Awake! Awake!
Ring the alarum bell. Murder and treason!

But in the audience no one heard these words. If anything, the bedlam there was worse than on the stage. The Jewesses who were not gasping, weeping, were sitting there stunned. Many of the male Baluters were pointing at Macbeth and his mate, as if to say, There he is! They did it! They’re the ones! Even the members of the Jewish Council were thrown into confusion. “Assassins!” they shouted. “Anarchists!” None paid attention to Popower, the former waiter. He was pulling the sleeves of his colleagues and saying, “But, Verble, but Miss Kleinweiss, it’s only a play!”

It’s an interesting point the minister raised. The Ghettoites, after all, had been living for years in the most dreadful conditions. Every day they saw things more frightening than witches and fogbanks and hooting owls. Was there a man or woman in the House of Culture who had not lost, one way or another, a person he loved? Could any spectator know for sure that he, himself, would not be deported before the week was out? No! No! Not likely. Here people walked around thin as sticks, with their bones practically showing. In the winter the Baluters froze. They choked from the smell in the summer. You could always hear some mad person shouting, an English tailor!, or some other meaningless phrase. It was as if hell had been moved to the surface of the earth. And the worst thing, the horror of horrors, was that the citizens of the Suburb had got used to their lives. Sometimes the newspapers would blow off the corpses: there would be the green face or the blue face or even the healthy-looking pink face of a person you knew. This is what everyone saw, including women, including young boys and girls. No one thought twice about it.

On Assisi Street, however, the Jews were frantic. They pulled on the roots of their hair. Impossible to think they didn’t know they were seeing a play. Those were rubber daggers. It was a story from a hundred years ago. No, the Ghettoites knew perfectly well that in a moment Nathan Hobnover would jump up from his pool of bogus blood; yet they wept for him as if he had been an actual king, painfully, mortally, wounded. Has there ever been a better illustration of the wonderful power of art?

By the time things calmed down the stage was nearly deserted. The actors had run off in different directions—the archers in search of the supposed plotters, the retainers carrying Lady Macbeth—who, in all the excitement, had fainted. Mann Lifshits, and poor Hobnover of course, were alone in the castle hall. The former walked down the staircase and put his boot on the latter’s chest. The purple walls of the curtain began to close jerkily on them both. Then—it was the last thing the crowd was able to see—the murderer stooped, plucked the bright crown from the head of his victim, and, carefully, using both hands, set it down upon his aviator’s helmet. He was the king, then, just as the witches predicted.