“You don’t say!”
“I didn’t want a child of mine playing with fire — anyone would have done the same. Don’t think I browbeat her, though. If anything, I tried making light of it. ‘Why pretend we can solve the world’s problems?’ I said to her. ‘Whatever will be, will be, there’s nothing you or I can do about it …’ That’s what I said, and do you know how she took it? She didn’t say a word. But not a peep out of her, as good as gold she was! So what does the good Lord do? The worst of it was already over, thank God; the Revolution, and the Constitution, and all those troubles were behind us. No more black shirts, no more red flags, no more short hair, no more hell’s-a-popping, no more bombs. My teeth could finally stop chattering. Do you think being afraid for her all the time was so easy? An only daughter, our pride and joy, and such a gifted child too. Just out of high school …”
“So?”
“In short, the nightmare was ended, God be praised. We could breathe easily again and think of a match for her. A dowry? No problem, if the right young man could be found. And so we began the whole routine: visits to matchmakers, lists of eligibles, and all the rest of it. I could see she wasn’t too keen on it. Why not? She wouldn’t tell us, not even to say she wasn’t interested. What was the matter, then? Wait until you hear the whole story.
“I kept a sharp eye out and one day I made a discovery: she had a book that she was reading in secret. And not alone, either; she was reading it with a friend of hers, the daughter of the cantor of our synagogue, a bright high school girl herself, and with a third person — the boy from Navaredok. Would you like to know who he was? Well, there’s nothing worth knowing. An ugly, scruffy, moonfaced, pimple-cheeked, eyebrowless little creep with gold-rimmed glasses — you wouldn’t want to eat at the same table with him. And a pest too, a slimy little worm! Do you know what a worm-person is? Then I’d better explain it to you. There are all kinds of people in the world. There are cow-people. There are horse-people. There are dog-people. There are pig-people. And there are worm-people. Do you get it now?”
“Quite.”
“How did this worm enter my life? Through the cantor’s daughter. He was a cousin of hers, a student of pharmacy, or dentistry, or law, or whatever the Devil it was. All I can tell you is that for me he was the Angel of Death. He and his gold glasses rubbed me the wrong way from the start. I told my wife that too. ‘Whatever can you be thinking of!’ she said. But I kept my eyes and ears open, and I didn’t like their reading together, or their talking together, or their arguing together so excitedly one bit … Once I even asked my daughter about it. ‘Tell me, missy,’ I said to her, ‘what’s that the three of you are smacking your lips over?’ ‘It’s nothing,’ she says, ‘just a book.’ ‘I can see it’s a book,’ I say. ‘I’m asking you what book.’ ‘And if I told you,’ she says, ‘would you know?’ ‘Why shouldn’t I know?’ I say. Well, she laughed at me and said, ‘It’s not the sort of book you think … it’s a novel called Sanine by Artsybashev.’ ‘The artsy pasha?’ I said. ‘Is he a Turk?’ That made her laugh even harder. Ai, missy, I thought, you’re laughing your father right into an ulcer! Who knows, I wondered, maybe they’re back to planning revolutions again … Don’t think I wasn’t itching to read that book myself!”
“My goodness!”
“I needed a little help, of course. That’s when I thought of my shopboy, a real whiz who knows Russian like the back of his hand. I stole the book from my daughter’s room one night and brought it to him. ‘Here, Berl,’ I said. ‘I want you to read this tonight and tell me tomorrow what it’s all about.’ I couldn’t wait for it to be morning. ‘All right, Berl,’ I said, grabbing him as soon as he showed up for work, ‘tell me what it says there.’ ‘Whew, that’s some book!’ he says, whistling through his teeth. ‘I didn’t sleep all night, I couldn’t put it down for a minute!’ ‘Is that a fact?’ I say. ‘In that case, suppose you let me in on it …’
“Well, my Berl starts describing the book — what can I tell you? Nothing has anything to do with anything! Listen to a schlock story. ‘Once upon a time,’ he says, ‘there’s this goy named Sanine who likes to get drunk and eat pickles … And he has a sister, Sanine does, called Lida, who’s wild about a doctor, even though she’s pregnant by an officer … And there’s also a student named Yuri, who’s crazy in love with a young teacher called Krasavitsa, who goes sailing one night — guess with who? — no, not with the student! — with that boozer, I mean Sanine …’
“ ‘And that’s all?’ I asked.
“ ‘Not so fast!’ he says. ‘I’m not done yet. There’s another teacher named Ivan, and he comes along with Sanine to see Krasavitsa take a skinny-dip …’
“ ‘Good for him,’ I say. ‘But what’s the upshot of it all?’
“ ‘The upshot,’ he says, ‘is that the boozer, this Sanine, is some stud, and even when he comes home to his own sister, Lida …’
“ ‘Feh,’ I say, ‘you should be ashamed of yourself! I’ve had enough of that drunk. Just tell me how it ends. What’s the punch line?’
“ ‘The punch line,’ he says, ‘is that the officer puts a bullet in his head, and so does the student, and Krasavitsa takes poison, and this Jew, Soloveichik — he’s part of it also — goes and hangs himself.’
“ ‘I wish you’d hanged yourself with him!’ I say.
“ ‘Who, me?’ he says. ‘What did I do?’
“ ‘Not you,’ I said. ‘I meant the artsy pasha.’
“That’s what I told my Berl, though I was really thinking of that damned little creep from Navaredok. Don’t think I wasn’t itching to have it out with him!”
“Well?”
“ ‘Tell me,’ I said to him, ‘where did you ever come up with such a schlock story?’ ‘What schlock story?’ he says, turning his gold glasses on me. ‘The one about that drunk called Sanine,’ I say. ‘Sanine is no drunk,’ he says. ‘Then what is he?’ I say. ‘He’s a hero,’ he says. ‘What makes him a hero,’ I say, ‘his eating sour pickles, drinking vodka from a teacup, and carrying on like a studhorse?’ That got under his skin, that creep from Navaredok. He took off his glasses, gave me a look with those red, browless eyes of his, and said, ‘You may have heard the music, Pa, but you sure can’t carry the tune. Sanine lives a free, natural life. Sanine says and does what he wants!’
“And off he goes into a long harangue about the dickens only knows what, freedom and love and love and freedom, waving his hands in the air and sticking out that pigeon breast of his as though he were preaching hellfire. I stood there looking at him and thinking: God in heaven, would you believe a scrawny little twerp like this talking about love?! Suppose I took him by the scruff of his neck and gave him such a shaking that he’d have to pick his teeth up off the floor? Only then I thought, what’s the matter with you? So the boy is a bubblehead, so what? Would you rather he had bombs on the brain?… Go be a prophet and guess that there are worse things than bombs and that because of that schlock story, I would lose my only daughter, and see my wife go nearly mad with grief, and suffer such shame and heartache that I had to sell my business and move to another town! I can’t believe it’s been two years already …