Job by Joseph Roth Page B

in her head everything she possessed, she nonetheless remained incessantly active. She packed, she unpacked again. She counted the dishes and counted them again. Menuchim broke two plates. He seemed on the whole to be gradually losing his stupid calm. He called his mother more often than usual, the only word he’d been able to speak for years he repeated, even when the mother wasn’t near him, a dozen times. He was an idiot, that Menuchim! An idiot! How easy it is to say that! But who can say what a storm of fears and anxieties Menuchim’s soul had to endure in those days, Menuchim’s soul, which God had hidden in the impenetrable garb of stupidity! Yes, he was afraid, Menuchim the cripple! Sometimes he crawled on his own out of his corner to the door, crouched on the threshold in the sun like a sick dog and squinted at the passersby, seeming to see only their boots and pants, their stockings and coats. Sometimes he reached unexpectedly for his mother’s apron and grumbled. Deborah picked him up, though he already weighed a considerable amount. Nonetheless, she rocked him in her arms and sang two or three fragmented verses of a nursery rhyme that she herself had already completely forgotten and that began to reawaken in her memory as soon as she felt her unfortunate son in her arms. Then she let him crouch on the floor again, and went back to work, which for days hadconsisted entirely of packing and counting. Suddenly she stopped again. She stood still for a while with pensive eyes, which were not unlike Menuchim’s; so without life were they, so helplessly searching in an unknown distance for the thoughts that the brain refused to provide. Her foolish gaze fell on the sack into which the pillows would be sewn. Perhaps, it occurred to her, they could sew Menuchim into a sack? Immediately she trembled at the idea that the customs officers would stick long sharp spears through the passengers’ sacks. And she began to unpack again, and the decision to stay flashed through her mind, as the rabbi of Kluczýsk had said: “Do not leave him, as if he were a healthy child!” The strength that belonged to faith she could no longer muster, and gradually she was also abandoned by the powers that a person needs to endure despair.
    It was as if they, Deborah and Mendel, had not voluntarily made the decision to go to America, but rather as if America had come over them, set upon them, with Shemariah, Mac and Kapturak. Now that they realized it, it was too late. They could no longer escape from America. The papers came to them, the ship tickets, the head taxes. “What if,” Deborah asked at one point, “Menuchim suddenly recovers, today or tomorrow?” Mendel shook his head for a while. Then he said: “If Menuchim recovers, we’ll take him with us!” And both of them yielded silently to the hope that, tomorrow or the day after, Menuchim would stand up healthy from his bed, with strong limbs and perfect speech.
    On Sunday they are to leave. Today is Thursday. For the lasttime Deborah stands before her stove to prepare the Sabbath meal, the white poppy-seed bread and the braided rolls. The open fire burns, hisses and crackles, and the smoke fills the room, as on every Thursday for thirty years. It’s raining outside. The rain drives the smoke back out of the chimney, the old familiar jagged stain in the lime of the ceiling shows itself again in its damp freshness. For ten years the hole in the roof shingles should have been repaired, the Billes family will do it. The large ironbound brown suitcase stands packed with its sturdy iron bar over the slit and two gleaming new iron locks. Sometimes Menuchim crawls up to them and swings them. Then there’s a merciless rattle, the locks strike against the iron bands and tremble for a long time and refuse to stand still. And the fire crackles, and the smoke fills the room.
    On the Sabbath evening Mendel Singer took leave of his