Sholem Aleichem - The Letters of Menakhem-Mendl and Sheyne-Sheyndl and Motl, the Cantor's Son

Elye had a problem. What to do with all that ink?

“Ink again?” asked my mother.

“It’s not the ink.” Elye said. “The devil can take the ink! It’s the bottles. We’ve sunk capital in them. We have to get our money back.”

He can make money from anything, Elye. There was nothing to do but pour the ink down the drain. The problem was where. It was embarrassing.

“We have no choice,” Elye said. “We’ll do it at night. No one will see us in the dark.”

We waited for it to get dark. Just out of spite, the moon came up bright as a lantern. (Have you ever noticed that when you need it it’s never there?) You would think someone had sent for it specially — that’s what Elye said as we carried out the bottles. He told me to spill them in different places to keep from making a lake, so I walked behind him and emptied each of them somewhere else. By the neighbor’s wall— splash! By the neighbor’s fence— splash! By the neighbor’s goats chewing their cud in the moonlight— splash!

“That’ll do for tonight,” Elye said, and we went home.

It was dark and quiet except for the crickets. Through the open door of our house we heard the cat purring by the oven. All the sleepyhead ever does is snooze and warm herself. Then we heard footsteps. A ghost!

It was my mother. She never sleeps. She’s up at all hours, sighing, groaning, wringing her hands, talking to herself. Each night she gets a little off her chest. Who is she talking to? There’s a new sigh every minute.

“Ah, God! Dear God!”

I lay half asleep on my mattress, listening to the hubbub outside. The voices sounded familiar. Little by little I opened my eyes. It was broad daylight. The sun was shining through the window, calling to me. I tried remembering last night …of course! The ink!

I jumped out of bed and dressed quickly. My mother was in tears. (When wasn’t she?) Brokheh was furious. (When wasn’t she?) Elye stood in the middle of the room with his head down like a cow being milked. What was the matter? Plenty!

All hell had broken loose when the neighbors rose that morning. Help! Murder! One man had ink on his wall. Another had ink on his new fence. Someone’s white goats had turned black. We might have wriggled out of it even then if not for the slaughterer’s socks. A new pair of white socks, hung by his wife on the neighbor’s fence — ruined! I ask you: who told her to go hang his socks there?

My mother promised to buy her a new pair if she calmed down. And the wall? And the fence? It was agreed that my mother and Brokheh would take two brushes and some whitewash and paint over the stains.

“You’re lucky to have such good neighbors. If that ink had ended up in the Doct’ress’ garden, you would know what the fear of God was!” So Pesye said to my mother.

“Who says you need luck to be lucky?” my mother answered, looking at me.

Search me what that means.

“I’ve learned my lesson,” Elye said. “Tonight we’ll take the rest of the bottles to the river.”

That’s quick thinking or else I’m not a Jew! I’d like to see you show me quicker. All the junk in the world ends up in the river anyway. Folks do their wash there, scrub their horses, clean their pigs. The river and I are old friends. I’ve already told you how I catch fish in it. I couldn’t wait to start dumping ink.

As soon as it was dark we filled a pillow case with bottles, carried it down to the river, poured out the ink, took home the empties, and filled the pillow case again. It took us all night. I’ve never had a grander one.

Just picture it. The town is fast asleep. The sky is full of stars. The moon is shining on the river. It’s so quiet it’s a joy.

The river has a life of its own. It’s liveliest after Passover, when the ice breaks up and it rips and tumbles along. After that it starts to shrink. By the end of summer it’s fallen asleep. The mud at the bottom goes bulla bulla bulla and the frogs sit and talk from bank to bank. It’s a poor excuse for a river then. Honest, I can cross it with my pants on.

All our ink made that river a little bigger. A thousand bottles of ink is no joke. We worked like oxen and slept like the dead in the morning. My mother was sobbing when she woke us.

“I’m ruined! What have you done to the river?”

Kasrilevke had been struck by a disaster. There was nowhere to do the wash, nowhere for the horses to drink, nowhere for the water carriers to get their water — and everyone was blaming us. That was my mother’s wake-up news. We didn’t wait to hear any more. We didn’t want to find out how an angry water carrier took his revenge. We lit out, my brother Elye and I, for Elye’s friend Pinye.

“Let them look for us there if they want to!”

That’s what Elye said, taking my hand and running down the hill to Pinye’s. Pinye is someone you should meet. He’s worth being introduced to. He’s a pretty quick thinker himself.

Would you like to know our latest business? It’s mice. My brother Elye spent the whole week reading One Ruble Gets You a Hundred . Now he’s an expert on exterminating mice, cockroaches, and other pests. Rats too. Just let him loose with his powder and the mice are done for. If they don’t run for their lives, they’ll lie down and croak on the spot. Don’t ask me how he does it. It’s a secret. Only the book and Elye know. Elye keeps the book in his breast pocket. The powder is in a packet of paper. It’s pink and grainy like snuff and called “shemeritsi.”

“What’s that?”

“Turkish pepper.”

“What’s Turkish pepper?”

“Any more whats out of you and I’ll make a door handle of your head.”

That’s what he said to me, Elye. He doesn’t like to be bothered when he’s working. I stopped asking and watched. He had another powder too. It was also good against mice, he said, but it had to be handled with care.

“It’s death itself,” Elye told my mother, Brokheh, and me a hundred times. Especially me. If I knew what was good for me, I’d keep away from it.

Our first experiment was on Pesye’s mice. Pesye has more mice than you can count. You know her husband, Moyshe the bookbinder. Their house is full of books. There’s nothing a mouse likes better. I mean, it’s not so much the books that the mouse likes. It’s the glue in the bindings. A mouse will eat a whole book just to get at the glue. Mice cause Moyshe a lot of damage. Not long ago they made a hole in a High Holy Day prayer book, right where it said “God is King” in big letters. By the time they were done with God, nothing was left but the top of the “K.”

“Just let me at them for one night,” my brother Elye begged the binder. Moyshe didn’t want to. He said: “I’m afraid you’ll ruin the books.”

“How can I ruin them?” Elye asked.

“I don’t know. But you will. They’re not mine.”

Go talk to a bookbinder! It wasn’t easy to get him to agree to even one night.

The first night didn’t go too well. We didn’t catch a single mouse. Elye said that was a good sign. It meant the mice had smelled the poison and run away. Moyshe wagged his head with a one-lipped smile. You could see he didn’t believe us.

Pretty soon the news got out that we were expert exterminators. It started with Pesye, who went to the market that morning and told the whole town we were the world’s best mice-ridders. Pesye is out to make a name for us. Back in the days when we made barley beer, she touted it all over Kasrilevke. Then we switched to ink and she spread the word that we made an ink to beat all. Not that it did any good, because who needed ink? But mice are something else. Everyone’s got them. There’s hardly a house without them.