Mendel the Miller had his own opinion about the descent of man. He believed that God had created man in His own image, just as his father, his grandfather, and his great-grandfather had believed.
His son could go right ahead and say that human beings are descended from apes - that didn't prevent Mendel the Miller from calling him in after the Friday evening dinner, and, having tucked his shirt up over his head, grinning and teasing him:
"I don't know what the apes do, my son, but you're going to rub your papa's back with vinegar in honor of the Sabbath and obey the commandment to honor your parents! Well?!"
That was the way he did things, Mendel.
Once a week, half a glass of castor oil; and every week a backrub with vinegar. Not because he had any pains in his stomach or his ribs, but just for fun. For the sake of order and economy.
And when Ezra, his learned son, had given him a sound backrub with vinegar - and with a smile - the miller would turn around, content with his rubbed-down flesh and his warmed-up bones, and say in sheer delight:
"Rub, rub, Ezra. An ape, you say? Don't spare your hands, my son, right there, in the side, that's it! That's a fine summing-up of the world - a little on the spine, Ezra. So according to your accounts, Adam must have been - don't rub so hard - an ape? Ha? What's that you say, my Aristotle, an ape?"
As for his own descent, Mendel only had to look at the cemetery. There he saw a long line of generations from the shtetl back to the kingdom of David's dynasty. All the shtetl Jews saw their pedigrees in those old gravestones with rubbed-out stars of David and rubbed-off inscriptions, stones hunching over the grass that covered the graves, the rotten bones of forebears. And whenever Mendel walked out of town and unwillingly saw the slaughterhouses to the right of the cemetery, he would turn his head. He hated them, the wet, slippery crates with the damp smell of flayed carcass. He hated the butchers with their wanton sons, always striding about with rods in their hands, as though forever hunting someone to drive along. And he constantly felt as if one of them were about to sic an angry bull on him and shout from a distance:
"Watch it, Mendel, you're lost in thought!"
A good part of the road approaching these greasy, slippery slaughterhouses was scattered with rotting horns and hooves; green, paunchy flies and stray dogs were having the time of their lives.
Mendel also knew that to the left of the cemetery there was a teeming swarm of tanneries, yellow pits overflowing with frothy lye. It seemed to Mendel as if there were always a stifling yellow rainfall there. Deep pits with acrid smells of tannery fluids. And the pits were belching up yellow and green foam. Swollen, speckled hides were soaking in them, like hairy horse blankets.
Here, Mendel knew, Zalman the Trustee, that worried man, might come along, or a couple of dressers, or even the owner himself, Mr. Berman.
But the last person Mendel would have expected to run into was his son Ezra, the university student with the gold buttons, who had come home to visit for a few weeks.
When Mendel spotted Ezra in the distance with Beryl the Convict, he decided to walk on by as though he hadn't seen them. But he couldn't stand it, and he called to him across the road:
"Didn't you see, Ezra? They didn't come by train."
"What train?" answered Beryl the Convict.
Mendel didn't want to hear what Beryl had to say. He wanted to ask his Ezra:
Weren't there better places to take a walk outside of town? And couldn't he find any better friends in town?
But instead, he asked:
"Well, Ezra, didn't you see Mottl's horses either?"
And when Ezra shook his head from afar, Mendel turned back angrily, and all the way home he babbled to himself:
"Convicts.... Apes.... Fine friends he gets for himself!...."
And he didn't even notice that his annoyance quickly carried him back to town and deposited him at his house.
Entering his home after such an unexpected encounter with Ezra, he did not take off his coat; instead, he whirled around furiously. He combed all the corners, looking for something to let out his bitterness on and to give him an excuse for hurrying back.
First of all, he got up on a chair next to the clock and began turning the hands. He kept turning them until the clock started ringing with such a staccato groaning that Mendel himself got panicky and began shouting through the house:
"I'd like to know who's been fooling with my clock. Who's been turning the hands for entire days so that the clock stops every minute?"
"What's going on with the clock again?" His wife ran in from the kitchen. "What's wrong?"
"Quiet! Can't you hear me counting? Quiet!... Forty-five, forty-seven.... Shush! Shush! Just look, you can't say a word in this house! Her and that son of hers, you can't say anything to them! They attack you on the spot. For absolutely nothing!"
"What's wrong, Mendel? You're not all there today! What are you yelling about? Just look, look! - Down from the clock and on your son...."
" 'Just look, look'!" Mendel mimicked her. "No one's allowed to say anything to them! The mother and the son! Next you'll be saying that people come from monkeys, ha? You won't say it?"
"What? Monkeys?" his wife broke in. "Ha? Did you say monkeys?"
"No, turkeys!"
"Mendel! What's come over you all of a sudden?" she asked, terrified.
"C'mon! Stop nagging me, Fradl, I didn't say anything! I didn't say anything about monkeys. So leave me alone! I just can't get a word in edgewise around here! They attack me on the spot!"
He left the clock ringing and ran out of the house. He didn't notice that he was moving towards the synagogue.
Opposite the high church with the blue dome, the little wooden synagogue looked as if it were wearing shingle rags and sinking into the earth. It stood there, stooping, hunched, its crooked back carrying the women's section with the tiny windows the way you carry a paralytic. Inside, the atmosphere was stale. It smelled of grease, of wax, of parchment, and of gingerbread and vodka.
Every Sabbath, Jewish grocers and shopkeepers and paupers came here with prayer books and prayer shawls to store up a meager bit of heaven and find out the latest news and edicts.
Between two lines of shops, a road ran through the entire shtetl until the railroad station. The marketplace was engraved in the road like an old, ravaged talisman. And Jews drove along this path to do business and walked along this path to synagogue and strode along this path to the station and traveled off to America. And they were carried back along this path to the cemetery, where gravestones with rubbed-off inscriptions guarded the rotten bones of forebears in their Jewish tribe.
There, in the graveyard, shtetl centuries lay open , as in a chronicle of generations.
People were born; people died.
People wept at weddings, they wept at funerals, and they. just wept for no special reason.
But when cholera was raging through the town, Mendel's father, old Hersh, had hired musicians to play in the streets. He hurried around, encouraging the band:
"Play, you guys! Play! Don't look to the side! Play! It's a remedy, Jews. It's good for the sick and it's bad for the devil. Play!"
The band marched through town, playing for the calamity. On one side - the musicians; on the other side - the black box. And thus the corpses were accompanied to the graveyard by musicians.
Now Ezra was walking down the same street. He went around at night with a gang of young men, carrying a red flag in his bosom, and the townsfolk couldn't fall asleep because of the songs coming fearfully from behind the town wall.
And Jews openly said to Ezra's father:
"Mendel, your Ezra with his apes - he's going to bring a calamity to the town! You'll see, Mendel! Just remember, Mendel!"
Once, when a bullet thundered over the dome of the town church, the old dry-goods man, Sender, washed his hands and said a blessing.
But the next day, peasants from the surrounding countryside came running with sticks, crowbars, axes, and with the priest, and they yelled and crossed themselves:
"You goddamn Jews! Goddamn Jews are shooting at God!"
The constable was already visiting the Jewish shops and taking money from the shopkeepers. And after every coin that he counted in Mendel's home, he touched his saber and dully twisted his ears:
"It's going to slice! We're gonna slice your guts out, all you Jewboys!"
"Shooting?!"
At the constable's words, Mendel's throat went dry. He barely managed to whisper:
"It was thunder, Your Grace, thunder from the sky!"
Mendel's wife, Fradl, was weeping in the kitchen, and every so often she murmured into the other room:
"Mendel, give him some more, Mendel, give him some more and make him stop talking like that, Mendel!"
Mendel, counting out the silver rubies for the constable, kept glaring in her direction, saying in Yiddish:
"I'll talk to you later, Fradl, when the angel of death is gone. But leave me alone for now, Fradl, leave me be. Can't you see the angel of death is still here. Let me puke out my heart, Fradl. Leave me be!"
Ezra wasn't at home. He had gone to Beryl's at the crack of dawn and then to the gardens. Two men were waiting there. Mottl, the typesetter, and Levin, the dresser in Berman's tannery.
Ezra looked all around and then exclaimed:
"Beryl, you go on to work. You don't know from nothing. Running away would be worse. There's no place to hide. And it'll soon look suspicious. One man can drive off in the wagon. That'll be Mottl. I'll stay. You go to work. If they arrest us, then remember what we have to do, brothers. It's better to die than say even one word. Enough. Let's get going. Each man in a different direction."
They listened, intent and prepared. And as they left, only Beryl clenched his fist and said:
"Look, guys! Petro the Policeman is gonna leave the smithy with a red-hot poker in his mouth, but not with me, goddamn it!"
Beryl had always liked the work. He felt depressed when he had none. If they needed to poke out a burgher's eye or smash his rib, Beryl wouldn't let anyone else at him. He did it himself. And he would paste up leaflets in the most dangerous places.
"What's the big deal," he would tell his gang, "sticking up a leaflet in Berman's tannery? You have to stick one up on the constable's wall. In the chancellery. On his mailbox, so he can read it every morning. Goddamn it!" One for the constable and the other sewn in his cap. Now he was looking forward to meeting Petro the Policeman.
But Petro was already waiting in the home of Eli-Leyzer the Blacksmith.
And as soon as Beryl had rolled up his sleeves and stationed himself at the anvil, Petro crept up from behind with a gun and barked:
"Hands up!"
Turning his head, Beryl saw the black hole of a revolver up against his mouth and heard Petro's command:
"Well? Are you gonna come peacefully?"
And so, with his sleeves rolled up on his brawny arms, Beryl walked through the town, arriving at the cooler. Petro's pointed revolver showed him the way, and half the town ran up and followed at their heels.
It was a morning in early autumn. Shopkeepers stood by their shops, their hands tucked into their sleeves; and with warm vapor emerging from their mouths, they asked one another:
"Him! Really? Beryl? That motherfucker! And they said....
You can't believe anybody." Beryl didn't see the town again for four years. By then, they had nicknamed him Beryl the Convict.
When he returned to town after four years of hard labor, he couldn't find any of the old gang. All he did find was his old cap in the attic. He ripped it open and pulled out a leaflet which he had sewn in before his departure. The leaflet had been awaiting him for four years. He pulled it out, gazed at it, gazed and then said:
"Literature!"
After four years of hard labor, he started calling leaflets "literature," the shtetl now depressed him more than hard labor had. He hung out with the dressers until Ezra came back to town. Ezra with the student buttons. And they got together at a secret meeting of the tanners. The meeting renewed Beryl's desire to paste up leaflets and beat up burghers.
Nevertheless, when Petro the Policeman had walked Beryl through town in his rolled-up sleeves, old Sender had peered through the window and shaken his beard:
"Let him live like that, the bastard, let him live like that - if he's the one! We know who shot at the church, don't we!?"
And the town dogcatcher was having a drink in Pearl's tavern, and he swore to the town that he would catch all the Jews on his hook.
"Like this!" he kept saying with a wave of his hands as though he had caught them on his instrument. "Like this! All of them! Like dogs!"

The shtetl was crisscrossed with ditches and drains. Time and events flowed away in them along with the rainwater. The ditches were spanned by small wooden bridges, almost like litter planks, like poor Jewish biers. The edges of the ditches were lined with brambles and tangly-bearded prickles. The squashed horizons around the shtetl were constantly astir with the muffled tumult of unfinished weddings, sobs at the seatings and veilings of brides, terminated quadrilles and other dances. There was always a smell of funerals, the echo of Mosikl the Gravedigger's cry: "Charity delivereth from death!" And no roosters crowed there. They always mourned someone from the crooked fences and perches.
From every roof, from every wall you could feel a misfortune that had already happened or was about to happen.
At the crack of dawn, burly slaughterers drove the heads to the slaughterhouse. The more elegant cattle turned up their noses, refusing to join the herd.
When the slaughterers trudged back with warm forequarters on their shoulders, Jews were already returning from synagogue, and tanners had already long been tanning in Berman's tannery. And the marketplace smelled of a riot caused by Vasil the Fireman, who had stolen a pack of tobacco from a poor shop. And Mendel the Miller was already at the station, waiting for a freight train.
That was how a day went.
In the evening, when Mendel came home, bristling with old Sender's pinpricks about today's kids, he strode over to his Ezra and circled him like a quiet, devoted animal, finally asking:
"Do you need anything at the station, huh, Ezra? I'm going early in the morning, I am. Don't you need anything, Ezra?"
He went to the station, poor Mendel. Went to the station every day. Trudging to the station, he had left Egypt forty-eight times in his life, wandered through the desert forty-eight times, and entered the land of his holy forebears just as often. And yet he remained at the station. In early years, his son Ezra, had joined him on these magnificent voyages when he was still very young. The little travel companion joined his father on these voyages until he went on one alone. His own voyage. All by himself. No longer in the desert. And certainly not to the land of his forebears. He went to a big town, where every stone cried out in poverty and hunger, throwing cripples and children out like cats.
Together with his father, he did the final reckoning of Pharaoh's Ten Plagues on his fingers and felt that the Plagues were raging somewhere near him, all around.
He saw them every day:
Yellow, rusty Jews with beards like rags. They smelled of lye even at a great distance. Their faces were withered and faded as though they had been struck by the hail of the Ten Plagues.
But Ezra already knew that this hail did not come from God - it came from Jonah Berman, the owner of the tanneries, where Jews labored from early in the morning till late at night.
Jonah Berman's tanning factory with its lye pits gaped at the shtetl Jews with the same assurance as the graveyard:
"Sooner or later you'll come here!"
One spring, after Passover, when Ezra found out that his friend Beryl had been taken from heder and apprenticed to Eli-Leyzer the Blacksmith, he felt utterly dejected. It was as if Beryl would no longer be his friend. And. he resented the fact that Beryl would be standing in Eli-Leyzer's smithy with the bellows, push up his sleeves, and hold fire in his hands, so that the entire shtetl would be scared of him. And every Sabbath, he would stroll out to the highway and do whatever he felt like.
"If he's a blacksmith, who's he gonna be afraid of?"
Ezra had said to his father at that time:
"Papa, how much longer do I have to go to heder? Why can't you take me out too?
"What?! Are you an orphan or something?!" his father promptly asked.
"But what about Beryl?"
"Take an example from Shloyme Senders. You can't compare yourself to Beryl! He knows what he has to already, he's a great scholar. But you've still got a bit to learn. You'll still have a chance to drive goats through the streets. Don't worry. There's time."
However, since they wouldn't send him there, he kept going to Eli-Leyzer's smithy to see Beryl.
Tears welled up in his eyes the first time he saw Beryl at the bellows.
There he stood, Beryl, pulling the wire on Eli-Leyzer's bellows. And every puff sent a crackling shower of sparks in all directions. And Beryl seemed to be holding his arm and his head in the midst of the shower of sparks. He had no fear whatsoever. He turned over the coals that were red on one side. He turned them over as if they were nuts, and not coals. And from puff to puff, they grew more and more luminous. And the fire became paler and whiter, and the iron rod, which Eli-Leyzer held in the long reddening pincers as in the long red bill of a crane - Ezra could almost feel the iron rod in his own hand, as it became softer and softer, melting like gold. Any minute now, Eli-Leyzer would yank it out and start kneading it with a hammer. He would knead it like golden dough. He would twist it back and then twist it forth, until it got darker, and then he would thrust it back into the fire, and Beryl would keep on working the bellows.
If only he could bang the hammer just once, he thought to himself, just one single time!
Ezra couldn't stand it. He marched over to Beryl and murmured to him softly so that Eli-Leyzer couldn't hear:
"Beryl, here's a kopek, Beryl. just let me pull on the bellows a little. C'mon, just one pull, Beryl!"
Ezra gave him a pleading stare, envious of the little bit of smoke on Beryl's nose, under his lip, and on his sides. Beryl looked like a real blacksmith, especially because of his smoky nose and upper lip. He swiftly pocketed the kopek, grabbed Ezra's hand, and together they quickly pulled the wire of the bellows until Ezra's father Mendel came along, saying in the distance:
"Eli-Leyzer, you could probably get along without my Ezra at your bellows, don't you think? There are enough blacksmiths in town without him."
And he signaled to Ezra:
"Come on home, sonny-boy, c'mon! You wanna become a blacksmith, God willing! You like some nice professions, thank the Lord! God willing, you'll end up as a ragamuffin! With God's help!"
Whenever Ezra walked past the smithy and caught sight of Beryl helping to shoe a horse, he could hear him from far away shouting self-importantly to the horse: "Foot! Foot!"
And when Beryl caught sight of Ezra, he started shouting even louder:
"Your foot, motherfucker, your foot!"
Ezra's head began to spin, he walked around the horse on one side, then the other. He peered under the horse's belly and saw Beryl holding nails in his mouth and stroking the horse's legs. Horseshoes were lying to the side. New ones. Fresh from being cooled in water. They were still blue, like the horse's eyes, the color of vaporous plums just off the tree. But there was nothing Ezra could do here. He walked and walked around and then had to go away.
The peasant glanced at him, and Ezra could hear the whistling of his whip in that glance alone.
If it weren't for the peasant, thought Ezra, he would have shouted, like Beryl, at the entire shtetl:
"Your foot, motherfucker, your foot!"
That year, the Red Sea parted for the last time for Ezra. Pharaoh's chariots went under for the last time, and so did Mendel's control over him. That year, after the high holidays, the fog that always hovered around the railroad station was torn open, and Ezra went far, far away. And Mendel still didn't get any further than the station. To the station every day, and back from the station every day.
Now he was standing next to his son, who was on a visit, and he asked Ezra:
"Do you need anything at the station, Ezra, huh? I'm going there early in the morning. Don't you need anything?"
And since Ezra had nothing for his father to take along to the station, Mendel came closer to his son and spoke softly to him with feigned regret:
"Nothing? Nothing at all?"
At the same time, he sneaked a sidelong glance at the skull that Ezra had brought back from the city and that was now perching on the table. He glanced at the skull to see where the teeth ended, and where the nose and eyes were; and, without raising his head, he blurted out, concealing his distrust:
"Well, what do you say? You say people are descended from apes? Huh? Well, okay, let it be apes!"
Ezra patted the miller on his back and burst into a loving grin:
"Oh, Papa, Papa!"
But Mendel the Miller looked at the walls that were hung with effigies of great tsaddiks and cried out to his son:
"Are you trying to tell me, Ezra, that Abraham came from a monkey? No? You're not saying it?"
And soon Mendel trudged off to the railroad station. The miller felt gloomy. He knew every single peasant but along the way. Every single head of peasant cattle. He recognized the fettered horses scattered on both sides of the field. In their boredom, they were sticking their nostrils into the sparse grass, that was too lazy to grow. There were the slaughterhouses. There were the tanneries. And there was the cemetery.
And windmills waved at one another with their skinny, useless arms. They were plowing the air and plowing through the winds and plowing up the entire countryside. The fields were silent, and silent was the only road that sprawled crooked over the hunchbacked hills and the valleys. Silently, the road carried twelve looming league-posts with black and white stripes - silently it carried them together with Mendel the Miller from the shtetl to the railroad station.