Mendel was suddenly weak. He had to sit down. He stared at the shining record in Skovronnek's hands.
“I know what you're thinking,” said Skovronnek.
“Yes,” answered Mendel.
Skovronnek turned the crank again. “A beautiful song,” said Skovronnek, leaned his head on his left shoulder and listened. Gradually the shop filled up with the tardy neighbors. No one spoke. All listened to the song and rocked their heads in time to it.
And they listened to it sixteen times, until they knew it by heart.
Mendel remained alone in the shop. He carefully locked the door from inside, cleared out the display window, began to undress. Each of his steps was accompanied by the song. As he fell asleep, it seemed to him that the blue and silver melody merged with the pitiful whimper, with Menuchim's, his own Menuchim's only, long unheard song.
The days grew longer. The mornings already contained so much brightness that they could even break through the closed iron shutters into Mendel's windowless back room. In April the street awoke a good hour earlier. Mendel lit the spirit stove, put on the
tea, filled the small blue washbasin, plunged his face in the bowl, dried himself with the corner of the towel that hung on the door latch, opened the shutters, took a mouthful of water, carefully spat it on the floorboards and gazed at the winding ornaments that the bright spray from his lips drew in the dust. Already the spirit stove hissed; the clock hadn't even struck six yet. Mendel stepped outside. The windows were opening in the street, as if of their own accord. It was spring.
It was spring. People were preparing for Easter,
*
in all the houses Mendel helped. He planed the wooden tabletops to rid them of the profane remains of food from the whole year. The round, cylindrical packages in which the Easter bread was stacked in crimson paper he placed on the white shelves of the display windows, and the wines from Palestine he freed from the cobwebs under which they had been resting in the cool cellars. He took apart the neighbors' beds and carried them piece by piece into the courtyards, where the mild April sun lured out the vermin and delivered them to extermination with gasoline, turpentine and petroleum. In pink and sky-blue decorative paper he cut with scissors round and angular holes and fringes and attached the paper with thumbtacks to the kitchen racks as an artful covering for the dishes. The casks and tubs he filled with hot water, great iron balls he held in the stove fire on wooden rods until they glowed. Then he submerged the balls in the tubs and casks, the water hissed, the vessels were purified, as the rule commanded. In gigantic mortars he pounded the Easter bread into flour, poured it into clean sacks and tied them with blue ribbons. All this he had once done in his own house. Spring had come more slowly there than in America. Mendel remembered the aging gray snow that lined the wooden pavement of the sidewalk in Zuchnow at this time of year, the crystal icicles on the edge of the faucets, the sudden gentle rains that sang in the gutters all night long, the distant thunder that rolled away behind the pine forest, the white frost that tenderly covered each light blue morning, Menuchim, whom Miriam had stuck into a roomy barrel to get him out of the way, and the hope that finally, finally this year the Messiah would come. He didn't come. He isn't coming, thought Mendel, he will not come. Let others wait for him. Mendel wasn't waiting.
Nonetheless, this spring Mendel seemed to his friends and neighbors to have changed. They observed sometimes that he hummed a song, and they caught a gentle smile under his white beard.
“He's becoming childish, he's already old,” said Groschel.
“He has forgotten everything,” said Rottenberg.
“It's a pleasure before death,” declared Menkes.
Skovronnek, who knew him best, was silent. Only once, one evening before going to sleep, he said to his wife, “Ever since the
new records came, our Mendel is another man. I catch him sometimes winding up a gramophone himself. What do you think about that?”
“I think,” Mrs. Skovronnek replied impatiently, “that Mendel is getting old and childish and will soon be useless.” She had already been dissatisfied with Mendel for some time. The older he became, the less sympathy she had for him. Gradually she also forgot that Mendel had been a wealthy man, and her compassion, which had been nourished by her respect (for her heart was small), died away. She also no longer addressed him as she had in the beginning: Mr. Singer â but simply: Mendel, as almost the whole world did. And if she had formerly given him orders with a certain restraint meant to show that his compliance at once honored and shamed her, she now began to command him so impatiently that her dissatisfaction with his obedience was already visible from the outset. Even though Mendel was not hard of hearing, Mrs. Skovronnek raised her voice to speak with him, as if she feared being misunderstood and as if she wanted to show through her shouting that Mendel often carried out her orders incorrectly because she had spoken to him in her usual register. Her shouting was a precautionary measure; the only thing that affronted Mendel. For he, who was so humiliated by heaven, made little of people's good-natured and careless mockery, and only when someone doubted his ability to understand was he offended. “Mendel, hurry up,” thus began every order from Mrs. Skovronnek. He made her impatient, he seemed to her too slow. “Don't shout so,” Mendel replied occasionally,
“I hear you.” “But you're not hurrying, you're taking your time!” “I have less time than you, Mrs. Skovronnek, for I'm older than you!” Mrs. Skovronnek, who did not immediately comprehend the answer's connotation and the rebuke and only believed herself to have been mocked, turned immediately to the nearest person in the shop: “Well, what do you say to that? He's getting old! Our Mendel is getting old!” She would have gladly maligned him for entirely other qualities, but she settled for the mention of his age, which she regarded as a vice. When Skovronnek heard that sort of talk, he said to his wife: “We're all getting old! I am just as old as Mendel â and you're not getting any younger either!” “You can go ahead and marry a young woman,” said Mrs. Skovronnek. She was happy that she finally had a ready-made reason for a marital dispute. And Mendel, who knew the development of these quarrels and comprehended from the beginning that Mrs. Skovronnek's rage would ultimately be vented against her husband and his friend, trembled for his friendship.
Today Mrs. Skovronnek was hostile toward Mendel for a particular reason. “Imagine,” she said to her husband, “a few days ago my chopping knife disappeared. I can swear that Mendel took it. But when I ask him, he knows nothing about it. He's getting older and older, he's like a child!” In fact Mendel Singer had taken Mrs. Skovronnek's chopping knife and hidden it. He had long been secretly preparing a great plan, the last of his life. One evening he believed that he could carry it out. He pretended to fall asleep on the sofa while the neighbors talked at Skovronnek's.
But in reality Mendel wasn't sleeping at all. He was lying in wait and listening with closed eyelids until the last of them had left. Then he pulled out the chopping knife from under the pillow of the sofa, stuck it under his caftan and slipped into the evening street. The streetlamps were not yet lit, from some windows yellow lamplight already shone. Opposite the house in which he had lived with Deborah, Mendel Singer stood and peered at the windows of his former apartment. The young married couple Frisch now lived there, downstairs they had opened a modern ice cream parlor. Now the young people emerged from the house. They closed the parlor. They were going to a concert. They were frugal, stingy, one might say, industrious, and they loved music. Young Frisch's father had conducted a wedding band in Kovno. Today a concert was being given by a philharmonic orchestra, just come from Europe. Frisch had already been speaking about it for days. Now they were going. They didn't see Mendel. He crept across the street, entered the house, felt his way up the old familiar banister and pulled all the keys out of his pocket. He got them from the neighbors, who entrusted him with watching their apartments when they went to the movies. Without difficulty he opened the door. He locked the bolt, lay down flat on the floor and began to knock on one floorboard after another. It took a long time. He grew tired, granted himself a short break and then went back to work. Finally there came a hollow sound, just at the place where Deborah's bed once had stood. Mendel removed the dirt from the gaps, loosened the board at all four edges with the chopping
knife and pried it up. He hadn't been mistaken, he found what he was looking for. He grasped the tightly knotted handkerchief, hid it in his caftan, replaced the board and left soundlessly. No one was in the stairwell, no one had seen him. Earlier than usual he locked the shop, he rolled down the shutters. He lit the large hanging lamp, the round burner, and sat down in its beam of light. He unknotted the handkerchief and counted its contents. Sixty-seven dollars in coins and bills Deborah had saved. It was a lot, but it was not enough and disappointed Mendel. If he added his own savings, the alms and small payments for his work in the houses, then he had exactly ninety-six dollars. That was not enough. “A few more months then!” Mendel whispered. “I have time.”
Yes, he had time, he must go on living for quite a long time! Before him lay the great ocean. Once again he had to cross it. The whole great sea waited for Mendel. All of Zuchnow and its environs wait for him: the barracks, the pine forest, the frogs in the swamps and the crickets in the fields. If Menuchim is dead, he is lying in the small cemetery and waiting. Mendel too will lie down. First he will enter Sameshkin's farm, he will no longer fear the dogs, give him a wolf from Zuchnow, and he is not afraid. Heedless of the bugs and the worms, the tree frogs and the grasshoppers, Mendel will be able to lie down on the naked earth. The church bells will sound and remind him of the listening light in Menuchim's foolish eyes. Mendel will answer: “I have come home, dear Sameshkin, let others wander through the world, my worlds have died, I have returned to fall asleep here forever!” The
blue night is stretched over the land, the stars are shining, the frogs are croaking, the crickets are chirping, and over there, in the dark forest, someone is singing Menuchim's song.
Thus Mendel falls asleep, in his hand he holds the knotted handkerchief.
The next morning he went to Skovronnek's apartment, lay the chopping knife on the cold kitchen stove and said: “Here, Mrs. Skovronnek, the chopping knife has turned up!”
He wanted to leave again quickly, but Mrs. Skovronnek began: “It has turned up! That wasn't hard, you hid it after all! By the way, you were fast asleep yesterday. We were outside the shop again and knocked. Did you hear? Frisch from the ice cream parlor has something very important to tell you. You should go over to him immediately.”
Mendel was frightened. So someone had seen him yesterday, perhaps someone else had plundered the apartment, and they suspected Mendel. Or perhaps those weren't Deborah's savings at all, but Mrs. Frisch's, and he had robbed her. His knees trembled. “Permit me to sit down,” he said to Mrs. Skovronnek. “For two minutes you can sit,” she said, “then I have to cook.” “What sort of important matter is it?” he probed. But he already knew that the woman would reveal nothing to him. She reveled in his curiosity and was silent. Then she thought the time had come to send him away. “I don't get involved in other people's business! Just go to Frisch!” she said. And Mendel left and resolved not to set foot in Frisch's. It could only be something bad. It would
come on its own soon enough. He waited. But in the afternoon Skovronnek's grandchildren came to visit. Mrs. Skovronnek sent him for three portions of strawberry ice cream. Timidly Mendel entered the shop. Luckily Mr. Frisch wasn't there. His wife said: “My husband has something very important to tell you, you must come in the afternoon!”
Mendel acted as if he hadn't heard. His heart raced wildly, it wanted to flee him, with both hands he held it back. Something bad definitely threatened him. He wanted to tell the truth, Frisch would believe him. If no one believed him, he'd go to jail. Well, there was no harm in that. In jail he will die. Not in Zuchnow.
He couldn't leave the vicinity of the ice cream parlor. He walked up and down in front of the shop. He saw young Frisch return home. He wanted to wait longer, but his feet hastened by themselves into the shop. He opened the door, which set off a shrill bell, and no longer found the strength to close the door, so that the alarm incessantly sounded, and Mendel, deafened, remained trapped in its violent noise, captive to the ringing and incapable of moving. Mr. Frisch himself closed the door. And in the silence that now ensued, Mendel heard Mr. Frisch say to his wife: “Quick, a raspberry soda for Mr. Singer!”
How long had it been since anyone had called Mendel “Mr. Singer”? Not until that moment did he feel that people had long been calling him only “Mendel” so as to insult him. It is a mean joke of Frisch's, he thought. The whole neighborhood knows that
this young man is stingy, he himself knows that I will not pay for the raspberry soda. I won't drink it.
“Thanks, thanks,” said Mendel, “I won't have anything to drink!”
“You won't turn us down,” the woman said with a smile.
“You won't turn me down,” said young Frisch.
He pulled Mendel to one of the small thin-legged cast-iron tables and pushed the old man into a broad wicker chair. He himself sat down on an ordinary wooden chair, moved close to Mendel and began: