Job by Joseph Roth Read Free Book Online Page B

hut, Shemariah stopped. He cast a glance into the little garden, then into the open empty stable. His brother Jonas wasn’t there. He left a melancholy thought for his lost brother, who had voluntarily sacrificed himself, as Shemariah still believed. He’s coarse, but noble and brave, he thought. Then he walked on with steady steps at the stranger’s side.
    Just beyond the marketplace they met the horses, as the man had said. It took them no less than three days to reach the border, for they avoided the railroad. Along the way it turned out that Shemariah’s escort knew the country well. He revealed it without Shemariah’s asking. He pointed to distant church steeples and named the villages to which they belonged. He named the farms and the estates and the landowners. He often branched off the wide road and found his way on narrow paths in a short time. It was as if he wanted to quickly make Shemariah familiar with his homeland, before the young man departed to seek a new one. He sowed homesickness for life in Shemariah’s heart.
    An hour before midnight they reached the border tavern. It was a quiet night. The tavern stood in it as the only house, a house in the stillness of the night, silent, dark, with sealed windows behind which no life could be suspected. A million crickets chirped around it incessantly, the whispering choir of the night. Otherwise no voice disturbed them. Flat was the land, the starry horizon drew a perfect deep blue circle around it, broken only in the northeast by a bright streak, like a blue ring with a setting of silver. They smelled the distant dampness of the swamps that spread out in the west and the slow wind that carried it over. “A beautiful true summer night!” said Kapturak’s messenger. And for the first time since they were together, he deigned to speak of his business: “On such quiet nights you can’t always cross without difficulties. For our purposes rain is more useful.” He cast a little fear into Shemariah. Because the tavern before which they stood was silent and closed, Shemariah hadn’t thought about its significance until his escort’s words reminded him of his plan. “Let’s go in!” he said like someone who no longer wants to postpone danger. “You don’t need to hurry, we’ll have to wait long enough!”
    Nonetheless, he went to the window and knocked softly on the wooden shutter. The door opened and released a wide stream of yellow light over the nocturnal earth. They entered. Behind the counter, directly in the beam of a hanging lamp, the innkeeper stood and nodded at them, on the floor a few men were crouching and playing dice. At a table sat Kapturak with a man in a sergeant’s uniform. No one looked up. The rattle of the dice and the tick ofthe wall clock could be heard. Shemariah sat down. His escort ordered drinks. Shemariah drank schnapps, he grew hot, but calm. He felt secure as never before; he knew that he was experiencing one of the rare hours in which a man has no less a part in shaping his destiny than the great power that bestows it on him.
    Shortly after the clock had struck midnight, a shot rang out, hard and sharp, with a slowly dwindling echo. Kapturak and the sergeant rose. It was the arranged sign with which the guard indicated that the border officer’s nightly patrol was over. The sergeant disappeared. Kapturak urged the people to set off. All rose sluggishly, shouldered bundles and suitcases, the door opened, they trickled out singly into the night and started on the way to the border. They tried to sing, someone forbade them, it was Kapturak’s voice. They didn’t know if it came from the front rows, from the middle, from the back. Thus they walked silently through the thick chirping of the crickets and the deep blue of the night. After half an hour Kapturak’s voice commanded them: “Lie down!” They dropped onto the dewy ground, lay