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PARTISAN REVIEW
toed into the house. Coming in it seemed to me that I heard not the
snoring of one but as it were a double snore, one a thin enough snore
and the other like the snoring of a slaughtered ox. Oh, I didn't like
that; I didn't like it at all. I went up to the bed, and things suddenly
turned black. Next to Elka there lay a man's form. Another in my
place would have made an uproar, and enough noise to rouse the
whole town, but the thought occurred to me that I might wake the
child. A little thing like that, why frighten a little swallow like that,
I thought. All right, then, I went back to the bakery and stretched
out on a sack of flour, and till morning I never shut an eye. I
shivered as if I had had malaria. "Enough of being a donkey,"
I
said to myself. "Gimpel isn't going to be a sucker all his life. There's
a limit even to the foolishness of a fool like Gimpel."
In the morning I went to the rabbi to get advice, and it made
a great commotion in the town. They sent the beadle for Elka right
away. She came, carrying the child. And what do you think she did?
She denied it, denied everything, bone and stone! "He's out of his
head," she said. "I know nothing of dreams or divinations." They
yelled at her, warned her, hammered on the table, but she stuck to
her guns: it was false accusation, she said.
The butchers and the horse-traders took her part. One of the
lads from the slaughter-house came by and said to me, "We've got
our eye on you, you're a marked man." Meanwhile, the child started
to bear down and soiled itself. In the rabbinical court there was
an
ark of the covenant, and they couldn't allow that, so they sent Elka
away.
do."
I said to the rabbi, "What shall I do?"
"You must divorce her at once," said he.
"And what if she refuses?" I asked.
He said, "You must serve the divorce, that's all you'll have to
I said, "Well, all right, Rabbi. Let me think about it."
"There's nothing to think about," said he. "You mustn't remain
under the same roof with her."
"And
if
I want to see the child?" I asked.
"Let her go, the harlot," said he, "and her brood of bastards
with her."
