“Food! Oi weh, a bite to eat! A job should I take?”
The disjointed thoughts of his tired brain urged him to move. He tried to rise, but he ached in every limb. The pain in his stiff body brought back to him the terror through which he had lived the day before. More than starvation, he feared the abyss of madness that yawned before him.
“Machine hand—anything,” he told himself. “Only to be sane—only to be like the rest—only to have peace!”
This new humility gave him strength. He mounted the stairs of the factory and took his place in the waiting line of applicants for work.
§ 6
For weeks Berel Pinsky worked, dull and inanimate as the machines he had learned to drive. Work, eat, sleep—eat, sleep, work. Day after day he went to and from his hall bedroom, day after day to and from the shop.
He had ceased to struggle. He had ceased to be an individual, a soul apart. He was a piece of a mass, a cog of a machine, an ant of an ant hill. Individually he was nothing—they were nothing. Together they made up the shop.
So he went on. Inert, dumb as a beast in a yoke, he brushed against his neighbours. He never talked. As if in a dream, he heard the shrill babble of the other shop hands rise above the roaring noises of the machines.
One day, while eating his scanty lunch, lost in a dull, wandering daydream, he felt a movement at his elbow. Looking up, he saw Sosheh, the finisher, furtively reaching for a crust that had dropped from his thick slice of bread.
“You don’t want it yet?” she questioned, her face colouring with confusion.