“No.” He named the first town that came to his tongue.
“Have you relatives here?”
“No. But I have obtained a furlough and am going home. I am waiting for a letter and some money. I have left my uniform with a friend.”
The assistant beadle asked Makar for news—whether there were any rumours of some new war, or of some fresh legislation affecting the condition of Jews. The query was made on the supposition that Makar, as a member of the Czar’s army and one who saw so many officers, could not be unfamiliar with what was going on “up above”; and Makar appeased the old man’s curiosity with some suitable bits of information. The assistant beadle was particularly interested in the story of a certain colonel, a bitter anti-Semite, who used to beat the Jews in his regiment because a Jewish money-lender had him under his thumb. Now this “Jews’ enemy” lay in bed, stricken with paralysis—a clear case of divine reckoning. Did Makar know him? Makar said he did.
The discussion was interrupted by the appearance of a bewigged woman with a pound of candles, in commemoration of the anniversary of a death. She wanted to make sure that they were going to be used for diligent study and not to be thrown away on loafers, and the assistant beadle told her that it would be all right and that she had better go home and put the children to bed. Another woman, whose boy was studying in a corner, was watching his gesticulations with beaming reverence. She had an apple for him and a copper coin for the assistant beadle, and when she saw Makar looking at her son, she said, nodding her head blissfully:
“Praised be the Master of the World. It is not in vain that I am toiling. The boy will be an adornment to my old age.”
Later in the evening a woman burst into the synagogue, lamenting and wringing her hands. She besought the recluses to pray for her newly-married daughter, who was on her death-bed. Makar was deeply touched. He felt like a foreigner amid these scenes that had once been his own world, and the consciousness of it filled him with melancholy.
He slept at the synagogue. After the service next morning he sent out a boy for some bread, butter and pot cheese, and at two o’clock a devout widow brought him, at the assistant beadle’s recommendation, a pot of soup and boiled meat. He ate his dinner with Talmudistic bashfulness, the woman looking on piously, and mutely praying to heaven that her dinner might agree with the holy man and give him strength for the study of God’s laws.
Toward evening he ventured out on a stroll through the spacious courtyard which lay between the Old Synagogue and several other houses of worship. In this yard was a great octagonal basin, celebrated for its excellent tea water, with moss-grown spouts and chained wooden dippers. He watched the water-bearers with their pails and the girls with their jugs—a scene that seemed to have sprung to life from certain passages in the Talmud—until he came within a hair’s breadth of being recognised by his former landlady.
Rabbi Rachmiel was absent from the synagogue that day. When Makar returned to the house of study he noticed signs of excitement. The recluses and other students were absorbed in whispered, panic-stricken conversation. They dared not discuss the news in groups, some even pretending to be engrossed in their books, as much as to say: “In case it comes to the knowledge of the police that you people are talking about it, I want you to remember that I took no part in your gossip.” The meaning of Clara’s disappearance was not quite clear to them. They knew in a very dim way that there were people, for the most part educated people, who wanted to do away with czars in general, and now it appeared that Rabbi Rachmiel’s daughter was one of those mysterious persons. Those of the Talmudists who knew Clara were trying to imagine her as something weird, preternatural, and when her familiar face came back to them they uttered subdued exclamations of amazement.