Stories and Pictures Part 45

"You will miss the wood again!"

"The wood!"--he gives himself a twist with a bitter smile--"my wife went into the wood the evening before last, to gather berries, and they marched her out and treated her to the whip."

"There is the river,"--I want to take him away from his sad thoughts.

His pale face grew paler.

"The river? In the summer it took one of my children."

I hurried away from the luckless home.

THE MADMAN

I returned to my lodgings quite unnerved, and lay a long time on the hard sofa without closing an eye.... A noise wakes me. Something is stealing in to me through the window. I see on the window ledge two long, bony, dirty hands, and there raises itself from behind them an unkempt head with two gleaming eyes in a livid face.

"Won't you enter _me_?" asks the head, softly.

I do not know how to answer. He, meanwhile, has taken silence for consent, and stands in the middle of the room.

Alarmed, and still more astonished, I keep my eye on him.

"Write!" he says impatiently. "Shall I give you the ink and a pen?"

Without waiting for an answer, he pushes up to my sofa the little table with the writing materials.

"Write, please, write!"

And his voice is so soft and gentle, it finds its way into my heart, and I am no longer frightened.

I sit up to write. I question him, and he answers me.

"Your name?"

"Jonah."

"Your surname?"

"When I was a little boy, they called me Jonah Zieg. After my wedding, Jonah Drong, but since the misfortune happened to me, Mad Jonah."

"What is your German name?"

"O, you mean _that_?... Directly, directly. Perelmann. You see my pearls?"

He points to a torn, red kerchief round his neck, and says: "Real pearls, _ha_? But that's what I'm called. How can I help it?"

"A wife?"

"You had better _not_ put her down: she doesn't live with me. Since the misfortune, she doesn't live with me ... a nice wife, too. I would gladly have given her a divorce, but the rabbi wouldn't allow it. He said I mustn't. A nice little wife!"

And his eyes grew moist.

"She even took the child with her. It's better off with her--what should _I_ do with it? Carry it about? They throw stones at me, and would have hurt it."

"One child is it you have?"

"One."

"What was your misfortune?"

"May you know trouble as little as I know that! Folk say a devil. The Rofeh says, a stone fell into my head, and the soul, or, as he calls it, the life, into my belly. I don't remember the stone, but I have a bruise on my head."

He takes off his hat and cap together, bends his head, and shows me a bare b.u.mp in the hair.

"It may have been from a stone, but I _am_ mad--that's certain."

"What is your eccentricity?"

"Two or three times a day I have my soul in my belly, and then I speak out of my belly, and crow like a c.o.c.k. I can't stop myself, I really can't!"

"What were you _before_ the misfortune?"

"I hadn't got to be anything. It happened to me early in the Kost.[103]

That is why I have only one child, health and strength to it!"

"Have you any money?"

"I had a few gulden dowry. A lot of it went in remedies--on 'good Jews'

... the rest I gave _her_."

"What do you live on?"

"On trouble. The boys throw stones at me. I daren't go about in the market-place, else I might have earned something near a stall. At one time people were sorry for me and gave me things. Now times are bad--I have to go begging. I beg before dinner, while the children are still in Cheder. And it's little enough I get by it! The town is small; there are two mad people in it beside me. And now they say that yesterday the 'Lokshiche'[104] threw a saucepan at her servant's head. The servant is sure to go mad, quite sure! Only I don't know yet if she will crow as I do, or trumpet into her fist, like the rabbi's Shlom'tzie, or be silent like Hannah the Tikerin."

MISERY

I shall not call the little town by its name, but if I come across another such, I, too, shall begin to crow, like the madman....

He was an excellent shoemaker, who supported wife and children (rarely less than four or five) respectably. He won a large sum of money in a lottery, took to drink, drank it all up, left his wife and children to shift for themselves, disappeared, and must have died since somewhere or other beneath a hedge.

But that is not specifically Jewish. Take another one of us, his partner in the lottery ticket. He was a teacher, won some money, hired a mill together with the Rebbe. The mill failed, now he is beadle in a Cha.s.sidic meeting-house, gets nothing for it, but he sells the "bitter drop." The wife is a "buyer-in," takes round eggs and b.u.t.ter to the houses. She doesn't earn much, because she is lame. One son is away, the second works somewhere at a carpenter's; one is at home, scrofulous.

The widow Beile Bashe, surname unknown, lives with a daughter-in-law, a soldier's wife. The husband disappeared in the Turkish war. The daughter-in-law plucks feathers--she is a Tikerin, and watches beside women in child-bed, or else by the sick. In summer, so long as the n.o.bleman allowed it, she gathered berries in the forest; a sickly woman, she does a little bit of begging besides.

Zeinwill Graf has only lately become a skinner. Last year he was a great fisher, rented a river which the n.o.bleman wished to let to a Christian; he paid a lot of cession-money, caught only "forbidden fish" the whole summer, and is now in dire poverty.

Shmerke Bentzies, formerly a Dantzig trader ... it is twenty years since he came home empty-handed. Since then he trades in currant-wine for Kiddush. The wife is a sempstress, has suffered a year or two with her eyes. "They haven't _no_ children," but compet.i.tion in the currant-wine trade is very keen, and they struggle.