The Dogs and the Wolves (3 page)

‘But really, Isa,’ she would say to her brother-in-law, ‘don’t you owe it to your good name to raise your children somewhere cleaner, with a better reputation?
You
seem to have forgotten, but as long as I live, I will never forget that my poor husband’s name, and yours as well, is Sinner.’

Ada listened to her, sitting in her usual place, on the old settee, between her cousins, Lilla and Ben. It must have been shortly after Aunt Raissa’s arrival. It was one of Ada’s earliest memories. They were drinking their evening tea. Her grandfather, her father and Aunt Raissa were sitting on cane chairs with dark wooden backs that were called, she never knew why, ‘Viennese chairs’, even though they’d been bought second-hand from the man on the square, while the children sat on the brown leather settee with its tall, stiff back. To Ada, the house had always seemed dark and
unwelcoming, which it was, to tell the truth . . . It was an old building; its four rooms led off to small, dimly-lit corridors with large cupboards, and the rooms were all on different levels so that in order to walk around the entire house, you had to go up and down rickety staircases, and through icy spaces paved with brick and serving no particular purpose. When night fell they were lit by the pale, flickering light of a street lamp out in the courtyard. Ada often felt afraid in this house, but the settee was a haven to her: she loved it there. It was where she waited for her father, where she fell asleep at night while everyone around her talked, not thinking to send her to bed. Behind the cushions, she hid old pictures, broken toys – the ones she loved most – and coloured pencils. The settee was worn out; the torn leather hung down in ribbons in places, the springs creaked. But she loved it. Now it was Ben’s bed; she felt ejected, cast out.

She held her cup of tea in both hands and blew on it with such concentration that her little face seemed to disappear into the large cup and all you could see of her was her thick, dark-brown fringe.

Her aunt looked at her and, wishing to be kind, said: ‘Come here, Adotchka. I’ll tie back your hair with a pretty ribbon, darling.’

Ada obediently stood up, but she had to make her way through the narrow space left between people’s legs and the table, and it took her a long time. When she finally arrived, her aunt had forgotten all about her. Ada slipped on to her father’s lap and listened to the grown-ups talk, while trying to poke her finger through the smoke rings that came from her father’s cigarette; it made little bluish rings, light and moist, that disappeared as soon as she reached out to touch them.

‘We are the Sinner family,’ Aunt Raissa said with pride. ‘And who is the richest man in this town? Old Salomon Sinner. And in Europe?’

She turned towards Ada’s grandfather. ‘You’ve travelled, Ezekiel Lvovich, have you ever seen the family’s mansions in London and Vienna?’

‘We’re not as closely related as that,’ Ada’s father said, laughing slightly in surprise.

‘Really? Not closely related? And just what makes you say that, if you please? Wasn’t your own grandmother the first cousin of old Sinner? Both of them ran barefoot through the mud. Then she married your grandfather who sold clothes and old furniture, in Berdichev.’

‘They’re called rag merchants,’ Ben said suddenly.

‘Keep your mouth shut,’ his mother said harshly, ‘you don’t know what you’re talking about! Rag merchants carry bundles of old clothes on their backs and go door to door trying to sell them in the slums. Your grandfather had a shop and an assistant, two assistants, when things were going well. Back then, Salomon Sinner worked hard, made money, and his sons did well and made even more money, so much so that today their fortune is worth at least as much as the Rothschilds’.’

But now, given the incredulous looks on their faces, she could sense she had gone too far.

‘They may have a few million less than the Rothschilds, two or three million less, I can’t remember, but they are hugely wealthy and we’re related to them. That’s what we mustn’t forget. If you were to put yourself forward a bit more, my poor Isa, and stop looking like a sad little dog – you’ve looked like that since the day you were born – as your brother always said, you could be someone in this town. Money is money, but blood is blood.’

‘Money . . .’ her father said quietly.

He sighed, smiled slightly. Everyone fell silent. He poured a little tea into his saucer and drank it, nodding his head. Everyone thought money a good thing, but to a Jew, it was a necessity, like air or water. How could they live without money? How could
they pay the bribes? How could they get their children into school when there were already too many students enrolled? How could they buy permission to go here or there, to sell this or that? How could they avoid military service? Oh, my God! Without money, how could they live?

Her grandfather moved his lips slightly and tried to recall the quotation from a Psalm he needed for chapter XII, paragraph 7 of his book. His family’s chatter simply did not exist as far as he was concerned. The external world was only important to base creatures who didn’t know how to shut it out through spiritual meditation and intellectual thought.

Aunt Raissa looked at the shabby, messy room, full of smoke from the kitchen, and could barely hide her disgust. The wallpaper, a dingy green decorated with silver leaves, was dirty and torn. The only plush armchair was threadbare and wobbly. From the riverbank they could hear the unearthly shouting of a drunkard being beaten by police. She had given up all hope of increasing her fortune by herself now. She’d done her very best in the past, though. When she was single, she hadn’t been content to allow a marriage broker to find her a husband; she’d looked for a suitable man herself amongst the university students in the town because they were responsible and intelligent, they had good prospects. Several times, she had gone on the prowl, tirelessly . . . until finally one of them fell into the trap – and how much trouble she had gone to! How many silk skirts had she patiently hemmed, how many old hats mended in her room, in the silence of the night. How many long walks had she taken along the wide avenues of her hometown where, at dusk, young men and unmarried women paraded themselves. She’d had to endure lascivious glances, crude comments. And all her craftiness, the endless, unrelenting schemes to finally steal the chosen one from her more beautiful or richer friends! It had been such a long, cruel, silent war. But what could she do now, a helpless, penniless widow?
She was old, and the husband she had conquered after so many battles – a good husband, owner of the town’s first printing works – had died suddenly, leaving her to bring up two children, the pretty Lilla, aged twelve, and that rascal Ben! Lilla was her only hope.

Lilla and Ben were sitting up very straight, next to each other. Lilla was a brunette with pale skin, an innocent, serious, pretty face, a schoolgirl’s dress and hair tied back with a black satin ribbon at the base of her neck. Ben had long black curls and a thin, translucent neck. They glanced around the room with curious, frightened faces, though Ben himself seemed less afraid than mocking. He was six years old and small for his age, but his expression was sarcastic, shrewd and bitter, if such emotions are possible in someone so young, and they made him appear older. Sometimes he had the look of a sly, sickly monkey. His face was never at rest; his features constantly quivered; he spoke little, but his eyes, his smile, were eloquent. His hands trembled, his lips moved; he copied the gestures of his mother, his uncle, his grandfather, not simply to mock them, but out of some unconscious imitation. He was passionate about everything: he lifted the lid of the sugar bowl to study a fly that had got trapped inside; he screwed up his eyes, made a horrible face, leaned forward to better see how its little feet moved, caught it in his hand, threw it into Ada’s cup. He got hold of his uncle’s watch and opened it with his agile fingers, made the needles go round. Every so often, he’d slip away, go over to the window and press his pale, angular little face to the panes of glass, but they were covered in ice. He turned his head this way and that, with quick little movements; his breath etched out a dingy, moist circle in the frosty patterns, so he could see the street where the lights were out in all the shops, where not a single soul passed by. Then he’d go back and sit down again next to Lilla.

On the old, smoke-tinged ceiling, amidst the stains and shadows,
Ada looked for a thin white face, a face only she could see by tilting her head at a certain angle; the face leaned down towards her and gestured to her, mysteriously. Ada smiled, snuggled up in her father’s arms, closed her eyes and fell asleep.

Ada was seven years old and had more or less grown accustomed to living with her aunt and cousins. Lilla and Ben didn’t bother her. Her aunt only paid attention to her in the presence of her father, who no longer took her with him to work, now that he needn’t worry about her. And so she was even more alone than before; she played silently on the old settee or in the courtyard. On Sundays, Lilla took her out. It was convenient for Lilla to have her little cousin with her when she met with boys from the local schools; she could count on Ada to run ahead obediently, to remain silent, when they got home, about what had actually happened, and to confirm all her lies.

In winter, the young people met up in the tea shops (they were of an age when love stimulates the appetite); they consumed an alarming number of heart-shaped pastries filled with cream and sprinkled with pink sugar, some of which they generously offered to Ada. They had to be careful as they ate not to let any crumbs fall into the folds of their coats as a tell-tale sign to the shrewd eyes of their mothers.

When talking about Lilla, her mother always said, with a sarcastic little snigger: ‘My daughter could never fool me. A robber never gets robbed.’ This local saying meant that no one
could be cleverer than someone who had spent his whole life playing the worst tricks on others to benefit himself. And Aunt Raissa certainly seemed to know what she was talking about . . . Yet she never noticed Lilla’s flushed cheeks, the rings under her eyes, her dishevelled hair when she came home. In summer, the young people would meet at one of the four public gardens: Nicolas Square, the Botanical Gardens, the Tsar’s Garden and Merchant’s Place. On hazy Sundays, they would walk arm in arm around the band stand, the girls in straw hats, the tops of their dresses stretched taut over their blossoming breasts, their skirts billowing around their hips, and the boys in light shirts, their belts with the Imperial Eagle around their waists and their caps tipped backwards, looking as if they could conquer the world. They exchanged longing glances and love letters. The brass instruments of the military band resounded through the pink evening. Supervisors from their schools wandered about, spying on the courting couples; the rules were strict. But there were ways around them: they met far away from the gates, at nightfall. They strolled slowly down empty streets where the only person in sight was the man ringing his bell to sell ice cream. Ada’s cousin gave her a little cup of chocolate ice cream and she ran on ahead of the couple, watching out for any suspicious figures in the houses, whistling if she saw a passer-by, while the ice cream slowly melted in the warm evening air.

One spring day, Lilla and her admirer had gone for a walk in the Botanical Gardens, Ada following behind. It was a rather isolated, overgrown spot. Some sleepy animals lived in iron cages: an eagle from the Caucasus crawling with vermin, some wolves, a bear panting with thirst. One of the cages was empty; its previous inhabitants, some foxes, had dug a hole in the ground and escaped a few years before, or so the story went. All that remained were the iron bars, a large, rusty lock, and a sign swaying in the wind that read: ‘Foxes’. But Ada always hoped that one of the young
cubs might have come back home. She pressed her face against the bars and called out, ‘Come on, let’s see you, I won’t tell anyone you’re here.’ But in vain. Finally, disappointed, she would walk away, throwing a crust of bread to the eagle and the wolves. Ill and indifferent, the animals never stirred. She glanced furtively over at Lilla, seated next to that day’s lucky boy, a nice fifteen-year-old secondary school student. Lilla had forgotten her. Ada was bored; the mosquitoes were eating up her bare arms. She walked slowly along the paths, then hopped until she got to two blocks of stone that the locals called ‘didko’ and ‘babko’, the grandfather and the grandmother; their worn-out features vaguely resembled human faces. Ada had been told they were pagan idols from the past: the god of storms and his wife, the queen of fertility. At their feet, it was still possible to see the plinth where sacrifices were made, and a drain carved into the stone where the victims’ blood would run. But to Ada, they were familiar friends – they really were a grandmother and grandfather dozing outside their house, warmed by the sun. She had built a little hut of dead leaves and branches behind them, no higher than a molehill, and she imagined it was their house, that they’d come outside to rest in the sunshine and that they would go back inside when it got dark. She made a crown of yellow daisies and placed it on the head of the savage idol; the daisies had dark centres and a bitter smell. Then she climbed up on to the shoulders of the old god of storms and stroked him, as if he were a dog, but she soon got bored.

She went and tugged on Lilla’s skirt. ‘Come on,’ she said, ‘let’s go for a walk.’

Lilla sighed. She was too gentle and soft to oppose Ada for long. She wished she could bribe her with sweets or those red balloons called ‘mother-in-laws’ tongues’ which made a shrill noise when you let the air out. But Ada wasn’t to be bought off with promises, and neither Lilla nor her boyfriend had any money left.

They left their mossy, leafy hiding place in the Botanical Gardens and headed up towards the top of the hill.

The houses were so beautiful! Ada had never been there before. She went up to each of the high, closed gates and looked at the large gardens planted with lime trees. Every now and again, a horse and carriage passed by. Everything here radiated wealth and calm. In front of one of the gilded gates, Ada saw a carriage stop. A young boy the same age as Ben came out of the house, accompanied by a woman. Ada had never before seen anyone dressed like that. All the boys she knew wore school uniforms, or shabby clothes if they lived in the Jewish quarter. This boy wore a suit of light beige silk and a large fine linen collar, but his resemblance to Ben was so striking: he had the same black curls, fine nose, long, delicate neck – too long: it tilted forward and made him look like a curious bird – and the same wide eyes, simultaneously bright and misty, like a light burning in oil . . . She grabbed Lilla’s hand and, at a loss for words, nodded towards the boy. The carriage pulled away.