‘There’ll be a woman in the house,’ Ada’s father finally said, looking sadly at her, ‘someone to take care of you . . .’
‘I don’t want anyone to take care of me.’
He shook his head. ‘Someone to stop the servant from stealing, and I won’t have to drag you around with me all day . . .’
‘Don’t you like me coming with you?’ asked Ada, her little voice trembling.
He stroked her hair gently: ‘Of course I do, but I have to walk slowly so your legs don’t get tired, and we brokers earn our living by running. The faster we run, the quicker we get to the rich people’s homes. Other brokers earn more than me because they run faster than me: they can leave their children at home, where it’s nice and warm.’
‘With their wives . . .’ he thought. But you weren’t supposed to speak of the dead, out of a superstitious fear of attracting the attention of disease or misfortune (demons were always lying in wait), and so as not to upset the child. She had plenty of time to learn how difficult life was, how uncertain, how it was always poised to steal the things you cherished most . . . And anyway, the past was the past. If you dwelt on it, you lost the strength you needed to keep going. That was why Ada had to grow up barely ever hearing her dead mother’s name, or anything about her or her brief life. There was a faded photograph in the house of a young girl in a school uniform with long dark hair spilling down over her shoulders. Half-hidden behind the heavy curtain, the portrait seemed to watch the living with a look of reproach: ‘I was also once like you’ those eyes seemed to say. ‘Why are you afraid of me?’ But no matter how shy, how sweet she may have been, she was still frightening, she who lived in a realm where there was no food, no sleep, no fear, no angry arguments, nothing, actually, that resembled the fate of humans on this earth.
Ada’s father feared the arrival of his sister-in-law and her children, but really, the house was too neglected, too dirty, and his little girl needed a woman to look after her. As for himself, he was resigned to never being anything but a poor man, uneducated, even though he’d dreamt of better things when he’d got married . . . But his own desires, he himself, in the end, counted for little. You worked, you lived, you had hopes for your children. Weren’t they your flesh and blood? If Ada managed to have more than he had on this earth, he’d be happy. He imagined her wearing a beautiful embroidered dress with a bow in her hair, like the rich children. How could he know how to dress a child? She looked old-fashioned and sickly in her clothes; they were too big and too long. He’d bought them because the fabric was of good quality, but sometimes the colours didn’t go well together . . . He glanced over at the Tartan dress she was wearing with the little black velvet bodice that Nastasia, the cook, had made. He didn’t like his daughter’s hairstyle either, that thick fringe on her forehead that came right down to cover her eyebrows, and the uneven dark ringlets around her neck. Her poor little thin neck . . . He put his hand around the back of her neck and gently squeezed it, his heart bursting with tenderness. But since he was Jewish, it wasn’t enough to dream of his little girl with plenty to eat, well cared for, and, later on, making a good marriage. He would love to find within her some talent, some extraordinary gift. Perhaps she could one day be a musician or a famous actress? His desires were modest and limited out of necessity, since he only had a daughter. Ah, vain wishes, hopes dashed! A son! A boy! It hadn’t been God’s will, but he consoled himself with the thought that the sons of his friends, far from being the delight of their twilight years, were the affliction, the disgrace and the obvious punishment inflicted by the Lord: they were involved in politics; they were imprisoned or exiled by the government; others wandered from one place to another, far away, in foreign cities. Not that he would object to sending Ada to study in Switzerland, Germany or France when she was older . . . But he had to work, tirelessly save money. He looked at the filthy little notebook where he made notes on the various merchandise he had to sell, and walked faster.
3
In the evenings they drank tea, squeezed together on the leather settee in the narrow dining room, one glass after another of strong, hot tea, with a slice of lemon in it and a sugar lump to nibble, until Ada fell asleep in her seat. The kitchen door was always left open, allowing the smoke from the stove to pour into the room. Nastasia rummaged through the dishes, stirred the wood in the stove, sometimes singing as she went, or muttering, her voice sounding tipsy. Barefoot, wearing a scarf on her head, she was fat, heavy, flabby and smelled of alcohol; she suffered from chronic toothache, and an old faded shawl framed her wide red face. Nevertheless, she was the ‘Messalina’ of the neighbourhood, and rare were the nights when there wasn’t a pair of boots belonging to one of the local soldiers standing in the kitchen, just in front of the dirty, torn curtain that screened off her bed.
Ada’s maternal grandfather lived with his son-in-law. He was a handsome elderly man, his face adorned with a white beard; he had a long thin nose and a receding hairline. His life had been strange: when he’d been a very young man, he’d escaped from the ghetto and travelled in Russia and Europe. He hadn’t been motivated by a desire for wealth, but rather a thirst for knowledge. He’d come home as poor as when he’d left, but with a trunk full of books. His father had died and he had to support his mother and find husbands for his sisters. He had never spoken a word to anyone about his travels, his experiences or his dreams. He had taken over his father’s jewellery business: he sold moderately priced silver, along with rings and brooches decorated with gemstones from the Urals which newlyweds from the lower town liked to buy. But even though he spent his days behind a counter, when night fell, he padlocked and chained his door closed and opened the trunk of books. He would take out a wad of paper and the old quill pen that made a scratching sound and work on his book, a book that Ada would never see completed; all she would ever know was its incomprehensible title: ‘The Character and Defence of Shylock’.
The shop was on the ground floor of the Sinners’ house. After evening tea, it was her grandfather’s habit to go down into the shop, the manuscript under his arm and carrying a small pot of ink and his pen. An oil lamp burned on the table, while the stove, filled with logs, roared, spreading warmth and casting a reddish glow throughout the room. Ada, whose father had gone back to town, would leave Nastasia in the arms of her soldier, and go downstairs to sit beside her grandfather, rubbing her heavy, tired eyes. She would slide silently on to a chair next to the wall. Her grandfather would read or write. An icy draught slipped through the crack in the door and made the end of his long beard flutter. These winter nights, full of tranquil melancholy, were the sweetest moments of Ada’s life. But they were about to be lost because of the arrival of Aunt Raissa and her children.
Aunt Raissa was a thin, energetic, dry woman with a pointy nose and chin, a scathing tongue and eyes as sharp and shining as the point of a needle. She was rather vain about her slim figure, which she made look even slimmer by wearing a narrow buckled belt and the full corset popular at the time. She was a redhead; the contrast between her flamboyant hair and her thin, aging body was strange and painful to behold. She wore her hair like the French cabaret singer Yvette Guilbert, with thousands of tiny red curls falling on to her forehead and temples. She stood up very straight, her small bosom thrust slightly back in her effort to stand tall. She had thin, tight lips, darting eyes beneath half-closed lids, and a piercing, frightening expression that missed nothing. When she was in a good mood, she had a peculiar way of puffing herself up and slightly moving her shoulders that made her look like a long, thin insect flapping its wings. Because of her slimness, her vivacity and jaunty maliciousness, she resembled a wasp.
In the days of her youth, Aunt Raissa had had many admirers – at least, that was what she implied with her little sighs. She was an ambitious creature; her husband had been the owner of a printing works, and she felt that her widowhood had forced her down into a lower social class. She, who had met intellectuals, she would say with a proud little scornful
smile hovering about her lips, she was now no more than a poor relation! She’d been taken in out of charity. She had to live, supreme indignity, in the Jewish quarter, above a miserable shop.
‘But really, Isa,’ she would say to her brother-in-law, ‘don’t you owe it to your good name to raise your children somewhere cleaner, with a better reputation? You seem to have forgotten, but as long as I live, I will never forget that my poor husband’s name, and yours as well, is Sinner.’
Ada listened to her, sitting in her usual place, on the old settee, between her cousins, Lilla and Ben. It must have been shortly after Aunt Raissa’s arrival. It was one of Ada’s earliest memories. They were drinking their evening tea. Her grandfather, her father and Aunt Raissa were sitting on cane chairs with dark wooden backs that were called, she never knew why, ‘Viennese chairs’, even though they’d been bought second-hand from the man on the square, while the children sat on the brown leather settee with its tall, stiff back. To Ada, the house had always seemed dark and unwelcoming, which it was, to tell the truth . . . It was an old building; its four rooms led off to small, dimly-lit corridors with large cupboards, and the rooms were all on different levels so that in order to walk around the entire house, you had to go up and down rickety staircases, and through icy spaces paved with brick and serving no particular purpose. When night fell they were lit by the pale, flickering light of a street lamp out in the courtyard. Ada often felt afraid in this house, but the settee was a haven to her: she loved it there. It was where she waited for her father, where she fell asleep at night while everyone around her talked, not thinking to send her to bed. Behind the cushions, she hid old pictures, broken toys – the ones she loved most – and coloured pencils. The settee was worn out; the torn leather hung down in ribbons in places, the springs creaked. But she loved it. Now it was Ben’s bed; she felt ejected, cast out.
She held her cup of tea in both hands and blew on it with such concentration that her little face seemed to disappear into the large cup and all you could see of her was her thick, dark-brown fringe.
Her aunt looked at her and, wishing to be kind, said: ‘Come here, Adotchka. I’ll tie back your hair with a pretty ribbon, darling.’
Ada obediently stood up, but she had to make her way through the narrow space left between people’s legs and the table, and it took her a long time. When she finally arrived, her aunt had forgotten all about her. Ada slipped on to her father’s lap and listened to the grown-ups talk, while trying to poke her finger through the smoke rings that came from her father’s cigarette; it made little bluish rings, light and moist, that disappeared as soon as she reached out to touch them.
‘We are the Sinner family,’ Aunt Raissa said with pride. ‘And who is the richest man in this town? Old Salomon Sinner. And in Europe?’
She turned towards Ada’s grandfather. ‘You’ve travelled, Ezekiel Lvovich, have you ever seen the family’s mansions in London and Vienna?’
‘We’re not as closely related as that,’ Ada’s father said, laughing slightly in surprise.
‘Really? Not closely related? And just what makes you say that, if you please? Wasn’t your own grandmother the first cousin of old Sinner? Both of them ran barefoot through the mud. Then she married your grandfather who sold clothes and old furniture, in Berdichev.’
‘They’re called rag merchants,’ Ben said suddenly.
‘Keep your mouth shut,’ his mother said harshly, ‘you don’t know what you’re talking about! Rag merchants carry bundles of old clothes on their backs and go door to door trying to sell them in the slums. Your grandfather had a shop and an assistant, two assistants, when things were going well. Back then, Salomon Sinner worked hard, made money, and his sons did well and made even more money, so much so that today their fortune is worth at least as much as the Rothschilds’.’
But now, given the incredulous looks on their faces, she could sense she had gone too far.
‘They may have a few million less than the Rothschilds, two or three million less, I can’t remember, but they are hugely wealthy and we’re related to them. That’s what we mustn’t forget. If you were to put yourself forward a bit more, my poor Isa, and stop looking like a sad little dog – you’ve looked like that since the day you were born – as your brother always said, you could be someone in this town. Money is money, but blood is blood.’
‘Money . . .’ her father said quietly.
He sighed, smiled slightly. Everyone fell silent. He poured a little tea into his saucer and drank it, nodding his head. Everyone thought money a good thing, but to a Jew, it was a necessity, like air or water. How could they live without money? How could they pay the bribes? How could they get their children into school when there were already too many students enrolled? How could they buy permission to go here or there, to sell this or that? How could they avoid military service? Oh, my God! Without money, how could they live?
Her grandfather moved his lips slightly and tried to recall the quotation from a Psalm he needed for chapter XII, paragraph 7 of his book. His family’s chatter simply did not exist as far as he was concerned. The external world was only important to base creatures who didn’t know how to shut it out through spiritual meditation and intellectual thought.
Aunt Raissa looked at the shabby, messy room, full of smoke from the kitchen, and could barely hide her disgust. The wallpaper, a dingy green decorated with silver leaves, was dirty and torn. The only plush armchair was threadbare and wobbly. From the riverbank they could hear the unearthly shouting of a drunkard being beaten by police. She had given up all hope of increasing her fortune by herself now. She’d done her very best in the past, though. When she was single, she hadn’t been content to allow a marriage broker to find her a husband; she’d looked for a suitable man herself amongst the university students in the town because they were responsible and intelligent, they had good prospects. Several times, she had gone on the prowl, tirelessly . . . until finally one of them fell into the trap – and how much trouble she had gone to! How many silk skirts had she patiently hemmed, how many old hats mended in her room, in the silence of the night. How many long walks had she taken along the wide avenues of her hometown where, at dusk, young men and unmarried women paraded themselves. She’d had to endure lascivious glances, crude comments. And all her craftiness, the endless, unrelenting schemes to finally steal the chosen one from her more beautiful or richer friends! It had been such a long, cruel, silent war. But what could she do now, a helpless, penniless widow? She was old, and the husband she had conquered after so many battles – a good husband, owner of the town’s first printing works – had died suddenly, leaving her to bring up two children, the pretty Lilla, aged twelve, and that rascal Ben! Lilla was her only hope.
Lilla and Ben were sitting up very straight, next to each other. Lilla was a brunette with pale skin, an innocent, serious, pretty face, a schoolgirl’s dress and hair tied back with a black satin ribbon at the base of her neck. Ben had long black curls and a thin, translucent neck. They glanced around the room with curious, frightened faces, though Ben himself seemed less afraid than mocking. He was six years old and small for his age, but his expression was sarcastic, shrewd and bitter, if such emotions are possible in someone so young, and they made him appear older. Sometimes he had the look of a sly, sickly monkey. His face was never at rest; his features constantly quivered; he spoke little, but his eyes, his smile, were eloquent. His hands trembled, his lips moved; he copied the gestures of his mother, his uncle, his grandfather, not simply to mock them, but out of some unconscious imitation. He was passionate about everything: he lifted the lid of the sugar bowl to study a fly that had got trapped inside; he screwed up his eyes, made a horrible face, leaned forward to better see how its little feet moved, caught it in his hand, threw it into Ada’s cup. He got hold of his uncle’s watch and opened it with his agile fingers, made the needles go round. Every so often, he’d slip away, go over to the window and press his pale, angular little face to the panes of glass, but
they were covered in ice. He turned his head this way and that, with quick little movements; his breath etched out a dingy, moist circle in the frosty patterns, so he could see the street where the lights were out in all the shops, where not a single soul passed by. Then he’d go back and sit down again next to Lilla.
On the old, smoke-tinged ceiling, amidst the stains and shadows, Ada looked for a thin white face, a face only she could see by tilting her head at a certain angle; the face leaned down towards her and gestured to her, mysteriously. Ada smiled, snuggled up in her father’s arms, closed her eyes and fell asleep.
4
Ada was seven years old and had more or less grown accustomed to living with her aunt and cousins. Lilla and Ben didn’t bother her. Her aunt only paid attention to her in the presence of her father, who no longer took her with him to work, now that he needn’t worry about her. And so she was even more alone than before; she played silently on the old settee or in the courtyard. On Sundays, Lilla took her out. It was convenient for Lilla to have her little cousin with her when she met with boys from the local schools; she could count on Ada to run ahead obediently, to remain silent, when they got home, about what had actually happened, and to confirm all her lies.
In winter, the young people met up in the tea shops (they were of an age when love stimulates the appetite); they consumed an alarming number of heart-shaped pastries filled with cream and sprinkled with pink sugar, some of which they generously offered to Ada. They had to be careful as they ate not to let any crumbs fall into the folds of their coats as a tell-tale sign to the shrewd eyes of their mothers.