“It is not my way to mention the war. If an hour has passed without my remembering it, I feel as if a kindness has been done me. But one thing I will tell you, my dear sir. During the war I served with a certain doctor. Once they brought in a soldier, a young man, whose feet had been frozen in the trenches. Since his feet were frozen he could not move away and hide from the enemy. So he was struck by a grenade splinter, which broke his teeth and smashed his gums. His legs, my dear sir, could not be saved, for there was no more life in them, so the doctor amputated them above the knee, but he repaired his mouth. He sewed and cut and sewed and made him some kind of gums from some kind of material — I don’t remember what it was. When I saw that young man, who had lost his legs and had nothing left of his face but a kind of open wound, I used to turn my face away and weep, for I was afraid I might go mad. But the doctor liked to look at him, and whenever he was not busy with the other wounded he would occupy himself with him, patching and mending his face and sticking on one strip of flesh over another. And he would mention the names of famous professors and say, ‘Such perfect work they have never done in their lives.’ Meanwhile they would bring other wounded men, and there was no room for them in his surgery. So they put the earlier group in an ambulance wagon and sent them to a certain hospital in the town. Among them was that soldier I told you of. Indeed, the doctor did not want to send him away, but his clinic was full, and every day they would bring more wounded; so the doctor tied a ticket on his neck and wrote how they should treat him, how they should feed him and what they should feed him with. And he told us to take particular care of him every hour and every moment, for he had also lost the strength of his hands and could not raise them to his mouth. We traveled at the side of the wagon, looking after the wounded and protecting them, and trying to lighten their sufferings. On the way, along came a German lieutenant. He asked us if there was room in the wagon. ‘The whole wagon is full of sick and wounded,’ we replied, ‘and we are taking them to the hospital in town.’ ‘I will go and see if there is no place here for a German officer,’ said the lieutenant. So he took the legless soldier with the shattered mouth, put him off the wagon and sat him on the ground in a lonely and desolate place. Then he came and took his place on the wagon. And now, try to understand. Surely all our efforts to understand are in vain.
“Or another example, my dear sir, an example from times of peace. But why should I sadden you, my dear sir? Sometimes I apply my mind to life and I come to the conclusion that it is not worth a man’s while to live, for even if he does good and never sins, surely his very existence only brings about more evil and leads to sin, because his fellows have not reached this standard, and therefore they are compelled — both because they are evil themselves and because he is good — to do him evil. Wait for me, my dear sir, a little while; Aunt is calling me. I shall come back at once.”
Chapter seven and sixty. The Street Where I Lived in My Childhood
I did not wait for Leibtche to come back, and when he went to his aunt I went away.
I made my way to the left bank of the Stripa, where a house stands in which I lived as a child with my father and mother and my brothers and sisters. Even that morning I had intended to go there, but Zippora had come along and stopped me on the road. Although Leibtche had refrained from giving me examples of the troubles he had seen in peacetime, so as not to sadden me, I was not joyful. In these days, whether you hear about the days of the war or the days of peace, you are sad.
In days gone by, the street to which I was going was a model of tranquillity. At its beginning stood the post office, in the middle was the high school, and at the end was a convent, containing a little hospital surrounded by a large garden; between them was a row of little houses, looking out on the Stripa, and opposite the post office stood a few green benches in the shadow of acacias. It was here that the intellectuals of the town used to come to open out their newspapers and read. In the evenings boys and girls used to stroll here until nightfall, and if the occasion called for it, they would add another hour.
The benches had been taken away and the acacias cut down; most of the houses were in ruins and the intellectuals of the town were dead. What was left of all that tranquillity, except for the river, which flowed as before? This was the river in which I used to bathe, and in front of which I would light a candle on the first night of the Penitential Prayers, to give light to the souls of those who had drowned there, so that if they rose to recite the Penitential Prayers they might see the light and guard themselves against the evil spirits that tried to cling to them. But the benches had been taken away and there was no place to sit; so I went to the house where I had lived as a child.
All the other houses lined up in a row, but this one jutted out somewhat from the rest, at a little distance from the street, and you went up to it on stone steps. There was a large stone in front of the house and a kind of little garden behind it, from which something like a hill arose — and behind that was the end of the world. There, when I was a child, I had dug a little pit, like the pit of Asmodeus, King of the Demons, in the Tractate of Divorces, and on the slab in front of the house I would play ball with my little girl neighbors. This game was not like the boys’ games, such as the overthrow of the wall of Jericho and the Battle of David and Goliath, with their parallels in the Scriptures; but it involved waving of the hands and running with the feet and beating of the heart, for when you let the ball fly in the air it becomes its own master: if it likes it rolls one way, if it likes it rolls another, and you can never be sure it will come back to you.