But Mendel replied: ‘Be still, Deborah! No doctor can cure him, if God does not will it. Should he grow up among Russian children? Never hear a holy word? Eat milk with meat and chickens roasted in butter, the way people get them in the hospital? We are poor, but I will not sell Menuchim’s soul just because he can be cured free. One is not healed in strange hospitals.’

Like a hero Mendel held out his scraggy white arm to be vaccinated. But he would not give Menuchim away. He decided to beseech God’s help for his youngest and to fast twice in the week, Mondays and Thursdays. Deborah undertook pilgrimages to the cemetery; she called upon the bones of her ancestors to plead her cause before the Almighty. Thus would Menuchim become well and no epileptic.

Nevertheless, after the hour of the vaccination, fear hung over the house of Mendel Singer like a monster, and care blew steadily through their hearts like a hot, piercing wind. Deborah would sigh and her husband did not reprove her. When she prayed, she held her face buried longer than usual in her hands, as though she created her own night in which to bury her fears, and her own darkness in which to find peace. For she believed, as it stands written, that God’s light shines in the darkness and His goodness illumines the black night.

The older children grew and grew; their healthiness sounded an evil warning in the ears of the mother as though it were inimical to Menuchim. It was as though the healthy children drew strength from thq sickly one, and Deborah hated their noisiness, their red cheeks, their straight limbs. She pilgrimaged to the cemetery in rain and shine. She struck her head against the mossy sandstone which grew up from the bones of her father and mother. She called upon the dead whose quiet comforting answer she thought she heard. On the way home she trembled with the hope that she would find her son cured. She neglected her duties at the hearth; the soup ran over, the earthen pots cracked, the pans rusted, the shimmering green glasses splintered with a sharp report, the chimney of the oil lamp was clouded with soot, the wick charred away to a miserable stump, the dirt of many soles and many weeks lay thick upon the boards of the floor, the dripping melted in the pots, the buttons withered from the shirts of the children like leaves before the winter.

One day, a week before the high holy days (the summer had turned into rain and the rain sought to turn into snow), Deborah packed her son in a basket, laid a blanket over him, put him on the cart of the driver Sameshkin, and journeyed to Kluczýsk, where the Rabbi lived. The boardseat lay loosely upon the straw and slid out of place with every movement of the wagon. Deborah had to hold it down by the main weight of her body. It was a living thing; it wanted to hop about. The narrow winding streets were covered with a silver-grey mud. The high boots of the passersby sank into it, and the cartwheels disappeared to the hubs. Rain veiled the fields, dispersed the smoke over the isolated huts, pounded with endless patience everything firm that it struck – the limestone, which here and there grew out of the earth like a white tooth; the sawed-up logs at the edges of the road; the aromatic boards piled one upon another before the entrance to the saw-mill; the shawl on Deborah’s head; and the woollen blanket under which Menuchim lay buried. No drop must wet him.

Deborah reckoned that she still had four hours to go; if the rain did not stop, she would have to wait in an inn and dry the blanket, drink tea, and eat the dampened poppy-seed pretzels she had brought with her. That could cost five kopeks, five kopeks, which one did not throw about carelessly. God Himself could see that; it stopped raining. Above flying rags of cloud a blurred sun shone pale for barely an hour; then it finally sank in a new and deeper twilight.