The Collected Stories

to realize that some of the proofs were defective and she went to look for Jake among the humming linotype machines. The boy screamed at her and called her names, she complained when she came back. “Is this the way they treat literature in America?”
    Toward spring, Morris Terkeltoyb began to go down to the newspaper again, but Margit had a gallstone attack and was taken to the hospital. Morris visited her twice a day. The doctors found all kinds of complications. They made many tests and took a good deal of blood for them. Morris claimed that American doctors had no respect for their patients; they cut them up as if they were already corpses. The nurses didn’t come when they were called and the sick didn’t get proper food. Morris had to prepare soup for Margit and bring her orange juice. He asked me, “In what way are doctors better than writers or theater directors? It’s the same human species.”
    I left New York again for about three months. When I came back in the fall, I read in the newspaper that the Yiddish Writers’ Union was having a memorial evening on the thirtieth day after the death of Morris Terkeltoyb. He had been stricken with a heart attack while reading proofs. Perhaps he died of a printing error. In the evening, I took Margit in a taxi to the hall. It was badly lit, half empty. Margit was wrapped in black. She did not understand the Yiddish speakers, but each time the name of Morris Terkeltoyb was mentioned she sobbed.
    A few days after that, Margit knocked at my door. For the first time I saw her without cosmetics. She looked to me like a woman of ninety. I had to help her sit down on a chair. Her hands trembled, her head was shaking, and she spoke with difficulty. She said, “I don’t want them to throw Morris’s manuscripts into the garbage after my death.” I had to give her a solemn promise that I would find an institution which would accept his manuscripts and books, the thousands of letters he kept in trunks and even in a laundry hamper.
    Margit lived on for thirteen months. During that time she kept coming to me with projects. She wanted to publish a collection of Morris Terkeltoyb’s best writing, but he had left so many manuscripts it would have taken years to choose among them. There was no chance of getting a publisher. She kept asking the same question: “Why didn’t Morris write in an understandable language—Polish or Hungarian?” She wanted me to find a Yiddish grammar for her so that she could learn the language. Even though she had never read anything he had written, Margit called him a talent, possibly a genius. Another time Margit found a manuscript that looked like a play, and she urged me to offer it to a theater director or to find someone to translate it into English.
    Margit Levy spent more of the last two months of her life in the hospital than at home. A few times I went to visit her. She was in the general ward, and her face had changed so much that on each visit I had trouble recognizing her. Her false teeth no longer fit her shrunken mouth. Her nose had become hooked, just like Morris’s. She spoke to me in German, French, Italian. Once, I found her with another visitor—her lawyer, a German Jew. I heard her telling him that she had bought a plot in the cemetery of the Klimontow Society, near Morris’s grave.
    She died in January. It was a frosty day and the wind was blowing. Two people came to the chapel—the lawyer and myself. The rabbi quickly recited “God Full of Mercy,” and delivered a brief eulogy. I heard him say, “The privilege of leaving a good name is for villagers only. In a city like New York, a person’s name often dies before him.” Then the coffin was put into a hearse and Margit Levy rode into eternity without anyone to accompany her.
    I wanted to carry out my promise to find a place for Morris Terkeltoyb’s packs of manuscripts, but the institutions I called all refused to take them. I kept in my apartment one valise filled with his writings and two albums that belonged to Margit Levy. All the rest the superintendent threw out into the street. That day I did not leave the house.
    In Morris Terkeltoyb’s valise I found, to my surprise, bundles of faded love letters that women had written him—all in Yiddish. One woman threatened that she would commit suicide if he did not return to her. No, Morris Terkeltoyb was not the psychopathic boaster I had thought him to be. Women did love him. I remembered Spinoza’s saying