HOTEL BARSTOW
247
warm only by hugging one another while the revelers, warm as toast
with vodka and the stove heat, poked fun at the shivering little
bodies and the chattering teeth and the bright red noses. One day,
Constantin Ivanovitch Korf began to malign his dead wife, calling
her in one breath a whore and a pious old crone, though she was
neither but only a good hard-working creature who had come to the
city from the farm and perhaps had died of years of homesickness.
Here came a hiatus in the narrative and I knew that my father,
like myself, was mouthing the words that were to follow. She brought
out: "The Russians are always homesick people." It was a minute
or two before she went on, and in the firm enclosure of the silence, I
seemed myself to ail like a Russian and a hot cloud grazed my eyelids.
"There was a yellow-haired German milliner who sat on
his
lap
and pulled at his beard.
Fraulein
Lili, she called herself. I suppose
she had no real parents and that was why she had no family names.
She would sit there plucking the old goat's beard and call him, 'Con–
stantin, my little bear.' Ah, it was sickening!"
His grief had flown away like a sparrow and he shouted for a song
from
Fraulein
Lili. One of the children whimpered whether from
sorrow or shame or cold no one knew, but whatever its cause, the out–
burst was contagious and directly all the children were sobbing and
wailing. You would have thought Constantin lvanovitch would be
too drunk to hear or care. But he flung the woman from his lap and
stood up, his feet wide apart, shaking
his
fist at
his
sons and daugh–
ters. He shouted that he was through with his brats, they could freeze
that night for all of him. Then he advanced and together they rose,
holding up their little arms as if to thwart the blows from his hairy
hands. They turned and made for the door as he followed, slapping
their backsides until they were across the threshold. The door was
shut. The bolt was drawn. Immediately the milliner began to sing:
Till with age my hair starts graying,
Till my locks have ceased to curl,
Let me live in joy and gladness,
Let me love a pretty girl!
Let me live my life in joy and gladness,
Let me love a pretty girl!
The children scattered, knowing that no one would take them all
in together. Whether my mother wandered by herself for hours or
for days, she was not sure, she said, for such cold as the cold of Mos–
cow tyrannizes over the light and the dark; the sun is like one poor
candle in a vast hall, or else, shining forth with a rowdy blaze, it
burns and the kindled snow sears the eye. But at the end of whatever
