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248
PARTISAN REVIEW
time
it
was, she was taken into the house of a witch, so-called because
of her profession: for a price, she mutilated men who wished to escape
military service. She cut off their fingers or their toes or broke the
arches of their feet. This Luibka was a dried and wrinkled old prune
of a woman with a cackling voice and a bright, shrewd eye and hands
which, even in idleness, crooked as though they held a knife.
f(y
ou
would have come to Luibka, Hermann Marburg," she ac–
cused my father.
((You
would be too lazy and cowardly to be a
soldier/'
"I served my time," he replied dully.
"In Germany, yes, where everything is soft. But you would have
cqme to Luibka in Russia where the food is scarce and the soldiers'
boots are no good."
The
koldunya
was not a bad woman, my mother insisted, but was
only the innocent slave of the wicked men who patronized her. The
customers might cuff and kick the little girl who washed the knives
and handed up the cloths, but the old woman never raised a finger
against her and never spoke so much as a single world of reproof.
And still, though she had enough to eat and a dry place to sleep,
there came a time when the witch's kindness was not enough to stop
my mother's ears to the screams nor to close her eyes to the bloody
blades and the anxious hound who sprang from his corner whenever
a gobbet of flesh fell to the sawdu!lt-covered floor. She was already a
tall girl, about fourteen years old, when she left Luibka; and she was
so comely that once she set about it, she had not trouble
in
finding
work. She Became a waitress in an officers' tavern. From two o'clock
in the afternoon until two in the morning, she brought the gentle–
men dinners and tea and suppers with champagne as well as the
occasional glass of vodka and Lowenbrau beer, imported from Mu–
nich, the specialty of the house.
In many ways, my mother felt she had advanced considerably in
the world for she was supplied with a pair of handsome uniforms
and she was allowed to feed on delicacies, and her tips, because she
was beautiful, were by no means trifling. And yet, with all her good
fortune, there were times when she would sooner have been hand–
maiden to Luibka, for the officers made such impertinent overtures
to her that she. could scarcely sleep at night for shame. Once, in her
second year, a cossack whose advances she had rebuffed slapped her
face in a drunken fury and his companions jeered her and to him
they cried,
((Touche!''
A few days later, she fell
ill
of a mysterious
fever. She recalled that two old nuns, friends of the landlady of the
tavern, came to see her sometimes
in
the afternoons and stroked her
