602
PARTISAN REVIEW
reply. It always said the same thing, 'I have a husband.' On Sunday
Chwalski used to go to church just to be able to gaze at her. When
both of them were invited to the same ball, Aliza only accepted one
dance with him. It seemed she liked him too, but she did not want to
betray her husband. The priest often beseeched Chwalski to leave
Aliza in peace . But Chwalski said , 'From all the women in the whole
world there is only one Aliza. All week long I live with one hope, to
see her on Sunday.'
"Count Lipski, her husband , was a tall fat man with a per–
petually red face and broken veins covering his nose . He drank until
he burnt out his lungs. The doctors forbade him to drink but he
drank to the last day. A doctor in our town said ,
'If
a man drank as
much water as Count Lipski drank spirits , he would become mor–
tally sick.' Chwalski on the other hand , never got drunk. He was
drunk from Aliza.
"Count Lipski had the eyes of a madman . He never knew what
was going on with his estate . Everything was handled by a manager
who stole as much as he could and the rest was lost through bad
management. As to Aliza, she kept to herself and did not interfere
with business matters. She liked to read books and to take long walks
through the orchards. She never had any children . Who knows?
Count Lipski might have been even too drunk for anything. In his
last months , he could no longer walk. The liquor had gone to his
legs . He had also developed diabetes since vodka contains a lot of
sugar. One way or another he died without last rites, without con–
fession, without a will . I was told that after his death his body blew
up and became like a barrel. Almost no one from the gentry came to
the funeral because he had insulted all his neighbors and blas–
phemed God and all the Christian saints . The hearse passed by our
windows. I was still a young girl and I watched the procession. It is
the custom among the Gentiles that two men lead the widow. Aliza
had a brother somewhere whom I saw then for the first time, and the
other man was Jan Chwalski. Just as Count Lipski was tall and
broad , so was Jan Chwalski small and lean with a long yellowish
mustache which reached to his chin . Aliza was dressed in black.
Chwalski held onto her arm as if in fear that she might run away.
Love is a kind of madness.
"Lipski died, he was buried . Everyone thought that the widow
would immediately marry Chwalski, but she insisted that he wait a
year for the period of mourning. When Chwalski found out that he
would have to wait he raised Heaven and Earth . Hadn't he waited
long enough? But Aliza contended that she would never marry him
