It was a hot sunny morning when the commission came through Mendel's street. The last in the row of Jewish houses was Mendel's house. With a police officer, who was carrying a large book under his arm, Dr. Soltysiuk walked with broad strides, a fluttering blonde mustache on his brown face, a gold-rimmed pince-nez on his reddened nose, in creaking yellow leather leggings, and his coat hanging casually over his blue
rubashka
due to the heat so that the sleeves looked like another pair of arms, which seemed equally poised to perform vaccinations: thus came Dr. Soltysiuk into the street of the Jews. Toward him resounded the wailing of women and the howling of children who had not been able to hide. The police officer hauled women and children out of deep cellars and down from high attics, out of tiny closets and large straw baskets. The sun brooded, the doctor sweated. He had no less than one hundred and seventy-six Jews to vaccinate. For each one who had escaped and could not be reached he thanked God inwardly. When he came to the fourth of the little blue-washed houses, he beckoned to the police officer to stop searching so zealously. The farther the doctor went, the louder the screaming swelled. It wafted along before his strides. The howls
of those who were still afraid joined the curses of the already vaccinated. Weary and completely disconcerted, he sank down with a heavy groan on the bench in Mendel's kitchen and asked for a glass of water. His glance fell on little Menuchim, he lifted up the cripple and said: “He will be an epileptic.” He poured fear into the father's heart. “All children have spasms,” the mother objected. “It's not that,” declared the doctor. “But I might be able to cure him. There's life in his eyes.”
He wanted to take the little one to the hospital at once. Deborah was ready. “They'll cure him for free,” she said. But Mendel replied: “Be quiet, Deborah! No doctor can cure him if God doesn't will it. Shall he grow up among Russian children? Hear not one holy word? Eat milk with meat and chickens fried in butter, as they are served in the hospital? We are poor, but I will not sell Menuchim's soul just because he can be cured for free. One is not healed in strange hospitals.” Like a hero Mendel held out his scrawny white arm for the vaccination. But he did not give Menuchim away. He resolved to beg God's help for his youngest and to fast twice a week, Monday and Thursday. Deborah decided to make pilgrimages to the cemetery and appeal to the bones of the ancestors to intercede with the almighty. Thus would Menuchim become healthy and not an epileptic.
Nonetheless, after the hour of the vaccination, fear hung over the house of Mendel Singer like a monster, and sorrow blew through their hearts like a constant hot and biting wind. Deborah could sigh, and her husband did not reprimand her. Longer than
usual she held her head buried in her hands when she prayed, as if she were creating her own nights, to bury her fear in them, and her own darknesses, so as to find grace in them. For she believed, as it was written, that God's light shone in the dimnesses and his goodness illuminated the blackness. But Menuchim's attacks did not cease. The older children grew and grew, their health clamored evilly in their mother's ears like an enemy of Menuchim, the invalid. It was as if the healthy children drew strength from the sick one, and Deborah hated their shouting, their red cheeks, their straight limbs. She made pilgrimages to the cemetery through rain and sun. She struck her head against the mossy sandstone that grew from the bones of her fathers and mothers. She invoked the dead, whose silent consoling replies she believed she heard. On the way home she trembled with the hope of finding her son healthy. She neglected her duty at the stove, the soup boiled over, the clay pots cracked, the pans rusted, the greenish shimmering glasses shattered with a harsh crash, the chimney of the petroleum lamp was darkened with soot, the wick was charred to a miserable stub, the dirt of many soles and many weeks coated the floorboards, the lard melted away in the pot, the withered buttons fell from the children's shirts like leaves before the winter.
One day, a week before the high holy days (the summer had turned into rain, and the rain wanted to turn into snow), Deborah packed her son in the basket, laid wool blankets over him, placed him on the coachman Sameshkin's cart, and traveled to Kluczýsk, where the rabbi lived. The board seat lay loosely on the
straw and slid with every movement of the wagon. Deborah held it down with only her body weight, it was alive, it wanted to jump. The narrow winding road was covered with silver-gray mud in which the high boots of the passersby and the bottom halves of the wheels sank. Rain veiled the fields, scattered the smoke over the isolated huts, ground with endless, fine patience everything solid that it struck, the limestone that here and there grew like a white tooth out of the black earth, the sawed-up logs on the sides of the road, the fragrant boards piled in front of the entrance to the sawmill, also Deborah's headscarf and the wool blankets under which Menuchim lay buried. Not one little drop should wet him. Deborah reckoned that she still had four hours to travel; if the rain didn't cease, she would have to stop at the inn and dry the blankets, drink tea and eat the poppy-seed pretzels she had brought along, which were now soggy too. That could cost five kopecks, five kopecks with which one must not be careless. God showed understanding, it stopped raining. Above hasty wisps of clouds a dissolved sun paled for scarcely an hour; in a new deeper twilight it finally sank.
Black night had settled in Kluczýsk when Deborah arrived. Many helpless people had already come to see the rabbi. Kluczýsk consisted of a few thousand low straw and shingle-covered houses, a kilometer-wide marketplace that was like a dry lake wreathed with buildings. The carts that stood around in it were reminiscent of stranded wrecks; and they were lost, tiny and meaningless, in the circular expanse. The unhitched horses whinnied next to the
carts and trod the sticky mud with tired, slapping hooves. Solitary men wandered with swaying yellow lanterns through the round night to fetch a forgotten blanket and some rattling dishes with provisions. All around, in the thousand little houses, the arrivals were taken in. They slept on plank-beds next to the residents' beds, the infirm, the misshapen, the lame, the mad, the idiotic, the heart-afflicted, the diabetic, who bore cancer in their bodies, whose eyes were contaminated with trachoma, women with infertile wombs, mothers with deformed children, men threatened by prison or military service, deserters who prayed for a successful escape, those given up on by doctors, cast out by mankind, maltreated by earthly justice, the troubled, the yearning, the starving and the satiated, deceivers and the honest, all, all, all . . . Deborah stayed with her husband's Kluczýsk relatives. She didn't sleep. She crouched all night beside Menuchim's basket in the corner next to the stove; dark was the room, dark was her heart. She no longer dared appeal to God, He seemed to her too high, too great, too remote, infinitely far beyond infinite heavens, she would have needed a ladder of a million prayers to reach even a hem of God's garment. She sought help from the dead, appealed to her parents, Menuchim's grandfather after whom the little one was named, then the patriarchs of the Jews, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the bones of Moses, and finally the matriarchs. Wherever support was possible she sent a sigh. She pounded on a hundred graves, on a hundred doors of paradise. For fear that she wouldn't reach the rabbi tomorrow because too many supplicants were there, she
first prayed for the good fortune to make it there early, as if her son's recovery would then be child's play. Finally she saw through the cracks of the black window shutters a few pale streaks of morning. She rose quickly. She kindled the dry pine chips that lay on the stove, sought and found a pot, fetched the samovar from the table, threw in the burning chips, poured in coal, held the urn by both handles, bent down and blew into it so that the sparks flew out and crackled about her face. It was as if she were acting in accordance with a mysterious rite. Soon the water boiled, soon the tea brewed, the family rose, they sat down in front of the earthen brown dishes and drank. Then Deborah lifted her son out of the basket. He whimpered. She kissed him rapidly and many times, with a frantic tenderness, her moist lips smacked on the gray face, the scrawny little hands, the crooked thighs, the bloated belly of the little one, it was as if she were striking the child with her loving motherly mouth. Then she wrapped him up, tied a cord around the package, and hung her son around her neck so that her hands would be free. She wanted to clear a way through the throng in front of the rabbi's door.
With a sharp scream she plunged into the waiting crowd, with cruel fists she forced apart the weak, no one could stop her. Whoever, struck by her hand and pushed away, looked after her so as to send her back was blinded by the burning pain in her face, by her open red mouth, from which a scorching breath seemed to stream, by the crystal gleam of her large rolling tears, by her cheeks, ablaze in red flames, by the thick blue veins on her craned
neck, in which the cries gathered before they broke out. Like a torch Deborah wafted along. With a single shrill cry, in the wake of which the terrible silence of a whole dead world ensued, Deborah finally reached the rabbi's door and fell down before it, the latch in her outstretched right hand. With her left she pounded against the brown wood. Menuchim grazed the ground in front of her.
Someone opened the door. The rabbi stood at the window, his back to her, a thin black line. Suddenly he turned around. She remained at the threshold, she presented her son on both arms, as one offers a sacrifice. She caught a glimmer from the man's pale face, which seemed to be one with his white beard. She had planned to look into the holy man's eyes so as to convince herself that powerful goodness truly lived in them. But now that she stood there, a lake of tears lay before her gaze, and she saw the man behind a white wave of water and salt. He raised his hand, she thought she discerned two scrawny fingers, instruments of blessing. But very close to her she heard the voice of the rabbi, though he only whispered:
“Menuchim, Mendel's son, will grow healthy. There will not be many of his like in Israel. Pain will make him wise, ugliness kind, bitterness gentle, and illness strong. His eyes will be far and deep, his ears clear and full of echoes. His mouth will be silent, but when he will open his lips, they will herald good things. Have no fear and go home!”
“When, when, when will he be healthy?” Deborah whispered.
“After long years,” said the rabbi, “but don't question me further, I have no time and know nothing more. Do not leave your son, even if he is a great burden to you, do not give him away, he comes from you just as a healthy child does. And go!”
Outside the people cleared the way for her. Her cheeks were pale, her eyes dry, her lips slightly opened, as if she were breathing pure hope. Grace in her heart, she returned home.
When Deborah returned home, she found her husband at the stove. Grudgingly he tended the fire, the pot, the wooden spoons. His upright mind was directed toward the simple earthly things and tolerated no miracle within range of his eyes. He smiled at his wife's faith in the rabbi. His simple piety required no mediating power between God and man. “Menuchim will grow healthy, but it will take a long time!” With these words Deborah entered the house. “It will take a long time!” repeated Mendel like an evil echo. With a sigh Deborah hung the basket from the ceiling again. The three older children came from their play. They set upon the basket, which they had missed for a few days, and swung it forcefully. Mendel Singer seized his sons, Jonas and Shemariah, with both hands. Miriam, the girl, fled to her mother. Mendel pinched his sons' ears. They howled out. He unbuckled his belt and swung
it through the air. As if the leather were part of his body, as if it were the natural continuation of his hand, Mendel Singer felt each slapping lash that struck his sons' backs. An uncanny roar broke out in his head. His wife's warning cries fell into his own noise and died away meaninglessly in it. It was as if glasses of water were being poured into a turbulent sea. He didn't feel where he stood. He whirled the swinging, cracking belt around, struck the walls, the table, the benches, and didn't know whether the missed lashes pleased him more or the successful ones. Finally the wall clock struck three, the hour in which the pupils gathered in the afternoon. With an empty stomach â for he had not eaten anything â and the choking agitation still in his throat, Mendel began to recite word after word, sentence upon sentence from the Bible. The bright choir of children's voices repeated word after word, sentence after sentence, it was as if the Bible were being tolled by many bells. Like bells the students' upper bodies swung forward and back, while above their heads Menuchim's basket swung in almost the same rhythm. Today Mendel's sons participated in the lesson. Their father's rage dissipated, cooled down, died out, because they were more advanced than the others in chanting recitation. To test them, he left the room. The choir of children sounded on, led by the voices of his sons. He could rely on them.
Jonas, the older, was strong as a bear, Shemariah, the younger, was sly as a fox. Stamping, Jonas trudged along, with his head bent forward, with hanging hands, bursting cheeks, eternal hunger,
curly hair that grew profusely over the edges of his cap. Gentle and almost creeping, with a sharp profile, with constantly alert, bright eyes, thin arms, hands buried in his pockets, his brother Shemariah followed him. A quarrel never broke out between them, they were too distant from each other, their realms and possessions were separate, they had formed a pact. Out of tin cans, matchboxes, pottery fragments, horns, willow twigs, Shemariah made wonderful things. Jonas could have blown them over and destroyed them with his strong breath. But he admired his brother's delicate adroitness. His little black eyes flashed like tiny sparks between his cheeks, curious and cheerful.