A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [102]
Xenia watched over her daughter assiduously, to make sure she did not fall pregnant. She explained to her endlessly, do this, don't do that, and if he says this, you say that, and if he insists on this, you do that. In this way we also heard something and learned, because no one had ever explained such not-nice things to us. But it was all to no avail: little Dora became pregnant, and it was said that Xenia had gone to Pan Krynicki to ask for money, and he had refused to give her anything and pretended he didn't know either of them. That's how God created us: wealth is a crime and poverty is a punishment, though the punishment is given not to the one who sinned but to the one who hasn't got the money to escape the punishment. The woman, naturally, cannot deny that she is pregnant. The man denies it as much as he likes, and what can you do? God gave men the pleasure and us the punishment. To the man He said, in the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, which is a reward not a punishment, anyway, take away a man's work and he goes out of his mind—and to us women He gave the privilege of smelling their sweat of thy face close up, which is not such a big pleasure, and also the added promise of "in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children." I know that it is possible to see it differently.
Poor Dora, when she was nine months pregnant, they came and took her away to a village, to some cousin of Xenia's. I think that Papa gave them some money. Xenia went with Dora to the village, and a few days later she came back sick and pale. Xenia, not Dora. Dora came back after a month, neither sick nor pale but red-faced and plump, like a juicy apple, she came back without a baby and she did not seem in the least sad, only, as it were, even more childish than she had been before. And she had been very childish before. After she came back from the village, Dora spoke to us only in baby talk, and she played with dolls, and when she cried, it sounded just like the crying of a three-year-old. She started sleeping the hours a baby sleeps too: that girl slept for twenty hours a day.
And what happened to the baby? Who knows. We were told not to ask and we were very obedient daughters: we did not ask questions and nobody told us anything. Only once, in the night, Haya woke me and Fania saying that she could hear very clearly from the garden, in the dark—it was a rainy, windy night—the sound of a baby crying. We wanted to dress and go out but we were frightened. By the time Haya went and woke Papa, there was no baby to be heard, but still Papa took a big lantern and went out in the garden and checked every corner, and he came back and said sadly, Hayunia, you must have been dreaming. We did not argue with our father, what good would it do to argue? But each of us knew very well that she had not been dreaming, but that there really had been a baby crying in the garden: such a thin high-pitched cry so piercing, so frightening, not like a baby that is hungry and wants to suck, or a baby that's cold, but like a baby in terrible pain.
After that pretty Dora fell ill with a rare blood disease, and Papa paid again for her to go and be examined by a great professor in Warsaw, a professor as famous as Louis Pasteur, and she never came back. Xenia Dimitrovna went on telling stories in the evening, but her stories ended up wild, that is to say not very proper, and occasionally words crept into her stories that were not so nice and that we didn't want to hear. Or