I know beforehand what it will be: if not thirty-six rubles a year, it will be thirty-three or thirty-two.... I shall find "many trades and few blessings,"[98] more soap factories, any number of empty houses.... The beadle will reckon up for me: he is a messenger, she, a huckstress; two daughters are out in service in Lublin, in Samoscz.... one son is a "helper" in a Cheder, the other serving his time in the army, and the daughter-in-law with three, four, five children has gone home to her father and mother....
I shall find neglected children tumbling about in the swamp with the ducks and geese; mites of babies screaming their throats out in the cradles; sick people left alone in bed; boarded-out children sitting over Gemorehs; young women in furry wigs and with or without shyness; I hardly shut my eyes, before these same weary, livid, pale, twisted faces, walking sorrows, rise before me ... there is seldom one who smiles, one with a dimple ... all the men so unmanly, so mummy-like, women with running eyes, carrying a load of fruit, a sack of onions, or else an unborn child together with the onions. I know I shall come across an unlicensed third-rate public-house, two or three horse-stealers, and more than two or three receivers of stolen goods. But what about the statistics? Can they answer the question, how many empty stomachs, useless teeth? how many people whose eyes are drawn out of their sockets as with pincers at the sight of a piece of dry bread? how many people who have really died of hunger?
All you gain by statistics is that you find out about an unlicensed public-house, or a horse-thief, or a receiver of stolen goods.
Scientific medicine has invented a machine for checking heart-beats, one by one; the foolish statistics play with figures. Do statistics record the anxious heart-beats that thumped in the breast of the grandson of the descendant from Spanish ancestors, or the son of the author of the Tevuas Shor, before they committed their first illegality? Do they measure how their hearts bled after they committed it? Do they count the sleepless nights before and after?
Can they show how many were the days of hunger? How many times the children flung themselves about in convulsions, how often hands and feet shook when the first glass was filled by the unlicensed brandy-seller? Livid, ghastly, blue faces float before me in the empty air, and blue-brown, parched lips whisper: "There has been no fire in my chimney for twenty-four days."
"We have eaten potato peelings for ten."
"Three died without a doctor or a prescription; I had to save the fourth!"
The hoarse voices cut me to the heart, like a blunt knife; I leave the window where I have been standing; but the room is full of ghosts.
By the stove stands a red Jew, well-nourished: "Hee, hee!" he laughs. "Steal? buy stolen things? a business like any other ... not less than a month's imprisonment ... in a month I would have lost a fortune ... all the noblemen will bear me witness ... honestly! honestly!"
That voice is worse; it saws ... I throw myself on the bed, I shut my eyes, and there appears to me the good old rebbitzin of Skul.