by Joseph Roth
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.
II
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 – for he had not eaten anything – 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.
A few days after her return, Deborah believed that the time had come to unfasten Menuchim’s basket from the ceiling. Not without solemnity she handed the little one over to the older children. “You will take him walking!” said Deborah. “When he gets tired, you will carry him. Do not drop him, God forbid! The holy man has said he will grow healthy. Do him no harm.” From that point on began the children’s torment.
They dragged Menuchim through the town like a misfortune, they left him unattended, they dropped him. They found it hard to endure the scorn of the other children their age, who followed them when they took Menuchim walking. The little one had to be held between two of them. He didn’t put one foot in front of the other like a person. His legs wobbled like two broken wheels, he stopped, he collapsed. Finally Jonas and Shemariah left him unattended. They put him in a corner, in a sack. There he played with dog excrement, horse dung, pebbles. He devoured everything. He scratched the lime from the walls and stuffed his mouth full, then coughed and turned blue in the face. A piece of rubbish, he lay in the corner. Sometimes he started to cry. The boys sent Miriam to console him. Delicate, coquettish, with thin skipping legs, an ugly and hateful disgust in her heart, she approached her ridiculous brother. The tenderness with which she stroked his ash-gray wrinkled face had something murderous about it. She looked around carefully, to the right and to the left, and then she pinched her brother’s thighs. He howled out, neighbors looked out their windows. She contorted her face into a weepy grimace. Everyone took pity on her and asked what was wrong.
One rainy day in summer the children dragged Menuchim out of the house and stuck him in a tub in which rainwater had been collecting for half a year, worms were floating around, fruit scraps and moldy bread crusts. They held him by his crooked legs and plunged his broad gray head a dozen times into the water. Then they pulled him out, with pounding hearts, red cheeks, in the joyful and horrible expectation of holding a corpse. But Menuchim lived. His breath rattled, he spat up the water, the worms, the moldy bread, the fruit scraps, and lived. Nothing happened to him. Then the children carried him silently and anxiously back into the house. A great fear before God’s little finger, which had just waved very softly, seized the two boys and the girl. All day they didn’t speak to one another. Their tongues were stuck to the roofs of their mouths, their lips opened to form a word, but no sound took shape in their throats. It stopped raining, the sun appeared, rivulets flowed cheerfully along the edges of the streets. It would have been time to launch paper boats and watch them float toward the canal. But nothing at all happened. The children crept back into the house like dogs. All afternoon they waited for Menuchim’s death. Menuchim didn’t die.
Menuchim didn’t die, he stayed alive, a powerful cripple. From that point on, Deborah’s womb was dry and infertile. Menuchim was the last, failed fruit of her body, it was as if her womb were refusing to bring forth still more misfortune. In fleeting moments she embraced her husband. They were brief as lightning, dry lightning on the distant summer horizon. Long, cruel and sleepless were Deborah’s nights. A wall of cold glass separated her from her husband. Her breasts withered, her body swelled like a mockery of her infertility, her thighs became heavy, and lead clung to her feet.
One morning in summer she awoke earlier than Mendel. A chirping sparrow on the windowsill had roused her. Its whistle was still in her ear, the memory of something dreamed, something happy, like the voice of a sunbeam. The early warm dawn penetrated the pores and cracks of the wooden window shutters, and even though the edges of the furniture still dissolved in the sh
adow of the night, Deborah’s eyes were already clear, her thoughts hard, her heart cool. She cast a glance at the sleeping man and discovered the first white hairs in his black beard. He cleared his throat in his sleep. He snored. Quickly she leaped in front of the murky mirror. She ran her cold, combing fingers through her thin hair, pulled one strand after another over her forehead, and searched for white hairs. She thought she found one, grasped it with the hard pincers of two fingers, and tore it out. Then she opened her shirt before the mirror. She saw her sagging breasts, lifted them, let them fall, stroked her hand over her hollow and yet bulging body, saw the blue branching veins on her thighs, and decided to go back to bed. She turned around, and her frightened gaze met the open eye of her husband. “What are you looking at?” she cried. He didn’t answer. It was as if the open eye did not belong to him, for he himself was still asleep. It had opened independently of him. It had become curious on its own. The white of the eye seemed whiter than usual. The pupil was tiny. The eye reminded Deborah of a frozen lake with a black spot in it. It could scarcely have been open for a minute, but to Deborah that minute felt like a decade. Mendel’s eye closed again. He continued to breathe quietly, he was asleep, without a doubt. A distant trilling of a million larks arose outside, above the house, below the heavens. The dawning heat of the young day already penetrated the morning darkness of the room. Soon the clock would strike six, the hour in which Mendel Singer usually got up. Deborah didn’t move. She remained where she had stood when she had turned to the bed, the mirror at her back. Never before had she stood thus, listening, without purpose, without need, without curiosity, without desire. She was waiting for nothing at all. But it seemed to her that she must have been waiting for something special. All her senses were awake as never before, and a few unknown, new senses were aroused in support of the old ones. She saw, heard, felt a thousand times over. And nothing at all happened. Only a summer morning dawned, only larks trilled in the unreachable distance, only sunbeams forced their way through the cracks in the shutters with hot power, and the broad shadows at the edges of the furniture grew narrower and narrower, and the clock ticked and prepared to strike six, and the man breathed. Soundlessly the children lay in the corner next to the stove, visible to Deborah but far away, as if in another room. Nothing at all happened. Yet infinite things seemed to want to happen. The clock struck like a release. Mendel Singer awoke, sat up straight in bed and stared in astonishment at his wife. “Why aren’t you in bed?” he asked, rubbing his eyes. He coughed and spat. Nothing at all about his words or his demeanor betrayed that his left eye had been open and had gazed on its own. Perhaps he didn’t recall, or perhaps Deborah had been mistaken.
From that day on, the desire ceased between Mendel Singer and his wife. Like two people of the same sex they lay down, slept through the nights, awoke in the morning. They felt ashamed before each other and were silent, as in the first days of their marriage. Shame was at the beginning of their desire, and at the end of their desire was shame too.
Then it too was overcome. They talked again, their eyes no longer avoided each other, their faces and their bodies aged in the same rhythm, like the faces and bodies of twins. The summer was languid and stifling and poor in rain. Door and window stood open. The children were rarely at home. Outside they grew quickly, invigorated by the sun.
Even Menuchim grew. Though his legs remained curved, they were unquestionably longer. His upper body stretched out too. Suddenly, one morning, he emitted a previously unheard, shrill cry. Then he was silent. Awhile later he said clearly and audibly: “Mama.”
Deborah flung herself upon him, and from her eyes, which had long been dry, flowed tears, hot, strong, large, salty, painful and sweet. “Say: Mama!” “Mama,” repeated the little one. A dozen times he repeated the word. A hundred times Deborah repeated it. Her prayers had not been in vain. Menuchim spoke. And this one word of the deformed child was sublime as a revelation, mighty as thunder, warm as love, gracious as heaven, wide as the earth, fertile as a field, sweet as a sweet fruit. It was more than the health of the healthy children. It meant that Menuchim would be strong and big, wise and kind, as the words of the blessing had said.
However: no other comprehensible sounds came from Menuchim’s throat. For a long time this one word that he had produced after such terrible silence meant food and drink, sleep and love, pleasure and pain, heaven and earth. Though he said only this word at every occasion, he seemed to his mother Deborah as eloquent as a preacher and as rich in expression as a poet. She understood every word that was hidden in this one. She neglected the older children. She turned away from them. She had but one son, her only son: Menuchim.
III
Perhaps blessings need a longer time for their fulfillment than curses. Ten years had passed since Menuchim had spoken his first and only word. He could still say nothing else.
Sometimes, when Deborah was alone in the house with her sick son, she bolted the door, sat down next to Menuchim on the floor, and stared into the little one’s face. She remembered the frightful day in summer when the countess had driven up to the church. Deborah sees the open portal of the church. A golden glow of a thousand candles, of colorful pictures wreathed with light, of three priests in vestments standing deep and far at the altar, with black beards and white hovering hands, penetrates the white sunlit dusty square. Deborah is in her third month, Menuchim is stirring in her body, she is holding little, delicate Miriam firmly by the hand. Suddenly shouts ring out. They drown out the singing of the worshipers in the church. The staccato clatter of horses can be heard, a cloud of dust whirls up, the dark blue equipage of the countess stops in front of the church. The peasant children cheer. The beggars on the steps hobble toward the carriage to kiss the countess’s hand. All of a sudden Miriam breaks free. In no time she has disappeared. Deborah trembles, she’s freezing, in the midst of the heat. Where is Miriam? She asks every peasant child. The countess has climbed out. Deborah comes very close to the carriage. The coachman with the silver buttons on his dark blue livery sits so high that he can look out over everything. “Did you see the little black girl running?” asks Deborah, craning her neck, her eyes blinded by the brightness of the sun and the liveried man. The coachman points with his white-gloved left hand into the church. Miriam has run in there. Deborah considers for a moment, then plunges into the church, into the golden glow, into the full singing, into the thunder of the organ. In the entrance stands Miriam. Deborah seizes the child, drags her into the square, runs down the white-hot steps, flees as if from a fire. She wants to strike the child, but she is afraid.
She runs, pulling the child behind her, into a side street. Now she is calmer. “You must tell your father nothing of this,” she gasps. “Do you hear, Miriam?”
From this day on, Deborah knows that a misfortune is approaching. She is carrying a misfortune in her womb. She knows it and is silent. She unbolts the door, there’s a knock, Mendel is home.
His beard is prematurely gray. Prematurely withered were also Deborah’s face, body and hands. Strong and slow as a bear was the oldest son Jonas, sly and quick as a fox the younger son Shemariah, coquettish and thoughtless as a gazelle the sister Miriam. When she glided through the streets to run errands, svelte and thin, a shimmering shadow, a brown face, a big red mouth, a golden-yellow shawl knotted under her chin in two fluttering wings, and the two old eyes in the midst of the brown youth of her face, she caught the attention of the officers of the garrison and stuck in their carefree, pleasure-craving minds. Occasionally some of them chased her. She noticed nothing about her hunters but what she could take in directly through the outer gates of her senses: a silver clanking and rattling of spurs and weapons, an enveloping fragrance of pomade and shaving soap, a glaring shimmer of golden buttons, silver braids and blood-red reins of Russian leather. It was little, it was enough. Just behind the outer gates of Miriam’s senses lurked curiosity, the sister of youth, the herald of desire. In sweet and hot fear the girl fled her pursuers. Only so as to
savor the painful exciting pleasure of the fear, she fled through several side streets, many minutes longer. She fled by a roundabout route. Only so as to be able to flee again, Miriam left the house more often than necessary. On street corners she stopped and cast glances back, bait for the hunters. These were Miriam’s only pleasures. Even if there had been someone who understood her, her mouth would have remained closed. For pleasures are stronger so long as they remain secret.
Miriam did not yet know what a threatening relationship she would have to the strange and terrible world of the military and how heavy the fates were that were already beginning to gather over the heads of Mendel Singer, his wife and his children. For Jonas and Shemariah were already at the age when according to the law they were supposed to become soldiers and according to the tradition of their fathers they had to escape from service. A gracious and provident God had given other youths a physical affliction that didn’t disable them much and protected them from the evil. Some were one-eyed, some limped, this one had a hernia, that one jerked his arms and legs for no reason, several had weak lungs, others weak hearts, one was hard of hearing and another stuttered and a third quite simply had general physical weakness. But in Mendel Singer’s family it seemed as if little Menuchim had taken on himself the sum total of human agonies, which a kind nature might otherwise have distributed little by little among all the members. Mendel’s older sons were healthy, no defect could be discovered on their bodies, and they had to begin to torment themselves, to fast and drink black coffee and hope for at least a temporary heart condition, though the war against Japan was already over.
