Part 35 (1/2)

Then some women came with old Lanche; I took Sorle by the hand, and we went into the large room, without speaking a word.

The mere sight of this room, where the two little brothers had played so long, made my tears come afresh, and Sorle, Safel, and I wept together. The house was full of people; it might have been eight o'clock, and they knew already that we had a child dead.

XIX

THE Pa.s.sOVER

Then, Fritz, the funeral rites began. All who died of typhus had to be buried the same day: Christians behind the church, and Jews in the trenches, in the place now occupied by the riding-school.

Old women were already there to wash the poor little body, and comb the hair, and cut the nails, according to the law of the Lord. Some of them sewed the winding-sheet.

The open windows admitted the air, the shutters struck against the walls. The _schamess_* went through the streets, striking the doors with his mace, to summon our brethren.

* Beadle.

Sorle sat upon the ground with her head veiled. Hearing Desmarets come up the stairs, I had courage to go and meet him, and show him the room.

The poor angel was in his little s.h.i.+rt on the floor, the head raised a little on some straw, and the little _thaleth_ in his fingers. He was so beautiful, with his brown hair, and half-opened lips, that I thought as I looked at him: ”The Lord wanted to have thee near his throne!”

And my tears fell silently: my beard was full of them.

Desmarets then took the measure and went. Half an hour afterward, he returned with the little pine coffin under his arm, and the house was filled anew with lamentations.

I could not see the coffin closed! I went and sat upon the sack of ashes, covering my face with both hands, and crying in my heart like Jacob, ”Surely I shall go down to the grave with this child; I shall not survive him.”

Only a very few of our brethren came, for a panic was in the city; men knew that the angel of death was pa.s.sing by, and that drops of blood rained from his sword upon the houses; each emptied the water from his jug upon the threshold and entered quickly. But the best of them came silently, and as evening approached, it was necessary to go and descend by the postern.

I was the only one of our family. Sorle was not able to follow me, nor Zeffen. I was the only one to throw the shovelful of earth. My strength all left me, they had to lead me back to our door. The sergeant held me by the arm; he spoke to me and I did not hear him; I was as if dead.

All else that I remember of that dreadful day, is the moment when, having come into the house, sitting on the sack, before our cold hearth, with bare feet and bent head, and my soul in the depths, the _schamess_ came to me, touched my shoulder and made me rise; and then took his knife from his pocket and rent my garment, tearing it to the hip. This blow was the last and the most dreadful; I fell back, murmuring with Job:

”Let the day perish wherein I was born, and the night in which it was said, there is a man child conceived! Let a cloud dwell upon it, let the blackness of the day terrify it! For mourning, the true mourning does not come down from the father to the child, but goes up from the child to the father. Why did the knees prevent me? or why the b.r.e.a.s.t.s that I should suck? For now I should have lain still in the tomb and been at rest!”

And my grief, Fritz, had no bounds; ”What will Baruch say,” I exclaimed, ”and what shall I answer him when he asks me to give him back his child?”

I felt no longer any interest in our business. Zeffen lived with the old rabbi; her mother spent the days with her, to take care of Esdras and comfort her.

Every part of our house was opened; the _schabesgoe_ burned sugar and spices, and the air from without had free circulation. Safel went on selling.

As for myself, I sat before the hearth in the morning, cooked some potatoes, and ate them with a little salt, and then went out, without thought or aim. I wandered sometimes to the right, sometimes to the left, toward the old gendarmerie, around the ramparts, in out-of-the-way places.

I could not bear to see any one, especially those who had known the child.

Then, Fritz, our miseries were at their height; famine, cold, all kinds of sufferings weighed upon the city; faces grew thin, and women and children were seen, half-naked and trembling, groping in the shadow in the deserted by-ways.

Ah! such miseries will never return! We have no more such abominable wars, lasting twenty years, when the highways looked like ruts, and the roads like streams of mud; when the ground remained untilled for want of husbandmen, when houses sank for want of inhabitants; when the poor went barefoot and the rich in wooden shoes, while the superior officers pa.s.sed by on superb horses, looking down contemptuously on the whole human race.

We could not endure that now!