Sholem Aleichem - Tevye the Dairyman and the Railroad Stories

“Well, lo and behold — two years hadn’t passed since he left for America when one day the door opens and who should walk in but some stranger in a top hat, a handsome, ruddy, brawny, merry young fellow who grabs me in his arms and begins to cover me with kisses! ‘What’s the matter with you?’ he says to me. ‘Are you just pretending, or do you really not know who I am?’

“ ‘Well, I’ll be! It’s Danielchik!’ I said, trying to look glad, though I was boiling inside. Why the Devil, I thought, couldn’t you have been killed in America, or better yet, on the train we saw you off on, or best of all, drowned in the ocean? But out loud I just said, ‘When did you get here, Danielchik, and what brings you back?’

“ ‘I blew in this morning,’ he says. ‘What brings me? I’ve come to settle the accounts with you.’

“When I heard him say ‘the accounts,’ I thought I would rupture an artery. What accounts did that gangster think he was talking about? But I managed to pull myself together and say to him, ‘Why trouble yourself to come all the way from America for that? My goodness, if you wanted to pay me what you owe me, you could have mailed it to me from there …’

“ ‘What I owe you?’ he says with a grin. ‘Don’t you mean what you owe me?’

“ ‘What I owe you?’ I say. ‘What makes you think I owe you?’

“ ‘Me, and my brothers, and my sister, and all of us,’ he says. ‘I’ve come from America on behalf of the whole family. I want a full accounting of my father’s money. You can deduct whatever you laid out for us and give us the balance. We won’t go to court over a ruble more or less; screw that, we’ll work it out between us … How the heck are you? How are your children? I’ve brought each one of them a present …’

“I thought I would keel over, or else take a chair and bash his head in with it … but I got a grip on myself and invited him to come, God willing, on Saturday night to go over the books with me. Then I went to see some lawyers. How, I asked them, could I get him off my back? The Devil take them if I could get a straight answer! One said that since ten years had gone by, I could claim the statute of limitations; another said no, being a fi-who-ciary meant I had to give an accounting even after a hundred years …

“ ‘But how can I give an accounting,’ I said, ‘when I kept no books and have no receipts?’

“ ‘In that case,’ says the lawyer, ‘you’re in trouble.’

“ ‘I didn’t need you to tell me that,’ I say. ‘What I want to know is, how do I get out of it?’

“A blank, that’s all I drew from him. I must be made of iron, do you hear me, to have gone through all this! I ask you, what did I need such a miserable mess for, this whole etcetera, etcetera, etcetera? What in the world ever made me agree to be someone else’s fi-who-ciary? Don’t you think I would have been a thousand times better off coming down with pneumonia, or breaking a leg, or having some terrible accident? Anything, anything, but this fool fi-who-ciation of five children, of a widow, of a Danielchik, of no account books, of etcetera, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera!..”

(1902)

Across from me, by the window, sat a man with a smile on his face and the kind of eyes that try to crawl under your skin. I could see he was waiting for me to break the ice, but I preferred to keep to myself. After a while, though, it was simply too much for him to sit in silence with a fellow Jew. He laughed to himself abruptly, then turned to me and said:

“You’re wondering what made me laugh? I just happened to think of a joke that I played on Yehupetz, ha ha! You’d never guess it from looking at me, Moyshe-Nachman from Kennele, a Jew with a cough and with asthma, would you? Well, did I put one over on Yehupetz — but one that will give them something to remember me by! If you’ll just excuse me for a moment while I cough … ai, Purishkevitch should only have a cough like this … there! Now let me tell you what a Jew can do.

“One fine day I had to go to Yehupetz. Why does a Jew with a cough and with asthma have to go to Yehupetz? To see the doctor, of course. With my cough and my asthma, I don’t have to tell you, Yehupetz gets to see a lot of me, even if it’s not supposed to, since what business do I, Moyshe-Nachman from Kennele, have in Yehupetz without a pravozshitelestvo , that is, a residence permit?… But when you have a cough and asthma and you need to see the doctor — well, that’s life: where else but Yehupetz can you go? You get there in the morning, you slip away at night, and you’re in a panic all day long, because if you’re caught and served a prokhodnoyo , that is, an expulsion order, you’re right back where you started from. Still, that’s nothing compared to an etap; an etap , you should know, is a criminal arrest — why, I’d die of shame three times before I could live through one of those! After all, I am, as you can see, a pretty solid citizen, praise God. I own my own house, I can afford my own cow, and I have two daughters, one married and one engaged. What can I tell you? That’s life …

“And so I came to Yehupetz to see the doctor — or rather, the doctors, because this time I meant to have a consultation with at least three of them. I wanted, you see, to have it out with them once and for all and to know what I was, fish or fowl. There wasn’t any question I had asthma, but how you get rid of it when you have it — that, you see, was a different story entirely. Each doctor had run all the tests on me. Each had tried everything. And each was at his wits’ end. For example, the first, a prince of a fellow named Stritzel, wrote me out a prescription for codeini sacchari pulverati; it wasn’t expensive and it even tasted sweet. The second doctor prescribed tinctura opia —why, you could have passed out from a drop of it! Then I went to see a third doctor; the medicine he gave me tasted almost the same, but it wasn’t tinctura opia , it was tinctura tebiacca . If you were me, you’d have called it quits by now, no? Well, I went to still another doctor; what he prescribed was as bitter as wormwood and went by the name of morphium aqua amigdalarium . Does it surprise you that I know all that Latin? In fact, I’ve studied Latin the way you’ve studied Greek, but that’s life: when you have a cough with asthma, and a touch of tuberculosis on the side, picking up Latin is a breeze …

“And so I came to Yehupetz for a consultation. Where does a Jew like me stay in Yehupetz? Not in a hotel, of course, and not in a boardinghouse either. First of all, they fleece you but good there. And second of all, how can I stay in a hotel when I don’t have a pravozshitelestvo? The place I always go is my brother-in-law’s. I happen to have, you see, a schlemiel of a brother-in-law, a miserable beggar of a heder teacher; Purishkevitch should only be as poor. And children — God save us from such a litter! You know what, though? The lucky devil has a pravozshitelestvo , and a perfectly good one at that. How did he come by it? Because of Brodsky; he’s got a little job with Brodsky on the side. Don’t think that means he runs a factory. In fact, he’s just a backbencher in Brodsky’s synagogue, but he happens to be the Torah reader there. That makes him an obradchik , which is someone with clerical status, and gives him the right to live on Malovasilkovsky Street, not far from the ex-chief of police, though it’s all he can do to keep body and soul together. The one bright spot in his life is me. I am, so to speak, the moneyman in the family — and whenever I come to Yehupetz I stay with him, eat lunch and supper at his house, and find him some errand to run that will earn him a ruble or two; Purishkevitch should only earn as much. But that’s life …