THE MADMAN
I returned to my lodgings quite unnerved, and lay a long time on the hard sofa without closing an eye.... A noise wakes me. Something is stealing in to me through the window. I see on the window ledge two long, bony, dirty hands, and there raises itself from behind them an unkempt head with two gleaming eyes in a livid face.
"Won't you enter me?" asks the head, softly.
I do not know how to answer. He, meanwhile, has taken silence for consent, and stands in the middle of the room.
Alarmed, and still more astonished, I keep my eye on him.
"Write!" he says impatiently. "Shall I give you the ink and a pen?"
Without waiting for an answer, he pushes up to my sofa the little table with the writing materials.
"Write, please, write!"
And his voice is so soft and gentle, it finds its way into my heart, and I am no longer frightened.
I sit up to write. I question him, and he answers me.
"Your name?"
"Jonah."
"Your surname?"
"When I was a little boy, they called me Jonah Zieg. After my wedding, Jonah Drong, but since the misfortune happened to me, Mad Jonah."
"What is your German name?"
"O, you mean that?... Directly, directly. Perelmann. You see my pearls?"
He points to a torn, red kerchief round his neck, and says: "Real pearls, ha? But that's what I'm called. How can I help it?"
"A wife?"
"You had better not put her down: she doesn't live with me. Since the misfortune, she doesn't live with me ... a nice wife, too. I would gladly have given her a divorce, but the rabbi wouldn't allow it. He said I mustn't. A nice little wife!"
And his eyes grew moist.
"She even took the child with her. It's better off with her—what should I do with it? Carry it about? They throw stones at me, and would have hurt it."
"One child is it you have?"
"One."
"What was your misfortune?"
"May you know trouble as little as I know that! Folk say a devil. The Röfeh says, a stone fell into my head, and the soul, or, as he calls it, the life, into my belly. I don't remember the stone, but I have a bruise on my head."
He takes off his hat and cap together, bends his head, and shows me a bare bump in the hair.
"It may have been from a stone, but I am mad—that's certain."
"What is your eccentricity?"
"Two or three times a day I have my soul in my belly, and then I speak out of my belly, and crow like a cock. I can't stop myself, I really can't!"
"What were you before the misfortune?"
"I hadn't got to be anything. It happened to me early in the Köst.[103] That is why I have only one child, health and strength to it!"
"Have you any money?"
"I had a few gulden dowry. A lot of it went in remedies—on 'good Jews' ... the rest I gave her."
"What do you live on?"
"On trouble. The boys throw stones at me. I daren't go about in the market-place, else I might have earned something near a stall. At one time people were sorry for me and gave me things. Now times are bad—I have to go begging. I beg before dinner, while the children are still in Cheder. And it's little enough I get by it! The town is small; there are two mad people in it beside me. And now they say that yesterday the 'Lokshiche'[104] threw a saucepan at her servant's head. The servant is sure to go mad, quite sure! Only I don't know yet if she will crow as I do, or trumpet into her fist, like the rabbi's Shlom'tzie, or be silent like Hannah the Tikerin."
——