• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1203 0

and nihilism, they talked about America, they talked about Lenin, they even talked about the "woman question," women's emancipation. Your aunt Haya was the most daring of the three of us about women's emancipation—but only when it came to talking and arguing, naturally—Fania was a bit of a suffragette too, but she had some doubts. And I was the silly little girl who is always being told, Sonia don't talk, Sonia don't interrupt, you wait till you grow up, then you'll understand. So I closed my mouth and listened.

All young people in those days bandied notions of freedom about: this kind of freedom, that kind of freedom, another kind of freedom. But when it came to "between him and her" there was no freedom: there was just walking in the dark in a cellar full of scorpions with no shoes on. Not a week went by without our hearing horrifying rumors about a young girl who experienced what happens to girls who aren't careful; or a respectable woman who fell in love and went out of her mind; or a maid who was seduced; or a cook who ran off with her employer's son and came back alone with a baby; or a respectable woman who fell in love and threw herself at her beloved's feet only to be cast out and scoffed at. Do you say scoffed? No? When we were girls, chastity was both a cage and the only railing between you and the abyss. It lay on a girl's chest like a thirty-kilo stone. Even in the dreams she dreamed at night, chastity stayed awake and stood beside the bed and watched over her, so she could be very ashamed when she woke up in the morning, even if nobody knew.

All that business "between him and her" may be a bit less in the dark nowadays. A bit simpler. In the darkness that covered things then, it was much easier for men to abuse women. On the other hand, the fact that it's so much simpler and less mysterioius now—is that a good thing? Doesn't it turn out too ugly?

I'm surprised at myself that I'm talking to you about this at all. When I was still a girl, we would sometimes whisper to one another. But with a boy? Never in my life have I talked about such things with a boy. Not even with Buma, and we've been married now for nearly sixty years. How did we end up here? We were talking about Lyubov Nikitichna and her Tasia and Nina. If you go to Rovno someday, you can have a detective adventure. Maybe you could try to check if they still have in the town hall any documents that can shed light on that cover-up. Discover whether that countess, or princess, was or wasn't the mother of her two daughters. And whether she really was a princess or a countess. Or maybe whether Lebedevski, the mayor, was also the father of Tasia and Nina, just as he was said to be the father of poor Dora.

But on second thought, any documents there must have been burned by now ten times over, when we were conquered by the Poles, by the Red Army, and then by the Nazis, when they simply took us all and shot us in ditches and covered us with earth. Then there was Stalin again, with the NKVD, Rovno was thrown from hand to hand like a puppy being teased by Russia-Poland-Russia-Germany-Russia. And now it doesn't belong to Poland or to Russia but to Ukraine, or is it Belarus? Or some local gangs? I don't know myself who it belongs to now. And I don't even really care: what there was doesn't exist anymore, and what there is now will in a few more years also turn to nothing.

The whole world, if you just look at it from a distance, will not go on forever. They say one day the sun will go out and everything will return to darkness. So why do men slaughter one another throughout history? What does it matter so much, who rules Kashmir or the Tombs of the Patriarchs in Hebron? Instead of eating the apple from the tree of life or the tree of knowledge, it seems we ate the apple from the tree of rishes, and we ate it with pleasure. That's how paradise came to an end and this hell began.

There's so much either-or: you know so little even about people who live under the same roof as you do. You think you know a lot—and it turns out you know nothing at all. Your mother,