A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [83]
And so the young Jew got in the habit of maintaining and repairing the machinery, haggling with the peasants who brought in their wheat and barley, paying the workers their wages, bargaining with dealers and customers. Thus he became a miller like his father, Ephraim. Unlike his idle, childlike father, however, he was clever, hardworking, and ambitious. And he was successful.
Meanwhile, Princess Ravzova in the evening of her life became increasingly pious: she wore nothing but black, multiplied vows and fasts, was in perpetual mourning, conversed in whispers with Jesus, traveled from monastery to monastery in search of illumination, squandered her wealth on gifts to churches and shrines. ("And one day she picked up a great hammer and hammered a nail into her own hand, because she wanted to feel exactly what Jesus had felt. And then they came and tied her up, took care of her hand, shaved her hair off, and shut her up for the rest of her days in a convent near Tula.")
The wretched engineer, Konstantin Steletsky, the Princess's nephew, subsided into drunkenness after his aunt's demise. His wife, Irina Matveyevna, ran off with Anton, the son of Philip the coachman. ("She was a great pianitsa—drunkard—too. But it was he, Steletsky, who made her a pianitsa. He used to lose her at cards sometimes. That is, he would lose her for one night, get her back in the morning, and the next night he would lose her again.")
And so Steletsky drowned his sorrows in vodka and cards. ("But he also wrote beautiful poetry, such wonderful poetry full of feeling, full of repentance and compassion! He even wrote a philosophical treatise, in Latin. He knew all the works of the great philosophers by heart, Aristotle, Kant, Soloviev, and he used to go off on his own in the forest. To abase himself he used to dress up as a beggar sometimes, and wander the streets in the early hours of the morning rooting around in the rubbish heaps like a starving beggar.")
Gradually Steletsky made Hertz Mussman his right-hand man at the mill, and then his deputy, and eventually his partner. When my grandfather was twenty-three, some ten years after he was "sold into slavery" to Princess Ravzova, he bought up Steletsky's share of the mill.
His business soon expanded, and among other acquisitions he swallowed up his father's little mill.
The young mill owner did not bear a grudge on account of his eviction from his parents' house. On the contrary: he forgave his father, who in the meantime had managed to become a widower for the second time, and installed him in the office, the so-called kontora, and even paid him a decent monthly salary to the end of his days. The handsome Ephraim sat there for many years, sporting an impressive long white beard, doing nothing: he passed his days slowly, drinking tea, and conversing pleasantly and at great length with the dealers and agents who came to the mill. He loved to lecture them, calmly and expansively, on the secret of longevity, the nature of the Russian soul as compared to the Polish or Ukrainian soul, the secret mysteries of Judaism, the creation of the world, or his own original ideas for improving the forests, for sleeping better, for preserving folk tales, or for strengthening the eyesight by natural means.
My mother remembered her Grandpa Ephraim Mussman as an impressive patriarchal figure. His face seemed sublime to her on account of the long snowy beard that flowed down majestically like that of a prophet and the thick white eyebrows that gave him a biblical splendor. His blue eyes sparkled like pools in this snowy landscape, with a happy, childlike smile. "Grandpa Ephraim looked just like God. I mean the way