A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [107]
Nina was a very good friend of your mother Fania, they were exactly the same age, and I made friends with the little one, Tasia. For many years they lived in our house with the princess, Maman they called her. Maman is the French for Mama, but who knows if she was really their Mama? Or just their nanny? They were very poor, I don't think they paid us even a kopek in rent. They were allowed to come into the house not through the servants' entrance, the chyorny khod, but through the main entrance, which was called paradny khod. They were so poor that the princess, the Maman, used to sit at night by the lamp sewing paper skirts for rich girls who were learning ballet. It was a kind of corrugated paper, and she glued lots of glittering stars on, made from golden paper.
Until one fine day that princess, or countess, Lyubov Nikitichna, left her two girls and suddenly went off to Tunis, of all places, to look for some long-lost relative called Yelizaveta Franzovna. And now just look how my memory is making an idiot of me! Where have I put my watch? I can't remember. But the name of some Yelizaveta Franzovna that I've never seen in my life, some Yelizaveta Franzovna that maybe eighty years ago our Princess Lyubov Nikitichna went off to Tunis, of all places, to look for, that I can remember as clear as the sun in the sky! Perhaps I lost my watch in Tunis, too?
In our dining room hung a picture in a gilded frame by some very expensive khudozhnik (artist): I remember that in the picture you could see a good-looking boy with fair hair, all disheveled, looking more like a spoiled girl than a boy, like something between a boy and a girl. I can't remember his face but I do remember very well that he was wearing a kind of embroidered shirt with puffy sleeves, a big yellow hat hanging by a string on her shoulder—perhaps it was a little girl after all—and you could see her three skirts, one under the other, because one side was raised a little and the lace peeped out from underneath, first a yellow underskirt, a very strong yellow like in a Van Gogh, then under that a white lace underskirt, and the bottom one—her legs were covered apparently by a third underskirt in sky blue. A picture like that, it seemed modest but it wasn't really. It was a life-size picture. And that girl who looked so much like a boy was standing there in the middle of the field, surrounded by pasture and white sheep, there were some light clouds in the sky, and in the distance you could see a strip of forest.
I remember once Haya said that a beauty like that shouldn't go out herding sheep but should stay inside the walls of the palace, and I said that the bottommost skirt was painted the same color as the sky, as though the skirt had been cut straight from the sky. And suddenly Fania burst out in fury against us and said, Be quiet, both of you, why are you talking such nonsense, it's a lying painting that is covering a very great moral decay. She used more or less these words, but not exactly, I can't repeat your mother's way of speaking, nobody could—can you still remember a little how Fania spoke?
I can't forget that outburst of hers, or her face at that moment. She was maybe fifteen or sixteen at the time. I remember it all precisely because it was so unlike her: Fania never raised her voice, ever, even when she was hurt, she would just withdraw inward. And anyway, with her you always had to guess what she was feeling, what she didn't like. And here suddenly—I remember it was Saturday night or the end of some festival, maybe Sukkot? or Shavuot?—she suddenly burst out and shouted at us. Never mind me, all my life I've been just the silly little one, but to shout