Even strangers regarded him anxiously. No one had ever asked after his sick child, but everyone inquired about his healthy sons.

Finally, on the twenty-sixth of March, both brothers journeyed to Targi. Both drew service numbers in the lots. Both were perfectly healthy. Both were accepted. They were allowed to pass one more summer at home. They had to report in the autumn. On a Wednesday they became soldiers; on a Sunday they returned home.

On a Sunday they returned home, equipped with free railway passes from the State. Already they travelled at the expense of the Tsar. Many of their kind travelled with them. It was a slow train. They sat on wooden benches among peasants. The peasants sang and were drunk. They all smoked black tobacco, with the smoke of which a distant reminder of sweat was blended. They told each other stories. Jonas and Shemariah did not separate for a minute. It was almost their first journey on the railway. Often they changed seats with each other. Each of them wished to sit for a few minutes at the window and look at the landscape. In Jonas’s eyes it was flat; it bored him. The train glided smoothly over the flat land, like a sleigh over snow. The fields were framed in the windows, the peasant women in their coloured shawls waved. Wherever a group of them appeared, the peasants in the train greeted them with a roar.

Dark, shy, and anxious, the two Jews sat amongst the peasants, pushed into a corner by the exuberance of the drunken men.

‘I should like to be a peasant,’ Jonas suddenly said.

‘Not I,’ answered Shemariah.

‘But I would really like to be a peasant,’ repeated Jonas. ‘I’d like to get drunk and sleep with the girls.’

‘I want to be what I am,’ said Shemariah. ‘A Jew like my father, Mendel Singer. No soldier, and sober.’

‘I’m sort of glad I’m going to be a soldier,’ said Jonas.

‘You’ll have a nice time of it! I’d rather be a rich man and see life.’

‘What’s life?’

‘Life,’ declared Shemariah, ‘is in the big towns. The trams run in the middle of the streets, all the stores are as big as our gendarmerie barracks, and the show windows are even bigger.