But my brother Elyahu really gets back at him! He tells him to mind his own business and to be careful not to bind together a Haggadah with the High Holiday penitential prayers. Moishe the bookbinder knows very well what that dig is about! He was once engaged by a coachman to do a job. The coachman had given him a Haggadah to bind, but by mistake the bookbinder bound in with it a section of the penitential slichot prayers of the High Holidays instead of the welcoming prayers for Elijah at the Passover seder. Everyone at the seder laughed. The following morning the coachman went to our neighbor the bookbinder and wanted to tear him limb from limb.
“Villain, what did you do to me? Why did you stick an unkosher prayer into my Passover Haggadah? I’m going to rip the guts out of your belly!”
Yes, that was quite a jolly Passover.
But don’t be upset that I brought in another story. I’ll get back to our moneymaking ventures now.
IX
AFTER THE FLOOD (of Ink)
A.
My brother Elyahu is beside himself with worry. What to do with all that unsold merchandise?
“Still with the ink?” my mother asks him.
“I’m not talking about ink!” my brother Elyahu answers. “To the devil with the ink! I’m talking about the bottles! There’s a fortune in them! We have to make sure to empty the bottles so we can get our money out of them!”
Everything has to be turned into money! My brother Elyahu decides we have to get rid of all that ink, no matter how. But that’s the problem — where to pour it all? It could be embarrassing.
“There’s nothing to it,” says my brother Elyahu. “We have to wait till night. At night it’s dark, no one will see.”
Night falls at last. Out of spite, the moon shines like a lantern. “When you need it, it hides. But look at it now, as if we’d sent for it!” my brother Elyahu says as we carry out bottle after bottle and — splash! pour the ink onto the street. A huge puddle grows in the place where we’re pouring the ink. “We shouldn’t pour it all in one place,” says my brother Elyahu, and I obey him. I find a fresh place to pour the bottles. Splash! Against a neighbor’s wall! Splash! Against another neighbor’s fence! Splash! All over two goats chewing their cuds in the moonlight!
“That’s enough for tonight!” my brother Elyahu says, and we go to bed. It’s quiet and dark. I can hear the crickets. The cat is purring under the stove — that sleepyhead! Day and night all she wants is to warm herself and doze. I hear footsteps on the other side of the door. Could it be some bad person? No, it’s my mother — she isn’t sleeping. It seems she never sleeps. During the nights I can always hear her cracking her knuckles, sighing and groaning, and talking to herself. That’s her habit. Every night she talks out her troubles. To whom is she talking? To God. Every other minute she lets out an “Oy, God! God!”
B.
I’m lying on my bedding on the floor and hear a hubbub of familiar voices in my sleep. Slowly I open my eyes — it’s broad daylight. The bright sunlight bursts through the window. It’s calling me outdoors. I try to remember what happened the night before — aha! Ink! I jump up and quickly dress. My mother is teary-eyed — but when isn’t she teary-eyed? My sister-in-law Bruche is furious — but when isn’t she furious? And my brother Elyahu is standing in the middle of the room, hanging his head, trying to look innocent as a lamb.
What’s been happening? A great deal! Once our neighbors woke up this morning, all hell broke loose. You’d think they were being slaughtered! One neighbor’s wall is splashed with ink. Another neighbor’s fence, a new fence, has ink all over it. A third neighbor had two white goats but now they’re black, unrecognizable. All this might be tolerable were it not for the slaughterer’s wife’s stockings. She had hung out her new pair of white stockings to dry on our neighbor’s fence. They’re ruined. To keep the peace, my mother promises to buy her a new pair of stockings. But what about the wall and the fence? We decide that my mother and sister-in-law Bruche will very kindly take two brushes and whitewash the stains.
“You’re lucky you live next door to decent neighbors. If you had splashed ink on Menashe the doctor’s garden, you’d know what kind of God we have!” our neighbor Pessi says to my mother.
“What are you talking about? Do you mean you need to have luck to have bad luck?” My mother looks at me meaningfully.
What do you think she means?
C.
“Now I’ll be smarter,” my brother Elyahu says to me. “Just wait till nightfall, and we’ll take the bottles down to the river.”
Right, as I am a Jew! What could be smarter than that? People pour filth into the river anyway! They wash laundry and water horses there, and it’s where the pigs wallow. I know that river well. I used to catch fish in it. In fact, I’m looking forward to going to the river.
As soon as night falls, we load baskets full of bottles and carry them to the river. We pour out the ink and carry the empty bottles back home, then take another load of full bottles. We work all night. I haven’t had such a happy, enjoyable night in a long time.
Just picture it: the town is asleep, the sky is full of stars, and the moon is reflected in the river. It’s peaceful and quiet. A river is like a living thing. After Passover, when the ice melts, it performs wonders! It swells, spreads itself out, and pours over its banks. And then it grows smaller, narrower, and shallower. By the end of summer, it quiets down and takes a nap. Occasionally some creature in the bottom mud goes bul-bul-bul. A pair of frogs reply from the other side: krua-krua! It’s so small, it’s an embarrassment, not a river! And I can cross by foot to the other side without even taking off my pants!
Because of our ink, the river becomes a little wider. Imagine, toiling like oxen, we pour in about a thousand bottles! We sleep afterward like the dead.
The next morning my mother awakens us. “Woe unto me and my miserable life! What have you done to the river?”
It appears we have brought catastrophe to the whole town. The washerwomen don’t have anywhere to wash their laundry. The coachmen don’t have anywhere to water their horses. The water-carriers are ganging up to come after us. That’s the good news our mother brings. But we aren’t going to wait. We aren’t anxious to learn what the water-carriers have in store for us. I and my brother Elyahu decide we’d better take off as fast as our legs can carry us to his friend Pinni.
“Let them look for us there if they want us!” My brother Elyahu takes my hand, and we speed down the hill to his friend Pinni. When we meet again, I’ll tell you all about Pinni. It’s worth your while to get to know him: he also has lots of good ideas.
X
THE NEIGHBORHOOD SNEEZES
A.
Guess what we’re breaking our heads over these days. Mice! All week my brother Elyahu has been studying his little book on how to make money with little investment, From One Ruble — A Hundred! Lately he’s learned, he says, how to drive out mice, cockroaches, and other vermin. Rats too. Just let him put a powder in a place, and not one mouse will be left! They’ll run away, or die — no more mice. How he makes it, I don’t know. It’s a secret. He keeps the book in his chest pocket, the powder wrapped in a piece of paper. The powder is reddish and ground fine like snuff. It’s called shemeritzi.