A Tale of Two Sisters

Leon, or Haim Leib, Bardeles, poured cream into his coffee. He put in a lot of sugar, tasted it, grimaced, added more cream and took a bite of the macaroon the waiter had brought him.

He said, "I like my coffee sweet, not bitter. In Rio de Janeiro they drink tiny little cups of coffee that's as bitter as gall. They serve it here, too--espresso--but I like a glass of coffee like you used to get in Warsaw. When I sit here with you, I forget that I'm in Buenos Aires. It seems to me we're in Lurs's in Warsaw. What do you say to the weather, eh? It took me a long time to get used to Sukkoth falling in the spring and Passover in the fall. I can't even begin to tell you the confusion this topsy-turvy calendar brings out in our people. Hanukkah comes during a heat wave and you can melt. On Shevuoth, it's cold. Well, at least the spring smells are the same--the lilac has the same aroma that used to waft in from the Praga Woods and the Saxony Gardens. I recognize the smells, but I cannot identify them. The gentile writers list every flower and plant, but how many names are there for flowers in Yiddish? I know only two kinds of flowers--roses and lilies. When I go to a florist's once in a while to buy someone a bouquet, I always rely on the clerk. Drink your coffee!"

"Tell the story," I said.

"Eh? Can it be told? Where shall I begin? I promised to tell you everything, the whole truth, but can you tell the truth? Wait, I'll have a cigarette first. Actually, one of your American cigarettes."

Leon Bardeles took out one of the packs of cigarettes I had brought him from New York. I had known him over 30 years. I had once even written an introduction for a book of his poems. He was 53 or 54 and had survived the Hitler hell and the Stalin terror, but he still looked young for his age. He had a head of black curly hair, big black eyes, a thick lower lip and a neck and shoulders that exuded masculine strength. He still wore a shirt with a slawojka collar, just as in Warsaw. He blew smoke rings and gazed at me with narrowed eyes, like an artist at a model.

He said, "I'll begin in the middle. I beg you: Don't ask me for any dates, because when it comes to that I'm completely disoriented. It must have been 1946, or maybe it was still the end of '45. I had left Stalin's Russia and gone back to Poland. In Russia I was supposed to go into the Polish Army, but I wormed my way out of it. I went through Warsaw and saw the ruins of the ghetto. You wouldn't believe this, but I actually went looking for the house where I had lived in 1939--maybe I'd find some of my manuscripts among the bricks. The chances of recognizing the house on Nowolipki Street and finding a manuscript after all the bombardments and fires were less than zero, but I recognized the ruins of the house and found a printed book of mine, actually the one with your introduction. Only the last page was missing. I was amazed, but not terribly so. So many incredible things have occurred in my life that I have become completely blasé. If I came home and found my dead mother tonight, I wouldn't blink an eye. I'd say, 'Momma, how are you?'

"From Warsaw I stumbled on to Lublin and from there to Stettin. Most of the cities lay in ruins and we slept in stables, barracks and in the street, too. They berate me here in Buenos Aires why I don't write about my experiences. First of all, I'm not a prose writer. Secondly, everything has grown jumbled in my mind, particularly the dates and names of towns, and I'm sure that I'd brew up such a stew of errors that they'd call me a liar and a fabricator. Some refugees were half-mad. One woman had lost a child and she looked for it in ditches, in haystacks, in the most unlikely places. In Warsaw a deserter from the Red army took it into his head that there were treasures buried beneath the rubble. He stood in the bitter frost and dug with a spade among the bricks. Dictatorships, wars and cruelty drive whole countries to madness. My theory is that the human species was crazy from the very first and that civilization and culture are enhancing man's insanity. Well, but you want the facts.

"The facts, to make it brief, were these: In Stettin I met a woman who literally bewitched me on the spot. You know that I've had a good many women in my life. In Russia there was a lack of everything except so-called love. The way I am, no danger, crisis, hunger or even sickness can rob me of that which is now called a libido, or whatever names the professors dream up for it. It was as far from the romantic love of our youth as we're now from Jupiter. All of a sudden, I'm standing in front of a woman and gaping as if I'd never seen a female before. Describe her? I'm not good at description. She had long black hair and skin white as marble. You must forgive me all these banalities. Eyes she had that were black and strangely frightened. Fear was nothing unusual in those days. You risked your life every second. Russia wouldn't let us out and we were supposed to enter Palestine illegally, since England wouldn't let us in. False papers were arranged for us, but it was easy to tell that they weren't in order. Well, but those eyes reflected another kind of fear. It was somehow as if this girl had been dropped on earth from another planet and didn't know where she was. Maybe that's what the fallen angels looked like. But those were men. She wore cracked shoes and a magnificent nightgown that she mistook for a dress. The Joint Distribution Committee had sent underwear and clothes to Europe that rich American ladies had donated to the refugees, and she had received this costly nightgown. Besides fear, her face expressed a rare kind of gentility. All this somehow didn't jibe with reality. Such delicate creatures usually didn't survive the war. They dropped like flies. Those who made it were the strong, the resolute and often those who walked over the corpses of others. For all my womanizing, I am somewhat bashful. I'm never the one to make the first move. But I virtually couldn't tear myself away. I mustered my courage and asked her if I could help her. I spoke to her in Polish. At first she was silent and I suspected that she was mute. She looked at me with the kind of helplessness often seen in a sick child. Then she replied in Polish, 'Thank you. You cannot help me.' "

• • •

"Ordinarily, when someone gives me this kind of rebuff, I walk away, but this time something held me back. It turned out that she came from a Hasidic home and was the daughter of a Warsaw landlord, a follower of the Alexander rabbi. Deborah, or Dora, was one of those Hasidic girls who are raised in an almost assimilated atmosphere. She attended a private girls' Gymnasium and studied piano and dancing. At the same time, a rabbi's wife came to her house to tutor her in prayers and Jewish law. Before the war, she had two older brothers, the elder of whom already had a wife in Bedzin, while the younger studied in a Yeshiva. She also had an older sister. The war made a quick mess of the family. The father was killed by a German bomb, the older brother in Bedzin was shot by the Nazis, the younger brother was drafted into the Polish army and killed somewhere, the mother died of starvation and kidney disease in the Warsaw ghetto and the sister, Ytta, disappeared and Dora never heard from her again. Dora had a French teacher on the Aryan side, a spinster named Elzbieta Dolanska, and she saved Dora. How she did this would take too long to tell. Dora spent two years in a cellar and the teacher fed her with her last savings. A saint of a woman, but she perished during the Polish uprising. That's how the Almighty rewards the good gentiles.

"I didn't get all this out of her at once but gradually, literally drawing out word after word. I said to her, 'In Palestine you'll get back on your feet. You'll be among friends.'

"'I can't go to Palestine,' she said.

"'Why not? Where, then?'

" 'I must go to Kuibyshev.'

"I couldn't believe my own ears. Imagine, a trip in those days from Stettin back to the Bolsheviks--and to Kuibyshev. The road was rife with danger.

"'What business have you in Kuibyshev?' I asked her and she told me a story that, if I hadn't confirmed it myself later, I would have called the ravings of a sick mind. Her sister, Ytta, had jumped from the train taking her to the concentration camp and made her way through the fields and forests to Russia. There she lived with a Jewish engineer who had attained a high rank in the Red army. This officer was later killed in the war and Ytta lost her mind. She was confined in an insane asylum in that area. Through wild chance, actually a miracle, Dora found out that her sister was still alive. I asked her, 'How can you help your sister when she is insane? There she at least gets medical care. What can you do for a deranged woman without money, an apartment or a groschen to your name? You'll both die.'

"And she said, 'You are perfectly right, but she is the only one left of my family and I can't leave her to waste her years away in a Soviet asylum. It's possible that she'll get well when she sees me.'

"It's usually not my way to mix into other people's business. The war taught me that you can't help anybody. In essence, we were all walking on graves. When you spend years in camps and prisons and stare death in the face ten times a day, you lose all compassion. But when I heard what this girl proposed to do, I was filled with a kind of pity that I had never felt before. I tried to talk her out of it time and again. I offered a thousand arguments.

"She said, 'I know that you are right, but I must go back.'

" 'How will you get there?' I asked her and she said:

" 'I'm ready to go even on foot.'

"I said, 'I'm afraid you're no less crazy than your sister.'

"And she replied, 'I fear that you're right.'

"After all his wanderings and tribulations, the person sitting here next to you gave up the chance to go to Israel, which was to me at that time the most beautiful dream, and I went off with a strange girl to Kuibyshev. It was actually an act of suicide. One thing I found out then was that pity is a form of love and, actually, its highest expression. I won't describe the trip to you--it was not a trip but an odyssey. I can only tell you that the Reds detained us twice along the way and it failed by a whisker that we didn't both end up in prison or in a slave camp. Dora behaved in a strangely heroic fashion during the trip, but I sensed that this was more resignation than bravery. I forgot to tell you--she was a pure virgin and underneath all that despair lay a passionate woman. I was used to women loving me, but this was different from anything I had ever known. She clung to me in a mixture of love and desperation that frightened me. She had an education and in the cellar where she had hidden for two years she had read a whole library in Polish, French and German, but she lacked all experience. Every little thing frightened her. In her hiding place she had read many Christian books as well as the works of Madam Blavatsky, and occult and theosophic writings that had been left to Miss Dolanska by an aunt. Dora babbled on about Jesus and ghosts, but I had no patience for such things, even though I myself had become a mystic, or at least a fatalist, during the holocaust. Oddly enough, she combined all this with the Jewishness of her home.

"There was no particular hardship in crossing the border into Russia, but the trains were jammed. In the middle of everything, the locomotive was uncoupled, hooked on to some other wagons, and we were left standing there for days on end. In the cars, the passengers fought constantly. A brawl would erupt and everyone would be shoved out of the wagons. Corpses lay scattered along the tracks. The cold inside the cars was frightful. Some people even rode on flatcars while the snow fell on them. In the closed cars you had to carry a chamber pot or a bottle in which to relieve yourself. A peasant sat on the roof of a car and when the train entered a tunnel, he lost his head. And that's how we got to Kuibyshev. All the way there, I couldn't stop wondering at myself over what I had done. This thing with Dora was no simple affair. I had actually bound myself up with her for life. To abandon someone like that would have been like leaving a child alone in a forest. Even before we got there, we got into all kinds of conflicts, all of which had to do with the fact that Dora was afraid to leave me alone for even a minute. When the train stopped at a station and I tried to get some food or hot water, she didn't let me get off. She was always suspicious that I was trying to desert her. She would seize my sleeve and try to drag me back. The passengers, especially the Russians, had something to laugh at. A streak of insanity seemed to run through this family; it manifested itself in fears, suspicions and a kind of mysticism that stemmed from the time when man still lived in caves. How this primitive heritage reached all the way to an affluent Hasidic family in Warsaw is a riddle. This whole adventure that I went through remains an enigma to me to this day."

• • •

"We got to Kuibyshev and it was all in vain. There was no sister and no insane asylum. That is to say, there was an asylum but not for strangers. The Nazis destroyed hospitals, clinics and asylums as they retreated. They shot or poisoned the patients. The Nazi murderers hadn't reached Kuibyshev, but the hospital was jammed with the heavily wounded. Who in those days worried about the insane? Well, but a woman had told Dora all the details. The Jewish officer's name was Lipman, the woman was Lipman's relative and there was no reason for her to lie. Can you imagine the disappointment? We had endured the whole trek with all its miseries for nothing. But wait, we did find Ytta, not in an insane asylum but in a village living with an old Jew, a shoemaker. The woman hadn't invented things. Ytta had suffered from depression and had been treated for it at some institution and after a while they had discharged her. I never learned all the facts, but even those that she told me I later forgot. The whole holocaust is tied up with amnesia.

"The shoemaker was a Polish Jew, actually from one of your towns, Bilgoraj or Janow, an old man nearly eighty but still active. Don't ask me how he got to Kuibyshev or why Ytta moved in with him. He lived in some dump, but he could patch boots and shoes and there is need for this everywhere. He sat there with his long white beard, surrounded by old shoes in a shack that was more like a chicken coop, and as he hammered tacks or drew the thread, he mumbled a verse of the Psalms. By a clay stove stood a red-haired woman--barefoot, ragged, disheveled and half-naked--cooking barley. Dora recognized her sister at once, but the other didn't know Dora. When Ytta finally realized that this was her sister, she didn't cry but started to bay like a dog. The shoemaker began to rock to and fro on his stool.

"There was supposed to be a communal farm, a kolkhoz, somewhere nearby, but all I could see was an old-fashioned Russian village with wooden huts, a little church, deep snow and sleighs harnessed to dogs and skinny nags, just the way I used to see them in pictures in a Russian-language textbook. Who knows, I thought, maybe the whole Revolution had been only a dream? Maybe Nicholas still sat on the throne? During the war and afterward, I saw many reunions of people with their loved ones, but these two sisters played out a shattering sisterly drama. They kissed, licked, howled. The old man mumbled through his toothless mouth, 'A pity, a pity....' Then he turned back to his shoes. He seemed to be deaf.

"There was nothing to pack. All that Ytta had were a pair of shoes with thick soles and heels and a sheepskin without sleeves. The old man took a black loaf of bread out of somewhere and Ytta tucked it away in her sack. She kissed the old man's hands, his brow and beard and commenced to howl anew, as if possessed by the spirit of a dog. This Ytta was taller than Dora. Her eyes were green and as fearsome as a beast's. Her hair was of an unusual shade of red. To describe to you how we made our way from Kuibyshev to Moscow and from there back to Poland again, I'd have to sit here with you till morning. We dragged along and smuggled our way through, facing arrest, separation or death at any moment. But summer had come and after lengthy travails, we finally got to Germany, and from there to Paris. I make it sound so simple. Actually, we only got to France by the end of 1946, or maybe it was already 1947. One of the social workers on the Joint Distribution Committee was a friend of mine, a young man from Warsaw who went to America in 1932. He knew English and other languages as well. You can't imagine the power Americans wielded in those days. I could easily have obtained a visa to America through him, but Dora took it into her head that I had a sweetheart there. In Paris, the Joint--actually, that same young man--got us a small apartment, which was no easy task. We received a monthly stipend from this same organization.

"I know what you're about to ask me--have a little patience. Yes, I lived with them both. I married Dora officially in Germany--she wanted to stand under a canopy and she did--but, in actuality, I had two wives, two sisters, just like the patriarch Jacob. All I lacked was a Bilhah and a Zilpah. What would stop the likes of me? Not the Jewish and certainly not the gentile laws. In the war, the whole human culture crumbled like a ruin. In the camps--not only in Germany but in Russia and later in the DP camps where the refugees lived for years--all shame vanished. I knew of one case where a woman had her husband on one side and her lover on the other and all three of them lived together. I've witnessed so many wild things that to me they've become normal. A Schicklgruber or a Dzhugashvili comes along and moves the clock back ten thousand years. Not completely, mind you. There were also instances of rare piety and of self-sacrifice for a minor law in the Shulchan Aruch or even for some custom. This itself may be a bit of wildness, too.

"I didn't want all this. It's one thing to have an adventure--it's quite another to make a permanent institution out of it. But it was out of my hands. From the moment the two sisters met, I was no longer a free man. They enslaved me with their love for me, their love toward each other and their jealousy. One minute they would be kissing and crying from great devotion and suddenly they would begin to slug away, pull hair and curse each other with words you wouldn't hear in the underworld. I had never before seen such hysteria or heard such screams. Every few days one of the sisters, or sometimes both, tried to commit suicide. One moment it would be quiet. The three of us might be sitting eating or discussing a book or picture--all of a sudden, a horrible shriek and both sisters would be rolling on the floor, tearing pieces from each other. I'd run up, trying to separate them, but I'd catch a slam in the face or a bite and the blood would be dripping from me. Why they were fighting I would never know. Fortunately, we lived on the upper story, a garret, and we had no neighbors on our floor. One of the sisters would run to the window and try to throw herself out while the other seized a knife and went (continued on page 128) Tale of Two Sisters (continued from page 114) for her own throat. I'd grab one by the leg and take the knife away from the other. They'd howl at me and at each other. I'd try to find out what caused the outburst, but I learned in time that they didn't know the reason themselves. At the same time, I want you to know that both of them were intelligent in their own fashion. Dora had an excellent taste in literature. She'd offer an opinion about a book and it was accurate to the dot. Ytta was musically inclined. She could sing whole symphonies. When the energy came upon them, they displayed great capability. They had picked up a sewing machine somewhere and from scraps and pieces they sewed dresses of which the most elegant ladies would be proud. One thing both sisters shared, a complete lack of common sense. Actually, they shared many traits. At times it even seemed to me that they were two bodies with one soul. If there had been a tape recorder to take down the things they said, particularly at night, it would make Dostoievsky seem trite. Complaints against God poured out of them, along with laments for the holocaust that no pen could transcribe. What a person really is comes out only at night, in the dark. I know now that both of them were born crazy, not the victims of any circumstances. The circumstances, naturally, made everything worse. I myself became a psychopath living with them. Insanity is no less contagious than typhus."

• • •

"Besides squabbling, brawling, telling endless stories of the camps and of their home in Warsaw and chattering about clothes, fashions and what not, the sisters had one favorite topic: my treachery. They forged an indictment against me that made the Moscow trials seem like pure logic by comparison. Even as they sat on the sofa, kissed me, waged a playful competition over me and indulged in a game that was both childish and animalistic and therefore indefinable, they kept abusing me. It boiled down to the fact that I had only one urge--to betray them and carry on with other women. Each time the concierge called me to the telephone, they ran to listen in. When I received a letter, they promptly opened it. No dictator could have enforced such a strict censorship as these sisters did over me. They left no doubt that the mailman, the concierge, the Joint Committee and I were all part of a conspiracy against them, although what kind of conspiracy this was and what was its purpose was something even their twisted minds couldn't establish. Lombroso contended that genius is insanity. He forgot to say that insanity is genius. Their helplessness was genius, too. I sometimes had the feeling that getting through the war had drained them of that specific power for survival that every human and animal possesses. The fact that Ytta hadn't been able to find another job in Russia besides that of a maid and mistress to that old shoemaker only accented her lack of initiative. They often toyed with the notion of becoming maids in Paris, governesses, or something in that vein, but it was dear both to me and to them that they couldn't hold any kind of job for more than a few hours. They were also the laziest creatures I had ever met, although from time to time they were seized by a burst of effort and energy that was as exaggerated as their usual laziness. Two women should have been able to keep house, but our apartment was always a mess. They would prepare a meal and argue as to who should wash the dishes until it came time to cook again. Sometimes, days and even weeks went by and we ate only dry food. The bedding was often dirty, and we had cockroaches and other vermin. The sisters weren't physically dirty. They boiled pots of water at night and turned the apartment into a bathhouse. The water dripped down below and the downstairs tenant, an old French cavalier, banged on our door and threatened us with the police. Paris was starving, but in my house food was thrown out in the garbage. The apartment was piled with rags. They hardly ever wore the dresses that they sewed or received from the Joint Committee, but they went around half-naked and barefoot.

"As alike as the sisters were, so were they also different. Ytta possessed a brutality that was completely foreign to a girl from a Hasidic home. Many of her stories dealt with beatings and I knew that bloodshed and violence of any kind roused her sexually. She told me that while she was still a girl in her father's house, she once sharpened a knife and slaughtered three ducks that her mother kept in a shed. Her father beat her for this severely and Dora used to throw this up to her when they quarreled. Ytta was unusually strong, but each time she tried to do something, she managed to hurt herself. She walked around covered with bandages and plasters. She often hinted that she would take revenge on me, even though I had rescued her from slavery and want. I suspected that somewhere inside her she would have been glad to remain with the old shoemaker; maybe because this would have allowed her to forget her family and especially Dora, with whom she maintained a love-hate relationship. This hostility used to come out in every quarrel. Dora was the one who screamed, wept and scolded, while Ytta resorted to blows. I was often afraid that she might kill Dora in a rage.

"Dora was better educated, more refined and possessed of a sick imagination. She slept fitfully and kept telling me her dreams, which were sexual, diabolical, tangled. She awoke quoting verses from the Bible. She tried to write poems in Polish and in Yiddish. She had formulated a sort of personal mythology. I often said that she was possessed by the dibbuk of a follower of Shabbetai Zevi or Jacob Frank.

"I had always felt a curiosity about the institution of polygamy. Could jealousy be rooted out? Could you share someone you loved? In a sense, the three of us were taking part in an experiment whose results we all awaited. The longer the situation lasted, the more obvious it became to us all that things couldn't remain the way they were. Something had to happen and we knew that it would be evil, a catastrophe. Each day posed a new crisis, each night carried the threat of some scandal, or impotence. Although our neighbors on the lower floors had their own troubles and were accustomed to wild doings from the time of the German Occupation, they began to look at us suspiciously, to nose around and to shake their heads in disapproval. As sinful as was our behavior, our religious upbringing soon began to make demands on our Jewishness. Dora made the benediction over the Sabbath candles every Friday and then sat around smoking cigarettes. She had formulated her own version of the Shulchan Aruch in which pork was forbidden but horse meat was kosher, in which there was no God but you had to fast on Yom Kippur and eat matzoh on Passover. Ytta had become an atheist in Russia, or so she said, but every night before going to sleep, she mumbled a nightly prayer or some incantation. When I gave her a coin, she spat on it to ward off the evil eye. She would get up in the morning and announce, 'Today will be an unlucky day...something bad is going to happen....'Inevitably, what happened was that she hurt herself, or broke a dish, or a stocking tore on her.

"Dora kept the funds in our household. I always gave her more than she needed, since I received stipends from a few institutions and later money from relatives in America as well. After a while, I noticed that she had accumulated a nest egg. Her sister apparently knew of this and received her share of the loot. I often heard them whispering and arguing about money.

"I forgot the main thing--children. Both sisters wanted a child by me and many arguments erupted because of this. But I was dead set against it. We were living on charity. Each time the conversation came around to children, I came up with the same answer: 'For what? So the next Hitler would have someone to burn?' I don't have a child to this day. As far as I'm concerned, I want to put an end to the human tragedy. I suspect that neither Dora nor Ytta was even (continued on page 136)Tale of Two Sisters (continued from page 128) capable of bearing children. Such females 14 are like mules. I'll never understand how a Hasidic Jew came to have two such daughters. We carry stray genes going back to the time of Genghis Khan, or the Devil knows when."

• • •

"The calamity that we anticipated came in a quiet fashion. The arguments gradually subsided to be replaced by a depression that consumed the three of us. It began with Dora's getting sick. Exactly what was wrong with her, I never found out. She lost weight and coughed a lot. I suspected consumption and took her to a doctor, but he found no evidence of illness. He prescribed vitamins and iron, which didn't help. Dora be came frigid, too. She no longer wanted to join in our nightly games and idle chatter. She even got herself a cot and set it up in the kitchen. Without Dora, Ytta soon lost interest in our sex triangle. She had never been the one to take the initiative; in fact, she did only what Dora told her. Ytta was a big eater and a heavy sleeper. She snored and snorted in her sleep. A situation soon developed in which instead of having two women, I had none. Not only were we silent at night but during the day, too, we be came steeped in moroseness. Before, I used to get weary from all the babbling, endless wrangling and the extravagant praises the sisters heaped on me, but now I longed for those days. I talked the situation over with the sisters and we decided to put an end to the alienation that lay between us, but such things can't be changed with decisions. I often had the feeling that some invisible being lurked among us, a phantom who sealed our lips and burdened our spirits. Each time I started to say something, the words stuck in my throat. When I did say it, the words that came out required no answer. I looked on with amazement as the two chatterbox sisters became close mouthed. All the speech seemed to have been drained from them. I became as taciturn as they. Before, I could babble on for hours without any thought or reflection, but suddenly I became diplomatic and careful to weigh every word, afraid that no matter what I said would cause a commotion. I used to laugh when I read your stories about dibbuks, but I now actually felt myself possessed. When I wanted to pay Dora a compliment, it came out an insult. Oddly enough, the three of us couldn't stop yawning. We sat there, yawned and looked at one another with moist eyes in astonishment, partners in a tragedy we could neither understand nor control.

"I became impotent, too. I lost the urge for the two sisters. I lay in bed nights and instead of lust, I felt some thing that can only be called anti-lust. I often had the uncomfortable feeling that my skin was icy cold and my body was shrinking. Although the sisters didn't mention my impotence, I knew that they were lying in bed with their ears cocked, listening to the strange process taking place within my organs--the ebbing of the blood and the cramping and shrinking of the limbs that seemed to degenerate to the verge of withering. I often imagined that in the dark I saw the silhouette of a figure that was as flimsy and transparent as a spider web--tall, thin, long-haired--a shadowy skeleton with holes instead of eyes, a monster with a crooked mouth that laughed soundlessly. I assured myself that it was nerves. What else could it be? I didn't believe in ghosts then and I don't to this day. I became convinced of one thing one night--thoughts and emotions can literally materialize and become entities of some substance. Even now, as I think about it, ants crawl up and down my spine. I've never spoken about this to anyone--you're the first and, I assure you, the last person to ever hear this.

"It was a spring night in 1948. A spring night in Paris can sometimes be bitter cold. We went to sleep separately--I on the cot, Dora on the sofa and Ytta in bed. We put out the lights and lay down. I don't remember such a cold night even in the camps. We covered ourselves with all the blankets and rags we had in the house, but we still couldn't get warm. I put the sleeves of a sweater over my feet and threw my winter coat over the blanket. Ytta and Dora burrowed into their covers. We did all this without speaking and this silence lent our frantic efforts a brooding oppressiveness that defies description. I remember precisely lying there in bed and thinking that the punishment would come that night. At the same time, I silently prayed to God that it shouldn't. I lay there for a while half-frozen--not only from the cold but from the tension, too. I searched in the dark for the shed (as I called the creature of spider webs and shadows), but I saw nothing. At the same time, I knew that he was there, hovering in some corner or possibly even behind the bedboard. I said to myself, 'Don't be an idiot, there are no such things as ghosts. If Hitler could slaughter six million Jews and America sends billions of dollars to rebuild Germany, there are no other forces except the material. Ghosts wouldn't permit such an injustice....'

"I had to urinate and the toilet was out in the corridor. Usually, I can hold myself in, if need be, but this time the urge was too insistent. I got up from the cot and went creeping toward the kitchen door, which led to the outside. I had taken only two steps when someone stopped me. Brother, I know all the answers and all the psychological flimflam, but this thing before me was a person and he blocked my path. I was too frightened to cry out. It's not in me to scream. I'm sure that I wouldn't scream even if it were killing me. Well, and who was there to help me, even if I did? The two half-mad sisters? I tried to push him aside and I touched something that might have been rubber, dough or some sort of foam. There are such fears from which you can't run away. A furious wrangling erupted between us. I pushed him back and he yielded a bit, yet offered resistance. I remember now that I was less afraid of the evil spirit than of the outcry the sisters might raise. I can't tell you how long this struggle lasted--a minute or perhaps only a few seconds. I thought I would pass out on the spot, but I stood there and stubbornly and silently wrestled with a ghost or whatever it was. Instead of feeling cold, I became hot. Within a second, I was drenched as if standing under a shower. Why the sisters didn't scream is something I'll never understand. That they were awake I am sure. They were apparently terrified of their own fear. Suddenly, I caught a blow. The Evil One vanished and I sensed that my organ was no longer there, either. Had he castrated me? My pajama bottoms had fallen. I felt around for my penis. No, he hadn't torn it out but had jammed it so deep into me that it had formed an indentation negative rather than positive. Don't look at me that way! I'm not crazy now and I wasn't crazy then. During this whole nightmare, I knew that it was nerves--nervousness that had assumed substance. Einstein contends that mass is energy. I say that mass is compressed emotion. Neuroses materialize and take on concrete form. Feelings put on bodies or are themselves bodies. Those are your dibbuks, the sprites, the hobgoblins.

"I walked out into the corridor on wobbly knees and found the toilet, but I literally had nothing to urinate with. I read somewhere that in the Arab lands, such things happen to men, especially to those who keep harems. Strange, but during the whole excitement, I remained calm. Tragedy sometimes brings a kind of brooding resignation that no one knows where it comes from.

"I turned back to the apartment, but neither of the sisters made a rustle. They lay there quiet, tense, barely breathing. Had they cast a spell over me? Were they themselves bewitched? I began to dress slowly. I put on my drawers, my pants, my jacket and my summer coat. I packed some shirts, socks and manuscripts in the dark. I gave the two sisters enough time to ask me what I was doing and where I was going, but they didn't utter a peep. I took my satchel and left in the middle of the night. Those are the bare facts."

"Where did you go?"

(concluded on page 254)Tale of Two Sisters (continued from page 136)

"What's the difference? I went to a cheap hotel and took a room. Gradually, everything began to return to normal and I was able to function again. I some--how managed to overcome the nightmarish night and the next morning I caught a plane to London. I had an old friend there, a journalist on the local Yiddish newspaper, who had invited me to come a few times. The editorial office consisted of a single room and the whole paper went under soon afterward, but in the meantime, I got some work and lodgings. From there, I left for Buenos Aires in 1950. Here I met Lena, my present wife."

"What became of the two sisters?"

"Do you know? That's as much as I know."

"Didn't you ever hear from them?"

"Never."

"Did you look for them?"

"Such things you try to forget. I hypnotized myself into thinking that the whole thing had been only a dream, but it really happened. It's as real as the fact that I'm sitting here with you right now."

"How do you explain it?" I asked.

"I don't."

"Maybe they were dead when you left."

"No, they were awake and listening.

You can differentiate between the living and the dead."

"Aren't you curious to know what happened to them?"

"And if I am curious, what of it? They're probably alive. The witches are somewhere--maybe they've married. I was in Paris three years ago, but the house where we lived no longer exists. They put up a garage there."

We sat there silently, then I said, "If mass consisted of emotion, every stone in the street would be a skein of misery."

"Maybe they are. Of one thing I'm sure--everything lives, everything suffers, struggles, desires. There is no such thing as death."

"If that's true, then Hitler and Stalin didn't kill anyone," I said.

"You have no right to kill an illusion, either. Drink your coffee."

For a long while neither of us spoke, then I asked, half in jest, "What can you learn from this story?"

Haim Leib smiled. "If Nietzsche's crazy theory about the exhaustion of all atomic combinations and the eternal return is true, and if there'll be another Hitler, another Stalin and another holocaust, and if in a trillion years you'll meet a female in Stettin--don't go with her to look for her sister."

"According to this theory, I will have no choice but to go and to experience everything that you did," I said.

"In that case, you'll know how I felt."