Mr. Monday and other tales of Jewish Amsterdam

YESTERDAY NEVER RETURNS 169

When he had done that work for twenty-four hours or longer, sweating under sacks of sugar weighing more than a hundred pounds, and finally knocked off, he would stumble like a cripple back to his house in Marken Alley.

If you added up all the hours, you still could not escape the conclusion that Levi was out of work at least ten months of the year. Now and then he would stand on the cobblestones and try to scratch some money together with a small business of some sort or another. But it was pitiful to see that he did not possess any talent for business. If it is true, as they say, that a businessman is born with a nose for smelling how the market will go, then Levi was born without a nose. By way of speaking, of course, for in reality his face was provided with an imposing schnozzel. When he bought a bunch of skates so cheap that even a blind man could see the profit laying inches thick on the resale, there was sure not be to be a winter that year.

Fortunately, Levi's temperament did not suffer perceptibly under such adversities. He accepted them because he regarded them as being part of life. His face bore an unchanging comical expression, a little bewildered, as if he was surprised each day that he had not yet died of starvation. But it may also be that he was wondering why it was that Duplikate gave birth to child after child. For the numerousness of his offspring, he himself had a rather indistinct explanation. "If I so much as hang my jacket on the bedroom chair, my wife becomes pregnant again," he'd say. But he refused to take his troubles seriously and possessed a stubborn confidence in a happy ending. His philosophy was that if one would live to become 150 years old, everything would turn out all right in the end.