ISAAC BASHEVIS SINGER
27
"Antshel was such a man. When Reitzele and I quarreled, he
made peace between us. He wanted her to have her Loshikl.
"Yes, we all want pleasure, but what kind of pleasure is it to
stretch out across someone's knee and be thrashed with a cat-o'-nine–
tails 'til your butt swells? That's what some of my sweethearts wanted
me to do to them. They would beg of me: 'Whip harder, Itchele, pull
my hair! Bite my shoulder!' Reitzele had her own quirks. It started
with her taking it upon herself to marry me off. I asked her: 'What
good would it do you? And she said, 'When a colt grows older he
needs his own mare.' I said to her: 'What do I need my own mare
for? So that she should run around with every thug while I rot in
jail?' And she said: 'I have a husband and I want you to have a wife.
It'll be more fun that way. We'll go to the theater together or to the
circus all four of us. We'll chat over a mug of beer.' I told her in no
uncertain terms: 'It's not for me.' When she heard that, she set out to
supply me with lovers. She would lie next to me on the sofa and say:
'Loshikl, I want to be your mother. I don't have any children, only
one Loshikl, and I want to provide for his future. You are younger
than me,' she says, 'and when I'm gone maybe you'll keep me in
mind and say the Kaddish or light a candle for me.' I said: 'You're
not about to croak yet, you'll outlive all of us,' and she said: 'No,
Loshikl. My mother died young and my father passed away when I
was a little girl of three. In our family, they barely make it to fifty.'
"I'll make it short. She wanted to set me up with some
woman - if not a wife, let it be a lover. I asked her: 'What's in it for
you?' And she said: 'It's interesting. It'll amuse me.' 'I could have,'
she said, 'as many men as my heart desires. They still turn their
heads after me in the streets as if I were a young girl, but for now,
one husband and one Loshikl are enough.' Something is always nag–
ging women on. Men go to war, or go on strike, throw bombs and
get themselves banished to Siberia. A female has only one string to
her bow. It's even written in the Bible .
"She wasn't just babbling," Blind Itche continued. "One day, I
came in for lunch and sitting there already is a little female - slight,
with orange-yellow hair, with a string of pearls around her neck. I
saw right away that this was no ordinary piece, but well-bred, from a
wealthy home. Reitzele introduced her: a doctor's wife. We had
lunch and when Reitzele cooked you licked your fingers. We talked
and I found out that she employed a cook and a maid . She had
everything, but she was just about fed up with her husband, a skin
doctor. He practiced at St. Lazar Hospital, and there they treat only
cankers, psoriasis, lupus, what have you. All day long she didn't lay
