Job (7 page)

All of a sudden Mendel Singer felt as if the stranger were no longer a stranger, and as if he understood the man's peculiar language. “Tell me something!” he said to Mac. And the American, as if he had understood Mendel's words, began to move his large mouth and relate incomprehensible things with cheerful enthusiasm, and it was as if he were chewing up many a tasty dish with a healthy appetite. He told the Singers that he had come to Russia because of some business with hops – he was planning to build breweries in Chicago. But the Singers didn't understand him. Now that he was here, he definitely didn't want to miss visiting
the Caucasus and especially climbing Mount Ararat, which he had read all about in the Bible. As the audience listened to Mac's story with strained hearkening gestures so as to catch out of the whole ranting jumble perhaps one tiny, comprehensible syllable, their hearts trembled at the word “Ararat,” which seemed to them strangely familiar but also dismayingly altered, and which rolled out of Mac with a dangerous and terrible rumble. Mendel Singer alone smiled incessantly. He found it pleasant to hear the language that had now become that of his son Shemariah too, and as Mac talked, Mendel tried to imagine how his son looked when he spoke the same words. And soon he felt as if the voice of his own son were speaking from the cheerfully chomping mouth of the stranger. The American finished his talk, went around the table and squeezed everyone's hand heartily and firmly. Menuchim he swept swiftly into the air, observed the sloping head, the thin neck, the blue lifeless hands and the curved legs, and set him on the floor with a tender and pensive contempt, as if he wanted thus to express that strange creatures ought to crouch on the ground and not stand at tables. Then he walked, broad, tall and swaying a little, his hands in his pants pockets, out the open door, and the whole family jostled after him. All shaded their eyes with their hands as they looked into the sunny street, in the middle of which Mac strode away and at the end of which he stopped once more to give a brief wave back.

For a long time they stayed outside, even after Mac had disappeared. They held their hands over their eyes and looked into the
dusty radiance of the empty street. Finally Deborah said: “Now he's gone!” And as if the stranger had only then disappeared, they all turned around and stood, each with an arm around the other's shoulder, in front of the photographs on the table. “How much are ten dollars?” Miriam asked, and began to calculate. “It doesn't matter,” said Deborah, “how much ten dollars are, we're certainly not going to buy ourselves anything with it.”

“Why not?” replied Miriam, “shall we travel in our rags?”

“Who is traveling and where?” cried the mother.

“To America,” Miriam said with a smile, “Sam himself wrote it.”

For the first time a member of the family had called Shemariah “Sam,” and it was as if Miriam had intentionally spoken her brother's American name to lend emphasis to his demand that the family should travel to America.

“Sam!” cried Mendel Singer, “who is Sam?”

“Yes,” repeated Deborah, “who is Sam?”

“Sam!” said Miriam, still smiling, “is my brother in America and your son!”

The parents were silent.

Menuchim's voice suddenly rang out shrilly from the corner into which he had crawled.

“Menuchim can't go!” Deborah said softly, as if she feared that the sick child could understand her.

“Menuchim can't go!” repeated, just as softly, Mendel Singer.

The sun seemed to sink rapidly. On the wall of the house across
the street, at which they all stared through the open window, the black shadow rose visibly higher, as the sea climbs up its shoreline bluffs with the approach of the flood. A faint wind stirred, and the window creaked in its hinges.

“Close the door, there's a draft!” said Deborah.

Miriam went to the door. Before she touched the latch, she stood still for a moment and stuck her head out the doorframe in the direction in which Mac had disappeared. Then Miriam closed the door with a hard slam and said: “That's the wind!”

Mendel stood at the window. He watched as the shadow of evening crept up the wall. He raised his head and contemplated the gold-gleaming rooftop of the house across the street. He stood for a long time thus, the room, his wife, his daughter Miriam and the sick Menuchim at his back. He felt them all and sensed each of their movements. He knew that Deborah laid her head on the table to weep, that Miriam turned her face toward the stove and that her shoulders now and then jerked, even though she wasn't weeping at all. He knew that his wife was only waiting for the moment when he would reach for his prayer book to go to the temple and say the evening prayer, and Miriam would take the yellow shawl to hurry over to the neighbors. Then Deborah would bury the ten-dollar bill, which she still held in her hand, under the floorboard. He knew the floorboard, Mendel Singer. Whenever he stepped on it, it creakingly betrayed to him the secret it covered and reminded him of the growling of the dogs Sameshkin kept tethered outside his stable. He knew the board,
Mendel Singer. And so he wouldn't have to think of Sameshkin's black dogs, which were unearthly to him, living figures of sin, he avoided stepping on the board when he wasn't being forgetful and wandering through the room in the enthusiasm of teaching. As he saw the golden streak of the sun grow ever narrower and glide from the top ridge of the house onto the roof and from there onto the white chimney, he believed he felt distinctly for the first time in his life the soundless and wily creeping of the days, the deceptive treachery of the eternal alternation of day and night and summer and winter, and the stream of life, steady, despite all anticipated and unexpected terrors. They grew only on the changeful banks, Mendel Singer drifted past them. A man came from America, laughed, brought a letter, dollars and pictures of Shemariah and disappeared again into the veiled regions of the distance. The sons disappeared: Jonas served the Tsar in Pskov and was no longer Jonas. Shemariah bathed on the shores of the ocean and was no longer called Shemariah. Miriam gazed after the American and wanted to go to America too. Only Menuchim remained what he had been since the day of his birth: a cripple. And Mendel Singer himself remained what he had always been: a teacher.

The narrow street darkened completely and came to life at the same time. The fat wife of the glazier Chaim and the ninety-year-old grandmother of the long dead locksmith Yossel Kopp brought chairs out of their houses to sit down outside the doors and enjoy the fresh evening hour. The Jews rushed, black and hurried and with hastily murmured greetings, to the temple. Then Mendel
Singer turned around, he wanted to set off too. He passed Deborah, whose head still lay on the hard table. Her face, which Mendel had not been able to bear for years, was now buried, as if embedded in the hard wood, and the darkness that began to fill the room also covered Mendel's hardness and shyness. His hand glided over his wife's broad back, this flesh had once been familiar to him, now it was strange to him. She rose and said: “You go to pray!” And because she was thinking of something else, she modified the sentence with a distant voice and repeated: “To pray you go!”

At the same time as her father, Miriam left the house in her yellow shawl and proceeded to the neighbors.

It was the first week in the month of Av. The Jews gathered after the evening prayer to greet the new moon, and because the night was pleasant and refreshing after the hot day, they followed more willingly than usual their devout hearts and God's commandment to greet the rebirth of the moon in an open place over which the sky arched more widely and vastly than over the narrow streets of the little town. And they hastened, silent and black, in disorderly little groups, behind the houses, saw in the distance the forest, which was black and silent like them, but eternal in its rooted persistence, saw the veils of night over the wide fields and finally stopped. They looked to the sky and sought the curved silver of the new heavenly body that today was born once again as on the day of its creation. They formed a tight group, opened their prayer books, white shimmered the pages, black stared the angular letters before their eyes in the night's bluish clearness, and
they began to murmur the greeting to the moon and to rock their upper bodies back and forth so that they looked as if shaken by an invisible storm. Ever faster they rocked, ever louder they prayed, with warlike courage they cast to the distant heaven their foreign words. Alien to them was the earth on which they stood, hostile the forest, which stared back at them, spiteful the yapping of the dogs, whose mistrustful ears they had awakened, and familiar only the moon, which was born today in this world as in the land of the fathers, and the Lord, who was everywhere watching over, at home and in exile.

With a loud “Amen” they concluded the blessing, shook hands with each other and wished each other a happy month, prosperity for the businesses and health for the sick. They parted, walked home singly, disappeared in the narrow passages behind the little doors of their slanting huts. Only one Jew stayed behind, Mendel Singer.

His companions might have left only a few minutes earlier, but he felt as if he had already been standing there for an hour. He breathed the undisturbed peace in the open, took a few steps, felt weary, had an urge to lie down on the ground and was afraid of the unknown earth and the dangerous worms it most likely harbored. His lost son Jonas came to his mind. Jonas now slept in barracks, on the hay, in a stable, perhaps next to horses. His son Shemariah lived on the other side of the water: Who was farther, Jonas or Shemariah? Deborah had already buried the dollars at
home, and Miriam was now telling the neighbors the story of the American's visit.

The young crescent moon was already shedding a strong silver glow, faithfully accompanied by the brightest star of the sky it glided through the night. Occasionally the dogs howled and frightened Mendel. They rent the peace of the earth and increased Mendel Singer's unease. Though he was scarcely five minutes away from the houses of the little town, he felt infinitely far from the inhabited world of the Jews, inexpressibly alone, threatened by dangers and yet incapable of going back. He turned northward: there the forest breathed darkly. On the right the swamps, with scattered silver willows, stretched for many versts. On the left the fields lay under opalescent veils. Sometimes Mendel thought he heard a human sound from an indeterminable direction. He heard familiar people talking, and he felt as if he understood them. Then he remembered that he had heard those voices long ago. He realized that he was now only hearing them again, merely their echo, which had been waiting so long in his memory. All of a sudden there was a rustling to the left in the grain, even though no wind had stirred. The rustling came closer and closer, now Mendel could also see the head-high grain moving, a person must be creeping through, if not a gigantic animal, a monster. To run away would probably have been right, but Mendel waited and prepared for death. A peasant or a soldier would now emerge from the grain, accuse Mendel of theft and beat him to death on
the spot – with a stone perhaps. It could also be a tramp, a murderer, a criminal, who doesn't want to be heard and seen. “Holy God!” whispered Mendel. Then he heard voices. It was two people walking through the grain, and that it wasn't one calmed the Jew, even though he told himself at the same time that it could be two murderers. No, it wasn't murderers, it was lovers. A girl's voice spoke, a man laughed. Even lovers could be dangerous, there was many an example of a man flying into a rage when he caught a witness to his love. Soon the two would emerge from the field. Mendel Singer overcame his fearful disgust for the worms of the earth and lay down quietly, his eyes directed at the grain. Then the grain parted, the man emerged first, a man in uniform, a soldier with a dark blue cap, booted and spurred, the metal flashed and rang softly. Behind him a yellow shawl gleamed, a yellow shawl, a yellow shawl. A voice sounded, the voice of the girl. The soldier turned around, put his arm around her shoulders, now the shawl opened, the soldier went behind the girl, he held his hands on her breast, the girl embedded herself in the soldier.

Mendel closed his eyes and let the misfortune pass by in the darkness. Had he not been afraid of revealing himself, he would have liked to plug his ears too, so that he wouldn't have to hear. But as it was he had to hear: terrible words, the silver rattle of the spurs, soft mad giggling and the man's deep laugh. Longingly he now awaited the yapping of the dogs. If only they would howl loudly, they should howl very loudly! Murderers should emerge
from the grain to beat him to death. The voices receded. It was silent. All was gone. Nothing had been. Mendel Singer hastily stood up, looked all around, lifted with both hands the skirts of his long coat and ran toward the little town. The window shutters were closed, but some women were still sitting outside their doors, chatting and rasping. He slowed his run to avoid attracting attention, he merely took great hurried strides, his coattails still in his hands. He stood before his house. He knocked on the window. Deborah opened it. “Where's Miriam?” asked Mendel. “She's still taking a walk,” said Deborah, “she can't be stopped! Day and night she goes walking. She's in the house for barely half an hour. God has punished me with these children, has anyone ever in the world –”“Be quiet,” Mendel interrupted her, “when Miriam comes home, tell her: I was asking for her. I'm not coming home today, but only tomorrow morning. Today is the anniversary of the death of my grandfather Zallel, I'm going to pray.” And he departed without waiting for his wife's reply.