The one thing I didn’t like about him was his habit of disappearing now and then. Suddenly he would vanish—vehayeled eynenu, Peppercorn was nowhere to be found. “Where have you been, my wanderbird?” I would ask him when he came back. Peppercorn kept silent as a fish, though. I don’t know about you, but secretive people annoy me. Even God, when He created the world, did it out loud, or else how would we know all about it? But I will say this for Peppercorn: when he opened his mouth, it erupted like a volcano. You wouldn’t have believed the things that came out of it then, such wild, crazy ideas, everything backwards and upside down with its feet sticking up in the air. A rich Jew, for instance — that’s how warped his mind was! — wasn’t worth a row of beans to him, but a beggar was a big deal, and a workingman — why, a workingman was king, he was God’s gift to the world — the reason being, I gathered, that he worked.
“Still,” I would say, “when it comes to livelihoods, you can’t compare work to making money.”
That would get him so mad that he’d go all out to convince me that money was the root of all evil. All the monkey business in the world, he said, was due to it and nothing honest could ever come of it. And he would give me ten thousand proofs and demonstrations that stuck to me like a radish to a wall. “Stop talking like a madman,” I would say. “I suppose it’s dishonest of my cow to give milk and of my horse to pull my wagon for me?” I had some idiot question like that for every idiot statement that he made; trust Tevye not to let him get away with anything. If only Tevye hadn’t trusted Peppercorn!.. And he wasn’t embarrassed to speak his mind, either. One evening, for instance, as we were sitting on the front stoop of my house and philosophizing away, he says to me, “You know what, Reb Tevye? You have some wonderful daughters.”
“You don’t say!” I said. “Thanks for letting me know. They have a wonderful father to take after.”
“Especially your second eldest,” he says. “What a head she has! She’s perfection itself.”
“So what else is new?” I say. “The apple fell close to the tree.” Between you and me, though, my heart swelled with pleasure. Show me the father who doesn’t like to hear his kids praised! Was I a prophet that I should have known what a crazy love affair would come of it? Listen and I’ll tell you all about it.
In a word, vayehi erev vayehi voyker—one afternoon as I was making my rounds of the Boiberik dachas, someone hailed me in the street. I looked around to see who it was — why, it’s Efrayim the Matchmaker! Efrayim the Matchmaker, you should know, is a Jew who makes matches. “Begging your pardon, Reb Tevye,” he says, “but I’d like to have a word with you.”
“With pleasure,” I say, reining in my horse. “I hope it’s a good one.”
“Reb Tevye, you have a daughter,” he says.
“I have seven, God bless them,” I say.
“I know you do,” he says. “So do I.”
“In that case,” I say, “we have fourteen between the two of us.”
“All joking aside,” he says, “what I want to talk to you about is this: being as you know a matchmaker, I have a match for you — and not just any match either, but something really exclusive, extraprime and superfine!”
“Perhaps you can tell me,” I say, “what’s hiding under the label, because if it’s a tailor, a shoemaker, or a schoolteacher, he can save himself the trouble and so can I. Revakh vehatsoloh ya’amoyd layehudim mimokoym akher—thank you very kindly but I’ll look for a son-in-law elsewhere. It says in the Talmud that—”
“Good Lord, Reb Tevye,” he says, “are you starting in on the Talmud again? Before a body can talk with you, he has to spend a year boning up. The whole world is nothing but a page of Talmud to you. If I were you, I’d listen to the offer I’m about to make you, because it’s going to take your breath away.”
And with that he delivers himself of an after-dinner speech about the young man’s credentials. What can I tell you? Champagne and caviar! In the first place, he comes from the best of families, not from the hoi polloi — and that, I want you to know, is what matters most to me, because although we have all kinds in my family, akudim nekudim uvrudim—well-off folk, working folk, even some pretty common folk — I’m far from a nobody myself … Secondly, Efrayim tells me, his man can parse a verse with the best of them, he knows how to read the small print — and that’s no trifle with me either, because I’d sooner eat a buttered pig than sit down to a meal with an illiterate. A Jew who can’t read a Jewish book is a hundred times worse than a sinner. I don’t give a hoot if you go to synagogue or not; I don’t even care if you stand on your head and point your toes at the sky; as long as you can match me quote for quote and line for line, you’re a man after my own heart, that’s just the way Tevye is … And finally, says Efrayim, the fellow is rolling in money; why, he rides about in a droshky pulled by a pair of horses who leave a trail of smoke wherever they go — and that, I thought, is certainly no crime either. Any way you look at it, it’s an improvement on being poor. How does the Talmud put it? Yo’oh aniyuso leyisro’eyl, not even God likes a beggar. And the proof of it is that if He liked them, He wouldn’t make them beg …
“Is that all?” I say. “I’m waiting to hear more.”
“More?” he says. “What more can you want? He’s crazy in love, he’s dying to have you. That is, I don’t mean you, Reb Tevye, I mean your daughter Hodl. He says he wants a beauty …”
“Does he now?” I say. “He should only deserve to have her. But just who is this hotshot of yours? A bachelor? A widower? A divorcé? Or the Devil’s own helper?”
“He’s a young bachelor,” he says. “That is, he’s not so young as all that, but a bachelor he certainly is.”
“And what might his God-given name be?” I ask.
That, though, was something I couldn’t get out of him for the life of me. “Run your daughter down to Boiberik,” Efrayim says, “and I’ll be glad to tell you.”
“Run my daughter down to Boiberik?” I say. “Do you think she’s a horse being brought to a fair?”
Well, a matchmaker, as you know, can talk a wall into marrying a hole in the ground; we agreed that after the Sabbath I would run my daughter down to Boiberik. I can’t tell you what sweet dreams that gave me. I imagined Hodl trailing smoke in a droshky, and the whole world burning up too, but with envy — and not just for the droshky and the horses, but for all the good I would do once I was the father of a rich woman. Why, I’d become a real philanthropist, giving this beggar twenty-five rubles, that one fifty, that one over there an even hundred; I’d let everyone know that a poor man is a human being too … That’s just what I thought as I traveled home that evening. “Giddyap,” I told my horse, giving him a taste of the whip. “If you want your oats tonight, you’d better dance a little faster, because im eyn kemakh eyn Toyroh, by me there’s no something for nothing.”
In a word, there I was talking to him in Horsish when who do I see slipping out of the forest but a young couple, a boy and a girl, deep in talk and walking so close that they’re practically hugging. Who can that be in the middle of nowhere, I wondered, squinting into the setting sun at them. Why, I could have sworn it was Peppercorn! But who was the schlimazel out with at this hour? I shaded my eyes with my hand and looked again: who was the female? My God, I said to myself, can that be Hodl? Yes, it’s her, all right, or else I’m not a Jew … so these are the grammar lessons he’s been giving her! Ah, Tevye, I thought, are you ever a jackass — and I stopped my horse and called out to them, “A good evening to you both! What’s the latest war news from Japan? I hope it isn’t too nosy of me to ask what you’re doing here, because if you happen to be looking for pie in the sky, it’s already been eaten by Brodsky …”