Free Job by Joseph Roth

pray.” And he departed without waiting for his wife’s reply.
    It could scarcely have been three hours since he’d left the temple. Now that he entered it again, he felt as if he were returning there after many weeks, and he stroked with a tender hand the lid of his old prayer desk and celebrated a reunion with it. He opened it and reached for his old, black and heavy book, which was at home in his hands and which he would have recognized without hesitation among a thousand similar books. So familiar to him was the leather smoothness of the binding with the raisedround islets of stearin, the encrusted remains of countless candles burned long ago, and the lower corners of the pages, porous, yellowish, greasy, curled three times over through decades of being turned with moistened fingers. Any prayer he needed at the moment he could open to in no time. It was engraved in his memory with the tiniest features of the physiognomy it bore in this prayer book, the number of its lines, the nature and size of the print and the exact shading of the pages.
    It was twilight in the temple, the yellowish light of the candles on the eastern wall next to the cabinet of the Torah scrolls did not dispel the darkness, but rather seemed to bury itself in it. He saw the sky and a few stars through the windows and recognized all the objects in the room, the desks, the table, the benches, the scraps of paper on the floor, the candelabra on the wall, a few golden-fringed little covers. Mendel Singer lit two candles, stuck them to the bare wood of the desk, closed his eyes and began to pray. With closed eyes he knew where a page ended, mechanically he turned to the next. Gradually his upper body slipped into the old customary regular swaying, his whole body prayed with him, his feet scraped the floorboards, his hands closed into fists and pounded like hammers on the desk, on his chest, on the book and in the air. On the stove bench slept a homeless Jew. His breaths accompanied and supported Mendel Singer’s monotonous song, which was like a hot song in the yellow desert, lost and intimate with death. His own voice and the breath of the sleeper benumbedMendel, drove every thought out of his heart, he was nothing more than one praying, the words went through him on the way to heaven, a hollow vessel he was, a funnel. Thus he prayed into the morning.
    The day breathed on the windows. The lights became scanty and dull, behind the low huts one already saw the sun rising, it filled the two eastern windows of the temple with red flames. Mendel snuffed out the candles, put away the book, opened his eyes and turned to go. He stepped outside. It smelled of summer, drying swamps and awakened green. The window shutters were still closed. People were asleep.
    Mendel knocked three times with his hand on his door. He was strong and fresh, as if he had slept dreamlessly and long. He knew exactly what was to be done. Deborah opened. “Make me some tea,” said Mendel, “then I want to tell you something. Is Miriam home?” “Of course,” replied Deborah, “where else would she be? Do you think she’s already in America?”
    The samovar hummed, Deborah breathed into a drinking glass and polished it. Then Mendel and Deborah drank steadily with pursed slurping lips. Suddenly Mendel put down the glass and said: “We will go to America. Menuchim must stay behind. We must take Miriam with us. A misfortune hovers over us if we stay.” He remained silent for a while and then said softly:
    â€œShe’s going with a Cossack.”
    The glass fell clanging from Deborah’s hands. Miriam awokein the corner, and Menuchim stirred in his dull sleep. Then it remained silent. A million larks were trilling above the house, below the sky.
    With a bright flash the sun struck the window, reached the shiny tin samovar and lit it into a curved mirror.
    Thus the day began.

VII
    To Dubno one travels with Sameshkin’s cart; to