Tevye the Dairyman and the Railroad Stories Page 31

  “ ‘The ace takes!’ …

  “Well, a nest of angry hornets would have been easier to shoo off than that monk! May all his curses be on him! He kept threatening to get off at the first station and turn us in to the police … I ask you: why can’t a person be allowed to live?

  “But that’s neither here nor there. I just wanted you to know what some people will go through for a good game of sixty-six. I’ve only gotten to the real story now. Listen.

  “It happened in winter too, around Hanukkah time, and on the train again. I was on my way to Odessa with some money, a whole big wad of it—I should only earn so much in a month! It’s a rule of mine not to sleep when I travel with money. It’s not that I’m afraid of thieves, because I keep it—guess where?—right here in my jacket pocket, in a good wallet that’s tied twice to be safe. I pity the thief who thinks he can make off with it! It’s just that these days, you never know … riots, expropriations … why take chances?… Well, there I was, sitting that winter day all by myself. I don’t mean I was alone in the car; there were other passengers too, but none of them were Jews. What good did that do me? There wasn’t a soul to play a game of sixty-six with. Just as I was beginning to feel sorry for myself, though, the door of the car opens—we were still quite a few stops away from Odessa—and in walks a pair of our fellow Israelites. You know, I can spot a Jew anywhere, even if he’s dressed like a dozen Russians and speaking Russian too, or for that matter, Chinese. One of the pair was an older man and the other was a younger one, and you should have seen what fine fur hats and coats they wore. Fine isn’t the word! They put down their luggage, took off their hats and coats, smoked a few cigarettes, gave me one too—and we began to talk, at first, of course, in Goyish, and then in Yiddish. ‘Where are you from? Where are you going?’ ‘Where are you going?’ ‘To Odessa.’ ‘To Odessa? That’s where I’m going too!’ ‘Well, then, that makes three of us.’ We chatted about this and that until one of them says to the other, ‘Say, did you know that today is a holiday?’ ‘It is?’ says the other. ‘Have you forgotten that it’s Hanukkah?’ says the first. ‘Hanukkah, eh?’ says the second. ‘Why, I do believe that it’s a Jewish custom on Hanukkah to play a friendly game of cards. How about a little sixty-six?’ ‘Good idea!’ says the younger man, reaching into the older one’s pocket and taking out a pack of cards. ‘All right, Papa! Let’s play a game of sixty-six in honor of Hanukkah …’

  “So the two of them were father and son: it tickled my funny bone to think of them playing sixty-six together! In fact, I had quite an urge to play with them myself, but I was resolved not to give in to temptation. Just watching them would be entertainment enough …

  “They upended one of their suitcases, stood it between their legs, and dealt the cards. The father played first hand and the son second, and I sat looking on. After a while the old man turned to me and asked if I knew how to play. I had to laugh at that: it was a good one, all right—why, I had practically invented the game, and here I was being asked if I played it! In fact, it took a will of iron to sit watching quietly, because the way that old codger played his hand could have made you turn over in your grave. Just imagine: the man sits there holding the queen, jack, and nine of trumps, two spades, and the ten of clubs—he only has to take the first trick with the ten and exchange the nine for the deck trump, which happens to be a king, in order to declare a trump marriage. Not him! The old bumblepuppy decides to play the jack of spades instead—and with a perfectly good ten in his hand! So what does his son do? The young rascal takes the jack with a queen, declares two twenty-point marriages, draws the ace of clubs from the deck, tops the old man’s ten with it, and goes out as pretty as you please with three game-points, just as God would have wanted!

  “That was a hand to remember!

  “What followed, though, was even worse; I tell you, it could have made a man scream! Listen to this. The father has six game-points already, he needs just one more to win. His son has only three. Better yet, the old geezer draws a hand with three trumps and a twenty-point marriage to boot. He doesn’t declare it, though, even when he takes the first trick; no, he’s afraid to play the king or queen, he’s worried his son may top them. Well, his son takes the next trick, declares twenty points of his own, closes the stock, breaks up the marriage, and schneiders his father but good!… That was already too much for me; such an agonizing Hanukkah I had never yet spent in my life. I couldn’t go on watching any longer. ‘You’ll have to excuse me,’ I said to the old coot. ‘It’s a principle of mine never to kibitz, but I’m dying to know why you played that way. What were you thinking of? If your partner was holding junk, you had it made, no matter what. And if he wasn’t—if he happened to have a strong hand—what were you waiting for? What did you have to lose? One game-point at the most, when you were leading six to three anyway. How can a man cut his own throat like that?’

  “The old loon didn’t say a word. Junior, though, he smiled at me and said, ‘Papa doesn’t play so well. Papa’s not so good at sixty-six.’

  “ ‘Your father,’ I said, ‘has no business playing sixty-six at all. Tell him to move over and make room for me.’

  “But the old hound dog refused to quit. He kept on playing and making such blunders that I thought I’d burst a blood vessel. It was all I could do to convince the old booger to let me play two or three hands. ‘After all,’ I said, ‘it’s Hanukkah. Let me celebrate too …’

  “ ‘What stakes shall we play for?’ Junior asked me.

  “ ‘For whatever you like,’ I say.

  “ ‘A ruble a game?’ he asks.

  “ ‘Let it be a ruble a game. My one condition is,’ I joked, ‘that your father promise not to look at your hand and give you any advice …’

  “Well, he laughed at that and we started to play. We play one game, we play a second, we play a third—I’m going like a house on fire. My partner begins to get flustered. ‘Let’s double the stakes,’ he says. ‘If that’s your pleasure,’ I say, ‘then double it is.’ Of course, that only made him lose twice as much and get twice as flustered as before. ‘You know what,’ he says, ‘let’s double the stakes again.’ ‘If that’s your pleasure,’ I say, ‘then double again it is.’ That meant he was losing quadruple. By now he was foaming at the mouth. ‘All right,’ he says, ‘let’s play for twenty-five rubles.’ When his father hears that, the old Methuselah, he says he won’t allow it, but the young rogue pays him no nevermind. We play for twenty-five rubles—and I win. Well, the old goat is really sore now; he gets up, he sits down, he peeks at my cards, he hums a little tune, he snuffles up his nose—and the boy is mopping his brow as though he’s come down with a fever. The more he loses, the more flustered he gets, the more flustered he gets, the more he loses. The old hoot owl was beside himself. He grumbled, he scolded, he hummed, he snuffled, he peeked at my cards, while the young scamp kept losing hand after hand until he was the color of a burning barn. ‘I’ll be jiggered,’ says the father, ‘if I’ll let you play any more!’ ‘Papa!’ pleads the son, just one more game. I’d sooner die than quit now!’ ‘Just one more, I promise,’ I say to the old buzzard. ‘Come on, be a sport …’

  “In the end the cards were dealt and, thank God, the son won. I was actually glad of it. Right away he wanted another game. What the deuce, I thought: when someone’s been losing like he has, you can’t be small about it. Well, we played another game, and then another, and another—the shoe, you should know, was now on the other foot. ‘So tell me,’ I said to the old fox, ‘how come you’re not blowing the whistle on Junior now?’ ‘Just wait till we get home,’ he says, ‘and I’ll give him what-for. He’ll have something to remember me by, he will!’

  “That’s what he answers me, the old weasel, peeking at my hand, and humming, and hemming, and snuffling up his nose. Not that I had liked any of that before, either—but as long as the cards were going my way, he could peek-hum-hem-and-snuffle all he pleased; it was only now that they weren’t that I began to smell a ra
t. Meanwhile, though, they kept being dealt and one deal was worse than the next. I was on a real losing streak; I kept having to get up, reach into my jacket, and take out another hundred. What a turnabout! I was beginning to run low on cash. Suddenly the old horse thief grabs my hand and says, ‘I’ll be jiggered if I’ll let you play another game! Why, you’re down to your last hundred.’ You can be sure that burned me up even more. ‘Who says I’m down to my last hundred?’ I said—and just to show him how wrong he was, I went and bet my last hundred.

  “It was only then, when I was totally cleaned out—when, seeing my partner, flushed with victory, button up his vest, the truth hit home that I was as fleeced as a shorn lamb and as broke as a dropped dish—it was only then that I began to take stock of what had happened. Something told me I had supped with the Devil and gotten stuck with the bill. Too late it dawned on me that the father was no father and that son of his no son—you could tell it from how they looked at each other, and from how the young man went off to one side and waited for the old one to join him. The old pirate whispered something to him, and I could have sworn the young punk slipped something into his hand …

  “My first thought was to throw myself from the train; my next one: them, not you! You should stick a knife into them, you should put a bullet in them, you should choke the living daylights out of both!… Just try it, though, when it’s two against one—and meanwhile the train is zipping along, the wheels are going clickety-clack, and my head is spinning too. I felt about to blow a gasket … what now? Before I knew it, the train had pulled into a station. What should I do? Who should I turn to? What should I say?… I looked up and saw my two fellow passengers reaching for their suitcases. ‘Where are we?’ I asked. ‘In a town called Odessa,’ they said. I put a hand in my pocket—there wasn’t enough change there to pay a porter. I broke into a cold sweat. My hands shook. There were actually tears in my eyes. I went over to the old vulture and said, ‘Look, perhaps you could do me a small favor … just twenty-five rubles, that’s all I’m asking for …’

  “ ‘Why ask me? Ask him,’ shrugs the old crocodile, pointing to his companion. But the young con just twirled his mustache and pretended not to hear. The engine whistled. ‘All out!’—we were in Odessa. I don’t have to tell you that the first person to jump from that car was me. Or that the shouts that everyone heard were mine too. ‘Police!’ I screamed at the top of my lungs. ‘Po-li-i-ce!…’

  “In no time one, two, three, four, five, six, seven policemen sprang up out of the ground. By then, though, the young blan-kety-blank had disappeared from sight. There was only the old hyena, whose arm I had a tight grip on to keep him from getting away. I won’t even try to describe the bedlam that broke out in that station. It was like being in the middle of an earthquake. The two of us were brought to a special room, where I told the whole story from start to finish. I poured my bitter heart out, I all but broke down and cried—and it seemed to make an impression, because right away they warned the old shill that he had better come clean. Guess what, though? He didn’t know what they were talking about! Sixty-six? What sixty-six! Cards? What cards! Son? What son! In fact, he had no son and never had one. ‘The man,’ says the old bastard, putting a finger to his head, ‘is off his rocker …’

  “ ‘Oh, I am, am I?’ I said. ‘Why don’t you search him!’

  “Well, they took him and turned him inside out right down to his underwear—no money, no cards! His total worth amounted to twenty-two rubles and seventy kopecks, and he really did look like such a poor, harmless beggar that I began to wonder myself if I hadn’t imagined it all. Maybe I just dreamed that I met a father and a son and lost a wad playing sixty-six with them?… You know what the end of it was? Don’t ask! Suppose we forget about the past and play a little game of sixty-six ourselves in honor of Hanukkah …”

  Whereupon the dignified gentleman, who appeared to be a commercial traveler like myself, produced a pack of cards, cut the deck for first deal, and inquired, “What stakes shall we play for?”

  I watched him cut the deck; he did it a little too skillfully, a little too fast. And his hands were a little too white. Too white and too soft. Suddenly I had a most unpleasant thought …

  “I would be happy,” I said, “to play a game of sixty-six with you in honor of Hanukkah, but I wouldn’t know how to begin. What actually is this sixty-six you keep talking about?”

  My fellow passenger gave me a long, hard look, the barest hint of a smile on his lips, and then quietly, with an inaudible sigh, replaced the cards in his pocket.

  He vanished at the next station. On a whim I walked up and down the train twice, looking for him everywhere—he was nowhere to be seen.

  (1910)

  HIGH SCHOOL

  Winter. Across from me, wearing a rather worn skunk-fur coat, sat a middle-aged man whose blond beard was shot with gray. We began to talk.

  “You know,” he said to me, “a man is his own worst enemy, especially when there’s a woman involved—I mean a wife. I happen to be talking about myself. Just from looking at me, what would you take me for? A pretty average Jew, wouldn’t you say? You can’t tell by the shape of my nose if I’m rich, poor, or down-and-out. For all you know, I may once have had lots of money. And not just money, either—because what’s money, after all?—but a solid, respectable business, not one of your flash-in-the-pan operations that make a big hoo-ha while they last. No, sir! It happens to be my personal opinion that slowly but surely is best. Slowly but surely is how I built up my business, slowly but surely is how I watched it go under, slowly but surely is how I paid off my debts, and slowly but surely is how I started all over again. If only God hadn’t gone and given me a wife … she isn’t traveling with me, so I can be frank with you. That is, at first glance she’s just a wife like any other, you wouldn’t guess there was anything the matter with her. She cuts a pretty imposing figure, in fact, because she’s twice as big as I am, and not at all bad-looking either—on the contrary, she’s downright pretty. And intelligent too; why, she’s sharp as a razor, she thinks exactly like a man … which is, you know, the first thing wrong with her, because it’s no good for a woman to want to wear the pants in a family. I don’t care how smart she is—the fact remains that when God Almighty created the world, He made Adam before He made Eve. Just try telling that to her, though. ‘Who God made before who,’ she says to me, ‘is His affair; that still doesn’t make it my fault if I have more brains in my small toe than you have in your whole fat skull’

  “ ‘Just what do you mean by that?’ I ask.

  “ ‘What I mean,’ she says, ‘is that it’s me who does all the thinking around here. Even when it comes to finding a high school for our son, I have to supply the brainpower.’

  “ ‘Where does it say,’ I ask, ‘that our son has to go to high school? If he wants to be a scholar, who’s keeping him from being one at home?’

  “ ‘I’ve told you a thousand times,’ she says, ‘that you can’t make me fly in the face of the whole world. And in today’s world, children go to high school.’

  “ ‘If you ask my opinion,’ I say, ‘today’s world is crazy.’

  “ ‘And you, I suppose,’ she says, ‘are the only sane one in it! A fine world it would be if everyone went by your opinions.’

  “ ‘Well,’ I say, ‘they’re the only opinions I have.’

  “ ‘All my enemies and friends’ enemies,’ she says, ‘should only have as much in their pockets as you have in your head!’

  “ ‘It’s a black day in a man’s life,’ I say, ‘when a woman has to tell him how to run it!’

  “ ‘And it’s a black day in a woman’s life,’ she says, ‘when she’s married to such a man!’

  “Go argue with your own wife! Whatever you talk about, she’ll answer you off the wall; say one word to her, and she’ll come back at you with ten; try not saying anything, and she’ll begin to cry, or better yet, throw such a fit that you’ll wish you were never born. In short, when the dust had
settled, she had her way. Between you and me, why pretend? When she wants it, she gets it …

  “Anyway, what can I tell you? A high school it was! And that meant, first of all, starting him in junior high school. You wouldn’t imagine that junior high school was such a big deal, would you? And especially not, I thought, with a whiz kid like mine who ran rings around them all in the rabbi’s schoolroom. Why, you could search all of Russia for another child like him! Granted, I’m his father; but the head on that boy’s shoulders is something else … Why drag it out, though? He applied for the entrance exams, and he took the entrance exams, and he failed the entrance exams. What was the problem? The problem was that he scored only a two in arithmetic. Your child, I was told, has an insufficient mathematical background. I ask you, doesn’t that take the cake? You won’t find a head like his in all of Russia, and they’re talking about mathematical backgrounds! But failed is failed. I don’t have to tell you how down in the dumps I was; if he had to take the exams already, I would just as soon he had passed. But being a mere male of the species, I thought to myself: well, we did what we could—he isn’t the first Jew who won’t go to high school and he won’t be the last … A lot it helped to tell that to the wife, though. There was no getting it out of her head; the boy was going to high school if it killed her!

  “ ‘Tell me,’ I said to her, ‘I only want you to be happy, but what do you need all this for? To keep the boy out of the army? But he’s an only son, he already has an exemption. To help him make a living? For that he needs high school like a hole in the head. What’s so terrible if he has to work in the store with me, or buy and sell like other Jews? And if, God forbid, it’s his bad luck to end up a rich businessman or a banker, we’ll manage to live with that too.’