“No,” replied Mendel, “on the seat and the back.”
Golda made him undress, and she gave a gasp of anger when she saw the weals and bruises on his back. “But what did you do?” she cried.
“I don’t know,” answered Mendel. This was true. At school he would suddenly find the teacher towering over him in a fury; he would be told to stay behind, and then he would be flogged. He had suffered more from the humiliation than from the pain inflicted. He could never understand why this fury should descend upon him out of his happy dreams. And now as his mother wept over the marks upon his body the suffering in him was released. All the feeling suppressed in him by his inability to understand came tearing out of him and he shook with rage. He could find no words to express these new emotions, which were terrible and frightened him.
Lotte came up and felt the weals on his back with her fingers, and she said: “They don’t do that to girls.”
“Be quiet, Lotte,” said Golda. “Don’t touch him. You will hurt him.” And she stood staring in amazement at the boy’s back. “That’s an awful mess,” she said to herself, and her thoughts flew back to men who had been flogged by the soldiers in Austria. But this was England, where everybody was left alone. She could not understand it. She did not know what to do. The boy could not be kept from school, for they would come and drag him to it. There were often dreadful scenes in Gun Street when children were dragged off to school. She made Lotte sit at the table and write: “Please, teacher, you must not beat my son. His back is like a railway-line, and it is not good to beat children.” She could think of no threat which could intimidate the teacher, no power she could invoke to her aid. Her powerlessness appalled her. She signed the letter and thought she would go to the Rabbi and ask him what she must do. “Yes,” she said, “the Rabbi will tell me, and perhaps the Rabbi will write to the teacher also.” She could feel the torture in the boy, and she knew that it must be stopped. It was all very well to knock Harry or Issy about. They could put up with any amount of violence. But Mendel was different. With him pain went so deep. That was what made it horrible. He was like a very little child. It was wicked to hurt him. His silence now was almost more than she could bear.
There came a knock at the door. Lotte went to open it and gave a little scream. It was her father come back from America. He came into the room, not different by a hair from when he went away; thinner, perhaps, a little more haggard and hollow under the eyes, so that the slight squint in his right eye, injured to avoid conscription, was more pronounced. He came in as though he had returned from his day’s work, nodded to his wife, and looked at the boy’s back.
“Who has done that?” he asked.
“At school,” replied Golda. “The teacher.”
Jacob took off his coat, rolled up his sleeves, picked up a chair and smashed it on the floor. Mendel put on his shirt and coat again and said: “It is like when you knocked the soldier over with the glass.”
Jacob gave a roar: “Ah, you remember that? Ah! yes. That was when I had the inn near the barracks. He was an officer. Two of them came in. They were drunk, the swine! The man made for your mother and the officer for your sister. The glasses were big, with a heavy base. I took one of them . . .”