Stories and Pictures Part 41

I make a note and ask further: "Have you served in the army?"

"I bought exemption from Kohol, for four hundred rubles![88] Where should I find them now?" and he groans.

"And your sons?"

"The eldest has a swelling below his right eye, and has besides--not of you be it said!--a rupture. He has been in three hospitals. It cost more than a wedding. They only just sent him home from the regiment! The second drew a high number.[89] ... The third is serving his time now."

"And the wife?"

"At home with me, of course. Need you ask?"

"She might have been at _her_ father's."

"A pauper!"

"Have you a house?"

"Have I a house!"

"Worth how much?"

"If it were in Samoscz, it would be worth something. Here it's not worth a dreier, except that I have a place to lay my head down in."

"Would you sell it for one hundred rubles?"

"Preserve us! One's own inheritance! Not for three hundred."

"Would you give it for five hundred?"

"_Me!_ I should hire a lodging and apply myself to some business!"

"And what is your business now?"

"What business?"

"What do you live on?"

"_That's_ what you mean! One just lives."

"On what?"

"G.o.d's providence. When He gives something, one has it!"

"But He doesn't throw things down from heaven?"

"He does so! Can I tell how I live? Let us reckon: I need a lot of money, at least four rubles a week. The house yields, beside my own lodging, twelve rubles a year--nine go in taxes, five in repairs, leaves a hole in the pocket of two rubles a year! That's it."

He puts on airs:

"Heaven be praised, I have no money. Neither I, nor any one of the Jews standing here, nor any other Jews--except perhaps the 'German' ones[90]

in the big towns. We have no money. I don't know any trade, my grandfather never sewed a shoe. Therefore I live as G.o.d wills, and have lived so for fifty years. And if there is a child to be married, we have a wedding, and dance in the mud."

"Once and for all, what are you?"

"A Jew."

"What do you do all day?"

"I study, I pray--what else should a Jew do? And when I have eaten, I go to the market."

"What do you do in the market?"

"What do I do? Whatever turns up. Well, yesterday, for example, I heard, as I pa.s.sed, that Yoneh Borik wanted to buy three rams for a gentleman.

Before daylight I was at the house of a second gentleman, who had once said, he had too many rams. I made an agreement with Yoneh Borik, and, heaven be praised, we made a ruble and a half by it."

"Are you, then, what is called a commission-agent?"

"How should I know? Sometimes it even occurs to me to buy a bit of produce."

"Sometimes?"

"What do you mean by 'sometimes'? When I have a ruble, I buy."

"And when not?"

"I get one."

"How?"

"What do you mean by 'how'?"

And it is an hour before I find out that Levi Yitzchock Barenpelz is a bit of a rabbinical a.s.sistant, and acts as arbiter in quarrels; a bit of a commission-agent, a fragment of a merchant, a morsel of a match-maker, and now and again, when the fancy takes him, a messenger.

Thanks to all these "trades," the counted and the forgotten ones, he earns his bread, although with toil and trouble, for wife and child--even for the married daughter, because her father-in-law is _but_ a pauper.

THE SECOND ATTEMPT

I am taken into a shop.

A few packets of matches, a few boxes of cigarettes; needles, pins, hair-pins, b.u.t.tons, green and yellow soap, a few pieces of home-made, fragrant soap, a few grocery wares.

"Who lives here?" I ask.

"You can see for yourself!" answers a Jewish woman, and goes on combing the hair of a little girl about ten years old, who has twitched her head from under the comb and stares with great, astonished eyes, at the Go[91] who talks Yiddish.

"Lay your head down again!" screams the mother.

"What is the name of your husband?" I inquire.