"Is it possible for me to see her now?" Max Greitzer asked. "I am a very close friend of hers, and ..."

"Let me ask if she's ready." The girl disappeared behind a door.

Dr. Greitzer understood what she meant. The dead are elaborately fixed up before they are shown to their families and those who attend the funeral.

Soon the girl returned and said, "It's all right. Fourth floor, room three."

A man in a black suit took him up in the elevator and opened the door to room number 3. Liza lay in a coffin opened to her shoulders, her face covered with gauze. He recognized her only because he knew it was she. Her black hair had the dullness of dye. Her cheeks were rouged, and the wrinkles around her closed eyes were hidden under makeup. On her reddened lips there was a hint of a smile. How do they produce a smile? Max Greitzer wondered. Liza had once accused him of being a mechanical person, a robot with no emotion. The accusation was false then, but now, strangely, it seemed to be true. He was neither dejected nor frightened.

The door to the room opened and a woman with an uncanny resemblance to Liza entered. "It's her sister, Bella," Max Greitzer said to himself. Liza had often spoken about her younger sister, who lived in California, but he had never met her. He stepped aside as the woman approached the coffin. If she burst out crying, he would be nearby to comfort her. She showed no special emotion, and he decided to leave her with her sister, but it occurred to him that she might be afraid to stay alone with a corpse, even her own sister's.

After a few moments, she turned and said, "Yes, it's her."

"I expect you flew in from California," Max Greitzer said, just to say something.

"From California?"

"Your sister was once close to me. She often spoke about you. My name is Max Greitzer."

The woman stood silent and seemed to ponder his words. Then she said, "You're mistaken."

"Mistaken? You aren't her sister, Bella?"

"Don't you know that Max Greitzer died? There was an obituary in the newspapers."

Max Greitzer tried to smile. "Probably another Max Greitzer." The moment he uttered these words, he grasped the truth: he and Liza were both dead-the woman who spoke to him was not Bella but Liza herself. He now realized that if he were still alive he would be shaken with grief. Only someone on the other side of life could accept with such indifference the death of a person he had once loved. Was what he was experiencing the immortality of the soul, he wondered. If he were able, he would laugh now, but the illusion of body had vanished; he and Liza no longer had material substance. Yet they were both present. Without a voice he asked, "Is this possible?"

He heard Liza answer in her smart style, "If it is so, it must be possible." She added, "For your information, your body is lying here too."

"How did it happen? I went to sleep last night a healthy man."

"It wasn't last night and you were not healthy. A degree of amnesia seems to accompany this process. It happened to me a day ago and therefore-"

"I had a heart attack?"

"Perhaps."

"What happened to you?" he asked.

"With me, everything takes a long time. How did you hear about me, anyway?" she added.

"I thought I was lying in bed. Fifteen minutes to eight, the telephone rang and a woman told me about you. She refused to give her name."

"Fifteen minutes to eight, your body was already here. Do you want to go look at yourself? I've seen you. You are in number 5. They made a krasavetz out of you."

He hadn't heard anyone say krasavetz for years. It meant a beautiful man. Liza had been born in Russia and she often used this word.

"No. I'm not curious."

In the chapel it was quiet. A clean-shaven rabbi with curly hair and a gaudy tie made a speech about Liza. "She was an intellectual woman in the best sense of the word," he said. "When she came to America, she worked all day in a shop and at night she attended college, graduating with high honors. She had bad luck and many things in her life went awry, but she remained a lady of high integrity."

"I never met that man. How could he know about me?" Liza asked.

"Your relatives hired him and gave him the information," Greitzer said.

"I hate these professional compliments."

"Who's the fellow with the gray mustache on the first bench?" Max Greitzer asked.

Liza uttered something like a laugh. "My has-been husband."

"You were married? I heard only that you had a lover."

"I tried everything, with no success whatsoever."

"Where would you like to go?" Max Greitzer asked.

"Perhaps to your service."

"Absolutely not."

"What state of being is this?" Liza asked. "I see everything. I recognize everyone. There is my Aunt Reizl. Right behind her is my Cousin Becky. I once introduced you to her."

"Yes, true."

"The chapel is half empty. From the way I acted toward others in such circumstances, it is what I deserve. I'm sure that for you the chapel will be packed. Do you want to wait and see?"

"I haven't the slightest desire to find out."

The rabbi had finished his eulogy and a cantor recited "God Full of Mercy." His chanting was more like crying and Liza said, "My own father wouldn't have gone into such lamentations."

"Paid tears."

"I've had enough of it," Liza said. "Let's go."

They floated from the funeral parlor to the street. There, six limousines were lined up behind the hearse. One of the chauffeurs was eating a banana.

"Is this what they call death?" Liza asked. "It's the same city, the same streets, the same stores. I seem the same, too."

"Yes, but without a body."

"What am I then? A soul?"

"Really, I don't know what to tell you," Max Greitzer said. "Do you feel any hunger?"

"Hunger? No."

"Thirst?"

"No. No. What do you say to all this?"

"The unbelievable, the absurd, the most vulgar superstitions are proving to be true," Max Greitzer said.

"Perhaps we will find there is even a Hell and a Paradise."

"Anything is possible at this point."

"Perhaps we will be summoned to the Court on High after the burial and asked to account for our deeds?"

"Even this can be."

"How does it come about that we are together?"

"Please, don't ask any more questions. I know as little as you."

"Does this mean that all the philosophic works you read and wrote were one big lie?"

"Worse-they were sheer nonsense."

At that moment, four pallbearers carried out the coffin holding Liza's body. A wreath lay on top, with an inscription in gold letters: "To the unforgettable Liza in loving memory."

"Whose wreath is that?" Liza asked, and she answered herself, "For this he's not stingy."

"Would you like to go with them to the cemetery?" Max Greitzer asked.

"No-what for? That phony cantor may recite a whining Kaddish after me."

"What do you want to do?"

Liza listened to herself. She wanted nothing. What a peculiar state, not to have a single wish. In all the years she could remember, her will, her yearnings, her fears, tormented her without letting up. Her dreams were full of desperation, ecstasy, wild passions. More than any other catastrophe, she dreaded the final day, when all that has been is extinguished and the darkness of the grave begins. But here she was, remembering the past, and Max Greitzer was again with her. She said to him, "I imagined that the end would be much more dramatic."

"I don't believe this is the end," he said. "Perhaps a transition between two modes of existence."

"If so, how long will it last?"

"Since time has no validity, duration has no meaning."

"Well, you've remained the same with your puzzles and paradoxes. Come, we cannot just stay here if you want to avoid seeing your mourners," Liza said. "Where should we go?"

"You lead."

Max Greitzer took her astral arm and they began to rise without purpose, without a destination. As they might have done from an airplane, they looked down at the earth and saw cities, rivers, fields, lakes-everything but human beings.

"Did you say something?" Liza asked.

And Max Greitzer answered. "Of all my disenchantments, immortality is the greatest."

Neighbors.

THEY both lived in my building on Central Park West-he two floors below me, she one above. Greater contrast than those two would be hard to imagine. Morris Terkeltoyb, as I will call him, was a writer of "true stories" for the Yiddish newspaper to which I also contributed. Margit Levy was the former lover of an Italian count. One quality was common to the two of them: I could never learn the truth about either. Morris Terkeltoyb assured me that his stories were invented, but when I read them I realized they couldn't be all fantasy. They contained details and odd incidents that only life itself could devise. Besides, I often saw him with elderly people who looked like the characters out of his tales. Morris Terkeltoyb was far from being a man of literary skill. His style teemed with cliches. I once saw a manuscript of his at the newspaper. He had no notion of syntax. He used commas and hyphens indiscriminately. Each sentence ended with three dashes. But Morris Terkeltoyb wanted me to believe that he was a creative writer, not a reporter.

In the years I knew him, he told me many lies. Countless women threw themselves into his arms-socialites, stars of the Metropolitan Opera, famous authoresses, ballet dancers, actresses. Each time Morris Terkeltoyb traveled to Europe on vacation, he returned with a list of fresh amorous adventures. Once, he showed me a love letter in handwriting I recognized as his own. He wasn't even ashamed to include in his stories scenes taken from world literature. Actually, he was a lonesome old bachelor with a sick heart and one kidney. He himself seemed unaware of the missing kidney; I knew about it from a relative of his.

Morris Terkeltoyb was short, broad-shouldered, with remnants of white hair that he combed into a bridge spanning his skull. He had large yellow eyes, a nose like a beak, and a mouth almost without lips-a gash revealing a large set of false teeth. He said he was descended from rabbis and merchants, and he must have studied the Talmud in his youth, because his conversation was filled with quotations from it. Yiddish was his language, but he also spoke a broken English, faulty Polish, and the kind of Yiddish-German that was used at Zionist congresses. Slowly, I managed to dig out some truths from his exaggerations. In Poland he had been engaged to the daughter of a rabbi; she died of typhoid fever a week before the wedding. He had studied in Hildesheimer's rabbinical seminary in Berlin but never graduated. He attended lectures on philosophy at a university in Switzerland. He had published a few poems in a Yiddish collection and some articles in the Hebrew newspaper the Morning Star. Of his mistresses I knew only one-the widow of a Hebrew teacher. I met her at a New Year's party, and after a few drinks she told me that she had been involved with Morris Terkeltoyb for years. He suffered from insomnia and had periods of impotence. She made fun of his boasting. He had bragged to her that he had had an affair with Isadora Duncan.

The other neighbor, Margit Levy, seemed not to be a liar, but the events of her life were so strange and complicated that I could never figure her out. Her father was a Jew; her mother belonged to the Hungarian aristocracy. Her father was supposed to have committed suicide when he learned that his wife was having an affair with a member of the Esterhazy nobility-a relative of the Esterhazy who was a major figure in the Dreyfus affair. Her mother's lover committed suicide when he lost his fortune at Monte Carlo. After his death, Margit's mother became insane and remained in a clinic in Vienna for twenty years. Margit was brought up by her father's sister, who was the paramour of the Brazilian owner of a coffee plantation. Margit Levy spoke a dozen languages. She had valises filled with photographs, letters, all kinds of documents that testified to the truth of her stories. She used to tell me, "From my life one could write not one book but a whole literature. Hollywood movies are child's play compared to what happened to me."

Now Margit Levy lived in a single room as the boarder of an old maid and survived on Social Security. She suffered from rheumatism and could barely walk. She took mincing steps, supporting herself on two canes. Though she claimed to be in her sixties, I calculated that she was well over seventy. Margit Levy existed in a state of confusion. Each time she visited me, she forgot something-her pocketbook, her gloves, her glasses, even one of her canes. Sometimes she dyed her hair red, sometimes black. She rouged her wrinkled face and used too much mascara. There were black bags under her dark eyes. The nails of her crooked fingers were painted bright red. Her neck made me think of a plucked chicken. I told her that I was poor at languages, but she tried again and again to talk to me in French, Italian, Hungarian. Though her name was Jewish, I noticed that she wore a little cross beneath her blouse, and I suspected that she had been converted. Margit Levy had one time borrowed a book of mine from the public library, and after that she became a reader of whatever I wrote. She assured me that she possessed all the powers I described in my stories-telepathy, clairvoyance, premonition, the ability to communicate with the dead. She owned a Ouija board and a small table without nails. Poor as she was, she subscribed to a number of occult magazines. After her first visit to me, she took my hand and said in a trembling voice, "I knew that you would come into my life. This will be my last great friendship."

And she brought me as a gift a pair of cuff-links that she had inherited from Count Esterhazy-the same Esterhazy who lost eighty thousand crowns in one night and then put a bullet through his head.

It didn't occur to me to bring my two neighbors together. The truth is that I didn't invite either one of them. They used to knock on my door, and if I wasn't too busy I would ask whoever it was to come in, and I would treat him or her to coffee and cookies. Morris Terkeltoyb received Hebrew newspapers from Tel Aviv. When he found a review of a book of mine or even an advertisement, he brought it to me. From time to time, Margit Levy would bake a cake in the oven of the old maid where she boarded, and she would insist on stopping by to give me a piece.

But once it happened that both came in at the same time. Margit found among her papers a letter she had spoken to me about. Morris had discovered a monthly magazine from South Africa that reprinted a sketch of mine. I introduced my guests to each other; though they had been living in the same building for years, they had never met. Margit had become partially deaf in recent months. For some reason she could not pronounce "Terkeltoyb." She pulled at her ear, frowned, mispronounced the name. At the same time she shouted into Morris Terkeltoyb's ear as if he were the one who was hard of hearing. Morris spoke to her in English, but she could not understand his accent. He shifted to German. Margit Levy shook her head and made him repeat each word. Like a demanding teacher, she corrected his grammar and pronunciation. He had the habit of swallowing words, and when he became excited his voice was shrill. Without finishing the coffee, he got up and went to the door. "Who is that crazy old woman?" he asked me. He slammed out as if I were to blame for his failure to impress Margit Levy.

When he had left, Margit Levy, who as a rule was exaggeratedly polite with everyone, going so far as to shower compliments on the neighbors' dogs and cats, called Morris Terkeltoyb an uneducated idiot, a ruffian. Though she knew that I came from Poland, she couldn't contain her rage and spoke of him as "a Polish schlemiel." She apologized immediately and assured me that I was an exception. The spots that came out on her cheeks were so red they could be seen through the rouge. She left the coffee I had placed before her. At the door she took both my wrists, kissed me, and pleaded, "Please, my dear, do not let me meet that creature again."

I imagined that I heard her cry as she made her way up the steps. Margit had a fear of elevators. She had been stuck in one for three hours. Also, an elevator door had closed on her hand, causing her to lose a diamond ring. She sued the building.

After this encounter, I decided never to let one of the two enter my apartment if the other was already there. I had lost patience with both of them. When Morris Terkeltoyb wasn't boasting of his successes with women or the brilliant offers he got from publishers and universities, he complained about the rudeness he met with from editors, reviewers, officials of the journalists' union, secretaries of the P.E.N. club. He was accepted nowhere; people were always doing him in. The proofreaders on our newspaper not only refused to correct the mistakes he marked in his stories but they intentionally crippled his text. Once, he caught a makeup man in the composing room reversing lines of type in an article. When Morris protested to the printers' union, he received no reply. He called Yiddish literature a racket. He accused playwrights of the Yiddish theater of stealing from his stories. He said to me, "You probably believe that I suffer from a persecution mania. You forget that people really do persecute one another."

"No, I don't."

"My own father persecuted me." And Morris Terkeltoyb recited in a plaintive voice a long monologue that could have been serialized as a dozen chapters on his true-story page. Whenever I tried to interrupt to ask for details, he rushed on with such intensity that there was no way to stop him. He dismissed my questions with an impatient wave of his hand. In the end, his stories left me utterly depressed.

I decided that with all their differences Margit Levy and Morris Terkeltoyb had much in common. Just as he did, Margit mixed up names, dates, episodes. Like him, she accused people who had died years before of innumerable offenses against her. All the evil powers had conspired to ruin Margit Levy. A broker who had invested her money became a devotee of race tracks and squandered her capital. A physician who was supposed to cure her rheumatism gave her an injection that brought out a rash on her body and caused an illness that almost killed her. Often she slipped on ice in winter, fell on escalators in department stores. Her pocketbook was snatched. Once, she was held up in the middle of the day in a street crowded with passers-by. Margit Levy swore that when she went on vacation the spinster who was her landlady wore her dresses and underwear, that she opened her letters, and even helped herself to her medicines.

"Who would use another person's medicine?" I asked her.

She replied, "If people could, they'd steal each other's eyes."

In the summer, I took a long holiday. I went to Switzerland, France, Israel. I left in the middle of August, when my hay fever begins, and came back at the beginning of December. I had paid my rent in advance, locking up my apartment before I left. There was nothing in it for thieves except books and manuscripts.

The day I returned, snow was falling in New York. When I got out of the taxi in front of my building, I was stunned by what I saw. Margit Levy was creeping along on a cane and a crutch, with Morris Terkeltoyb holding on to her arm. With his free hand he was pushing a cartful of food from the supermarket on Columbus Avenue. Margit's face was yellow from the cold and more wrinkled than ever. She wore a mangy fur coat and a black hat that reminded me of my childhood in Warsaw. She seemed ill, emaciated. Her eyes, too close together, had a piercing expression like those of a bird of prey. Morris Terkeltoyb had also aged. His beaked nose was red, and white whiskers sprouted on his face.

No matter how unusual an event may seem, my astonishment never lasts more than an instant. I approached them and asked, "How are you, my friends?"

Margit shook her head. "The facts speak for themselves."

Later a neighbor told me that the old maid in whose apartment Margit boarded had given up her place to go to Miami. Margit would have been thrown out into the street. Instead, she had moved in with Morris Terkeltoyb. How this came about my neighbor did not know. I noticed that the name of Margit Levy had been added on Morris Terkeltoyb's letter box.

A few days after my return, Margit visited me. She wept, mixed German with English, and told me at great length how the selfish spinster had decided without warning to move away, how all the neighbors had treated her misfortune with indifference. The only one who showed humanity was Morris Terkeltoyb. Margit acted as if he had taken her in as just a boarder. But the next day Morris knocked at my door, and from his unfinished sentences and gesticulations it became clear that their relationship was more than that of tenant and boarder. He said, "One gets older, not younger. When you are ill, you need someone to bring you a glass of tea." He nodded, winked, smiled guiltily and sheepishly, inviting me to come see them in the evening.