ABSTRACT
By one o’clock in the afternoon the town of Iksiniszki was full of seething humanity. The market square and all the streets were jammed with carts, horses and cattle, and though there seemed to be no room left fresh crowds flowed to the town from all directions. There was so much noise that it was almost impossible to hear one’s neighbor speak. The tumult was worst at the outskirts of town where the horse-market was located. Here, there gathered at fair-time the horse sellers and buyers, the agents and merchants, the thieves and policemen who dogged their footsteps. Now and again one heard the cry of the crowd calling together “Thief!” Someone called, “The police are taking a thief to jail.” Someone else called, “The thief is a Jew.” “All Jews are thieves,” called a whole group together. Here, the police lead off a young Jew caught red-handed trying to pick a farmer’s pocket, and a whole crowd of people jeer him. There, a horse and its owner are led away to the police-station for one of the farmers recognized that the horse was stolen from him. Here, the police drag away one of the farmers who had drunk more than his fill and had begun to break things in the tavern and had brawled with everyone in sight, and he even punched the police. There, a mob gathered and began fighting and punching and lashing out with sticks and the police struggled to separate the brawlers. At one comer there was the sound of bitter sobbing as one of the village women bewailed the loss of thirty roubles which she had either lost or which had been stolen from her. She had sold her only calf for thirty roubles and now the money was gone. A crowd gathered around her, either to console her or to provoke her further, 114but she wept without consolation. Suddenly, among the crowd which was gathered round her, an old Jew appeared. His hair and beard were bleached with age and his face betrayed that wealth was a stranger to his household. In one hand he held a stick and in his other he held a small flat tin on which was written in Hebrew, “Charity for the sick.” This man was the shamas of the synagogue and also the shamas of the Society for Visiting the Sick.
