This, then, was the shop which Inspector Eibenschütz invaded the following morning, together with the gendarme Piotrak. Although a severe frost prevailed, a good dozen people nevertheless collected in front of the shop and the children ran out from the Jewish school opposite. It was about eight in the morning and Mendel Singer emerged from the prayer-house. When he saw the assembly before the little house he was alarmed, for he feared his house was burning. Some of the curious ran up to him and cried: ‘The gendarme has come! The Inspector has come!’ He rushed inside. And he was even more alarmed than he would have been by a fire. A real gendarme with a rifle stood there while Eibenschütz checked the goods, the scales and the weights. The two cats had disappeared.

The cream was sour, the milk curdled, the cheese wormy, the onions rotten, the raisins mouldy, the figs withered, the scales unsteady and the weights false. Now it came to official procedure. Everything must be written down. When the gendarme pulled out his big official black calico notebook, Mendel Singer and his wife felt as if he were drawing the most dangerous of all his dangerous weapons against them both. The Inspector dictated and the red-haired gendarme wrote. A fire would have been a bagatelle.

The penalty amounted to exactly two gulden and seventy-five kreuzer. The business was not to be continued until the fine had been settled. The purchase of new scales and new weights cost a further three gulden. Where is a Mendel Singer to find two gulden seventy-five and a further three? God is very kind but he does not concern himself with such trivial amounts.

Mendel Singer reflected on all this. That is why he went up to the Inspector, took off his fur cap and said: ‘Your Excellency, Herr General, I beg you, strike everything out. As you can see, I have a wife and children!’

Eibenschütz saw the lean raised hands, the meagre bony cheeks, the poor sparse beard and the black, moist, imploring eyes. He wanted to say something. He wanted, for example, to say: ‘It’s no good, old chap, it’s the law.’ He even wanted to say: ‘I hate this law and myself into the bargain.’ But he said nothing. Why did he not say anything? Because God had closed his mouth and the gendarme was pushing Mendel Singer away. One glance from him was enough. One glance from him was like a fist. And off they went, with weights, scales and the black book.

If Frau Mendel sold anything more today, be it only a single almond, she would be locked up for four months.

The few onlookers and the children who had loitered outside ran off.

‘We shouldn’t have done that!’ said Eibenschütz to Piotrak. ‘In spite of it all he’s an honest man!’