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PARTISAN REVIEW
pected of me, but the air would not go down into my lungs arJ.d was
caught like a hiccough in my throat. There was a raw-edged blade
of pain straight through my chest to my backbone as though fear
had laid back the sheath of my nerves. Anxious for morning, I lay
on my back staring at the invi'Sible ceiling or cautiously I turned over
on my side, making out the contours of the sagging bed where my
mother and father were enormously sprawled out and humped up,
hissing their fury at one another. Until I was about ten years old,
though, my distress did not continue after their voices had ceased
and, exhausted a'S much by being an audience as they were by being
the actors, I would fall asleep at once. It was not until then, the
summer of my tenth year, that I learned, in what terms of childhood
I cannot remember, that peace was to be desired above all things. The
upraised voices, the bitter blasphemies, the profound outcries of
hatred carried through the day.
If,
at the end of it there was a silent
night, I lay awake for a long time waiting for the storm to
break~
and in the morning got up fretful for my vigil.
Our poverty was my mother's excuse for perpetuating the old
anger. Although she had never been anything but poor, for her life
in Russia before she married had been a tale of privation and suffer–
ing, still she had dreams of what it was like to be rich and, as she
accused him, my father had promised her the finest of goods when
he asked her to marry him. And what had she instead, she de–
manded. A two-room house in a fishermen's village where the sand
seeped in the doorways and across the window sills, where the winter
winds gained access through the cracks in the walls, and where in
the summer time the heat descended from the low beaverboard
ceilings in a steady, unmerciful blast. And had she to eat the fowl,
the caviar, the strawberries and melons and pears he had promised?
Our fare was no better than the poorest peasant's: day-old bread,
pokhlyobka,
side meat, and on great occasions, eggs. And did Shura
Korf have a servant girl to go to the wine-cellar and fetch up cham–
pagne, Malaga, Rhine wines and Scotch whiskey, vodka and kiim–
mel? Perhaps four times a year my father bought a bottle of corn
whiskey from a bootlegger, and in the sordid kitchen they drank it
in hot toddies which neither pleased their palates nor elevated their
spirits and made them waken the following day with headaches,
biliousness, and intermittent vertigo. Where were the yellow dresses,
the summer house and the island in the lake, the solid silver samovar
and the little black dog and the chestnut mare? What a brazen liar
he had been! He was not the clever, ambitious man he had said he
was when on the boat, caressing her as they leaned against the rail
