by Joseph Roth
And thus began their torments. They didn’t eat, they didn’t sleep, they staggered weak and trembling through days and nights. Their eyes were reddened and swollen, their necks thin, and their heads heavy. Deborah loved them again. To pray for the older sons, she again made pilgrimages to the cemetery. This time she prayed for an illness for Jonas and Shemariah, as she had once begged for Menuchim’s health. The military rose before her troubled eyes like a heavy mountain of smooth iron and clanking torture. Corpses she saw, nothing but corpses. High and gleaming, his spurred feet in red blood, sat the Tsar, waiting for the sacrifice of her sons. They went on maneuvers, this alone was for her already the greatest terror, she didn’t even think of a new war. She was angry with her husband. Mendel Singer, what was he? A teacher, a stupid teacher of stupid children. She’d had something else in mind when she was still a young girl. Mendel Singer meanwhile found the distress no easier to bear than his wife did. On the Sabbath in the synagogue, when the legally prescribed prayer for the Tsar was held, Mendel thought about his sons’ imminent future. He could already see them in the detested khaki uniforms of fresh recruits. They ate pork and were lashed by officers with riding whips. They carried rifles and bayonets. He often sighed for no conceivable reason, in the midst of praying, in the midst of instruction, in the midst of silence. Even strangers gave him concerned looks. About his sick son no one had ever asked him, but about his healthy sons everyone inquired.
On the twenty-sixth of March, finally, the two brothers traveled to Targi. Both drew lots. Both were in perfect health. Both were taken.
They were allowed to spend one more summer at home. In autumn they had to report for duty. On a Wednesday they became soldiers. On Sunday they returned home.
On Sunday they returned home, equipped with complimentary tickets from the state. Already they were traveling at the expense of the Tsar. Many of their kind rode with them. It was a slow train. They sat on wooden benches among peasants. The peasants sang and were drunk. All of them smoked black tobacco, with the smoke of which a distant memory of sweat mingled its scent. All told one another stories. Jonas and Shemariah didn’t separate from each other for an instant. It was their first railroad journey. Often they switched seats. Each of them wanted to sit by the window for a little while and look into the landscape. To Shemariah the world appeared tremendously vast. It was flat in Jonas’s eyes, it bored him. The train ran smoothly through the flat land like a sleigh over snow. The fields lay in the windows. The colorful peasant women waved. Where they appeared in groups, the peasants in the car greeted them with resounding howls. Black, shy and anxious, the two Jews sat among them, pushed into the corner by the exuberance of the drunken peasants. “I’d like to be a peasant,” Jonas suddenly said.
“Not I,” replied Shemariah.
“I’d like to be a peasant,” repeated Jonas, “I’d like to be drunk and sleep with the girls there.”
“I want to be what I am,” said Shemariah, “a Jew like my father Mendel Singer, not a soldier, and sober.”
“I’m a little bit glad that I’m going to be a soldier,” said Jonas.
“You’ll experience your pleasures! I’d rather be a rich man and see life.”
“What is life?”
“Life,” declared Shemariah, “is to be seen in big cities. The trams run in the middle of the streets, all the shops are as big as our gendarmerie barracks, and the display windows are even bigger. I’ve seen postcards. You don’t need a door to enter a shop, the windows reach down to your feet.”
“Hey, why are you so gloomy?” a peasant suddenly cried from the opposite corner.
Jonas and Shemariah acted as if they hadn’t heard or as if his question hadn’t been directed at them. To pretend to be deaf when a peasant talked to them was in their blood. For a thousand years nothing good had ever come of it when a peasant asked and a Jew answered.
“Hey!” said the peasant, standing up.
Jonas and Shemariah stood up at the same time.
“Yes, I was speaking to you, Jews,” said the peasant. “Have you had nothing to drink yet?”
“Already had our drink,” said Shemariah.
“I haven’t,” said Jonas.
The peasant pulled out a bottle he’d been carrying on his breast under his jacket. It was warm and slippery and smelled more strongly of the peasant than of its contents. Jonas put it to his mouth. He bared his full blood-red lips, on both sides of the brown bottle his strong white teeth could be seen. Jonas drank and drank. He didn’t feel his brother’s light hand, which touched his sleeve admonishingly. With both hands, like a gigantic infant, he held the bottle. On his raised elbows, his shirt shimmered white through the worn thin material. Regularly, like a piston in a machine, his Adam’s apple rose and sank under the skin of his neck. A soft muffled gurgle rumbled from his throat. Everyone watched as the Jew drank.
Jonas was finished. The empty bottle fell out of his hands and into his brother Shemariah’s lap. He himself sank down after it, as if he had to take the same path. The peasant held out his hand, silently asking Shemariah for the bottle back. Then he caressed a little bit with his boot the broad shoulders of the sleeping Jonas.
They reached Podvorsk, where they had to get off. It was seven versts to Yurki, the brothers had to hike on foot, who knows whether someone would take them on a wagon along the way. All the travelers helped lift the heavy Jonas to his feet. Once he stood outside, he was sober again.
They hiked. It was night. They sensed the moon behind milky clouds. Scattered, irregularly contoured patches of earth darkened on the snow-covered fields like the mouths of craters. Spring seemed to waft from the woods. Jonas and Shemariah walked quickly on a narrow path. They heard the fine crackle of the thin brittle shell of ice under their boots. Their white round bundles they carried on sticks over their shoulders. A few times Shemariah tried to start a conversation with his brother. Jonas didn’t reply. He felt ashamed because he had drunk and fallen down like a peasant. In the places where the path was so narrow that the two brothers could not walk side-by-side, Jonas let his younger brother go ahead. He preferred to have Shemariah walk in front of him. When the path widened again, he slowed his pace in the hope that Shemariah would walk on without waiting for his brother. But it was as if the younger one feared losing the older. Since he’d seen that Jonas could be drunk, he no longer trusted him, doubted the older one’s reason, felt responsible for him. Jonas surmised what his brother was feeling. A great senseless rage boiled in his heart. “Shemariah is ridiculous,” thought Jonas. “He’s thin as a ghost, he can’t even hold the stick, he shoulders it again and again, the bundle is going to fall in the dirt.” At the idea that Shemariah’s white bundle could fall from the smooth stick into the black dirt of the road, Jonas laughed aloud. “What are you laughing at?” asked Shemariah. “At you!” answered Jonas. “I’d have more right to laugh at you,” said Shemariah. Again they fell silent. The pine forest grew blackly toward them. From it, not from themselves, the silence seemed to come. From time to time a wind arose from an arbitrary direction, a homeless gust. A willow bush stirred in its sleep, branches cracked dryly, the clouds ran brightly across the sky. “So now we are soldiers!” Shemariah suddenly said. “That’s right,” said Jonas, “and what were we before? We have no profession. Should we become teachers like our father?” “Better than being a soldier!” said Shemariah. “I could become a merchant and go out into the world!” “Soldiers are world too, and I can’t be a merchant,” Jonas declared. “You’re drunk!” “I’m as sober as you. I can drink and be sober. I can be a soldier and see the world. I’d like to be a peasant. That I tell you – and I’m not drunk . . .”
Shemariah shrugged his shoulders. They walked on. Toward morning they heard the cocks crowing from distant farms. “That must be Yurki,” said Shemariah.
“No, it’s Bytók!” said Jonas.
“Fine, Bytók!” said Shemariah.
A cart clattered and rattled around the next bend of the pa
th. The morning was pale, as the night had been. No difference between moon and sun. Snow began to fall, soft, warm snow. Ravens took wing and cawed.
“Look at the birds,” said Shemariah; only as a pretext to placate his brother.
“Those are ravens!” said Jonas. “Birds!” he mimicked mockingly.
“Fine!” said Shemariah. “Ravens!”
It really was Bytók. Another hour and they’d be home.
It snowed thicker and softer as the day progressed, as if the snow were coming from the rising sun. In a few minutes the whole country was white. Also the individual willows along the path and the scattered groups of birches among the fields, white, white, white. Only the two young striding Jews were black. They too were showered with snow, but on their backs it seemed to melt faster. Their long black coats fluttered. The skirts knocked with a hard regular beat against the shafts of the their high leather boots. The thicker it snowed, the faster they walked. Peasants coming toward them walked very slowly, with bent knees, they turned white, on their broad shoulders the snow lay as on thick branches, at once heavy and light, intimate with the snow, they walked along in it as in a home. Occasionally they stopped and looked back at the two black men as at strange apparitions, even though the sight of Jews wasn’t foreign to them. Out of breath, the brothers arrived home, dusk was already falling. They heard from a distance the singsong of the studying children. It came toward them, a motherly sound, a fatherly word, it carried their whole childhood toward them, it meant and contained all that they had seen, heard, smelled and felt since the hour of their birth: the singsong of the studying children. It contained the smell of hot and flavorful meals, the black and white shimmer that emanated from their father’s beard and face, the echo of their mother’s sighs and of Menuchim’s whimpering tones, Mendel Singer’s whispered prayers in the evening, millions of unnamable regular and special events. Both brothers reacted with the same stirrings to the melody that wafted through the snow toward them as they neared their father’s house. Their hearts beat in the same rhythm. The door flew open before them, through the window their mother Deborah had long seen them coming.
“We’ve been taken!” said Jonas without a greeting.
All of a sudden a terrible silence fell over the room in which the children’s voices had been sounding only a moment before, a silence without bounds, much vaster than the space it had captured, and yet born from the little word “taken” that Jonas had just spoken. In the middle of a word they had memorized the children broke off their studying. Mendel, who had been pacing up and down the room, stopped, looked into the air, raised his arms and lowered them again. The mother Deborah sat down on one of the two stools that always stood near the stove as if they had long been waiting for the opportunity to receive a grieving mother. Miriam, the daughter, groped her way backwards into the corner, her heart pounded loudly, she thought everyone could hear it. The children sat nailed to their seats. Their legs in colorfully striped wool socks, which had swung incessantly during the studying, hung lifelessly under the table. Outside it was snowing incessantly, and the soft white of the flakes streamed a pale shimmer through the window into the room and onto the faces of the silent people. A few times they heard the wood cinders crackle in the stove and a soft rattle of the doorposts when the wind shook them. The sticks still over their shoulders, the white bundles still on the sticks, the brothers stood at the door, messengers of misfortune and its children. Suddenly Deborah cried: “Mendel, go and run, ask people for advice!”
Mendel Singer grasped at his beard. The silence was banished, the children’s legs began to swing gently, the brothers put down their bundles and their sticks and approached the table.
“What foolishness are you talking?” said Mendel Singer. “Where should I go? And whom should I ask for advice? Who will help a poor teacher, and how should anyone help me? What help do you expect from people, when God has punished us?”
Deborah didn’t answer. For a while, she remained sitting completely still on the stool. Then she stood up, kicked it with her foot as if it were a dog, so that it tottered away with a clatter, grabbed her brown shawl, which had been lying like a hill of wool on the floor, wrapped her head and neck, tied the fringes at the back of her neck into a strong knot with a furious motion as if she wanted to strangle herself, turned red in the face, stood there hissing as if filled with boiling water, and suddenly spat, firing white saliva like a poison bullet before Mendel Singer’s feet. And as if with that alone she had not sufficiently demonstrated her contempt, she sent a cry after the saliva, which sounded like a phooey! but could not be clearly understood. Before the dumbfounded onlookers could recover, she opened the door. An evil gust of wind poured white flakes into the room, blew into Mendel Singer’s face, grasped the children by their hanging legs. Then the door slammed shut. Deborah was gone.
She ran aimlessly through the streets, always in the middle, a dark brown colossus, she rushed through the white snow until she sank in it. She got tangled in her clothes, fell, stood up with astonishing nimbleness, ran on, she still didn’t know where, but she felt as if her feet were running by themselves toward a destination that her head did not yet know. Twilight fell faster than the flakes, the first yellow lights glimmered, the few people who came out of the houses to close the window shutters turned their heads to Deborah and looked after her for a long time, even though they were freezing. Deborah ran toward the cemetery. When she reached the small wooden gate, she fell down again. She pulled herself up, the gate refused to give way, snow had jammed it. Deborah threw her shoulders against it. Now she was inside. The wind howled over the graves. Today the dead seemed deader than usual. Out of twilight night grew swiftly, black, black and glowing with snow. In front of one of the first gravestones in the first row, Deborah sank down. With clammy fists, she freed it from the snow, as if she wanted to assure herself that her voice would reach the dead more easily if the muffling layer between her prayer and the ear of the blessed were cleared away. And then a cry burst from Deborah, which sounded as if it were coming from a horn with a human heart in it. This cry was heard in the whole little town, but was immediately forgotten. For the silence that followed in its wake was no longer heard. Deborah gasped out only a soft whimper at short intervals, a soft, motherly whimper, which the night swallowed, the snow buried, and only the dead heard.
IV
Not far from Mendel Singer’s Kluczýsk relatives lived Kapturak, a man without age, without family, without friends, nimble and very busy, and intimate with the authorities. Deborah sought his help. Of the seventy rubles that Kapturak demanded before he would meet with his clients, she possessed only about twenty-five, secretly saved during the long years of tribulation, kept in a durable leather pouch under a floorboard known to her alone. Every Friday she lifted it up gently when she scrubbed the floor. To her motherly hope the difference of forty-five rubles seemed smaller than the sum she already possessed. For she added to it the years in which the money had accumulated, the privations to which each half a ruble owed its lastingness, and the many silent and hot pleasures of counting it.
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 i
t 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.
