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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 longerneeds 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.
    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 elicitsome 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:
    â€œHear me, Menuchim, I am alone! Your brothers have grown big and strange, they’re joining the army. Your