The End of Everything (New Yiddish Library Series) Read Online Free Page A

Kashperivke would be sequestrated by the bank.
    In response to these rumors, Velvl’s mother sent him frequent notes in which she cursed his former fiancée and her father and continually complained:
    —Six thousand rubles … this was no triviality! Six thousand rubles, in these days!
    And more:
    —To this very day the promissory notes were still made out in Reb Gedalye Hurvits’s name and the Count recognized no one but him as an interested party.
    Without being fully aware of it, he once again began sleeping away many of the brief, chilly days of late autumn, filling the air of his silent furnished cottage with the sound of his heavy, despondent snoring, starting awake every now and then and reminding himself:
    —He was going through a very difficult time … and nothing would come of having thought continually about Mirele … And above all … above all, he’d been a fool to squander so much money on new furniture and new horses.
    A while later here in town an unusually warm Sunday afternoon drew to a close. The slanting sun steeped straw roofs and leafless trees in red gold, and peasants in black sackcloth coats standing near the shop attached to an isolated Jewish house took enormous childlike delight in this red glow, felt tremendously pleased with themselves at the thought of all the grain they’d stored up for the winter season, and smiled at one another:
    —It’s time to pack bundles of straw against the walls of the houses to keep out the cold, eh?
    That was when a messenger from his father arrived with the Count’s promissory notes, woke him from sleep, and imparted some oddly disquieting information:
    —The old Count had arrived in Kashperivke in the dead of night, and the man who was to have been his father-in-law … more than likely the man who was to have been his father-in-law had rushed over there in his britzka * very early that morning.
    Half-asleep, he hurried off to Kashperivke in his own buggy, encountered the old Count alone in the bare manor house from which even the furniture had been packed away, and had all his promissory notes, made out in the name of Gedalye Hurvits, paid out in full. The old Count was even under the impression that Gedalye Hurvits himself had sent him here to cash in these notes of hand and consequently asked him to inform his principal:
    —He was paying out six thousand rubles now and the remaining three thousand … He didn’t have the balance at the moment, so he’d have to remit it from abroad.
    Velvl understood from this that the three thousand rubles belonging to the man who should’ve been his father-in-law were lost for good, felt that he was now doing something contemptible, yet nodded his head at the Count:
    —Good, good … he’d inform him accordingly.
    Only at nightfall, climbing the first hill on the road home from Kashperivke in his buggy, did he recognize in the distance the britzka of the man who should’ve been his father-in-law with the Gentile lad who was its driver. He felt his heart pounding violently as he quickly instructed his own driver to turn left into a very narrow side road. He was alarmed, could hardly believe what he was doing, and for the first time gave a thought to the man who should’ve been his father-in-law:
    —Did this mean that he’d spent the whole day from very early that morning on his own in the little wood? … Was he only now making his way to the Count of Kashperivke?
    For some reason, from the narrow side road he kept glancing at the britzka of the man who should’ve been his father-in-law and saw:
    As usual, the lank, emaciated horses were badly harnessed: the traces on the right-hand animal were too short, forcing it to keep leaping forward; the harness breechings on the left-hand horse with its blind, bulging eye were too loose, so that beast was forced to pull not with its chest but with its back. And up above, with his arms folded, sat Reb Gedalye Hurvits himself, his expression preoccupied, his head