,,
'i
,,
·'
,,
'I
,,
"
H
I
tl
"
,,
"
,,
'
i
II
246
PARTISAN REVIEW
neither he nor she would ever realize its full meaning. Mter a while,
my father howled wearily, "Then go away, for the love of God!" He
turned over and the bed springs gave a prolonged creak. My mother,
though, knew that he was not asleep, and she began to
talk
in a
monotone, marshaling the injustices she had suffered her whole life
long until their perpetrators thronged the room. She began, as was
her custom, with the beastliness at hand: "He tells his wife to go
away. First he promises her he will be rich and give her a fur cape
and French perfume and a hothouse with a gardener to grow white
grapes. And then, in a little bit, he tells her to go away out by her–
self in America where she don't know how to
talk
to beg. He wants
this wife of his to be a beggar! You wish it was winter, don't you,
mein herr?
So you could send me to the snow without shoes, me and
my little girl. Well, sir, wait till the first cold weather and drive us
out then. It won't be the first time for me. The child, she knows the
words to beg with."
"You speak English," said my father.
She paid no attention. The past was advancing slowly upon her.
I knew, because in the quiet I heard her sighing and I heard her
rubbing her hands together as she always did when she was thinking
of Russia. "It will not be the first time a man drove me into the snow."
"Shura!" implored my father. "Don't tell me again! I will go
tomorrow to Boston for work if only you'll go to sleep now."
Heedless of him, she began. Under the night's still heat, her
voice flowed lilte a deep, unbending river as for the millionth time,
using the familiar words and images, she recounted the disasters of her
childhood. It was a tale so
fanta.~tic
that not even I, a little girl, could
believe it. Yet it was one so horrible that to scoff at it would have
been inhuman. In the pauses I li<Jtened but could not hear my father's
breathing and I knew that he was wide awake, counting off each
episode as
i~
fell from her lips and calculating how many more were
still to come before the end.
As
she mourned on, the heat was
dispelled and the cold of Moscow's winter streets invaded the bed–
room. As clearly as a few minutes before I had seen Miss Pride's
afghan and pillows, now I could see nothing but crusted snow, a little
cold, yellow sun, and the blue faces of poor people freezing in the
gateways and the alleys.
When she was nine or ten years old, her mother died. Her father,
who was a tailor and a libertine and a brute, commenced to drink
heavily at the funeral dinner and continued to stay drunk for a week.
It
was in January and it was bitterly cold. The seven children, whom
their father and his rioting friends drove away from the stove, kept
