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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 reachedthe 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.
    â€œWhat 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 foolishbecause 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,