A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [98]
And after a few weeks or months Anton threw her out, or rather he went off to another village, and Irina went home, she went down on her knees to her husband, and apparently Engineer Steletsky took pity on her and took her back, but not for long: they kept taking her off to the hospital, and in the end male nurses came and bound her eyes and arms and took her away by force to a lunatic asylum in Kovel. I can remember her eyes, even now as I am talking to you I can see her eyes, and it's so strange, eighty years have passed, and there was the Holocaust, and there were all the wars here and our own tragedy, and illnesses, everyone apart from me is dead, and even so her eyes still pierce my heart like a pair of sharp knitting needles.
Ira came home to Steletsky a few times, calmed; she looked after the children, she even planted new rosebushes in the garden, fed the birds, fed the cats, but one day she ran away again, to the forest, and when they caught her, she took a can of petrol and went to the little hut that Anton had built himself in the pasture. The hut was roofed with tar paper—Anton hadn't lived there for a long time—and she lit a match and burned down the hut with all his rags and herself too. In the winter, when everything was covered with white snow, the blackened beams of the burned hut rose out of the snow, pointing to the clouds and the forest like sooty fingers.
Some time later Engineer Steletsky went off the rails and made a complete fool of himself; he remarried, lost all his money, and finally sold Papa his share of the mill. Your grandfather had managed to buy Princess Ravzova's share even before that. And to think that he started out as her apprentice, just a serf, a poor twelve-and-a-half-year-old boy who had lost his mother and been thrown out of the house by his stepmother.
Now see for yourself what strange circles fate draws for us: weren't you exactly twelve and a half when you lost your mother? Just like your grandfather. Although they didn't farm you out to some half-crazed landowner. You were sent to a kibbutz instead. Don't imagine I don't know what it means to come to a kibbutz as a child who wasn't born there: it was no paradise. By the age of fifteen your grandfather was virtually managing Princess Ravzova's mill for her, and at the same age you were writing poems. A few years later the whole mill belonged to Papa, who in his heart always despised property. He didn't just despise it, it choked him. My father, your grandfather, had persistence and vision, generosity, and even a special worldly wisdom. The one thing he didn't have was luck...
23
AROUND THE garden, Aunt Sonia says, we had a picket fence that was painted white every spring. Every year too the trunks of the trees were whitewashed to keep off the insects. The fence had a little kalitka, a wicket gate, through which you could go out into the ploshchadka, a sort of square or open space. Every Monday the tsiganki, the Gypsy women, came. They used to park their painted caravan there, with its large wheels, and erect a big tent of tarpaulin on the side of the square. Beautiful Gypsy women went barefoot from door to door: they came to the kitchens to read the cards, to clean the toilets, to sing songs for a few kopeks, and if you weren't watchful, to pilfer. They came into our house by the servants' entrance, the chyorny khod I told you about, which was to one side, in the wing.
That back door opened straight into our kitchen, which was enormous, bigger than this whole apartment, with a table in the middle and chairs for sixteen people. There was a kitchen range with twelve hobs of different sizes, and cupboards with yellow doors, and quantities of porcelain and crystal. I remember that we had a huge long dish on which you could serve a whole fish wrapped in leaves on a bed of rice and carrots. What happened to that dish? Who knows? It may still be adorning the sideboard of some fat hohol. And there was a kind of podium in one corner with an upholstered