The Dogs and the Wolves (7 page)

‘Let’s stay here, Ben,’ she pleaded softly.

He got angry, called her ‘mad, an idiot, a coward’, but she knew very well that he didn’t really want to leave this heavenly place either.

They held hands and walked aimlessly along. Ada clung to her cousin’s arm, limping. Ben had fallen and torn his trousers, his knee was bleeding.

‘Maybe we’ll find someone who’ll ask us to come inside,’ Ada said shyly.

Ben laughed sarcastically. ‘Ah, so that’s what you think, do you?’

‘Ben,’ said Ada after a moment, ‘this is where the Sinners live.’

‘So?’

‘So they’re our cousins . . .’

‘So you think we should go to their house, do you?’

‘Why not?’

‘They’d chase us away.’

‘Why?’

‘Because they’re rich.’

‘But we wouldn’t ask them for money!’

Ben called her ‘an idiot’ again. She didn’t argue, just sighed sadly and kept on walking. She could feel Ben beside her, shivering from the cold.

‘This is where they live,’ said Ada, pointing out the street.

‘I don’t give a damn.’

But the wind was blowing more harshly now. She took Ben’s hand.

‘We could at least get out of the cold for a while under their porch. I remember they have a porch with columns and a roof . . . made of marble,’ she added, after thinking for a moment.

‘Marble?’ said Ben, shrugging his shoulders. ‘Why not solid gold?’ he sniggered.

‘Well, anyway, it’s a porch and we’d get out of the wind.’

‘And how would you get into the garden?’

‘I thought you bragged about being able to climb over any gate, even the highest?’

‘Well
I
could, maybe . . . but
you
, you’re just a girl!’

‘I could do it just as well as you,’ she said, angrily.

‘Really? Just look at yourself! You’re a real sight, hobbling about in the snow . . . And we only ran for half an hour!’

‘Well, what about you? You were the one who fell down while we were running away, weren’t you? Your knee’s bleeding.’

‘I bet that I’ll be able to climb right over the top of the gate and jump down into the garden, and that you won’t even make it to the first rung!’

‘Well, we’ll see about that!’

‘I dare you!’

They ran all the way to the Sinners’ house. It was already nine o’clock and there was the odd passer-by: a few servants were hurrying towards the shops and the marketplace in the centre of town; a footman was walking some dogs; a worker was sweeping away the snow; but the children chose a moment when there was no one in sight and started to climb over the gate. They were both agile, even though their movements were hindered by their padded winter coats. Ben got over first and gave Ada a scornful look. Ada, putting herself in God’s hands – she wouldn’t dream of asking her cousin for help – managed to get a foothold between two
gilded bars. Getting up was the most important step; you could always get down . . . slowly or fast . . . She jumped down on to the snow-covered lawn and got buried up to her waist. Ben reached out to her; he pushed, pulled, hoisted her up so she was finally standing. Creeping behind the bushes, they made their way to the door, or rather to the front porch with its oval ceiling and slender stone columns. Ben and Ada edged their way along the cold wall and waited . . . for what, they had no idea . . . At first, they were just relieved to be out of the wind, but soon they felt horribly anxious and their exhaustion and hunger were stronger than ever.

‘Let’s ring the bell,’ Ada suggested in a quiet, nervous voice.

Ben, his face turning blue from the cold, shook his head ‘no’, but less insistently. Ada rang the bell. They huddled together, their hearts racing, staring at the door. It opened. A maid appeared and tried to shoo them away; she was a fat, dark-haired girl, with a little lace bow comically perched above her large, ruddy face with its sullen expression. But Ben had put his hand in the door-frame and was holding it open.

‘We want to see Mr Sinner,’ Ada said quickly. ‘We’re cousins of his.’

‘What are you talking about?’ the maid said, dumbfounded, as she leaned towards Ada.

‘We’re Mr Sinner’s cousins. We wish to speak to him,’ Ada said again, this time more confidently.

The maid hesitated. But the children had caught a glimpse of the entrance hall and could already feel its warmth, so were filled with a desperate sort of courage. They pushed the maid aside and walked right past her.

‘Very well!’ she said. ‘I’ll let Madame know . . . But you stay right where you are, or else!’

She went out, but they followed close on her heels; they knew very well they would be sent away. They couldn’t let their rich relations have any time to think.

In the dining room, where the Sinner family ate breakfast every morning, with its long red damask drapes, its expensive, impressive furniture, there suddenly appeared two pale little urchins with torn clothes and dishevelled hair. They were full of daring, arrogance and fear, yet yearned to be fed, warmed, reassured.

His voice hesitant, Ben began explaining who they were and why they were there. It was a long story. As for Ada, all she could do was stare. She didn’t just look at everything around her. She drank it in, as a person dying of thirst pounces upon a drink of water and gulps it down, still not managing to quench his thirst or let go of the glass; this was how each colour, the shape of each object, the faces of these strangers seemed to pierce her, finding their way into a secret place, deep within her heart, a place she had not realised even existed, until now. She stood absolutely still, wide-eyed, and with a wild, stunned expression gazed at the heavy, matt fabric of the red curtains, the high-backed ebony chairs covered in damask, the bright walls painted a pale cream to bring out the richness of the other colours, the deep purple of the carpets, the dark wood of the furniture, the silver platters on the sideboard.

In the middle of the room stood a very large table; some women were sitting around it, and with them, Harry. She recognised him at once. He was wearing a dressing gown of plum-coloured silk. Ada had never seen anything like this shimmering, heavy satin; she thought that Harry must have been ill to be so pampered and dressed like this. In front of him was a porcelain cup, as white and delicate as an egg shell, and a silver egg cup. On a plate sat two pieces of brown bread with butter and jam. One of the women was spreading the bread with butter she took from a small crystal dish with a lid decorated with a silver pine cone. Another woman was pouring Harry some coffee from a silver pot with a very long spout. A third woman added the milk; looking through her
lorgnette, she carefully skimmed the cream off the top with a little silver spoon. The fourth woman was cutting up an egg she had just taken out of a bowl, also made of silver, full of boiling hot water. But she didn’t cut it up with her knife, as Ada had only ever seen done until now; she used a pair of gilded scissors, made specially to cut eggs, and, to Ada, this was more extraordinary than everything else.

Two of the four women were wearing lace dressing gowns and, despite the fact that it was morning, large diamond earrings. One was Harry’s mother, the other, one of his married aunts. They were plump, heavy women, with pale skin and shiny black hair, parted down the middle so it fell in two arcs at the sides of their foreheads. Sitting at the table like two enormous white peonies, they had the replete, lazy, slow-moving demeanour of contented matrons, and the scornful pout and hard, implacable eyes of women who are too rich, too happy. The two younger ones were unmarried aunts; they dressed in the English style – straight skirts in a coarse, masculine material, linen blouses with starched collars, as stiff as a yoke – and had the mannerisms of that younger generation of Jewish millionaires: more ‘lady-like’ than was natural, with an affectation of simplicity and austerity, as if they wished each of their gestures to say, ‘You see how I wish to go unnoticed,
inconspicu-ous
as they say in English. I wish to blend in with mere mortals so they may forget who I really am.’

At the sight of Ben and Ada, everyone stopped eating. Lorgnettes were raised and dropped again. Voices cried out: ‘What on earth is going on?’

As Ben started speaking, Harry grew pale and stopped eating. He looked at the messy little boy with his bleeding knees, and the pale little girl whose dishevelled hair was so matted with dust and sweat that it fell in a thick tangle over her eyebrows.

Ben noticed him looking at them and deliberately began to
embellish his story; at first it had been more or less accurate, but now, with exquisite pleasure, he started to add gory details about blood, dead bodies, and at least a dozen disembowelled women. Harry pushed his plate away and stood, white and trembling, behind his seat.

Ben stopped to catch his breath.

‘Please,’ said Ada weakly, ‘can you give us something to eat?’

She started to walk towards the table, but the women all leapt up at once and stood in front of Harry to shield him with their bodies.

‘Stop her! She mustn’t come near us! They might be dirty. They might be diseased. Don’t come any closer, child! Stay where you are. We’ll give you something to eat. Dolly, take them into the kitchen.’

‘We’re not dirty,’ cried Ada. ‘If you’d spent the whole night hiding in a trunk, your faces would be all dusty and your beautiful dresses would get all torn, too.’

‘And I hope it does happen to you one day,’ she thought, but she didn’t say it.

The maid was ordered to take ‘these urchins’ into the kitchen, give them some bread and tea and wait for further instructions. Harry, meanwhile, had slipped off his chair and disappeared. The children were being led out when Harry came back, followed by an elderly gentleman who bore a strong resemblance to Ada’s grandfather; they could have been brothers. Everyone fell silent. He was the master of the house, Sinner senior, so rich that every Jew imagined only Rothschild surpassed him in status and wealth (Tzar Nicholas II came third).

He had a thin, rough, sallow face, a large, oddly-shaped nose, as if some fist had smashed it in two, a crease down his brow so darkly coloured it looked almost purple (the most definite sign, it was said, that he was being ravaged by cancer), greenish eyes streaked with fine, sinuous red lines, and a piercing, unpleasant
expression. But his white beard, his shiny, bald, egg-like head, his supple back, his long, dry fingers with their curved, yellow nails, hard as horn, his sharp, drawling Yiddish accent – all these were familiar to Ben and Ada. This wealthy Sinner looked like the old men in the ghetto, the sellers of second-hand goods, the ironmongers, the shoemakers in their stalls. The children were overwhelmed by respect and admiration as they stood before him, but they weren’t afraid.

Once again, it was Ben who recounted their adventures. Ada stood a little to the side; she felt weak and ill and suddenly indifferent to her fate. Nevertheless, it occurred to her that she should probably faint. Whenever a child fainted in books, someone immediately came to her rescue; she was given food; she was put to bed – she quivered with desire at the very idea – a clean, warm bed. She closed her eyes so tightly that her head was suddenly filled with a soft, echoing sound, like the sea. She waited a few moments, but she didn’t faint; regretfully, she opened her eyes and found herself leaning against the wall once more, her hands crossed tightly in front of her waist, looking at the people around her. The women seemed terribly angry and upset; they were all talking at once, looking at the children with an expression full of terror, almost hate.

‘They’re mean,’ thought Ada. However, as sometimes happened, she was filled with two different feelings both at once: one was naïve, childlike, and the other more mature, understanding and wise. She felt that two Adas lived within her, and one of them understood why she was being sent away, why they spoke to her with such hostility: the famished children stood before these wealthy Jews as an eternal reminder, a shameful and atrocious memory of what they themselves had once been or might have been. No one dared to add: ‘what they could become again some day’.

Ada hid behind the curtain and immediately fell half-asleep.
Every now and again she put her hand into her mouth and gently bit down on it in order to stay awake. Then the silk folds of the curtains would part, her pale, sleepy face would appear, and, thinking no one could see her, she would carefully lean forward and stick out her tongue at the women.

When she was pulled out of her hiding place, she was almost sleepwalking. She and Ben were pushed into an enormous room, which was the elderly Sinner’s office; a small table was set up, they were sat down at it and given something to eat. Ada was so exhausted that she couldn’t even answer the questions the old man asked her; she couldn’t even hear him. Later on, Ben would cruelly tease her about this. As for Ben, he spoke too quickly and too loudly, his little voice shrill and passionate.

‘So Israel Sinner is your uncle? I’ve heard of him. He’s an honest Jew.’

The old man had spoken these words slowly, sounding thoughtful and with a hint of pity. When anyone spoke of a Jew from the ghetto as honest, how could you not feel sorry; sorry for the poor man to whom God had forgotten to give sharp teeth and claws so he could defend himself?

‘Make sure to tell him to come and see me,’ he said. ‘He’ll make some money.’ (He had instructions to pass on to his agents in Kharkov; it wouldn’t be a bad idea to entrust them to a discreet, hard-working man who didn’t seem overly intelligent.)

He turned away so the children could eat in peace, and walked over to the window; from here, he could see the roofs of the ghetto. It would be interesting, Ada thought vaguely, to know what this old man was thinking as he looked down at that cursed part of town, so close yet so far from where he stood . . . But the thoughts of such a rich man were surely impenetrable to mere mortals, as lofty and strange as the spirits who lived in Heaven. And besides, she was so tired that everything, absolutely everything around her took on the feeling of a dream
or feverish delirium. She was only truly aware of the world around her the next day, when she was at Lilla’s friend’s house. The Sinners had contacted her father and he had taken her and Ben there. She had slept for twenty-four hours.