My Mistress's Sparrow Is Dead (49 page)

Then Galina again pushed me to the window.

‘Call your papa home,’ she said, ‘he hasn’t had anything to eat since early morning.’

And I stuck my head out of the window.

‘Papa,’ I said.

Father turned round when he heard my voice.

‘My little son,’ he mouthed with inexpressible tenderness, and began to tremble with love for me.

And together we went to the Rubtsovs’ veranda, where Mother lay in the green rotunda. Beside her bed lay dumbbells and gymnastic equipment.

‘Lousy copecks,’ Mother said to us in greeting, ‘human life and children and our unlucky fortune—you gave them everything . . . Lousy copecks,’ she shouted in a deep, hoarse voice that was not her own, jerked on the bed and grew quiet.

And then, in the silence, I hiccupped. I stood by the wall with my cap pulled down over my eyes and could not stop hiccupping.

‘For shame, my little snub-nose.’ Galina smiled with her disdainful smile and flicked me with her stiff peignoir. She walked over to the window in her red shoes and began to hang Chinese curtains on the unusual window ledge. Her exposed arms drowned in the silk, the living tress of her hair moved on her hip and I looked at her with rapture.

A bookish, nervous boy, I looked at her as if she were a remote stage lit by many lights. And at the same time I imagined I was Miron, the son of the charcoal-dealer who traded on our corner. I imagined myself in the Jewish Self-Defence League and there I am, like Miron, walking in tattered shoes that are tied with string. On my shoulder, on a green cord, hangs a worthless rifle; I am kneeling by an old wooden fence, shooting back at the murderers. Behind my fence stretches a vacant lot, and in it there are piles of dusty charcoal. The useless rifle shoots badly, the assassins in beards, with white teeth, are coming closer and closer to me; I experience a proud sense of imminent death and see, high up, in the blueness of the world, Galina. I see an embrasure cut in the wall of a gigantic house that is built of myriads of bricks. This purple house defies the lane in which the grey earth has been badly flattened; at its topmost embrasure stands Galina, flushed with a merciless winter gaiety, like a rich girl at a skating rink. With her disdainful smile she is smiling from the inaccessible window; her officer husband, half-dressed, is standing behind her, kissing her on the neck . . .

As I tried to stop hiccupping I imagined all this so as to love Rubtsova more bitterly, more ardently, more hopelessly, and, perhaps, because the bounds of sorrow are not great for one who is ten years old. The foolish dreams helped me to forget the doves and the death of Shoyl, I might even have forgotten about these murders had not Kuzma come on to the veranda at that moment with that terrible Jew Aba.

It was dusk when they arrived. On the veranda burned a meager lamp, somehow lopsided at one end, a blinking lamp, the spasmodic travelling companion of misfortunes.

‘I’ve got grandad all dressed up nice,’ said Kuzma, as he came in, ‘he lies there very handsome now. And look, I’ve brought someone from the synagogue, let him say something over the old man . . .’

And Kuzma pointed to the bored beadle, Aba.

‘Let him whimper for a bit,’ said the yardkeeper, amicably. ‘If the beadle stuffs his gut, he will bother God all night . . .’

He stood on the threshold—Kuzma—with his good-natured, broken nose turned in all directions, and was about to describe with as much emotion as possible how he had bound the dead man’s jaws, but Father interrupted the old man:

‘If you please, Reb Aba,’ said Father, ‘say a prayer or two over the deceased. I will pay you . . .’

‘But I fear you will not pay,’ Aba replied in a bored voice, putting his bearded, fastidious face on the tablecloth, ‘I fear you will take my money and go away with it to Argentina, to Buenos Aires, and open there a wholesale business with my money . . . A wholesale business,’ said Aba, giving his contemptuous lips a chew and pulling towards him the
Son of the Fatherland
newspaper that lay on the table. In this newspaper there was a report about the tsar’s manifesto of 17 October and about freedom.

‘. . . Citizens of Free Russia,’ Aba spelled out, chewing his beard which he had stuffed into his mouth, ‘citizens of Free Russia, a bright Sunday of Christ’s Resurrection to you . . .’

The newspaper was sideways before the old beadle, swaying: he read it sleepily, singsong-fashion, and pronouncing the Russian words he did not know with extraordinary stresses. Aba’s stresses were like the indistinct speech of a Negro who has just arrived in a Russian port from his native land. They made even my mother laugh.

‘I am committing a sin,’ she cried, leaning out from the rotunda. ‘I am laughing, Aba . . . Say, better, how do you live and how is your family?’

‘Ask me about something else,’ Aba muttered, without releasing his beard from his teeth, and continuing to read the newspaper.

‘Ask him about something else,’ Father said after Aba, and he went out into the middle of the room. His eyes, smiling at us through tears, suddenly turned in their orbits and fixed themselves on a point that was visible to no one else.

‘
Oy
, Shoyl,’ Father articulated in a level, false, preparatory voice, ‘
oy
, Shoyl, dear man . . .’

Father’s face, which had tightened into a spasm, was rent by exultation, and he was preparing to bawl as Jewish widows bawl at funerals or like old women in Morocco, old women who have landed in misfortune. We saw that he was going to bawl horribly, and Mother gave us advance warning.

‘Manus,’ she cried, growing instantly distraught, and beginning to tear at her husband’s breast, ‘look how our child suffers. Why do you not hear his little hiccups, why is this, Manus?’

And Father fell silent. His dying eyes were surrounded by tears.

‘Rakhil,’ he said fearfully, ‘I cannot tell you, Rakhil, how sad I am about Shoyl . . .’

He went into the kitchen and returned from it with a glass of water.

‘Drink,
artiste
,’ said Aba, coming over to me, ‘drink this water, which will help you just as a censer helps a dead man . . .’

And, true enough, the water did not help me. I hiccupped all the more fiercely. A snarl escaped from my breast. A swelling, pleasant to the touch, rose up on my throat. The swelling breathed, filled out, covered my gullet and tumbled out of my collar. Within it bubbled my lacerated breath. It bubbled like boiling water. And when towards night I was no longer the lop-eared boy I had been throughout all of my previous life, and became a writhing ball, rolling in my own green vomit, Mother, wrapping herself in her shawl and gown, taller and more shapely, approached the rigid Rubtsova.

‘Dear Galina,’ said Mother in a loud, singing voice, ‘how we are troubling you and dear Nadezhda Ivanovna, and all your family . . . how ashamed I am, dear Galina . . .’

With flaming cheeks Mother pushed Galina towards the door, then she rushed up to me and stuffed her shawl into my mouth to suppress my groans.

‘Be brave, dear son,’ she whispered, ‘be brave, my poor Babel, be brave for Mama . . .’

But even if I had been able to put up with it, I would not have done so, because I no longer had any feeling of shame. I tossed about on the bed and, falling to the floor, did not take my eyes off Galina. Fear was shaking the woman and making her writhe; I snarled in her face, so as to prolong my power over her; I snarled in triumph, in exhaustion, with the ultimate exertions of love.

Thus did my illness begin. I was ten at the time. In the morning I was taken to see the doctor. The pogrom continued, but we were left alone. The doctor, a fat man, found that I had a nervous illness.

‘This illness,’ he said, ‘occurs only in Jews and among Jews it occurs only in women.’

So the doctor was surprised to find I had such a strange illness. He told us to go to Odessa and the professors as soon as possible, and there await the warm weather and the sea bathing.

And so we did. A few days later I travelled with Mother to Odessa to stay with Grandfather Levi-Itskhok and Uncle Simon. We sailed in the morning by steamer, and by midday the brown waters of the Bug gave way to the heavy green swell of the sea. Before me opened life in the home of crazy Uncle Levi-Itskhok, and I said farewell for ever to Nikolayev, where ten years of my childhood had passed. And now, when I remember those sad years, I find in them the beginning of the ailments that torment me, and the causes of my premature and dreadful decline.

TONKA

ROBERT MUSIL

I

AT A HEDGE. A bird was singing. And then the sun was somewhere down behind the bushes. The bird stopped singing. It was evening, and the peasant girls were coming across the fields, singing. What little things! Is it petty if such little things cling to a person? Like burrs? That was Tonka. Infinity sometimes flows in drips and drops.

And the horse was part of it too, the roan that he had tied to a willow. It was during his year of military service. It was no mere chance that it was in that year, for there is no other time of life when a man is so deprived of himself and his own works, and an alien force strips everything from his bones. One is more vulnerable at this time than at any other.

But had it really been like that at all? No, that was only what he had worked it up into later. That was the fairy-tale, and he could no longer tell the difference. In fact, of course, she had been living with her aunt at the time when he got to know her. And Cousin Julie sometimes came visiting. That was how it had been. He remembered being disconcerted by their sitting down at the same table with Cousin Julie over a cup of coffee, for she was, after all, a disgrace to the family. It was notorious that one could strike up a conversation with Cousin Julie and take her back to one’s lodgings that same evening; she would also go to the bawdy-houses whenever she was wanted. She had no other source of income. Still, she was a relative, after all, even if one didn’t approve of the life she led; and even if she was a light woman, one couldn’t very well refuse to let her sit down at the table with one. Anyway, she didn’t come very often. A man might have made a row about it, for a man reads the newspaper or belongs to some association with definite aims and is always throwing his weight about, but Auntie merely made a few cutting remarks after Julie had gone, and let it go at that. So long as she was there, they couldn’t help laughing at her jokes, for she had a quick tongue and always knew more about what was going on in town than anyone else. So, even if they disapproved of her, there was no unbridgeable gap between them; they had something in common.

The women from the jail were another example of the same thing. Most of them were prostitutes too, and not long afterwards the jail itself had to be moved to another district because so many of them became pregnant while serving their sentence, carrying mortar on the building sites where male convicts worked as bricklayers. Now, these women were also hired out to do housework. For instance, they were very good at laundering, and they were very much sought after by people in modest circumstances, because they were cheap. Tonka’s grandmother also had one in on washing-day; she would be given a cup of coffee and a bun, and since one was sharing the work with her it was all right to share breakfast with her too—there was no harm in that. At midday someone had to see her back to the jail, that was the regulation, and when Tonka was a little girl, she was generally the one who had to do it. She would walk along with the woman, chatting away happily, not in the least ashamed of being seen in that company, although these women wore grey prison uniform and white kerchiefs that made them easily recognisable. Innocence one might call it: a young life in all its innocence pathetically exposed to influences that were bound to coarsen it. But later on, when the sixteen-year-old Tonka was still unembarrassed, gossiping with Cousin Julie, could one say that this was still all innocence, or was it that her sensibilities were blunted? Even if no blame attached to her, how revealing it was!

The house must also be mentioned. With its five windows looking on to the street, it was a survival between towering new buildings that had shot up around it. It was in the back premises that Tonka lived with her aunt, who was actually her much older cousin, and her aunt’s little son, the illegitimate offspring of a relationship that she had regarded as permanent, and a grandmother who was not really the grandmother but the grandmother’s sister. In earlier days there had also been a brother of her dead mother’s living there, but he too had died young. All of them lived together in one room and a kitchen, while the genteel curtains of the five front windows concealed an establishment of ill repute where lower-middle-class housewives of easy morals, as well as professionals, were brought together with men. This was something that the family tacitly ignored, and since they wanted no trouble with the procuress they even passed the time of day with her. She was a fat woman, very set on respectability. She had a daughter of the same age as Tonka, whom she sent to a good school; she had her taught the piano and French, bought her pretty clothes, and took care to keep her well away from the business. She was a softhearted creature, which made it easier for her to follow the trade she did, for she knew it was shameful. In earlier times Tonka had now and then been allowed to play with this daughter, and so had found her way into the front part of the house, at hours when it was empty, and to her the rooms seemed enormous, leaving her with an impression of grandeur and refinement that was only reduced to proper proportions after he came on the scene.