The brief tale I am telling you happened in the days before Kamenivke
had joined itself on, by means of the long, tall, and beautiful bridge,
to the great high hill that has stood facing it from everlasting,
thickly wooded, and watered by quantities of clear, crystal streams,
which babble one to another day and night, and whisper with their
running tongues of most important things. So long as the bridge had not
been flung from one of the giant rocks to the other rock, the Kamenivke
people had not been able to procure the good, wholesome water of the
wild hill, and had to content themselves with the thick, impure water of
the river Smotritch, which has flowed forever round the eminence on
which Kamenivke is built. But man, and especially the Jew, gets used to
anything, and the Kamenivke people, who are nearly all Grandfather
Abraham's grandchildren, had drunk Smotritch water all their lives, and
were conscious of no grievance.
But the lot of the Kamenivke water-carriers was hard and bitter.
Kamenivke stands high, almost in the air, and the river Smotritch runs
deep down in the valley.
In summer, when the ground is dry, it was bearable, for then the
Kamenivke water-carrier was merely bathed in sweat as he toiled up the
hill, and the Jewish breadwinner has been used to that for ages. But in
winter, when the snow was deep and the frost tremendous, when the steep
Skossny hill with its clay soil was covered with ice like a hill of
glass! Or when the great rains were pouring down, and the town and
especially the clay hill are confounded with the deep, thick mud!
Our Bertzi Wasserfuehrer was more alive to the fascinations of this
Parnosseh than any other water-carrier. He was, as though in his own
despite, a pious Jew and a great man of his word, and he had to carry
water for almost all the well-to-do householders. True, that in face of
all his good luck he was one of the poorest Jews in the Poor People's
Street, only----
V
Lord of the World, may there never again be such a winter as there was
then!
Not the oldest man there could recall one like it. The snow came down in
drifts, and never stopped. One could and might have sworn on a scroll of
the Law, that the great Jewish God was angry with the Kamenivke Jews,
and had commanded His angels to shovel down on Kamenivke all the snow
that had lain by in all the seven heavens since the sixth day of
creation, so that the sinful town might be a ruin and a desolation.
And the terrible, fiery frosts!
Frozen people were brought into the town nearly every day.
Oi, Jews, how Bertzi Wasserfuehrer struggled, what a time he had of it!
Enemies of Zion, it was nearly the death of him!
And suddenly the snow began to stop falling, all at once, and then
things were worse than ever--there was a sea of water, an ocean of mud.
And Passover coming on with great strides!
For three days before Passover he had not come home to sleep. Who talks
of eating, drinking, and sleeping? He and his man toiled day and night,
like six horses, like ten oxen.
The last day before Passover was the worst of all. His horse suddenly
came to the conclusion that sooner than live such a life, it would die.
So it died and vanished somewhere in the depths of the Kamenivke clay.
And Bertzi the water-carrier and his man had to drag the cart with the
great water-barrel themselves, the whole day till long after dark.