Sholem Aleichem - Tevye the Dairyman and Motl the Cantor's Son

Because of our ink, the river becomes a little wider. Imagine, toiling like oxen, we pour in about a thousand bottles! We sleep afterward like the dead.

The next morning my mother awakens us. “Woe unto me and my miserable life! What have you done to the river?”

It appears we have brought catastrophe to the whole town. The washerwomen don’t have anywhere to wash their laundry. The coachmen don’t have anywhere to water their horses. The water-carriers are ganging up to come after us. That’s the good news our mother brings. But we aren’t going to wait. We aren’t anxious to learn what the water-carriers have in store for us. I and my brother Elyahu decide we’d better take off as fast as our legs can carry us to his friend Pinni.

“Let them look for us there if they want us!” My brother Elyahu takes my hand, and we speed down the hill to his friend Pinni. When we meet again, I’ll tell you all about Pinni. It’s worth your while to get to know him: he also has lots of good ideas.

A.

Guess what we’re breaking our heads over these days. Mice! All week my brother Elyahu has been studying his little book on how to make money with little investment, From One Ruble — A Hundred! Lately he’s learned, he says, how to drive out mice, cockroaches, and other vermin. Rats too. Just let him put a powder in a place, and not one mouse will be left! They’ll run away, or die — no more mice. How he makes it, I don’t know. It’s a secret. He keeps the book in his chest pocket, the powder wrapped in a piece of paper. The powder is reddish and ground fine like snuff. It’s called shemeritzi.

“What is shemeritzi ?”

“Turkish pepper.”

“What is Turkish pepper?”

“If you don’t stop all this what-is, you’ll find your head going through the door!”

My brother Elyahu hates to be asked questions when he’s in the middle of work. I shut my mouth. Along with the red powder, I notice that he has another powder. It also works on mice. But you have to be very careful with it!

“Deadly poison!” my brother Elyahu says maybe a hundred times to my mother, to Bruche, and to me. Especially to me lest, God forbid, I touch it — it’s poison!

We make our first test on our neighbor Pessi’s mice. An endless horde of mice live there. Her husband Moishe is a bookbinder, and the house is full of prayer books. Mice love prayer books. Well, not so much the prayer books as the glue that holds the books together. But as long as the mice are eating the glue, they might as well eat the prayer books too. They do enormous damage. One time they gnawed through one of his holiday prayer books, brand-new, right to where THE KING was printed in large letters. They really loved those words THE kING! They only left the crown of the letter lamed.

“Let me at them for one night!” my brother Elyahu pleads with the bookbinder.

The bookbinder won’t have it. “I’m afraid you’ll ruin my prayer books,” he says.

“How will I ruin your prayer books?” my brother Elyahu asks.

“I don’t know how, but I’m still afraid. These prayer books belong to other people.”

You can’t argue with a bookbinder! But finally we got him to let us spend just one night there.

B.

That night didn’t work out too well for us. We didn’t catch one mouse! But my brother Elyahu says it was a good sign. The mice, he says, sniffed out our powder and ran off. The bookbinder shook his head and smirked. He didn’t believe it. Still and all, word got around town that we could drive away mice. It was our neighbor Pessi who spread the word around. She went off one morning to the market and told everyone that “no one drives away mice like they drive away mice.” She made our reputation. Earlier she praised our kvass all over town, and then she trumpeted far and wide that we made the best ink in the world. It turned out that no one needed ink, but mice are not the same as ink. Mice are everywhere, in every house. Every homeowner has a cat. But what good is one cat against so many mice? And rats! Rats are about as afraid of cats as Haman is of Purim noisemakers. In fact, cats are afraid of rats. That’s what Berreh the shoemaker says. He tells tales of terrifying rats. People say he is a big exaggerator, but even if only half of what he says is true, it’s still bad. Rats ate up a new pair of boots, he says. It was at night. He was afraid of coming too close to them — two huge rats, as big as calves. From a distance he whistled at them, stamped his feet, screamed kish-kish-kish-kish! Nothing helped. He threw the heel of a boot at them, but they just glanced up and then went about their business. Then he threw the cat at them. They attacked the cat and ate her. Nobody wanted to believe him, but if a person swears, you have to believe him.

“Give me just one night,” my brother Elyahu says to him, “and I’ll drive out all the rats!”

“Ah, with the greatest pleasure!” says Berreh the shoemaker. “I’ll thank you for it!”

C.

We sit through one whole night at Berreh the shoemaker’s, who himself sits with us. Ah, what wondrous tales he tells us! He’s a veteran of the Turkish War, stationed in a place called Plevneh.

“They were shooting with cannons. Do you know how big a cannon is? One cannonball is bigger than this whole house, and they shoot a thousand cannonballs in one minute. What do you think of that? When that cannonball flies through the air, it screams so loud you can go deaf!”

Once he was standing guard, as Berreh the shoemaker tells it, when suddenly he heard a bang . Something was carrying him up into the air, high up, way above the clouds, and there the cannonball exploded into a thousand pieces. Luckily he fell on a soft place, he says, otherwise he would have broken his head. My brother Elyahu listens to this tale, and his eyebrows smile — that is, he isn’t laughing, but his eyebrows are laughing. It’s a strange laughter. Berreh the shoemaker doesn’t notice. He keeps on telling his fantastic tales. Each story is scarier than the one before. And that’s how we spend our time until daybreak. And rats? We see not a one.

“You’re a magician!” Berreh the shoemaker says to my brother Elyahu. And he goes out into the town and tells everyone about this miracle, how with a magical incantation we drove away all the rats in one night. He swears that he himself saw it — my brother Elyahu muttered something, and the rats came out of their nests and than ran down to the river, swam across, and kept running, he does not know where to.

D.

“Are you the people who drive away mice?” People are coming to hire us to drive away mice with our magical incantation.

But my brother Elyahu is an honest person. He hates lies. He doesn’t drive away mice with a magical incantation, he explains, but with a powder. He has a kind of powder that, once the mice smell it, they run away.

“Let it be a powder, let it be whatever you want,” they say, “so long as you drive away the mice! How much will it cost?”

My brother Elyahu hates to bargain. For the powder it will cost so much, he says, and for the labor, so much and so much. As you might expect, with each new customer he raises the price. Actually, it isn’t he who raises the price; it’s my sister-in-law.

“Make up your mind,” she says. “If you’re going to eat pig, let the fat run down your beard. If you’re going to be a mouse-catcher, at least make some money out of it.”

“ Nu, and where is fairness? Where is God?” my mother interjects.

My sister-in-law snaps at her, “Fairness? There is fairness!” She indicates the stove. “God? Here is God!” She slaps her pocket.