Job (5 page)

Mendel Singer tried in vain to describe to her Kapturak's inaccessibility, his hard heart and his hungry pouch.

“What do you want, Deborah,” said Mendel Singer, “the poor are powerless. God doesn't cast them golden stones from heaven, they don't win the lottery, and they must bear their lot in humble devotion. To the one He gives and from the other He takes away. I don't know why He is punishing us, first with the sick Menuchim and now with the healthy children. Ah, the poor man has it bad, when he has sinned and when he is ill, he has it bad. One should bear one's fate! Let the sons report for duty, they won't go to ruin! Against the will of heaven there is no power. ‘From Him come the thunder and lightning, he arches over the whole earth, no one can escape Him' – so it is written.”

But Deborah replied, her hand on her hip above the bunch of rusty keys: “Man must seek to help himself, and God will help him. So it is written, Mendel! You always know the wrong sentences by heart. Many thousands of sentences were written, but you remember all the superfluous ones! You've become so foolish
because you teach children! You give them the little intellect you have, and they leave all their stupidity with you. You're a teacher, Mendel, a teacher!”

Mendel Singer wasn't vain about his intellect and his profession. But Deborah's words rankled him, her reproaches slowly gnawed away his good nature, and in his heart the little white flames of indignation were already flickering. He turned away to avoid seeing his wife's face. He felt as if he had already known it for a long time, far longer than since their wedding, perhaps since childhood. For long years it had seemed to him the same as on the day of his marriage. He had not seen how the flesh crumbled away from the cheeks like beautifully lime-washed mortar from a wall, how the skin stretched around the nose to hang all the more loosely in flaps under the chin, how the lids wrinkled into webs over the eyes, and how the black of the eyes dulled into a cool and sober brown, cool, sensible and hopeless. One day, he didn't remember when it could have been (perhaps it had happened the morning when he himself had been asleep and only one of his eyes had surprised Deborah before the mirror), one day the realization had come over him. It was like a second, repeated marriage, this time with the ugliness, with the bitterness, with the advancing age of his wife. He felt her closer, almost merged with him, inseparable and eternal, but intolerable, agonizing and even a little abhorrent. From a woman with whom one unites only in the darkness, she had become, so to speak, an illness to which one is bound day and night, which belongs entirely to oneself, which one no longer
needs to share with the world and of whose faithful enmity one perishes. Certainly, he was only a teacher! His father too had been a teacher, and his grandfather. He himself simply couldn't be anything else. Thus one attacked his existence when one deprecated his profession, one tried to efface him from the list of the world. Against this Mendel Singer defended himself.

Actually he was glad that Deborah was going away. Now, as she was making preparations for her departure, the house was already empty: Jonas and Shemariah roamed the streets, Miriam sat with the neighbors or went for walks. At home, around the midday hour, before the pupils returned, only Mendel and Menuchim remained. Mendel ate a barley soup he had cooked himself, and left on his earthen plate a considerable portion for Menuchim. He bolted the door so that the little one wouldn't crawl out, as was his way. Then the father went into the corner, lifted the child, set him on his knee and began to feed him.

He loved those quiet hours. He was glad to be alone with his son. Indeed, sometimes he wondered whether it wouldn't be better if they remained alone altogether, without mother, without siblings. After Menuchim had swallowed the barley soup spoonful by spoonful, his father set him on the table, sat still before him, and became absorbed with tender curiosity in the broad pale yellow face with its wrinkled forehead, creased eyelids and flabby double chin. He sought to divine what might be going on in that broad head, to see through the eyes as through windows into the brain, and by speaking, now softly, now loudly, to elicit
some sign from the impassive boy. He called Menuchim's name ten times in a row, with slow lips he drew the sound in the air so that Menuchim could see it if he couldn't hear it. But Menuchim didn't stir. Then Mendel grabbed his spoon, struck it against a tea glass, and immediately Menuchim turned his head, and a tiny light flashed in his large gray bulging eyes. Mendel kept ringing, began to sing a little song and to beat time with the spoon on the glass, and Menuchim displayed a distinct restlessness, turned his large head with some effort and swung his legs. “Mama, Mama!” he cried meanwhile. Mendel stood up, fetched the black book of the Bible, held the first page open before Menuchim's face and intoned, in the melody in which he usually taught his pupils, the first sentence: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” He waited a moment in the hope that Menuchim would repeat the words. But Menuchim didn't stir. Only in his eyes the listening light remained. Then Mendel put the book away, looked sadly at his son, and went on in the monotonous singsong:

“Hear me, Menuchim, I am alone! Your brothers have grown big and strange, they're joining the army. Your mother is a woman, what can I expect of her? You are my youngest son, my last and most recent hope I have planted in you. Why are you silent, Menuchim? You are my true son! Look here, Menuchim, and repeat the words: ‘In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth . . .'”

Mendel waited another moment. Menuchim didn't move. Then Mendel rang again with the spoon on the glass. Menuchim
turned around, and Mendel seized the moment of alertness as if with both hands, and sang again: “Hear me, Menuchim! I am old, you alone of all my children remain with me, Menuchim! Listen and say after me: ‘In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth . . .'” But Menuchim didn't move.

Then, with a heavy sigh, Mendel put Menuchim back down on the floor. He unbolted the door and stepped outside to wait for his pupils. Menuchim crawled after him and remained crouching at the threshold. The tower clock struck seven strokes, four deep ones and three high ones. Then Menuchim cried: “Mama, Mama!” And when Mendel turned to him, he saw that the little one was stretching his head into the air as if he were breathing in the resounding song of the bells.

Why have I been so punished? thought Mendel. And he searched his brain for some sin and found no grave one.

The pupils arrived. He returned with them into the house, and as he paced up and down the room, admonished this one and that, struck this one on the fingers and gave that one a light nudge in the ribs, he thought incessantly: Where is the sin? Where is the sin?

Meanwhile, Deborah went to the driver Sameshkin and asked him whether he could take her with him to Kluczýsk in the immediate future for free.

“Yes,” said the coachman Sameshkin, he sat on the bare stove bench without moving, his feet in pale brown bags wound with ropes, and he stank of home-brewed schnapps. Deborah smelled
the brandy as if it were an enemy. It was the dangerous smell of the peasants, the harbinger of incomprehensible passions and the accompaniment of pogrom moods. “Yes,” said Sameshkin, “if the roads were better!” “You have taken me with you once before in autumn when the roads were even worse.” “I don't remember,” said Sameshkin, “you're mistaken, it must have been a dry summer day.” “By no means,” replied Deborah, “it was autumn, and it was raining, and I went to the rabbi.” “You see,” said Sameshkin, and his two feet in the bags began to swing gently, for the stove bench was rather high and Sameshkin rather small in stature, “you see,” he said, “that time when you went to the rabbi, it was before your high holy days, and so I took you with me. But today you're not going to the rabbi!” “I'm going on important business,” said Deborah, “Jonas and Shemariah must never become soldiers!” “I too was a soldier,” declared Sameshkin, “for seven years, two of them I spent in prison, because I had stolen. A trifle, incidentally!” He drove Deborah to despair. His stories only proved to her how foreign he was to her, to her and to her sons, who would neither steal nor serve time in prison. So she decided to bargain quickly: “How much shall I pay you?” “Nothing at all! – I'm not asking for money, and I don't want to drive! The white horse is old, the brown one has just lost two horseshoes. Incidentally, he eats oats all day when he's gone only two versts. I can't keep him anymore, I want to sell him. It's no life at all, being a driver!” “Jonas will take the brown one to the blacksmith himself,” Deborah said insistently, “he'll pay for the horseshoes himself.” “Maybe!” replied
Sameshkin. “If Jonas wants to do that himself, then he has to have a wheel mounted too.” “That too,” Deborah promised. “So we'll leave next week!”

Thus she traveled to Kluczýsk, to the unearthly Kapturak. She would much rather have gone to the rabbi, for certainly one word from his holy, thin mouth was worth more than Kapturak's patronage. But the rabbi didn't receive anyone between Easter and Pentecost, except in urgent matters of life and death. She met Kapturak in the tavern, where he was sitting and writing, surrounded by peasants and Jews, in the corner by the window. His open cap, with the lining turned upward, lay on the table beside the papers like an outstretched hand, and many silver coins already rested in the cap and attracted the eyes of all the onlookers. Kapturak checked them from time to time, though he knew that no one would dare steal from him even one kopeck. He wrote applications, love letters and postal orders for every illiterate – (he could also pull teeth and cut hair).

“I have an important matter to discuss with you,” Deborah said over the heads of the onlookers. Kapturak pushed all the papers away from him with one stroke, the people scattered, he reached for the cap, poured the money into his empty hand and tied it into a handkerchief. Then he invited Deborah to sit down.

She looked into his hard little eyes as into rigid light-colored buttons made of horn. “My sons have been conscripted!” she said. “You are a poor woman,” said Kapturak with a remote singing voice, as if he were reading from the cards. “You have not been
able to save any money, and no one can help you.” “But I have saved.” “How much?” “Twenty-four rubles and seventy kopecks. I've already spent one ruble of that to see you.” “So that makes twenty-three rubles!” “Twenty-three rubles and seventy kopecks!” corrected Deborah. Kapturak raised his right hand, spread the middle and index fingers and asked: “And two sons?” “Two,” whispered Deborah. “Just one already costs twenty-five!” “For me?” “For you too!” They bargained for half an hour. Then Kapturak declared himself content with twenty-three for one. At least one! thought Deborah.

But on the way back, as she sat on Sameshkin's cart and the wheels jolted her intestines and her poor head, the situation seemed to her still more miserable than before. How could she choose between her sons? Jonas or Shemariah? she asked herself tirelessly. Better one than both, said her intellect, lamented her heart.

When she arrived home and began to report Kapturak's judgment to her sons, Jonas, the older, interrupted her with the words: “I'll gladly join the army!” Deborah, the daughter Miriam, Shemariah and Mendel Singer waited as if they were made of wood. Finally, when Jonas said nothing more, Shemariah said: “You are a brother! You are a good brother!” “No,” replied Jonas, “I want to join the army.”

“Perhaps you will be released in half a year!” their father consoled.

“No,” said Jonas, “I don't want to be released at all! I'm staying with the army!”

All murmured the bedtime prayer. Silently they undressed. Then Miriam went in her shirt on coquettish toes to the lamp and blew it out. They lay down to sleep.

The next morning Jonas had disappeared. They searched for him all morning. Not until late in the evening did Miriam catch sight of him. He was riding a white horse, wearing a brown jacket and a soldier's cap.

“Are you already a soldier?” Miriam called.

“Not yet,” said Jonas, stopping the horse. “Say hello to Father and Mother. I'm staying with Sameshkin temporarily, until I report for duty. Tell them I couldn't stand it at home, but I'm very fond of you all!”

Then he whistled with a willow rod, pulled on the reins, and rode on.

From that point on, he was the driver Sameshkin's stable boy. He groomed the white horse and the brown one, slept with them in the stable, sucked in with open savoring nostrils their sharp scent of urine and sour sweat. He got the oats and the drinking buckets, mended the pens, trimmed the tails, hung new little bells on the yoke, filled the troughs, replaced the rotten hay in the two carts with dry hay, drank
samogonka
with Sameshkin, got drunk and impregnated the maids.

They wept for him at home as a lost one, but they did not forget him. The summer began, hot and dry. The evenings sank late and golden over the land. Outside Sameshkin's hut Jonas sat and played accordion. He was very drunk and didn't recognize his own father, who sometimes hesitantly crept by, a shadow that was afraid of itself, a father who never ceased to be amazed that this son had sprung from his own loins.

On the twentieth of August a messenger from Kapturak appeared at Mendel Singer's home to fetch Shemariah. All had been expecting the messenger one of these days. But when he stood before them in the flesh, they were surprised and frightened. He was an ordinary man of ordinary stature and ordinary appearance, with a blue soldier's cap on his head and a thin rolled cigarette in his mouth. When they invited him to sit down and have some tea, he declined. “I'd rather wait outside the house,” he said in a way that indicated he was accustomed to waiting outside. But this very decision of the man's sent Mendel Singer's family into still more intense excitement. Again and again they saw the blue-capped man appear like a guard outside the window, and each time their movements grew more furious. They packed Shemariah's things, a suit, phylacteries, provisions for the journey, a
bread knife. Miriam fetched the objects, bringing over more and more. Menuchim, whose head already reached the table, raised his chin curiously and stupidly, and incessantly babbled the one word he could: Mama. Mendel Singer stood by the window and drummed against the pane. Deborah wept soundlessly, her eyes sent one tear after another toward her contorted mouth. When Shemariah's bundle was ready, it appeared to all of them much too scanty, and they searched the room with helpless eyes so as to discover some other object. Until that moment they hadn't spoken. Now that the white bundle lay next to the stick on the table, Mendel Singer turned away from the window and toward the room and said to his son: