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By Root 615 0

blindly into that pitiful and hopeless condition, and, having fallen into it, no matter whether by his own fault or by ours, couldn't he find more strength of spirit or more dignity to bear it without complaint? My mother could only check her anger with difficulty. The shop assistants, sitting on their ladders in dull amazement, had dreams of retaliation and thought of reckless pursuit along the shelves with a leather flyswatter, and their eyes became bloodshot. The canvas blind over the shop entrance was flapping furiously, the afternoon heat hung over miles of sun-drenched plain and devastated the distant world underneath it, and in the semiobscurity of the shop, under the dark ceiling, my father hopelessly circled and circled, enmeshing himself tighter and tighter in the desperate zigzags of his flight.

III

Yet, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary, such episodes were of no great importance, for, that same evening, my father was poring as usual over his papers, and the incident seemed to be long forgotten, the deep grudge overcome and erased. We, of course, refrained from any allusion to it. We looked with pleasure as, with seeming equanimity, in peaceful concentration, he industriously covered page after page with his calligraphically precise writing. Instead, it became ever more difficult to forget the compromising presence of the poor peasant. It is well known how stubbornly such unfinished business becomes rooted in certain minds. We ignored him on purpose during these empty weeks, leaving him to stamp on the counter in the dark corner, daily becoming smaller and grayer. Almost unnoticeable now, he was still stamping away on the same spot, smiling benevolently, hunched over the counter, indefatigable, chattering softly to himself. The stamping and knocking became his true vocation, in which he was completely engrossed. We did not interfere with him. He had gone too far; we could not reach him now.

Summer days have no dusk. Before we knew where we were, night would come to the shop, a large oil lamp was lighted, and shop affairs continued. During these short summer nights it was not worth returning home. My father usually sat at his desk in apparent concentration and marked the margins of letters with black scattered stars, ink spots, hair lines that circled in his field of vision, atoms of darkness detached from the great summer night behind the windows. The night meanwhile scattered like a puffball a microcosm of shadows under the globe of the lamp. Father was blinded as his spectacles reflected the lamp. He was waiting, waiting with impatience and listening while he stared at the whiteness of the paper through which flowed the dark galaxies of black stars and dust specks. Behind his back, without his participation, as it were, the great battle for the shop was being fought. Oddly enough, it was fought on a painting hanging behind his head, between the filing cabinet and the mirror, in the bright circle of the lamplight. It was a magic painting, a talisman, a riddle of a picture, endlessly interpreted and passed on from one generation to the next. What did it represent? That was the subject of unending disputations conducted for years, a never-ending quarrel between two opposing points of view.

The painting represented two merchants facing one another, two opposites, two worlds.

"I gave credit," cried the slim, down-at-heel little fellow, his voice breaking in despair.

"I sold for cash," answered the fat man in the armchair, crossing his legs and twiddling his thumbs above his stomach.

How my father hated the fat one! He had known both since his childhood. Even as a schoolboy, he was full of contempt for any fat egoist who devoured innumerable buttered rolls in the middle of the morning. But he did not quite support the slim one either. Now he looked amazed as all initiative slipped from his hands, taken over by the two men at loggerheads. With bated breath, blinking his eyes from which the spectacles had slipped, my father now tensely awaited the result of the dispute.

The shop itself was a perpetual