The Last Demon

this.’
    ‘Do you want me to show you?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Then I’ll get undressed.’
    Avigdor’s eyes widened. It occurred to him that Anshel might want to practice pederasty. Anshel took off the gaberdine and the fringed garment, and threw off her underclothes. Avigdor took one look and turned first white, then fiery red. Anshel covered herself hastily.
    ‘I’ve done this only so that you can testify at the courthouse. Otherwise, Hadass will have to stay a grass widow.’
    Avigdor had lost his tongue. He was seized by a fit of trembling. He wanted to speak, but his lips moved and nothing came out. He sat down quickly, for his legs would not support him.
    Finally he murmured: ‘How is it possible? I don’t believe it!’
    ‘Should I get undressed again?’
    ‘No!’
    Yentl proceeded to tell the whole story: how her father, bedridden, had studied Torah with her; how she had never had the patience for women and their silly chatter; how she had sold the house and all the furnishings, left the town, made her way disguised as a man to Lublin, and on the road met Avigdor. Avigdor sat speechless, gazing at the storyteller. Yentl was by now wearing men’s clothes once more.
    Avigdor spoke: ‘It must be a dream.’
    He pinched himself on the cheek.
    ‘It isn’t a dream.’
    ‘That such a thing should happen to me!’
    ‘It’s all true.’
    ‘Why did you do it?
Nu
, I’d better keep still.’
    ‘I didn’t want to waste my life on a baking shovel and a kneading trough.’
    ‘And what about Hadass – why did you do that?’
    ‘I did it for your sake. I knew that Peshe would torment you and at our house you would have some peace.’
    Avigdor was silent for a long time. He bowed his head, pressed his hands to his temples, shook his head. ‘What will you do now?’
    ‘I’ll go away to a different yeshiva.’
    ‘What? If you had only told me earlier, we could have …’
    Avigdor broke off in the middle.
    ‘No – it wouldn’t have been good.’
    ‘Why not?’
    ‘I’m neither one nor the other.’
    ‘What a dilemma I’m in!’
    ‘Get a divorce from that horror. Marry Hadass.’
    ‘She’ll never divorce me and Hadass won’t have me.’
    ‘Hadass loves you. She won’t listen to her father again.’
    Avigdor stood up suddenly but then sat down. ‘I won’t be able to forget you. Ever …’
VI
    According to the Law, Avigdor was now forbidden to spend another moment alone with Yentl; yet dressed in the gaberdine and trousers, she was again the familiar Anshel.
    They resumed their conversation on the old footing: ‘How could you bring yourself to violate the commandment every day: “A woman shall not wear that which pertaineth to a man”?’
    ‘I wasn’t created for plucking feathers and chattering with females.’
    ‘Would you rather lose your share in the world to come?’
    ‘Perhaps …’
    Avigdor raised his eyes. Only now did he realize that Anshel’s cheeks were too smooth for a man’s, the hair too abundant, the hands too small. Even so he could not believe that such a thing could have happened. At any moment he expected to wake up. He bit his lips, pinched his thigh. He was seized by shyness and could not speak without stammering. His friendship with
Anshel, their intimate talk, their confidences, had been turned into a sham and delusion. The thought even occurred to him that Anshel might be a demon. He shook himself as if to cast off a nightmare; yet that power which knows the difference between dream and reality told him it was all true. He summoned up his courage. He and Anshel could never be strangers to one another, even though Anshel was in fact Yentl …
    He ventured a comment: ‘It seems to me that the witness who testifies for a deserted woman may not marry her, for the Law calls him “a party to the affair.” ’
    ‘What? That didn’t occur to me!’
    ‘We must look it up in Eben Ezer.’
    ‘I’m not even sure that the rules pertaining to a deserted woman apply in this case,’ said Anshel in the manner of a scholar.
    ‘If you don’t want Hadass to be a grass widow, you must reveal the secret to her directly.’
    ‘That I can’t do.’
    ‘In any event, you must get another witness.’
    Gradually the two went back to their Talmudic conversation. It seemed strange at first to Avigdor to be disputing holy writ with a woman, yet before long the Torah had reunited them. Though their bodies were different, their souls were of one kind. Anshel spoke in
a