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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. Menuchimturned 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.
    â€œYes,” 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 smelledthe 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!” repliedSameshkin. “If Jonas wants to do that himself, then he has to have a wheel mounted too.” “That too,” Deborah promised.