without his jumping from his seat, peering out the window, saying out loud to himself, “Are we there? No, not yet,” and sitting down again a bit nearer to me than before, a jolly, radiant, happy-looking fellow.