The Spinoza of Market Street - Isaac Bashevis Singer [44]
The young men watching them smiled, nudged each other and exchanged meaningful glances. The older householders shrugged their shoulders.
"Why didn't you write a letter first?" they asked Moshe.
"I can't w-r-rite," was the answer.
"So you can get someone else to write for you. Beggars have made up stories before."
"But the beggar said. . . ."
All talk and counter-arguments proved vain. To every question the man had only one answer: "The beggar said so." One might have thought his wife would have had more sense, but she, too, had the same stock rejoinder: "The beggar said so." The crowd of townspeople grew swiftly and the strange tale passed from mouth to mouth. The onlookers began to whisper to each other about it; they shook their heads and made crude puns. One of the men, a flour dealer, called out:
"Just think, believing a poor tramp like that!"
"Maybe the beggar was the Prophet Elijah in disguise," jeered another.
The school children came out from the Cheder and mimicked the new arrivals. "The beggar said so," they hooted after them. The young girls giggled while the older women wrung their hands and lamented the lot of these poor fools from Great Poland. In the meantime Moshe the chimney sweep filled one of his cans with water at the town pump and gave his horse a drink. Then he proceeded to fasten a bag of oats around the animal's jaws. From the horse's collar which was studded with bits of brass two pine branches protruded stiffly. The shaft was painted blue. Everyone soon saw that the two travelers had with them, besides the horse and the bird, an odd assortment of geese, ducks, chickens, and one black rooster with a red comb--all in one big cage.
In Yanov at the time there were no vacant dwellings; temporarily, therefore, the two strangers were put up at the poorhouse. A coachman took their horse into his own stable, and someone else bought the fowl. Moshe's spouse, Mindel, immediately joined the other shnorrers' wives in the kitchen of the poorhouse where she cooked some porridge. Moshe, himself, went off to the study house to recite a few chapters from the Book of Psalms. And a new byword became fashionable in Yanov: "But the beggar said so." The schoolboys never tired of questioning Moshe and of laughing up their sleeves.
"Tell us," they would query, "just what did he look like, that beggar?"
"Like all other beggars," Moshe would reply.
"What kind of a beard did he have?"
"Yellow."
"Don't you know that men who grow yellow hair are cheaters?"
"How should I know?" Moshe would report. "I'm a simple man. The beggar said so, and I believed him."
"If he had told you that the rabbi's wife lays eggs, would you have believed that too?"
Moshe did not answer. He was a man well into his fifties, though still without one gray hair. His face was tanned like that of a gypsy. His back was straight; his shoulders and chest, broad. He produced for the school teacher's inspection two medals which he had gotten in the Tsar's service for proficiency in riding and marksmanship, and he told of his experiences as a soldier. He had been one of the young boys inducted by force. His father had been a blacksmith. He, Moshe, had still been a student at the Cheder when a child-snatcher from the Tsar's army had taken him away. But he, Moshe, had refused to eat forbidden foods and had fasted until he was faint with hunger. The village priest had tried to convert him, but he had a mezuzah which his mother had given him as well as the fringed ritual garment worn next to the body to remind him of his God at all times. Yes, they had whipped him, flogged him too with wet switches, but he had not given in. He had remained a Jew. When they tortured him, he had cried out, "Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is One."
Moshe also told about the time, years later, when he had fallen asleep while on sentry duty and his gun had slipped from his hand. If he had been caught napping, he would have