The door opened and a couple came in. The young man was tall with a short, trimmed beard. His neatness and modern garb had the look of someone who usually dressed more traditionally but was now on his way to America or to a spa. With his black fedora and parasol in hand he looked like a matchmaker or a cantor. Next to him stood a short woman. Her marriage wig, adorned with a broad hairband, was so small it looked like her own hair. She had a young girl’s rosy cheeks and was rather chubby and round; it seemed she was all flesh and no bones. She clung to the tall man like a little girl.
“Do you perform marriages here?” he asked.
“Yes,” Mother replied.
“How long does it take?”
“As quickly as you wish.”
“Well, how much does it cost?”
“Five rubles.”
“All right.”
The young man smiled at the woman. Apparently he had expected it to cost more.
“Who are the bride and groom?” Mother asked.
“I am the groom and she is my bride,” the young man replied. “Bride and groom are usually shy, but we have no reason to be. We were once married for six years already.”
“You’re not a Kohen?” Mother asked.
“No, I’m an Israelite.”
“And she has never remarried?”
The young man laughed. “Rebbetzin, do you think I’m an ignoramus? I know the law. I once studied in a yeshiva. The man who stands before you, even though he is wearing modern clothes, was close to getting rabbinic ordination. But I wanted to go abroad and she didn’t want to leave her mama. So we divorced and I went to Antwerp, where I became a diamond cutter. But what good are diamonds to me if I left the true diamond in Poland? I couldn’t sleep at night. I tossed and turned like someone with a high fever. Then I did a foolish thing while there and got married …”
The short woman grimaced coquettishly and said, “Why do you have to tell them all this?”
“So what! She didn’t bite off a piece of me. It didn’t work out and that’s that. Her father was a slaughterer and made a good living over there. He wanted to make me a shochet as well. But how could I slaughter other creatures when I had already slaughtered myself. I missed her so much I thought I’d go out of my mind. I would occasionally hear about love and I just
considered it the kind of nonsense written up in the papers. But I’m in love with this little woman standing next to me. I can’t live without her, and that’s the truth!“
“Oh, you’re talking too much,” the short woman said flirtatiously. “What difference does it make to them?”
“It makes a difference,” Mother said. “There’s a moral teaching that counsels that one must not rush into a divorce. What would you have done if, God forbid, she had gotten married, too? That would have been the end of it.”
The short woman spoke up. “Me marry? I swore to myself that once is enough. People suggested matches to me. The matchmakers ran after me. My good mother even arranged a meeting with one of the men. But as soon as I took one look at him I thought, He’s nothing like my husband, Berish, and I ran away!”
“Do you hear, Rebbetzin?”
“Well, it’s good that a young couple is in love,” Mother said. “That’s how it should be. Still, one should not be in a hurry …”
But the young couple was in a hurry. Father wanted to postpone the wedding for a day, but the young man refused to consider it. He went out to buy sponge cake and brandy. I went down to look for a minyan. In the meantime, Father began filling out the printed marriage contract. As the woman sat on the chair her face changed colors. Someone loved her. Because of her someone had divorced his wife and cast aside a life of working with diamonds to return to her. She played with the stones of her amber necklace. On one finger a diamond sparkled.
Mother asked, “Is the diamond from here?”
“From there,” the woman answered. “He brought it as a present.”
“What do your parents say?”
“To tell you the truth, they don’t want him,” the woman began hesitantly. “Why did he run away so quickly? I love him, but I also love my mama and papa. I didn’t want to put hundreds of miles between us. But once an idea gets into his head, it drives him crazy. So he ran and divorced me. What do you think? You think the shochet’s daughter accepted a divorce for nothing? He probably had to pay her off quite handsomely. Everything he saved up during the couple of years he was away went to the devil.”
“Do you have any children?”
“We have an eight-year-old girl.”
“And doesn’t he have children with the other woman?”
“He says no. But who knows? He began writing letters, but I didn’t answer them. My mama used to grab the letters and tear them up right away! She told the mailman to return all letters from Antwerp. But then he began sending the letters to his cousin, who brought them to me. I read them and saw at once that he had fallen into a pit. He missed me so much it was awful. And I longed for him, too. And the child kept asking, Where’s Papa? Rebbetzin, I tell you, it was terrible. When Mama heard he was coming back, she made such a tumult you could hear it all over town. But I still don’t have a hankering for anyone else. Papa is a mild-mannered man. He understood everything, but somehow it wasn’t appropriate to get married again in our hometown. How would you put it? Father married Mother again? … They even sang a ditty about us in town.”
“Things like that happen,” Mother said.
“Yes, anything can happen. Rebbetzin, I forgot to ask you—someone told me that he can use my ring. I don’t have a new wedding ring.”
“If you give it to him as a gift, he’ll be able to use it.”
“How do I give it to him?”
“You declare that you’re giving it to him as a gift.”
“Well, that’s fine with me.”
The young man returned with surprising speed. He had bought much more sponge cake and brandy than a minyan could eat or drink. Meanwhile, I had scratched together part of a minyan: a porter with a rope around his hips, an old man who sat in the shtibl and recited psalms, a youth wearing torn boots and disheveled sidecurls, a short man who sold hot chickpeas and beans on the street, and an ordinary Jew with a yellow beard whose sunburned face was full of freckles. But these men did not suffice for the quorum of ten. So I went off to round up some neighbors. The tailor, whose daughter had died and whose son-in-law had married her sister, came in white shirtsleeves, wearing glasses on the tip of his nose and a measuring tape around his neck. Father told him to put on a gaberdine and he returned wearing someone else’s garment from which the basting threads had not yet been removed.
I also called in the goose dealer from the third floor. While I was gathering the minyan, the young groom had already told every one of them his story. He looked half dizzy with joy. He didn’t stop talking, narrating, pointing to the short woman for whom he had dragged himself from one train to another, crossed borders, and brought ruination upon himself and others.
Then he remarked, “I’ll be darned if I know what I’ll do the morning after the wedding … I’m flat broke.”
“You could have taken a young girl and gotten another dowry,” the woman interjected.
“A dowry certainly wouldn’t have poisoned me, but I don’t need a young girl. In my eyes you are far better than the most beautiful girl. After all, I’m not the high priest who must marry a virgin. With God’s help we’ll scrape up a livelihood.”
“That’s exactly what I say.”
“I always thought that a foreign country would be paradise,” he said. “No small thing—being abroad! But once I crossed the border and saw that the sky is the same, the earth is the same, and the people are the same, I began to feel sad. That’s how it is with everything. I thought that polishing diamonds would be clean work. No small thing—diamonds! But your hands get so filthy you can barely wash them clean. It’s not much better than being a tanner. I’d be fine if at least there were steady work throughout the year. But no! It’s seasonal. One day you’re working and the next you’re out of a job. There’s a café in Antwerp where the jewel merchants meet. They gather at the little tables, and one man shows the next some sample diamonds wrapped in paper. The other man takes out his loupe, examines the gem, rubs it, and gives it to a third one. That one gives it to another. And so that little piece of paper goes from one hand to the next. These businessmen make a living, but the worker is afraid to buy a cup of coffee, for he may not have enough money for the tram ride home. Meanwhile, the shochet’s daughter sidled up to me. The shochet is a Polish Jew, one of our own, but over there he was already wearing a modern fedora. He wanted
to make a shochet out of me. I had already started studying Tevuos Shor, but even as I sat with that book in my hands I was thinking about this woman …”
“Nu, that’s quite enough!” Father said.
“What’s the matter? Is it forbidden to love? Jacob also loved Rachel …”
“That story is an allegory!”
“The Talmud states: ‘A verse in Scripture must be read in its literal sense.’ Jacob simply loved her. When he woke up in the morning and saw Leah, he felt the disappointment down to his belly button.”
“Come now, that’s no way to talk!”
“Rabbi, I’ve taken a drop of brandy. I’m drunk—that’s why I’m talking like that. Now that I’ve lived to see the day that I marry her, I feel it’s Simchas Torah.”
“Let’s hear what you have to say a year from now, God willing,” his wife said.
“I’ll never divorce you again. I’d rather die a thousand deaths.”
“Stop it, you’re embarrassing me in front of all these people.”
“What’s the embarrassment? We’re not strangers to each other.”
During the ceremony, the woman cried. She covered her face with a kerchief. Father recited the blessings and gave the bride and groom a sip of wine from the goblet. Afterward, the young man seized his former wife and began kissing her. He even tried dancing with her. She tore away from him, but he said, “Now it’s permitted.”
He gave the men of the minyan large slices of sponge cake and poured out full glasses of brandy. He too drank. He grew more and more excited. The woman went into the kitchen to speak to Mother. Mother began whispering to her, murmuring something about counting days, bedding, a ritual bath.
The young man came in and said, “Well, my wife, let’s go.”
“Now you can reveal it: where are you taking me?”
“To the Hotel Krakowski.”
“I’m not going to a hotel.”
“Where are we going to sleep—in the street?”
“Let’s go home.”
“There are no more trains today.”
Mother asked, “Do they have a mezuzah on the door?”
“For me today is like the night of Pesach. On Pesach the demons have no power,” the young man declared. “Today we don’t need a mezuzah.” The young man pointed to his wife. “She’s my little mezuzah!”
“Oh, he’s crazy!”
“Rebbetzin, you don’t know what I’ve gone through the past couple of years. We had a lessee who had a barn full of cows. A Jew came and bought a barren cow from him. The cow cried all the way home. It cried all day, it cried all night. This went on for two days, three days, a week. Rebbetzin, the cow cried until it died. It was longing for its mother or the other cows. The same thing happened to me. One day I divorced her and the next I began crying. The crying was within me, here, in my heart. I always thought I could damp the longing, make it mute, but it became worse and worse. If I hadn’t returned and if we hadn’t gotten married again, I would’ve ended up like that cow.”
“And I—didn’t I suffer plenty, too?”
The man took his wife and walked down the stairs with her. Outside, he waited for a droshky. He waved his parasol right and left. Finally, an empty droshky pulled up. The young man helped his wife get in, then he climbed up after her. He cast one last look at our balcony—the look of a man half crazy with love and impatience.