1080
PARTISAN REVIEW
ended-she preferred to live with us, used to direct a house, to com–
mand, to govern, to manage, scheme, devise and intrigue in all her
languages. She boasted French and German besides Russian, Polish
and Yiddish; and who but Mr. Lulov, the retouch artist from Division
Street, could have tested her claim to French? And he was a serene
bogus, too, that triple-back-boned gallant tea-drinker. Except that he
had been a hackie in Paris, once, and,
if
he told the truth about that,
might have known French, among other things like playing tunes on
his teeth with a pencil, singing and keeping time with a handful of
coins that he rattled by jigging his thumb along the table and how to
play chess.
Grandma Lausch played like Timur, whether chess or
klabyasch,
with palatal catty harshness and sharp gold in her eyes.
Klabyasch
she played with Mr. Kreines, a neighbor of ours who had taught her
the game. A powerful stub-handed man with a large belly, he swatted
the table with those hard hands of his, flinging down his cards and
shouting
"Shtoch, Yasch, Ment Z, KZabyasch!"
Grandma looked sar–
donically at him. She often said, after he left,
"If
you've got a
Hungarian friend, you don't need an enemy." But there was nothing
of the enemy about Mr. Kreines. He merely, sometimes, sounded
menacing because of his driIl-sergeant's bark. He was an old-time
Austro-Hungarian conscript and there was something soldierly about
him: a neck that had strained with pushing artillery wheels, a cam–
paigner's red in the face, a powerful bite in his jaw and gold-crowned
teeth, green cock-eyes and soft short hair, altogether Napoleonic. His
feet slanted out on the ideal of Frederick the Great but he was about
a foot under the required height for guardsmen. He had a masterly
look of independence. He and
his
wife, a woman quiet and modest to
the neighbors and violently quarrelsome at home, and his son, a phar–
macy student, lived in what was called the English basement, at the
front of the house. The son, Kotzie, worked evenings in the corner
drug-store and went to school in the neighborhood of County hospital,
and it was he who told Grandma about the free dispensary. Or
rather, the old woman sent for him to find out what one could get
from those state and county places. She was always sending for
people, the butcher, the grocer, the fruit-peddler, and received them
in the kitchen to explain that the Marches had to have discounts.
Mama usually had to stand by. The old woman would tell them,
