"What is it, Moshe-Yankel? God be with you!"
"Coarse blackguard! Man of the earth!" he shouted at the carpenter, and was ready to kill him.
"How could you be such a coarse blackguard? Such a man of the earth? Is a citron an ax? Or is it a saw? Or a bore? A citron is neither an ax nor a saw nor a bore. You have cut my throat without a knife. You have spoiled my citron. Here is the top of it—here, see! Coarse blackguard! Man of the earth!"
We were all paralysed on the instant. Zalmen was like a dead man. He could not understand how this misfortune had happened to him. How had the top come off the citron? Surely he had held it very lightly, only just with the tips of his fingers? It was a misfortune—a terrible misfortune.
Basse-Beila was pale as death. She wrung her hands and moaned.
"When a man is unfortunate, he may as well bury himself alive and fresh and well, right in the earth."
And Leibel? Leibel did not know whether he should dance with joy because the Lord had performed a miracle for him, released him from all the trouble he had got himself into, or whether he should cry for his father's agony and his mother's tears, or whether he should kiss Zalmen's thick hands with the sticky fingers and the red nails, because he was his redeemer, his good angel.... Leibel looked at his father's face and his mother's tears, the carpenter's hands, and at the citron that lay on the table, yellow as wax, without a head, without a spark of life, a dead thing, a corpse.
"A dead citron," said my father, in a broken voice.
"A dead citron," repeated my mother, the tears gushing from her eyes.
"A dead citron," echoed the carpenter, looking at his hands. He seemed to be saying to himself: "There's a pair of hands for you! May they wither!"