Mendel never read the papers and knew nothing at all about it. These three weeks had been a time of blank misery for him. He could not work. His people set his teeth on edge. He could not bear to see a soul, for he could not talk. When he met friends and acquaintances, not a word could he find to say to them. There was nothing to say. They were living in a world from which he had been expelled. More than once he was on the point of going to his father and asking to be taken into the workshop, since the only possible, the only bearable life was one of hard manual labour, which left no room for spiritual activity, none for happiness, and very little for unhappiness.
He found some consolation in going to the synagogue. His mother was delighted, but the religion was no comfort to him. What pleased him was to see the old Jews in their shawls and the women in their beaded gowns, praying each in their separate parts of the building—praying until they wept, and abasing themselves before the Lord. What woe, what misery they expressed! All the year round was this dismal wailing, and there was only happiness on the day that Haman was hanged. . . . It seemed good and decent to him that the sexes should be separate before the Lord, as they should be separate before the holy spirit that was in them. They should meet in holiness, hover for a moment above life, then sink back into it again to gather new strength. So love would be in its place. It could be gathered up and distilled. It would not be allowed to spread like a flood of muddy water over life, which had other passions, other delights, other glorious flowerings.
It had been a great day for him when, in a little shop near his home, he had come on a pair of wooden figures rudely carved by savages—African, the shopman said they were. Rudely carved, they were not at all realistic, but admirably simplified, the man and the woman sitting side by side, naked. The man was wearing a little round bowler hat, while the woman was uncovered. They had the spirit and the idea that he most loved—the idea of man and woman sitting side by side, bound in love, unfathomably deep and unimaginably high, until one should follow the other to the grave.
He showed them to Golda, and told her they were she and his father.
“What next will you be up to?” she said. “Why, they are blackamoors.”
“They are you and my father,” he said, caressing the figures lovingly.
“I wish you would put the thought of that girl out of your head,” she said tenderly. “It is making you so ill and so thin, and I dare not think what your father will say when he knows you are drinking again.”
“Mother,” he said, “when did you begin to love me?”
“When you were born,” she said.