The Spinoza of Market Street - Isaac Bashevis Singer [43]
"What kind of nonsense is this?" Dr. Margolis asked out loud. "She can't have thrown herself out of the window?" He went back to the hall and noticed a light on in his study. What could she be doing in there so late? He walked to the door and threw it open: There sat Mathilda clad in his dressing gown and slippers asleep at the desk. The manuscript lay open in front of her. A half-smoked cigar was propped against the ash tray and a bottle of cognac and a glass stood among the litter of papers. Never before had her beard seemed to him so grotesquely long and thick; it was as though during the few hours he had been absent it had been growing wildly. Her head was almost bald. She was snoring heavily. In sleep her eyebrows were drawn together, and her hairy, masculine nose protruded; her nostrils were clotted with small tufts of hair. In some mysterious way she had grown to resemble him--she was like the image he had just seen in the mirror. Man and wife share a pillow so long that their heads grow alike, Dr. Margolis quoted to himself, recalling the proverb. But, no, there was more to it than that. This was a biological imitation, like those creatures that simulate being trees and bushes or the bird whose bill looks like a banana. But what was the purpose of this imitation in old age? How could it benefit the species? He felt both compassion and disgust. Evidently she wished to convince herself that the book was worth publishing. On her tightly shut lids was stamped disappointment, the look of disillusionment that sometimes lingers on the face of a corpse. He started to wake her:
"Mathilda. Mathilda."
She stirred, then awoke and rose to her feet. Man and wife viewed each other, silent and amazed, with that strangeness which sometimes follows a life of intimacy. Dr. Margolis wanted to scold her, but he could not. It wasn't her fault. This was apparently the last stage of declining femininity.
"Come to sleep," he said. "It's late, you ninny."
Mathilda shook herself and pointed to the manuscript. "It's a great book, a work of genius."
--- Translated by Shulamith Charney and Cecil Hemley
The Beggar Said So
I
One hot summer day a big wagon, drawn by one horse, lumbered into the market place of Yanov. It was piled high with motley rags and bedding, laden with cans and buckets, and from the axle between the rear wheels a lantern hung. On top of everything a flower pot and a cage with a little yellow bird swayed precariously. The driver of the wagon was dark, with a pitch-black beard. He wore a cap with a leather visor and a coat not cut in the usual style. At first glance one could have taken him for an ordinary Russian. But the woman with him wore on her head the familiar Jewish coif. Jews, then, after all. Instantly, from all the little shops round about, the Jews of the town rushed out to meet the new arrivals. The stranger stood there in the market place with his whip in his hand.
"Wher-r-re's your magistr-r-rate?" he demanded. He pronounced his "r's" in the dialect of Great Poland, hard and sharp.
"And what would you need the magistrate for?"
"I want to be a chimney sweep," said the newcomer.
"And why should a Jew want to be a chimney sweep?"
"I served in the Army for twenty-five years. I have my working papers."
"There's a chimney sweep in town already."
"But the beggar said there wasn't," the newcomer insisted.
"What beggar?"
"Why, the one that came to our town."
It seemed that the man--his name was Moshe--had been a chimney sweep in some small town on the other side of the river Vistula, not far from the Prussian border. One day a beggar who traveled from place to place had come to that town and had said something about a