rld, which his mother feared, for which his father yearned, and of which Mordecai became increasingly aware. There the little waxen, silent boy grew into a bony, rasping youth, the dark down straggling like an indecision on his upper lip, the lips themselves blooming far too soon, the great nose assuming manifest importance. It was the age of mirrors, and in their surfaces Mordecai attempted regularly to solve the mystery of himself. He was growing muscular, sensual, yellow: hideous to some, provocative to others. What else, nobody was yet allowed to see. "Tell me, you ugly Jew, what it feels like to be one?" his friend Jürgen Stauffer asked. In fun, of course. Friendship and laughter still prevailed. The forest flecked the boys' skins, as they rubbed along, elbow to elbow, the soles of their boots made slippery by thicknesses of fallen leaves. "Tell me!" Jürgen laughed, and insisted. He was of that distinctive tint of German gold, affection showing in the shallows of his mackerel eyes. "Oh, like something that runs on a hundred legs," Himmel-farb replied. "Or no legs at all. A snake, for instance. Or scorpion. Anyway, specially created to be the death of gentiles." Then they laughed louder, and together. Sundays had become warmer than the Sabbath for the young Jew, when he walked with his friend, Jürgen Stauffer, on the wilder side of the _Stadtwald__ at Holunderthal. "Tell me," Jürgen asked, "about the Passover sacrifice." "When we kill the Christian child?" "So it seems!" How Jùrgen laughed. "And cut him up, and drink the blood, and put slices in a _Biötchen__ to send the parents?" Mordecai had learnt how to play. "_Ach, Gott__!" Jùrgen Stauffer laughed. How his teeth glistened. "Old Himmelfurz!" he cried. "_Du liebes Rindvieh__!" Then they were hitting each other, and grunting. Their skins were melting together. They could not wrestle enough on the beds of leaves. Afterwards they lay panting, and looked up through the exhausted green, to discuss a future still incalculable, except for the sustaining thread of friendship. In the silences they would sigh beneath the weight of their affection for each other. "But when I become a cavalry officer-and there is no question of anything else, because of Uncle Max-and you are the professor of languages, it is not very likely we shall ever see each other again," Jürgen Stauffer reasoned. "Then you must arrange to ride your horses," Mordecai suggested, "round and round whichever university I honour with my presence." "It is a vice, Martin, never to be serious. A hopeless, hopeless, vicious vice!" From where he lay, Jürgen Stauffer thumped his friend. "You are the hopeless one, not to choose a more civilized career." "But I like horses," Jürgen protested. "And then I am also a bit stupid." Himmelfarb could have kissed his friend. "Stupid? You are the original ass!" If they had not tired themselves out, they might have wrestled some more, but instead they lay and listened to the blaze of summer and their own contentment. Occasionally the young Jew was invited to his friend's house, for the parents' liberal attitude allowed them to receive regardless of race. Gerhard Stauffer, the father, was, of course, the publisher. He even loved books, and an undeserved failure would make him suffer more than an obvious success would cause him to rejoice. His wife, a minor actress in her youth, had retired into life and marriage equipped with a technique for theatre. Frau Stauffer was able to convince a guest that the scene they had just enacted together contributed immensely to the play's success. "Martin shall sit beside _me__," Frau Stauffer would emphasize, patting the place on the sofa with the touch the situation required. "Now that we are _comfortable__," she would decide, while inclining just that little in the direction of her guest, "you must tell me what you have been _doing__. Provided it has been _dis-reputable__. I refuse to listen to anything else. On such a _damp__ afternoon, you must _curdle__ my blood with indiscretions." Then Frau Stauffer smiled that deliberate smile. She had remained of the opinion that any line may be "improved," and that every scene needed "lifting up." But the boy was conscious of his lack of talent. Seated beside his hostess on her cloud, he remained the victim of his awkward body. Or, advancing from an opposite direction, the host would court their unimportant guest, inviting him to give his point of view, showering newspaper articles and books. "Have you discovered Dehmel?" Herr Stauffer might inquire, or: "What do you think, Martin, of Wedekind? I would be most interested to hear your honest opinion." As if it mattered to that grave man. The embarrassed boy was gratified, but could not escape too soon, back to his friend. The attention of the parents flattered more in retrospect. "You see," said Jürgen, without envy, "you are the respected intellectual. I am the German stable-boy." But it could have been for some such reason that the young Jew admired his friend. There was the elder brother, too, who would emerge mysteriously from his room, suffering from acne and a slight astigmatism, and eating a slice of buttered bread. Konrad has outgrown his strength, and must fortify himself, Frau Stauffer explained. Konrad came and went, ignoring whatever existed outside the orbit of his own ego. He seemed to despise in particular all younger boys-or was it only the Jewish ones? — that was not yet made clear. "What does he do all the time in his room?" Mordecai asked the younger brother. "He is studying," replied the latter, with the air of one who could not be expected to take further interest. "He is all right," he said. "Only a bit stuck-up." On that occasion Konrad Stauffer came out of his room chewing at a _Brötchen__ with caraway seeds on top. "What," he said to Mordecai, "you here again! Are you perhaps _en pension__?" As everybody else was embarrassed, he laughed a little for his own joke. There was the sister, Mausi, still a little girl. Her plaits glistened like the tails of certain animals. Once she threw her arms round the Jew's waist, and pressed against him with all her strength, and tried to throw him. "I am stronger than you!" she claimed. But neither proved, nor provoked. She stood laughing into the bosom of his shirt. Her breath burned where the V opened on his bare skin. Best and most alarming of all were evenings in the big salon, when girls came in bows and sashes, their necks smelling of _kölnisches Wasser__. There were girls already corseted stiff, and a few real young men, often the sons of cavalry officers. These absolute phenomena, themselves cadets, always knew what to do, with the result that younger boys would listen humiliated to their own crude, breaking voices, and mirrors reminded them that the pimples were still lurking in their tufts of down. One evening, after their elders had withdrawn to the library to amuse themselves at cards, somebody of real daring devised the most scandalous game. "Which person in the room do you like best?" it was asked of each in turn. "Why?" The next impossible question followed, and others, all headed in the inevitable, and most personal direction. Giggles, and the braying of the adolescent jackass, widened the circles of embarrassment. "Whom do you like, Mausi Stauffer?" finally it had to be asked. Mausi Stauffer did not hesitate. "Martin Himmelfarb," she said. Some of the young ladies might have burst, if their whalebone had not contained them. In the circumstances, they rocked and wheezed. "Why, Mausi?" asked Cousin Fritz, the son of Uncle Max. The scar across his left cheek appeared unnaturally distinct. "Because," said Mausi. "Because he is interesting, I suppose." "Come, now!" complained an upright young woman in steel spectacles, with a pale, flat rosette of a mouth. "That is a weak answer. You may have to pay a forfeit. Fifty strokes on the palm of your hand from the edge of a ruler." Mausi screamed. She could not have borne it. "We want to give you another chance," said Cousin Fritz, so beautiful and hateful in his cadet's uniform. "_Why__ does this Himmelfarb appeal to you?" He made the name sound particularly exotic and ridiculous. Mausi screamed. She tossed her plaits into the air. "Because," she cried, and snickered, and wound her thin legs together, and perspired in her crushed muslin. "Because," she screeched, in a voice they were dragging out of her, "he is like"-she still hesitated-"a kind of black _buck__!" The bronzes might have tumbled from their pedestals, if, at that moment, a spinster lady devoted to the family had not returned in search of her scarf, and decided instinctively to remain. In that same moment, Mordecai made down the passage for the lavatory. As he came out again, Konrad Stauffer was trying the door. "Oh!" exclaimed Konrad, mostly with his stomach, and recoiled. He looked quite pale, and blank, but could have been rehearsing a speech. "Just a lot of stupid Germans," he managed to utter breathily. "Germans are all animals." "Aren't we also Germans?" Mordecai suggested. "Those who pass judgment always exclude themselves," the spotty young man replied, and laughed. "Haven't you found that out? Oh, dear!" He sighed. "I don't propose to get involved in anything else tonight. I am going up to my room." Mordecai did not know what to make of Konrad. Nor did he see him again for years. One result of the evening was that Frau Stauffer apparently decided to bring down the curtain on the comedy they had been enacting in their relationship with the young Jew. Jürgen grew increasingly elusive. Attempts at even indirect inquiry would start him kicking holes in the ground, or else he would mumble, and fix his eyes on some point which, he let it be understood, lay outside his friend's field of vision. Often in this suffocating situation, Mordecai would struggle for breath. Then his mother, noticing his dark eyelids, and the colour of his skin, prescribed a tonic, and after only half a bottle he slept with a whore called Marianne, who lived beneath a gable in one of the older streets of the town. His body was flooded with a new, though at first dreadful, relief. "You Jews!" Marianne remarked, looking him over during a pause, for which she was sufficiently generous not to charge. "The little bit they snip off only seems to make you hotter." As for her client, he stared exhausted at her enormous beige nipples, and wondered whether his instincts would know how to navigate the frail craft in which he had embarked alone. Thus committed to the flesh, the ceremonies of his parents' house soon became intolerable. The Sabbath, for instance, all through his boyhood a trance of innocent perfection, in which he would not have been surprised to see the Bride herself cross the threshold, was now transformed into a wilderness of hours, where good aunts and all those ugly girl cousins were continually setting traps of questions to catch his guilt. Prayers and food choked him equally as he waited for sunset and the scent of spices to wake him from his nightmare. Lovingly. And he, in turn, loved all that he was rejecting, not so much by choice, it seemed to him at first in moments of self-exoneration, but by arrangement between unknown persons who controlled his future. The severest torture remained the trial by charity. There were the humble, sometimes even ragged, unwashed individuals, whom his father, from sense of duty, or the need for self-congratulation, collected at the synagogue, and brought home to the Sabbath table, where Martin-Mordecai would exert himself to offer friendly words and recommend the most delicious dishes, to atone for the disgust the visitors roused in him. There was one creature in particular: a little dyer, whose skin was bathed in indigo; the palms of his hands were mapped indelibly in purple. This man's material affliction impressed itself on his conscience the evening the dyer slipped while crossing one of Moshe's handsome rugs. The boy felt himself to be in a way responsible. As his hands slithered on the old Jew's greasy coat, he grabbed hold of what seemed a handful of rag, and just prevented the guest from falling. But his own fright and nausea were in his mouth; he might have been the one who had all but suffered a serious fall, whereas the old man grew servile with gratitude for what he called a gentlemanly act, was moved to caress every inch of his saviour's back, and to bestow pretentious titles such as Crutch of the Infirm, and Protector of the Poor. After Mordecai had escaped from the room, and was washing himself, his mother came and stood in the doorway, to say in her driest voice, which tender feelings would force her to adopt, "You are upset, my dear boy, and have not yet experienced the hundredth part." She watched her son thoughtfully. "Dry your hands quickly now," she coaxed, gentler, "and come on back to us. We must not allow that poor man to guess." She would have liked to use her compassion to comfort those nearest to her, but the loving woman was unable to. More often than not, she saw her words salt the wounds. The house was full of twilight situations, and shaken attitudes. The son became amused. He would raise one shoulder and compose his mouth, as the Kiddush introduced the Sabbath. He would barb the words of prayers with mockery, to aim at innocent targets. Even though he failed to destroy what he had loved most, his perversity had developed to the point where the attempt remained his painful substitute for ritual. Then, as soon as his duties had been at least outwardly discharged, he would rush out. He would roam the streets, looking into lit windows, brush against passers-by, and apologize with an effusiveness which could only be interpreted as insolence. Now that he was filled with a rage to live, the scents of the streets maddened him. He would try the breasts of the whores, propped on cushions, on their window-sills. He had an insatiable appetite for white flesh, of pale complaisant German girls, pressed against stucco, or writhing in the undergrowth of parks, beside stagnant water, in a smell of green decay. If he had not hardened quickly, he might have been consumed by his own disgust. But he grew steely. He plastered down his winged hair. He wore a moustache. And studied. All through the period of his worst disintegration, Mor-decai remained, to the innocent and unaware, dedicated solely to his books. He did, in fact, cling to them, like fingers to a raft. And what more solid and reasonable than words as such? It was only in the permutations and combinations that they dissolved into that same current which threatened to suck down the whole boiling, grinning crew of desperate, drowning souls. At the university the young man's intellectual activities were narrowed down to the study of his preferred language-English. Its bland and rather bread-like texture became his manna. But, in opposition to his will and intentions, he would find his mind hankering after the obdurate tongue he had got as a boy from the Cantor Katzmann. His proficiency in Hebrew had grown with intermittent attention, and he would often read, late at night, both for instruction, and for the bitter pleasure of it. In the second decade of the century Mordecai Himmelfarb received his doctorate in English, and shortly after, was informed that he would be permitted to continue his studies at the University of Oxford. Moshe was overjoyed, not only for the impression the event would make on his acquaintances, but because of his admiration for the English, for the excellent quality of their cloth, boots, and the silk hats he liked to wear on formal occasions. If he also sensed the distance which separated the English temperamentally from himself, that added, if anything, to their fascination. And now his own son was to be removed to the side of the elect. The gap in their relationship, already wide, would necessarily widen. Already the old man visualized himself, the self-sacrificing Jewish father, standing on railway platforms in the steam from trains. The joyous, painful tears spurted in anticipation. For that which moved and charmed Moshe most, was that which receded irretrievably: departing trains, the faces of the _goyim__, the relationship with his own son, and, if he had dared to think, let alone whisper-he who contributed so generously to the Zionist movement-the redemption of Israel as a possible event. It was Moshe who broke the news to the boy's mother, and in that way, perhaps, less pain was caused. Frau Himmelfarb, who was darning a sock, did not at first answer. She continued looking at the sock with the rather myopic patience characteristic of her. "I did expect, Malke, that you would grasp," her h