Well, it didn’t take much to convince him, and the two of us set out for my place. There was some to-do when we got there. A guest! A genuine third cousin! That may not seem like much, but kinfolk are best folk, as they say. What a carnival! How are things in Kasrilevke? How is Uncle Boruch Hirsh? How is Aunt Leah Dvossi? How is Uncle Yosl Menashe? How is Aunt Dobrish? What are all the children doing? Who’s died? Who’s been married? Who’s divorced? Who’s sick or expecting? “Golde,” I said at last, “what’s a wedding more or a circumcision less to you when we have nothing to put in our mouths? Koyl dikhfin yeysey veyitzrokh—it’s no fun dancing on an empty stomach. If there’s a bit of borscht around, that will do nicely, and if there isn’t, no matter — we’ll start right in on the knishes, or the kreplach, or the knaidlach, or the varnishkes, or the pirogen, or the blintzes. You needn’t limit yourself to one course, but be quick.”
In a word, we washed our hands and sat down to a fine meal. “Have some more, Menachem Mendl,” I said when I was done. “It’s all vanity anyway, if you don’t mind my quoting King David. It’s a false and foolish world, and if you want to be healthy and enjoy it, as my Grandma Nechomeh used to say — oh, she was a smart one, all right, sharp as a whistle! — then you must never forget to lick the pot clean.” My poor devil of a guest was so hungry that his hands shook. He didn’t stop praising my wife’s cooking and swearing up and down that he couldn’t remember when he had last eaten such delicious dairy food, such wonderful knishes and tasty varnishkes. “Don’t be silly, Menachem Mendl,” I said. “You should try her pudding or her poppy cake — then you would know what heaven on earth is really like.”
After the meal we chatted a bit as people do. I told him about my business and he told me about his; I talked about everything under the sun and he talked about Yehupetz and Odessa, where he had been, as they say, through thick and thin, now on top of the world and now in the pits, one day a prince, and the next a pauper, and then a prince again, and once more without a shirt on his back. Never in my life had I heard of such weird, complicated transactions: stocks and shares, and selling long and short, and options and poptions, and the Devil only knows what else. And for the craziest sums too, ten and twenty thousand rubles, as though money were water! “To tell you the truth, Menachem Mendl,” I said, “you must have a marvelous head on your shoulders to figure all that out. There’s one thing I don’t get, though: if I know your wife as I think I do, how does she let you run around loose like this without coming after you on a broomstick?”
“Ah, Reb Tevye,” he says with a sigh, “I wish you hadn’t mentioned that. She runs hot and cold, she does, mostly freezing. If I were to read you some of the letters she writes me, you’d see what a saint I am. But that’s neither here nor there. What’s a wife for, if not to put a man in his place? Believe me, I have a worse problem than her, and that’s my mother-in-law. I don’t have to describe her to you — you know her well enough yourself.”
“What you’re trying to tell me,” I say, “is that she’s just like it says in the Bible, akudim nekudim uvrudim. Or to put it in plain language, like an abcess on a blister on a boil.”
“Reb Tevye,” he says, “you’ve hit the nail on the head. And if you think the boil and the blister are bad, wait until you hear about the abcess.”
In a word, we stayed up gabbing half the night. By then I was dizzy from all his wild stories about the thousands of rubles he had juggled as though he were Brodsky. All night long my head was in a whirclass="underline" Yehupetz … gold imperials … Brodsky … Menachem Mendl and his mother-in-law … It wasn’t until the next morning, though, that he finally got to the point. What was the point? It was, said Menachem Mendl, that since money was so scarce in Yehupetz that you couldn’t even give away your goods, “You, Reb Tevye, have a chance not only to make a nice killing but also to help save my life, I mean literally to raise me from the dead!”
“And you,” I said to him, “are talking like a child. Are you really so foolish as to believe that I’m sitting on Yehupetz’s millions? I only wish the two of us could earn in a year a tenth of what I’d need to be half as rich as Brodsky.”
“Of course,” he said. “You don’t have to tell me that. But what makes you think I have such big sums in mind? Let me have a hundred rubles and in a couple of days I’ll turn them into two hundred for you, into three hundred, into six hundred, into seven. In fact, I’ll make it an even thousand.”
“That may very well be,” I said. “All things are possible. But do you know when they are? When there’s a hundred in the first place. When there isn’t, it’s begapoy yovoy uvegapoy yeytsey. Do you know what Rashi has to say about that? That if you invest a fever, you’ll get consumption for your profit.”
“Come, come,” he says to me. “A hundred rubles, Reb Tevye, you’re sure to find. With your business, your reputation, touch wood …”
“What’s my reputation got to do with it?” I ask. “A reputation is a wonderful thing to have, but would you like to know something? It’s all I do have, because Brodsky has all the rest. If you must know exactly, it may be that I could squeeze together somewhere in the neighborhood of roughly more or less a hundred rubles, but I can also think of a hundred different ways to make them disappear again, the first of which is marrying off my eldest daughter …”
“But that’s just it!” he says. “Listen to me! When will you have another opportunity, Reb Tevye, to invest a hundred rubles and wind up, God willing, with enough money to marry off every one of your daughters and still have plenty to spare?” And for the next three hours he’s off on another serenade about how he can turn one ruble into three and three into ten. “The first thing you do,” he says, “is take your hundred and buy ten whatchumacallits with it.” (That wasn’t his word, I just don’t remember what he called them.) “You wait a few days for them to go up, and then you send off a telegram with an order to sell and buy twice as much. Then you wait a few more days and send a telegram again. Before you know it, your hundred’s worth two, your two hundred four, your four hundred eight, and your eight a thousand and six. It’s the damnedest thing! Why, I know people who just the other day were shop clerks in Yehupetz without a pair of shoes on their feet; today they live in mansions with walls to keep out beggars and travel to the baths in Germany whenever their wives get a stomachache. They ride around town in rubber-wheeled droshkies — why, they don’t even know you anymore!”
Well, so as not to make a short story long, he gave me such an itch to be rich that it wasn’t any laughing matter. Why look a gift horse in the mouth? I told myself. Maybe he’s really meant to be your good angel. What makes you think you’re any worse than those shop clerks in Yehupetz who are living on easy street? He’s certainly not lying, because he could never make up such fairy tales in a million years … It just may be, I thought, that Tevye’s lucky number has come up at last and he’s finally going to be somebody in his old age. How long does a man have to go on working himself to the bone — day and night, horse and wagon, cheese and butter, over and over again? It’s high time, Tevye, for you to relax a bit, to drop in on a synagogue and read a book now and then like any respectable Jew. What are you so afraid of? That nothing will come of it? That you’ll be fleeced like a lamb? That your bread, as they say, will fall with the butter side down? But what’s to keep it from falling with the butter side up? “Golde,” I asked the old lady, “what do you think? How does our cousin’s plan strike you?”