The streets of the small town of Progrody were icy and treacherous. All the inhabitants teetered along with iron-tipped canes. Even so, some of them fell and broke their legs or their necks.
One evening, Nissen Piczenik’s wife took a fall. She lay there unconscious for a long time before kind neighbors had pity on her and took her home.
She began to vomit violently. The army doctor of Progrody said she had a concussion.
She was taken to the hospital, and the doctor there confirmed the diagnosis of his army colleague.
The coral merchant visited his wife every day in the hospital. He sat down at her bedside, listened for half an hour to her meaningless babble, looked at her fevered eyes, her thinning hair, remembered the few tender times he had given her, sniffed the acrid camphor and iodine, and went back home, stood in front of the stove and prepared borscht and kasha for himself, cut bread and grated radish and brewed tea and lit the fire, all for himself. Then he tipped all the corals from his many bags onto one of his four tables, and started to sort them. Mr. Lakatos’s celluloid corals he stored separately in the chest. The genuine corals had long since ceased to be like living creatures to Nissen Piczenik. Ever since Lakatos had turned up in the area, and since he, the coral merchant Nissen Piczenik, had begun mixing up the flimsy celluloid stuff with the heavy real stones, the corals in his house were dead. Corals nowadays were made from celluloid! A dead substance to make corals that looked like live ones, and even more beautiful and perfect than the real live ones! Compared to that, what was the concussion of his wife?
Eight days later, she died; it must have been of the effects of the concussion. But Nissen Piczenik told himself that she had not died only from her concussion, but also because her life had not been linked to that of any other human being in this world. No one had wanted her to remain alive, and so she had died.
Now the coral merchant Nissen Piczenik was a widower. He mourned his wife in the customary fashion. He bought her a relatively durable gravestone and had some pious phrases chiseled into it. He spoke the kaddish for her morning and night. But he did not miss her at all. He could make his own meals and his own tea. With his corals, he didn’t feel lonely. All that saddened him was the fact that he had betrayed them to their false sisters, the celluloid corals, and himself to the dealer Lakatos.
He longed for spring, but when it came, Nissen Piczenik realized that his longing had been pointless. In former years before Easter, when the icicles started melting a little at noon, the customers had come in their creaking wagons or on their jingling sleighs. They needed corals for Easter. But now spring had come, the sun was growing warm, with every day the icicles on the roofs grew shorter and the melting piles of snow by the side of the road grew smaller — and no customers came to Nissen Piczenik. In his oaken coffer, in his wheeled trunk which stood iron-hooped and massive next to the stove, the finest corals lay in piles, bunches, and chains. But no customers came. It grew ever warmer, the snow vanished, balmy rains fell. Violets sprang up in the woods, and frogs croaked in the swamps: no customers came.
At about this time, a certain striking transformation in the person of Nissen Piczenik was first observed in Progrody. Yes, for the first time, the people of the town began to suspect that the coral seller was an eccentric, even a peculiar fellow — and some lost their former respect for him and others laughed openly at him. Many of the good people of Progrody no longer said: “There goes the coral merchant”; instead, they said: “There goes Nissen Piczenik, he used to be a great coral merchant.”
He had only himself to blame. He failed to behave in the way that the law and the dignity of widowerhood prescribed. If his strange friendship with the sailor Komrower was forgiven him, and their visit to Podgorzev’s notorious bar, then his own further visits to that establishment could not be taken so lightly. For almost every day since the death of his wife, Nissen Piczenik visited Podgorzev’s bar. He acquired a taste for mead, and when in time it got to be too sweet for him, he started mixing it with vodka. Sometimes, one of the girls would sit beside him. And he, who all his life had known no other woman than his now dead wife, who had taken no pleasure in anything but stroking, sorting, and threading his true loves, the corals, suddenly in Podgorzev’s dive he succumbed to the cheap white flesh of women, to the pulsing of his own blood which mocked the dignity of a respectable existence, and to the wonderful narcotizing heat that radiated from the girls’ bodies. So he drank and he stroked the girls who sat next to him or occasionally even on his lap. He felt pleasure, the same pleasure he felt when playing with his corals. And with his tough, red-haired fingers he groped, less expertly — with laughable clumsiness, in fact — for the nipples of the girls, which were as rosy red as some corals. And, as they say, he let himself go more and more, practically by the day. He felt it himself. His face grew thin, his bony back grew crooked, and he no longer brushed his coat or his boots, or combed his beard. He recited his prayers mechanically every morning and evening. He felt it himself. He was no longer the coral merchant; he was Nissen Piczenik, formerly a great coral merchant.
He sensed that within a year, or maybe only six months, he would be the laughingstock of the town — but what did he care? Progrody wasn’t his home, his home was the ocean.
And so one day he made the fateful decision of his life.
But before that he went back to Sutschky one day — and there in the shop of Jenö Lakatos from Budapest he saw all his old customers, and they were listening to the blaring music on the phonograph, and buying celluloid corals at fifty kopecks a chain.
“So, what did I tell you last year?” Lakatos called out to Nissen Piczenik. “You want another ten pud, twenty, thirty?”
Nissen Piczenik said, “I don’t want any more fake corals. I only want to deal in real ones.”
VIII
AND HE WENT home, back to Progrody, and he discreetly looked up the travel agent Benjamin Broczyner, who sold boat tickets to people who wanted to emigrate. These were for the most part deserters from the army or else the very poorest Jews, who had to go to Canada and America, and who provided Broczyner with his livelihood. He represented a Hamburg shipping company in Progrody.
“I want to go to Canada!” said the coral seller Nissen Piczenik. “And as soon as possible.”
“The next sailing is on the Phoenix, which leaves Hamburg in two weeks. We can have your papers all ready by then,” said Broczyner.
“Good. Good,” replied Piczenik. “And I don’t want anyone to know about it.”
And he went home and packed all his corals, his real ones, in his wheeled suitcase.
As for the celluloid corals, he placed them on the copper tray of the samovar, and he set fire to them and watched them burning with a blue flame and a terrible stench. It took a long time: there were more than fifteen pud of fake corals. Indeed, all that was left of the celluloid was a gigantic heap of gray-black scrolled ashes, and a cloud of blue-gray smoke twisting round the oil lamp in the middle of the room.
That was Nissen Piczenik’s farewell to his home.
On 21 April, he boarded the steamship Phoenix in Hamburg, as a steerage passenger.
The ship had been four days at sea when disaster struck: perhaps some still remember it.
More than two hundred passengers went down with the Phoenix. They were drowned, of course.