Sholem Aleichem - Tevye the Dairyman and the Railroad Stories

“Shhh, all of you! Stop talking about it. Here she comes.”

“Who?”

“The basket woman.”

“Where? Where is our beauty queen?”

“Right over there!”

Pockmarked and redheaded, her eyes puffy with tears, she struggled through the passengers looking for a place until she finally sat down on her overturned basket, hid her face in her tattered shawl, and resumed crying silently into it.

An odd hush came over the car. Everyone stopped talking. No one let out a peep. Except, that is, for one person, who called out in a heavy bass voice:

“Jews! Why so quiet?”

“What’s there to shout about?” someone asked.

“Let’s pass the hat around!”

So help me! And do you know who the kind heart was? None other than the same character who had laughed at how Jews make a living, a queer-looking fellow with a queer-looking flat, glossy-brimmed cap and blue-tinted glasses that hid his eyes completely: there simply were none to be seen above his fat, fleshy bulb of a nose. Without further ado he took the cap from his head, threw a few silver coins into it, and went from one passenger to another, booming in his bass voice:

“Give what you can, children! All donations are welcome. Darovanomu konyu vzuby nye smotryat —that means, according to Rashi, that we won’t look a gift horse in the mouth.”

Folks began rummaging through their pockets and purses, and all sorts of coins, both silver and copper, were soon clinking in the cap. There was even a Christian there, a Russian with high boots and a silver chain around his neck, who yawned, crossed himself, and gave something too. In the whole car one passenger alone refused to part with a kopeck — and that, of all people, was the very same individual who had taken up the cudgel for Jewish livings, an intellectual-looking young man with pasty cheeks, a pointy yellow beard, and gold pince-nez on his nose. You could see he was one of those types with rich parents and in-laws who travel third class to economize.

“Young fellow,” said the Jew with the blue glasses and big nose, “let’s have something for the hat.”

“I’m not giving,” said our intellectual.

“Why not?”

“Because. It’s a matter of principle with me.”

“You didn’t have to tell me that.”

“Why not?”

“Because vedno pana po kholavakh —that means, according to Rashi, that you can tell a rotten apple by its peel.”

The young man flared up so that he almost lost his pince-nez. “You’re an ignoramus!” he squeaked furiously at the man with the blue glasses. “You’re a cheeky, insolent, impudent, impertinent illiterate!”

“Thank God I’m all of that and not a two-legged animal that oinks,” answered the man with the big nose in a surprisingly good-natured tone of voice before turning to the puffy-eyed woman and saying, “There, there, Auntie, don’t you think you’ve cried enough? You’ll ruin your pretty eyes if you don’t stop. Here, hold out your hands and I’ll fill them with a bit of spare change.”

A strange woman if ever there was one! You might have thought that, seeing all the cash, she would have thanked him from the bottom of her heart. In fact she did nothing of the sort. Instead of thanks, a volley of oaths spewed forth from her. She was a veritable fountain of them.

“It’s all his fault. I hope he breaks his neck! I pray to God he breaks every bone in his body! He’s to blame for everything — I only wish, dear Father in heaven, that everything happens to him! He shouldn’t live to cross his own threshold! He should die a hundred times from a fire, from a fever, from an earthquake, from a plague, from an ill wind that carries him away! He should croak! He should burst! He should dry up like a puddle! He should swell like a dead fish!”

Good Lord, where did one person get so many curses from? It was a lucky thing that the man with the blue glasses interrupted her and said:

“That’s enough of your kind wishes, my good woman. Why don’t you tell us why the conductors had it in for you?”

The woman looked at him with her puffy eyes.

“I only hope he gets a stroke! He was afraid I’d take his customers away, so he tried pushing ahead of me, so I elbowed him out of the way, so he grabbed my basket from behind, so I started to scream, so a policeman came along and winked to the conductors, so they threw both our baskets in the mud. God turn his blood to mud! I swear to you, may I hope to die if I’ve ever been bothered before or had a hair harmed on my head in all the years I’ve been working this line. Do you know why that is? It’s not from the milk of human kindness, believe me. He should only get a box in the ear for each free roll and hard-boiled egg I’ve handed out in that station! Everyone, from top to bottom, has to get his share of the pie. I hope to God they get all of it some day: one of them consumption, another a fever, another the cholera! The chief conductor takes what he wants, and the other conductors help themselves too to a roll, or an egg, or an orange. What can I tell you? Would you believe that even the stoker, a pox on his head, thinks he has a bite coming? I wish his ears were bitten off! He keeps threatening to rat on me to the policeman unless I give him something to eat. If only he knew, may the gout get his bones, that the policeman gets a cut too. Every Sunday I slip him a bagful of oranges to buy him off for the week. And don’t think he doesn’t choose the biggest, the sweetest, the juiciest fruit …”

“Auntie,” said the man with the blue glasses, interrupting her again, “judging by the volume of business you do, you must be making a mint.”

“What are you talking about?” the woman shot back as though her honor were impugned. “I barely manage to meet the overhead. I’ve been taking such a skinning that I’m at starvation’s door.”

“Then what do you go on for?”

“What do you want me to do, steal for a living? I have five children at home, may he get five ulcers in his stomach, and I’m a sick woman too, he should only, dear God, lie sick in the poor-house until the end of next year! Just look how he’s killed the business, buried it in the ground — it’s a pity he wasn’t buried with it. And what a good business it was, too. I couldn’t have asked for a better one.”

“A good business?”

“As good as gold! Why, I was raking it in.”

“But, Auntie, didn’t you just tell me you were starving?”

“That’s because fifty percent goes to the conductors and the Stationmaster and the policeman every Sunday. Do you take me for a gold mine? A buried treasure? A bank robber?”

The man with the blue glasses and the fleshy nose was getting exasperated. “Auntie!” he said. “You’re making me dizzy!”

“ I’m making you? My troubles are making you — they should only make a corpse out of him! I hope to God he’s ruined just as he ruined me! Why, he was nothing but a tailor, a needle pusher; he didn’t earn enough to buy the water to boil his kasha in. It made him green with envy to see how well I was doing, the eyes should fall out of his head, and that I brought home enough to eat, he should only be eaten by worms, and that I was supporting five orphaned children with my basket, may he swallow a basket of salt that turns to rocks in his belly! That’s when he went, I hope he goes and drops dead, and bought a basket too, may I soon buy the shrouds for his funeral! ‘What do you call this?’ I asked him. ‘A basket,’ he says. ‘And just what do you intend to do with it?’ I asked him. ‘The same thing that you do,’ he says. ‘What are you talking about?’ I asked him. ‘What I’m talking about,’ he says, ‘is that I have five children who have to eat too, and who aren’t going to be fed by you …’ What do you say to that? And ever since then, as you’ve seen for yourselves, he follows me around with his basket, may he be followed by the Angel of Death, and takes away my customers, I wish he’d be taken by the Devil, and steals the bread from my mouth — oh, dear sweet God, You should knock the teeth out of his!”