BREAKING THE NEWS
EUGENIA ISAKOVNA MINTS was an elderly émigré widow, who always wore black. Her only son had died on the previous day. She had not yet been told.
It was a March day in 1935, and after a rainy dawn, one horizontal section of Berlin was reflected in the other—variegated zigzags intermingling with flatter textures, et cetera. The Chernobylskis, old friends of Eugenia Isakovna, had received the telegram from Paris around seven a.m., and a couple of hours later a letter had come by airmail. The head of the factory office where Misha had worked announced that the poor young man had fallen into an elevator shaft from the top floor, and had remained in agony for forty minutes: although unconscious, he kept moaning horribly and uninterruptedly, till the very end.
In the meantime Eugenia Isakovna got up, dressed, flung with a crosswise flick a black woolen shawl over her sharp thin shoulders and made herself some coffee in the kitchen. The deep, genuine fragrance of her coffee was something she prided herself upon in relation to Frau Doktor Schwarz, her landlady, “a stingy, uncultured beast”: it had now been a whole week since Eugenia Isakovna had stopped speaking to her—and that was not their first quarrel by far—but, as she told her friends, she did not care to move elsewhere for a number of reasons, often enumerated and never tedious. A manifest advantage that she had over this or that person with whom she might decide to break off relations lay in her being able simply to switch off her hearing aid, a portable gadget resembling a small black handbag.
As she carried the pot of coffee back to her room across the hallway, she noticed the flutter of a postcard, which, upon having been pushed by the mailman through a special slit, settled on the floor. It was from her son, of whose death the Chernobylskis had just learned by more advanced postal means, in consequence of which the lines (virtually inexistent) that she now read, standing with the coffeepot in one hand, on the threshold of her sizable but inept room, could have been compared by an objective observer to the still visible beams of an already extinguished star. My darling Moolik (her son’s pet-name for her since childhood), I continue to be plunged up to the neck in work and when evening comes I literally fall off my feet, and I never go anywhere—
Two streets away, in a similar grotesque apartment crammed with alien bagatelles, Chernobylski, not having gone downtown today, paced from one room to another, a large, fat, bald man, with huge arching eyebrows and a diminutive mouth. He wore a dark suit but was collarless (the hard collar with inserted tie hung yokelike on the back of a chair in the dining room) and he gestured helplessly as he paced and spoke: “How shall I tell her? What gradual preparation can there be when one has to yell? Good God, what a calamity. Her heart will not bear it, it will burst, her poor heart!”
His wife wept, smoked, scraped her head through her sparse gray hair, telephoned the Lipshteyns, Lenochka, Dr. Orshanski—and could not make herself go to Eugenia Isakovna first. Their lodger, a woman pianist with a pince-nez, big-bosomed, very compassionate and experienced, advised the Chernobylskis not to hurry too much with the telling—“All the same there will be that blow, so let it be later.”
“But on the other hand,” cried Chernobylski hysterically, “neither can one postpone it! Clearly one cannot! She is the mother, she may want to go to Paris—who knows? I don’t—or she may want him to be brought here. Poor, poor Mishuk, poor boy, not yet thirty, all life before him! And to think that it was I who helped him, found him a job, to think that, if it had not been for that lousy Paris—”
“Now, now, Boris Lvovich,” soberly countered the lady lodger, “who could foresee? What have you to do with it? It is comical—In general, I must say, incidentally, that I don’t understand how he could fall. You understand how?”
Having finished her coffee and rinsed her cup in the kitchen (while not paying any attention whatsoever to the presence of Frau Schwarz), Eugenia Isakovna, with black net bag, handbag, and umbrella, went out. The rain, after hesitating a little, had stopped. She closed her umbrella and proceeded to walk along the shining sidewalk, still holding herself quite straight, on very thin legs in black stockings, the left sagging slightly. One also noted that her feet seemed disproportionately large and that she set them down somewhat draggingly, with toes turned out. When not connected with her hearing aid she was ideally deaf, and very deaf when connected. What she took for the hum of the town was the hum of her blood, and against this customary background, without ruffling it, there moved the surrounding world—rubbery pedestrians, cotton-wool dogs, mute tramcars—and overhead crept the ever-so-slightly rustling clouds through which, in this or that place, blabbed, as it were, a bit of blue. Amid the general silence, she passed, impassive, rather satisfied on the whole, black-coated, bewitched and limited by her deafness, and kept an eye on things, and reflected on various matters. She reflected that tomorrow, a holiday, So-and-so would drop in; that she ought to get the same little pink gaufrettes as last time, and also marmelad (candied fruit jellies) at the Russian store, and maybe a dozen dainties in that small pastry shop where one can always be sure that everything is fresh. A tall bowler-hatted man coming toward her seemed to her from a distance (quite some distance, in fact) frightfully like Vladimir Markovich Vilner, Ida’s first husband, who had died alone, in a sleeping-car, of heart failure, so sad, and as she went by a watchmaker’s she remembered that it was time to call for Misha’s wristwatch, which he had broken in Paris and had sent her by okaziya (i.e., “taking the opportunity of somebody’s traveling that way”). She went in. Noiselessly, slipperily, never brushing against anything, pendulums swung, all different, all in discord. She took her purselike gadget out of her larger, ordinary handbag, introduced with a quick movement that had been shy once the insert into her ear, and the familiar faraway voice of the watchmaker replied—began to vibrate—then faded away, then jumped at her with a crash: “Freitag … Freitag—”
“All right, I hear you, next Friday.”
Upon leaving the shop, she again cut herself off from the world. Her faded eyes with yellowish stains about the iris (as if its color had run) acquired once more a serene, even gay, expression. She went along streets which she had not only learned to know well during the half-dozen years since her escape from Russia, but which had now become as full of fond entertainment as those of Moscow or Kharkov. She kept casting casual looks of approval on kids, on small dogs, and presently she yawned as she went, affected by the resilient air of early spring. An awfully unfortunate man, with an unfortunate nose, in an awful old fedora, passed by: a friend of some friends of hers who always mentioned him, and by now she knew everything about him—that he had a deranged daughter, and a despicable son-in-law, and diabetes. Having reached a certain fruit stall (discovered by her last spring) she bought a bunch of wonderful bananas; then she waited quite a time for her turn in a grocery, with her eyes never leaving the profile of an impudent woman, who had come later than she but nevertheless had squeezed nearer than she to the counter: there came a moment when the profile opened like a nutcracker—but here Eugenia Isakovna took the necessary measures. In the pastry shop she carefully chose her cakes, leaning forward, straining on tiptoe like a little girl, and moving hither and thither a hesitant index—with a hole in the black wool of the glove. Hardly had she left and grown engrossed in a display of men’s shirts next door than her elbow was grasped by Madame Shuf, a vivacious lady with a somewhat exaggerated make-up; whereupon Eugenia Isakovna, staring away into space, nimbly adjusted her complicated machine, and only then, with the world become audible, gave her friend a welcoming smile. It was noisy and windy; Madame Shuf stooped and exerted herself, red mouth all askew, as she endeavored to aim the point of her voice straight into the black hearing aid: “Do you have—news—from Paris?”
“Oh I do, even most regularly,” answered Eugenia Isakovna softly, and added, “Why don’t you come to see me, why do you never ring me up?”—and a gust of pain rippled her gaze because well-meaning Madame Shuf shrieked back too piercingly.
They parted. Madame Shuf, who did not know anything yet, went home, while her husband, in his office, was uttering akhs and tsks, and shaking his head with the receiver pressed to it, as he listened to what Chernobylski was telling him over the telephone.
“My wife has already gone to her,” said Chernobylski, “and in a moment I’ll go there also, though kill me if I know how to begin but my wife is after all a woman, maybe she’ll somehow manage to pave the way.”
Shuf suggested they write on bits of paper, and give her to read, gradual communications: “Sick.” “Very sick.” “Very, very sick.”
“Akh, I also thought about that, but it doesn’t make it easier. What a calamity, eh? Young, healthy, exceptionally endowed. And to think that it was I who got that job for him, I who helped him with his living expenses! What? Oh, I understand all that perfectly, but still these thoughts drive me crazy. Okay, we’re sure to meet there.”
Fiercely and agonizingly baring his teeth and throwing back his fat face, he finally got his collar fastened. He sighed as he started to go. He had already turned into her street when he saw her from behind walking quietly and trustfully in front of him, with a net bag full of her purchases. Not daring to overtake her, he slowed down. God grant she does not turn! Those dutifully moving feet, that narrow back, still suspecting nothing. Ah, it shall bend!
She noticed him only on the staircase. Chernobylski remained silent as he saw her ear was still bare.
“Why, how nice to drop in, Boris Lvovich. No, don’t bother—I’ve been carrying my load long enough to bring it upstairs too; but hold this umbrella if you like, and then I’ll unlock the door.”
They entered. Madame Chernobylski and the warmhearted pianist had been waiting there for quite a long time. Now the execution would start.
Eugenia Isakovna liked visitors and her friends often called on her, so that now she had no reason to be astonished; she was only pleased, and without delay started fussing hospitably. They found it hard to arrest her attention while she dashed this way and that, changing her course at an abrupt angle (the plan that spread its glow within her was to fix a real lunch). At last the musician caught her in the corridor by the end of her shawl and the others heard the woman shouting to her that nobody, nobody would stay for lunch. So Eugenia Isakovna got out the fruit knives, arranged the gaufrettes in one little glass vase, bonbons in another.… She was made to sit down practically by force. The Chernobylskis, their lodger, and a Miss Osipov who by that time had somehow managed to appear—a tiny creature, almost a dwarf—all sat down, too, at the oval table. In this way a certain array, a certain order had, at least, been attained.
“For God’s sake, begin, Boris,” pleaded his wife, concealing her eyes from Eugenia Isakovna, who had begun to examine more carefully the faces around her, without interrupting, however, the smooth flow of her amiable, pathetic, completely defenseless words.
“Nu, chto ya mogu!” (“Well, what can I!”) cried Chernobylski, and spasmodically rising started to walk around the room.
The doorbell rang, and the solemn landlady, in her best dress, let in Ida and Ida’s sister: their awful white faces expressed a kind of concentrated avidity.
“She doesn’t know yet,” Chernobylski told them; he undid all three buttons of his jacket and immediately buttoned it up again.
Eugenia Isakovna, her eyebrows twitching but her lips still retaining their smile, stroked the hands of her new visitors and reseated herself, invitingly turning her little apparatus, which stood before her on the tablecloth, now toward this guest, now toward that, but the sounds slanted, the sounds crumbled. All of a sudden the Shufs came in, then lame Lipshteyn with his mother, then the Orshanskis, and Lenochka, and (by sheer chance) aged Madame Tomkin—and they all talked among themselves, but were careful to keep their voices away from her, though actually they collected around her in grim, oppressive groups, and somebody had already walked away to the window and was shaking and heaving there, and Dr. Orshanski, who sat next to her at the table, attentively examined a gaufrette, matching it, like a domino, with another, and Eugenia Isakovna, her smile now gone and replaced by something akin to rancor, continued to push her hearing aid toward her visitors—and sobbing Chernobylski roared from a distant corner: “What’s there to explain—dead, dead, dead!” but she was already afraid to look in his direction.