444
BORIS PI LNYAK
tolina's eyes, shining brightly, followed Klavdia for some time.
In
the next room Rimma Karpovna was feeding her granddaughter,
the daugl1ter of her eldest child, Varvara. The room was very
bare and spotlessly clean; it was very tidy and had that air. .of
having been lived in for many years-it was all that one could
expect of an old maid's room. It was furnished with an old
maid's narrow bed, a work-table and a tailor's dummy, and there
were curtains on the windows. Kapitolina Karpovna went into
the dining room.
"Rimma dear, let me feed the little one. I saw Klavdia
go
out. Has Varvara gone too?"
The two old ladies, Kapitolina and Rimma, came of a long
line of much respected townsfolk and they were seamstresses and
dressmakers of good standing. Their life was as simple as the life–
lines on the palms of their left hands. There was only a year
between them, and Kapitolina was the eldest. Kapitolina had
lived a life of righteousness in the best traditions of her class.
She had lived it in full view of her fellow citizens and in full
accord with the standards which ruled them. She was a highly
respectable member of her class. And not only she herself knew,
but the whole town knew that all her Saturday evenings had
been spent at vespers, that she had passed every weekday of her
life stooped over the hems and stitches of shirts and blouses–
countless thousands of them-and that never, never had she been
kissed by a stranger. But only she knew those thoughts and that
pain of the soured wine of life by which the heart is withered.
She had lived through all the seasons of her life-childhood and
youth and the later years-but never once had she been loved
and never once had she sinned in secret. By the standards of the
town she was a paragon-a virgin and an old maid whose life
had gone rancid in service to chastity, God, and the ways of her
fathers. The life of her sister Rimma, who was also a seamstress,
had taken a different tum. It had happened twenty-eight years
before and lasted three years--three years of shame that had
clung to her for the rest of her life. It had happened in the days
