Job Read Online Free PDF Page B

whole childhood toward them, it meant and contained all that they had seen, heard, smelled and felt since the hour of their birth: the singsong of the studying children. It contained the smell of hot and flavorful meals, the black and white shimmer that emanated from their father’s beard and face, the echo of their mother’s sighs and of Menuchim’s whimpering tones, Mendel Singer’s whispered prayers in the evening, millions of unnamable regular and special events. Both brothers reacted with the same stirrings to the melody that wafted through the snow toward them as they neared their father’s house. Their hearts beat in the same rhythm. The door flew open before them, through the window their mother Deborah had long seen them coming.
    â€œWe’ve been taken!” said Jonas without a greeting.
    All of a sudden a terrible silence fell over the room in which the children’s voices had been sounding only a moment before, a silence without bounds, much vaster than the space it had captured, and yet born from the little word “taken” that Jonas had justspoken. In the middle of a word they had memorized the children broke off their studying. Mendel, who had been pacing up and down the room, stopped, looked into the air, raised his arms and lowered them again. The mother Deborah sat down on one of the two stools that always stood near the stove as if they had long been waiting for the opportunity to receive a grieving mother. Miriam, the daughter, groped her way backwards into the corner, her heart pounded loudly, she thought everyone could hear it. The children sat nailed to their seats. Their legs in colorfully striped wool socks, which had swung incessantly during the studying, hung lifelessly under the table. Outside it was snowing incessantly, and the soft white of the flakes streamed a pale shimmer through the window into the room and onto the faces of the silent people. A few times they heard the wood cinders crackle in the stove and a soft rattle of the doorposts when the wind shook them. The sticks still over their shoulders, the white bundles still on the sticks, the brothers stood at the door, messengers of misfortune and its children. Suddenly Deborah cried: “Mendel, go and run, ask people for advice!”
    Mendel Singer grasped at his beard. The silence was banished, the children’s legs began to swing gently, the brothers put down their bundles and their sticks and approached the table.
    â€œWhat foolishness are you talking?” said Mendel Singer. “Where should I go? And whom should I ask for advice? Who will help a poor teacher, and how should anyone help me? What help do you expect from people, when God has punished us?”
    Deborah didn’t answer. For a while, she remained sitting completely still on the stool. Then she stood up, kicked it with her foot as if it were a dog, so that it tottered away with a clatter, grabbed her brown shawl, which had been lying like a hill of wool on the floor, wrapped her head and neck, tied the fringes at the back of her neck into a strong knot with a furious motion as if she wanted to strangle herself, turned red in the face, stood there hissing as if filled with boiling water, and suddenly spat, firing white saliva like a poison bullet before Mendel Singer’s feet. And as if with that alone she had not sufficiently demonstrated her contempt, she sent a cry after the saliva, which sounded like a
phooey!
but could not be clearly understood. Before the dumbfounded onlookers could recover, she opened the door. An evil gust of wind poured white flakes into the room, blew into Mendel Singer’s face, grasped the children by their hanging legs. Then the door slammed shut. Deborah was gone.
    She ran aimlessly through the streets, always in the middle, a dark brown colossus, she rushed through the white snow until she sank in it. She got tangled in her clothes, fell, stood up with astonishing nimbleness, ran on, she