Sholem Aleichem - Tevye the Dairyman and the Railroad Stories

“At that point I fainted dead away.

“As soon as I was revived, I promptly lost consciousness again. It was only when I came to a second time that I began to scream so loud that the whole Yehupetz police force came running. I promised them a fat reward and they took me with them to every thieves’ den in town, to every underworld rathole — but my young man was nowhere to be found. By now I was thoroughly exhausted and at the end of my tether. I went back to my lodgings, lay down on the bed there, and wondered how to take my life. By hanging? With a knife? Or by throwing myself in the Dnieper? As I was trying to decide, there was a knock on the door. Who is it? It was someone come to take me to the police station. My fine feathered friend had been caught — and with the goods still on him!

“Is there any need to tell you how I felt when I saw my case with all the diamonds in it? Before I knew it, I had blacked out once more. (That’s something I have a way of doing.) When I came around this time, I went over to the young man and said to him, ‘I simply don’t understand it. Please, explain it to me before I go crazy: where’s the logic in first running after me with my case and refusing to take even a cent for it, and then, the minute my back is turned, walking off with it again? Why, my whole life was in it, it was everything I had in the world! You almost ruined me. I was a hair’s breadth away from putting an end to it all!’

“He looked at me, that young man did, with those earnest brown eyes of his and said as calmly as you please, ‘What does one thing have to do with the other? A good deed is a good deed, but stealing is my profession.’

“ ‘Young man,’ I said to him, just exactly who are you?”

“ ‘Who am I?’ he said. ‘I’m a Jewish thief with a house full of children and the worst luck you ever saw. Not that I’ve chosen a hard line of work — I’m just a total bungler. Don’t think I’m complaining. Stealing, thank God, is no problem. The problem is getting caught. That’s where I never have luck.’

“Only when I was already on the train did it occur to me what an ass I had been. For a pittance I could have bought that thief his freedom. Why should I have been his Waterloo? Let someone else have it on his hands …

“Could I interest you in some reasonably priced diamond earrings? Here, let me show them to you. Stones like these you’ve never even seen in a dream — they’re something extra-special, let me tell you …”

(1910)

Taking his time as if weighing each word, a cultivated, rather worried-looking Jew with a broad, pale, wrinkled forehead, a good black Sabbath frock coat, and a hat with a wide silk ribbon around it told the following story about himself:

“If you’re fated for misfortune, there’s no place you can run to. You can try eighteen different ways to escape it — none of them will do any good. Take me, for example: I’m a quiet, peaceable Jew who minds his own business, never makes a fuss, and hates being in the public eye. I’ll do anything to avoid being made president of the synagogue, or the godfather at a circumcision, or the guest of honor at a wedding, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera …

“Well, just listen to what happened anyway. One day a Jew died in our town. We called him ‘Menashe-Goy,’ because he was, God forgive me, a simple soul. He couldn’t read or write, he didn’t know a Hebrew letter from the sign of the Cross, he was barely able to recite a few prayers, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera …

“In short, he was a real Simple Simon, but a decent fellow and honest to the core; his word of honor was sacred to him, and the next man’s money — sacrosanct. Was he ever stingy with his own, though! He would rather have given up his eyeteeth than a penny. He spent his whole life accumulating more and more, and he was still going strong when suddenly he upped and died. Well, dead is dead — and since that’s what Menashe now was, I was approached with the suggestion that, as he had left behind no small amount of money, plus some outstanding loans, plus some other assets, plus some property, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera, and as there was no one to manage it all — she, his widow, being only a woman and his children being too small (there were five of them, four boys and a girl) — I should agree to be their fiduciary, that is, their guardian. Of course, I wouldn’t hear of it. Their fi- who -ciary? What did I need it for?… But that only made them pester me more. ‘How,’ I was asked, ‘can you possibly refuse when you’re the only one in town who can be trusted,’ etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. ‘Don’t you realize what a crime it is to let such wealth go unmanaged? What will the poor children, the four little boys and the girl, have left when they grow up? What are you so afraid of? Be the fi-who-ciary, and let the widow, their mother, be the fi-who-ciary-ess!’ I did my best to beg off: what did they want from my life? What kind of fi-who-ciary would I make when I didn’t even know how to spell it? That just added fuel to the fire, though. How could I, and what kind of person was I, and where was my sense of duty, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera …

“Well, in the end I had to give in: I became a fi-who-ciary, that is, the children’s legal guardian, together with her, the widow. And since a fi-who-ciary is what God had made me, the first thing I did was try to determine just what the poor orphans were worth. I went about locating every asset, store, house, horse, cow, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera, and converting it all into cash … which was easier said than done, mind you, because Menashe, may he rest in peace, was one well-fixed miser of a Jew! However much people had guessed he was worth, they hadn’t guessed enough by half — and to make matters worse, he hadn’t put down a single thing in writing, because he was, God forgive me, an illiterate. New loans he had made kept turning up all the time. Wherever you looked, you found someone else who owed him money. And of course, you understand, I had to walk around with it all in my head and get every penny that I could for it — what other choice did I have? And I had to do it all by myself too, because she, my fi-who-ciary-ess, was a cow of a housewife who didn’t know left from right — a perfectly nice cow, it so happened, but a cow all the same. She couldn’t have told a good IOU from a bad one if her life depended on it, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera …

“Well, I put together ruble after ruble until there was quite a pile. And having gone to no small trouble to put it together, I next had to think of investing it, because if the family used it to live off, what would become of it? Children, it so happens, need clothing and shoes, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera, to say nothing of having to eat — and once you start eating up your capital, you eat your way through it in no time. And then what? A responsible person, you understand, had to put the money to work. And so I began to look around for somewhere to put it. Should I open a store for the family? But who was going to run it when my fi-who-ciary-ess, it so happened, was a cow, and the children were only children?… Should I lend it out at interest? But supposing the borrower went bankrupt — who would be held accountable? The fi-who-ciary!.. Until finally I decided, what more solid business could there be to sink it in than my own? What safer borrower was there than me, eh?… Credit, God be praised, I had everywhere, at every fair in the country, while as for my reputation — it should only be as good all my life! Wasn’t it the best solution by far to put the money into my own store? What better way to guard its value than to keep turning over the stock with it, eh?… And if you buy with cash, you should know, you’re in a different league entirely, because it commands a good premium. Hard cash, you understand, is a rare commodity these days; everyone pays with paper, with notes, a signature here, a signature there, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera …