By Miriam Karpilov
Translated by Jessica Kirzane
In the middle of my quiet, bitter cry, in the lonely silence of that strange house, I heard a quiet knock on my door. I shook myself awake and covered my head with a pillow to dampen the noise, but the stubborn knocking did not let up. I was worried that it would wake up my landlady. Barefoot and in my nightshirt, I went to the door.
“Who’s there?” I whispered.
“It’s me.” I recognized C.’s voice as he tried to whisper, though it came out as a squeak. I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t ask what he wanted through the closed door. Someone might hear. Should I open the door? That would be as good as an invitation.
“It’s too late,” I said, and walked away from the door. He knocked again. I marched back to the door and quietly but firmly insisted, “Go away!”
“Just give me a minute,” he begged. “I just have a few words to say to you, no more …”
“I can’t.”
He knocked again.
“What is it?” I said, opening the door an inch, “What do you want?”
“I need to ask you something.”
“Come back in the morning! How dare you? I was sleeping!” I lied. I tried to slam the door in his face, but he forced it open and came into my room. He closed the door gently behind him.
We stared at each other for a while, each of us gearing up for a fight.
“My God! How beautiful you look like that!” he said, gathering his hands in an almost religious pose. “Darling, I’ve never seen you like this before.”
I realized that I was almost entirely undressed. Although he’d just called me “darling” (which seemed to be some kind of rule with him when he’s alone in the dark with me), I ignored it, looking around for my robe.
He tore it out of my hands and threw it to the side. “Why do you need that?” he asked. “Are you embarrassed of your own beauty?”
“I’m cold,” I said through clenched teeth. It was true, I really was shivering, though not so much because of the temperature as out of anger at his tearing my robe away from me.
“Cold?” he said. He grabbed my hand, lay me in my bed and covered me with the blanket. Perched on the edge of the bed, he looked into my eyes and stroked my head. “Why did you run away from my lecture?” he accused.
“I wanted to,” I answered.
“Was it a bad speech?”
“It was absurd.”
“You didn’t hear the end.”
“I can imagine it.”
“You can’t. They practically threw me into the air when I was finished. Everyone shook my hand. I looked for you. I was upset that you weren’t there to see it. They’re going to rent a bigger hall for my next lecture so that everyone can come. So many people were turned away today because there wasn’t enough room in the hall.”
“Good for them!”
“Do you think so?”
“I think that I think so.”
“Why are you so angry?”
“I want to sleep. Go away!” I sighed. “I don’t want another scandal like we had last time in the other room. People here don’t know who or what I am. They might think …”
“If they hear noise they will certainly think … Let’s be quiet and let them sleep. I hate when people make scenes. People like your old landlords who threw me out, they make me crazy. I hardly know what to do with myself.”
“Why do we have to argue in the middle of the night?”
“Is it my fault that it’s the middle of the night? I feel like the sun could rise right now, just for me. What does time have to do with me?”
“But I—”
“Darling!”
“Don’t call me darling.”
“Alright. No more darlings. Although such endearments are made for silence, for darkness, for the kind of nightdress you’re wearing. And, darling, I love you, do you hear me? I love you with all of your whims, with your childish grudges against that thing which is so essential to your life, and to mine. You’re cruel to yourself, you suppress your natural urges. Your soft, velvety body begs to be caressed, to be covered in kisses. Your romantic soul wants love, but you, darling, turn away from it. You’re afraid to look the truth in the face. Are you … sleeping?”
I closed my eyes. I didn’t want to see him. When he talked this way, with my eyes closed I saw B. in him. And as he sat there in silence, holding my hand, I could almost imagine that he was A. instead.
When I kept my eyes closed and didn’t answer his questions, C. muttered to himself, “She’s actually asleep.” He began to undress.
“What do you think you’re doing?” I stared at him.
His plan was simple. Why should he sit there if he could lie down instead? And you don’t lie down with your clothes on. He only sleeps with his clothes on when he’s studying for an exam, he explained. But he’d already passed his examinations when it came to love. He was in no hurry to fall asleep. He could take his time and remove the unnecessary clothing.
It seemed to me that he was suggesting that everything he was wearing was unnecessary.
“No! What do you think you’re doing?” I protested, though weakly, since I didn’t want anyone to hear. “Where do you think you are, at a bathhouse?”
“Shhh …,” he said to me. “Enough with these questions! Now’s not the time …”
I got out of bed, grabbed my robe, and sat in a rocking chair. He could lie down alone if he wanted!
He lay down in my bed and laughed at me. What was I so afraid of? Why was I running away? He wasn’t going to lecture me! If I wanted him to, he’d be very quiet, absolutely quiet, quiet as a mouse. He knew that I preferred men not to say anything. At the beginning of our relationship he thought that I needed to be taken by storm like other girls, but he soon realized that he could only persuade with actions, not words. “Won’t you come a little closer, so I don’t have to speak so loudly?”
“No.”
“The landlady will come in, and that won’t be pretty.”
I didn’t say anything. “How can I keep quiet about this?” I thought. “He came to my room in the middle of the night—no, he broke in to my room in the middle of the night like an intruder, undressed, and got into my bed. My bed! Warmed by my own body! He’s lying there and I’m sitting here covered in a thin robe, shivering in the cold, terrified, angry, and powerless, because … why? … because I’m afraid of making noise! Can he just do whatever he wants, and I’ll say nothing?”
“You know,” he said conspiratorially, leaning on the edge of the bed with his head resting on his hands, “for a long time I’ve been picturing this moment, when I’d be with you in this—position. I couldn’t imagine it any other way. At night, in my dreams, I held you in my arms and kissed you. My God, how I kissed you! And then when I awoke and you weren’t beside me, I cried for sleep to return. My God! How bitterly, how pitifully I cried! It was like my soul was flying out of me. Neighbors had to wake me up and …”
“After you woke up someone had to wake you up?”
“What? You see my dear, I made a mistake and you noticed. I was just trying to see if you’re paying attention. And now that I know that you’re listening, I’ll say something more important. Don’t be such a child. Come to me. You’ll catch such a chill sitting over there in your chair that you’ll never warm up. A chill is a horrible thing that can turn into a serious illness. Come.”
I didn’t come.
“I swear by all that’s holy,” he said, raising his right hand, “they can cut off my hands if I touch you at all against your will.”
I heard someone talking somewhere, and then steps, a door opening. Two dark shadows grew larger in front of my door and then smaller again until they faded away.
C. lowered his hand. “How about this?” he said gleefully, after thinking for a moment. “Come here and I’ll go sit in your chair. I don’t want you to catch a chill and get sick because of me.”
I didn’t budge. I knew what he was up to.
“Why aren’t you moving? I’ll just sit here beside you.”
“I won’t move until you go away.”
“You’re afraid I’m trying to trick you. You think I’m going to slip back out of the chair and try to get into bed with you, right?”
“Well …”
“No wells! Admit it—you’re afraid. Didn’t I just tell you that there’s no reason to be afraid of me? I would never force you to love me. It’s not in my nature to force myself on someone. I only approve of things that happen through mutual consent. I even agreed not to call you darling if you didn’t want me to. It’s beneath my dignity to resort to such measures when I see that a woman isn’t interested.”
“Oh!” I cried out in impatience.
“No oh’s!” he chided. “They are absolutely unnecessary. Come and lie down. I’ll just sit next to you for a while, and then I’ll go away. You should trust me more, out of self-respect. Your fear for me shows how little you believe in yourself. How badly you trust in your ability to control yourself …”
I stifled a yawn with my hand and repositioned myself against the side of the chair, where I was more comfortable. In my imagination I’d already gone looking for another room to live in. I knew I couldn’t stay here much longer because of him. If my landlady caught this vagabond in my room—
C. got dressed in a huff and made a show of getting ready to leave. His glasses fell off his face, and he polished them and put them back on.
“I’m going,” he hissed.
I nodded. He wasn’t happy with that. He wanted to hear what else I had to say.
“I’m going,” he said again, louder this time.
“All right.”
“And I won’t be coming back.”
“All right.”
“Does that make you happy? You’ll only be happy for a minute. Once I’ve left, you’ll want me back. It’s true. You want to live, but you’re too afraid. But soon you’ll never have the chance to live, because you’ll die. You’re already dead.”
“How long do you plan to lecture a corpse?”
“As long as a there’s a chance I might resurrect it. I want to awaken your slumbering instincts, only once they are awake, I won’t be here anymore. Your lonely soul will regret not taking what I wanted to give you. You’ll come looking for me. You’ll beg me to come back to you but it will be too late …”
He stood and waited for me to say something. I didn’t say anything. I just looked at my door. Someone was standing behind it, starting to open the door with a key. My heart started to pound. I jumped up from my chair. It was just my next-door neighbor who had accidentally tried his key in my door. He cursed and went into his own room.
C. laughed at me. “Such a big girl, yet the slightest sound at your door makes you jump! It’s a good thing I was here so you didn’t have to be afraid. If not…”
He didn’t realize that I was afraid of someone coming and seeing him in my room. Or at least he pretended not to understand.
“You’re too weak to live alone, darling,” he said to me, returning once more to that “darling.” He took my hand and kissed my fingers. “Don’t make me go away. Let me stay here as long as you want me, darling. I’ll overcome all the unnatural restrictions you place on love. We’ll unite suffering with spirited union, love with joy, friendship with boundless devotion. You’ll get to have a man, but you won’t have to be his slave. You’ll be free. Don’t you want to be free, my darling?”
“Of you, yes.”
“You don’t mean that. You’re not saying what you really feel. You’re trying to be firm because you are so soft, so gentle, so full of longing to be loved! You want someone to love you fiercely. Don’t you want that? What do you want, if not to be loved?”
“To love someone.”
“Good. Here is a man. Love me!”
“Not you. Someone else.”
“Someone who doesn’t exist?”
“Someone who isn’t here.”
“Why love someone who isn’t here, when you can love someone who is right here, someone who is so full of feelings and who loves you so much? None of the many girls I’ve known before was able to refuse me. And you—why are you so stubborn? You not only refuse me, but you refuse yourself. You go against your own interests. Do you think you’ll find happiness in restraining yourself? You won’t.”
“I don’t want to.”
“Stubborn girl. You’ll take out your own eye to take two of mine. You’re just like other girls who’d sooner give themselves in slavery to a single man than be free with more than one man. You don’t know what freedom is.”
“If I don’t know what it is, I won’t miss it.”
“You’re ignorant. That’s what you are!”
“You just noticed!”
“You’re the same as all the others—a girl looking for a man. A reliable man who will take care of you, support you, control you.”
“That’s exactly what I am.”
“I can’t call you my darling anymore.”
“Then don’t.”
“And you call yourself an intellectual! Let me tell you, you’re not.”
“What a shame. I guess I’ll have to live with that. Why won’t you leave my room already? Go away!”
“You’re throwing me out!”
“Oh, no! I’m asking you to leave. Please go away.”
“I won’t go. I once knew a girl like you. She was stubborn for a long time until she drove everyone away and then she was an old maid.”
“Is that so? And I knew a man like you who stood so long that they had to throw him down the stairs to get him to leave.” I just said the first thing that came to my head. I didn’t expect it to move him.
My words seemed to strike a sore spot. He cried, “That’s a lie! They didn’t throw him down the stairs! He fell down on his own.”
His sudden anger amused me. I laughed, “He fell down on his own? How can a man just fall down the stairs?”
In response to the question came a whole story that he insisted on telling me so that I would know that whoever told me about throwing the man down the stairs had told me a lie. If he knew where that woman was now, he would tell me the whole story in front of her so that she wouldn’t be able to make up stories about throwing him down a flight of stairs anymore. It was in the same house, with those same miserable “intellectuals” who used to be my landlords, just one floor up, if he remembered correctly. The girl, he couldn’t remember if her name was Alta or Anna, lived there. He came up to see her. Things were starting to get heated up between them and then suddenly, when he almost had her wrapped in his arms, she asked him to leave her alone for a moment. She had to do what people sometimes have to do when they need a little privacy … He was good enough to leave her alone. How was he supposed to know that she was playing a trick on him? He went into the hall looking for her. It was dark and a cat ran between his legs. His shoelaces were untied. He lost his balance and fell down the stairs. He ended his story indignantly. Can you believe that she would claim to have thrown him down the stairs? There’s a big difference between being thrown down the stairs and falling down them yourself, don’t you think?
I had to agree that there is a difference. And I had to promise that I would never listen to anything that woman said. And if I ever saw her again, I should tell her his version of the story.
(1918)
Miriam Karpilov (1888-1956) was born in Minsk and immigrated to America in 1905, settling in New York City and in Bridgeport, CT, where several of her brothers lived. Karpilov wrote short stories, belles-lettres, plays, and novels that were published in leading American-Yiddish newspapers and served as a staff writer for the Yiddish daily newspaper the Forward in the 1930s. Five of her novels appeared in book form: Brokhe, a kleyn-shtetldike (Brokhe, a Small-town Girl, 1923), In di shturem teg (In Stormy Days, 1909), A provints-tsaytung (A Provincial Newspaper, 1926), Tagebukh fun an elender meydl, oder der kamf kegn fraye libe (Diary of a Lonely Girl, or the Battle Against Free Love, 1918), Yudis (Judith, 1911). Only one of her short stories has ever appeared in English translation (“In a Friendly Hamlet,” trans. Myra Mniewski, Have I Got a Story for You (W. W. Norton, 2016).
Jessica Kirzane is an incoming lecturer in Yiddish Studies at the University of Chicago. She holds a PhD in Yiddish Studies from Columbia University. She is Managing/Pedagogy Editor of In geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies and was a 2017 Translation Fellow at the Yiddish Book Center. Her translations have previously appeared or are forthcoming in In geveb, Pakn Treger, Queen Mob’s Teahouse, and Have I Got a Story For You (W. W. Norton, 2016).
