Each of the twelve brought him twenty kopeks every Friday. This was Mendel Singer’s only income. He was just thirty years old but his chances of earning more were small, perhaps non-existent. When the students grew older they would go to other, wiser teachers. Living became dearer from year to year. The crops were always poorer and poorer. The carrots diminished, the eggs were hollow, the potatoes froze, the soup was watery, the carp thin, the pike short, the ducks lean, the geese tough, and the chickens amounted to nothing.

Thus sounded the complaints of Deborah, the wife of Mendel Singer. She was a woman; sometimes she seemed possessed. She looked askance at the possessions of the well-to-do and envied merchants their profits. In her eyes Mendel Singer was inconsiderable. She blamed him for the children, for her pregnancy, for the high prices, for his poor fees, and sometimes, even, for the bad weather. On Friday she scrubbed the floor until it was yellow as saffron. Her broad shoulders bobbed up and down in an even rhythm; her strong hands rubbed the length and breadth of each single board; and her finger-nails sought in the cracks between the boards, scratched out the black dirt, and destroyed it with splashes of water from her pail. She crept through the bare blue-whitewashed room like a broad, mighty, and movable mountain. Outside, before the door, she aired the furniture, the brown wooden bed, the sacks of straw, the scrubbed deal table, two long, narrow benches, each a horizontal board nailed on two vertical ones. As soon as the first twilight misted the windows, Deborah lighted the candles in the plated candlesticks, threw her hands over her face, and prayed.

Her husband came home, in silky black; the floor shone up at him, yellow as melted sunshine; his countenance shimmered whiter than usual, and blacker than on weekdays gleamed his beard. He sat down, sang a little song, and then parents and children sipped their soup, smiled at the plates, and spoke no word. Warmth rose in the room. It exuded from the pots, from the platters, and from their bodies. The cheap candles in the plated candlesticks could not stand it, they began to bend. Tallow dropped upon the red-and-blue checked tablecloth, and became encrusted immediately. The window was thrown open; the candles manfully took hold of themselves and burned peacefully to the end. The children laid themselves upon the straw sacks, near the stove, but the parents sat awhile and gazed with troubled solemnity into the last blue flames which rose up out of the sockets of the candlesticks and wavered back, a fountain-play of fire. The tallow smouldered, thin blue threads of smoke drew upward towards the ceiling from the embers of wick. ‘Ah!’ sighed the woman. ‘Do not sigh,’ warned Mendel Singer. They were silent. ‘Let us sleep, Deborah,’ he commanded.