A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [97]
I remember asking my mother about it, and she turned pale and said to me, Soniechka! Oy vey! You should be ashamed of yourself! Just you stop, do you hear me?! Just you stop even thinking about nasty things like that this minute and start thinking about beautiful things instead! Because it's well known, Soniechka, that a girl who thinks nasty thoughts in her heart starts growing hair in all sorts of parts of her body, and she develops an ugly deep voice like a man, and after that no one will ever want to marry her!
That was the way we were brought up in those days. And the truth? I myself didn't want to think thoughts like that at all, about a woman who had to go off with some drunken wretch to some filthy hut at night as his prize. Thoughts about the fate of many women whose husbands lose us. Because there are other ways of losing a woman. Not just at cards! But thoughts are not like television, where if you see unpleasant things you simply press the button and run away to another program. Nasty thoughts are more like worms in the cauliflower!
Aunt Sonia remembers Ira Steletskaya as a frail, miniature woman with a sweet, slightly surprised expression. "She always looked as though she'd just been told that Lenin was waiting for her outside in the courtyard."
She lived in Anton's hut for several months, maybe half a year, and her husband forbade the children to go to her or even to answer her if she addressed them, but they could see her every day in the distance and she could see them. Her husband could also see her all the time, in the distance, in Anton's hut. Anton liked to pick Ira up off the ground—after giving birth to two children she still had the slim, beautiful body of a sixteen-year-old—and he liked to lift her in his hands like a puppy, swing her in circles, throw her up and catch her, hop hop hop, and Ira used to scream with fear and pummel him with her tiny fists that must hardly have tickled him. Anton was as strong as an ox: he could straighten out the shaft of our carriage with his bare hands if it got bent. It was simply a tragedy without words: every day Ira Steletskaya could see her home and her children and her husband opposite, and every day they could see her in the distance.
Once this unfortunate woman, who already drank more than was good for her—she started drinking in the morning too—well, once she simply hid by the gate of their house and waited for her younger daughter, Kira, to come home from school.
I happened to be passing and I saw from close up how Kiruchka wouldn't let her mother pick her up in her arms, because her father forbade any contact. The child was afraid of her father, she was afraid even to say a few words to her mother, she pushed her away, kicked her, called for help, until Kasimir, Engineer Steletsky's manservant, heard her cries and came out on the steps. At once he started waving his hands at her, like that, and making noises as if shooing a chicken away. I shall never forget how Ira Steletskaya went away and cried, not quietly, like a lady, no, she cried like a servant, like a muzhik she cried, with terrifying, inhuman howls, like a bitch whose whelp is taken away and killed in front of her eyes.
There's something like it in Tolstoy, you surely remember, in Anna Karenina, when one day Anna slips into her house while Karenin is away at his office, she manages to slip inside the house that was once hers, and even manages to see her son for a moment, but the servants drive her away. Except in Tolstoy it is much less cruel than what I saw when Irina Matveyevna ran away from Kasimir the servant, she passed me, as close as I am to where you are sitting—after all, we were neighbors—but she didn't greet me, and I heard her broken howls and I smelled her breath and I saw from her face that she was no longer entirely sane. In her look,