by Joseph Roth
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 Kaptur
ak’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.
V
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:
“You will send us word immediately and as quickly as possible, don’t forget!” Deborah sobbed aloud, spread her arms and embraced her son. For a long time they clasped each other. Then Shemariah pried himself loose, stepped up to his sister and kissed her with smacking lips on both cheeks. His father spread his hands over him in a blessing and hastily murmured something incomprehensible. Fearfully, Shemariah then approached the gawking Menuchim. For the first time it was necessary to embrace the sick child, and Shemariah felt as if it were not a brother he had to kiss, but a symbol that gives no answer. Everyone would have liked to say something more. But no one found a word. They knew that it was a farewell forever. In the best case, Shemariah would end up safe and sound abroad. In the worst case, he would be caught on the border, then executed or shot on the spot by the border guards. What are people supposed to say to each other when they’re parting for life? Shemariah shouldered the bundle and pushed open the door with his foot. He didn’t look back. The moment he stepped over the threshold he tried to forget the house and his whole family. Behind his back there sounded once more a loud cry from Deborah. The door closed. Sensing that his mother had fallen unconscious, Shemariah approached his escort.
“Just beyond the marketplace,” said the man with the blue cap, “the horses are waiting for us.” As they passed Sameshkin’s hut, Shemariah stopped. He cast a glance into the little garden, then into the open empty stable. His brother Jonas wasn’t there. He left a melancholy thought for his lost brother, who had voluntarily sacrificed himself, as Shemariah still believed. He’s coarse, but noble and brave, he thought. Then he walked on with steady steps at the stranger’s side.
Just beyond the marketplace they met the horses, as the man had said. It took them no less than three days to reach the border, for they avoided the railroad. Along the way it turned out that Shemariah’s escort knew the country well. He revealed it without Shemariah’s asking. He pointed to distant church steeples and named the villages to which they belonged. He named the farms and the estates and the landowners. He often branched off the wide road and found his way on narrow paths in a short time. It was as if he wanted to quickly make Shemariah familiar with his homeland, before the young man departed to seek a new one. He sowed homesickness for life in Shemariah’s heart.
An hour before midnight they reached the border tavern. It was a quiet night. The tavern stood in it as the only house, a house in the stillness of the night, silent, dark, with sealed windows behind which no life could be suspected. A million crickets chirped around it incessantly, the whispering choir of the night. Otherwise no voice disturbed them. Flat was the land, the starry horizon drew a perfect deep blue circle around it, broken only in the northeast by a bright streak, like a blue ring with a setting of silver. They smelled the distant dampness of the swamps that spread out in the west and the slow wind that carried it over. “A beautiful true summer night!” said Kapturak’s messenger. And for the first time since they were together, he deigned to speak of his business: “On such quiet nights you can’t always cross without difficulties. For our purposes rain is more useful.” He cast a little fear into Shemariah. Because the tavern before which they stood was silent and closed, Shemariah hadn’t thought about its significance until his escort’s words reminded him of his plan. “Let’s go in!” he said like someone who no longer wants to postpone danger. “You don’t need to hurry, we’ll have to wait long enough!”
Nonetheless, he went to the window and knocked softly on the wooden shutter. The door opened and released a wide stream of yellow light over the nocturnal earth. They entered. Behind the counter, directly in the beam of a hanging lamp, the innkeeper stood and nodded at them, on the floor a few men were crouching and playing dice. At a table sat Kapturak with a man in a sergeant’s uniform. No one looked up. The rattle of the dice and the tick of the wall clock could be heard. Shemariah sat down. His escort ordered drinks. Shemariah drank schnapps, he grew hot, but calm. He felt secure as never before; he knew that he was experiencing one of the rare hours in which a man has no less a part in shaping his destiny than the great power that bestows it on him.
Shortly after the clock had struck midnight, a shot rang out, hard and sharp, with a slowly dwindling echo. Kapturak and the sergeant rose. It was the arranged sign with which the guard indicated that the border officer’s nightly patrol was over. The sergeant disappeared. Kapturak urged the people to set off. All rose sluggishly, shouldered bundles and suitcas
es, the door opened, they trickled out singly into the night and started on the way to the border. They tried to sing, someone forbade them, it was Kapturak’s voice. They didn’t know if it came from the front rows, from the middle, from the back. Thus they walked silently through the thick chirping of the crickets and the deep blue of the night. After half an hour Kapturak’s voice commanded them: “Lie down!” They dropped onto the dewy ground, lay motionlessly, pressed their pounding hearts against the wet earth, their hearts’ farewell to their homeland. Then they were ordered to stand up. They came to a shallow wide ditch, a light flashed to their left, it was the light of the guard hut. They crossed the ditch. Dutifully, but without aiming, the guard fired his rifle behind them.
“We’re out!” cried a voice.
At that moment the sky brightened in the east. The men looked back to their homeland, over which the night still seemed to lie, and turned again toward the day and the foreign.
One began to sing, all joined in, singing they began to march. Only Shemariah did not sing along. He thought about his immediate future (he possessed two rubles); about the morning at home. In two hours at home his father would rise, murmur a prayer, clear his throat, gargle, go to the bowl and splash water. His mother would blow into the samovar. Menuchim would babble something into the morning, Miriam would comb white down feathers from her black hair. All this Shemariah saw more clearly than he had ever seen it when he was still at home and himself a part of the domestic morning. He scarcely heard the singing of the others, only his feet took up the rhythm and marched along.