For the first week, Varvara Stepanovna Klobukova felt simply splendid in her new surroundings. Above all, she was tickled by the knowledge that a miracle had occurred and she was abroad, in France. Making her no less happy was the thought of her salary: 700 francs a month, plus room and board—more than she would have earned in a year at home in Mertvovodsk. Finally, there was pleasure to be had from living in luxury and comfort of a kind she had never known.

Varvara Stepanovna had been given two wonderful rooms and a cabinet de toilette with a bath, a shower, and a very large three-section mirror in which one could admire oneself from every angle. The furniture was all truly “royal,” and most astonishing of all was the bed, an edifice with carved rosewood columns, silk covers, and lace curtains. Her chambermaid was a thousand times more elegant that that “faker” Oberemchenko—Mertvovodsk’s first social lioness—and at dinner a stately servant in stockings and white gloves served her innumerable dishes of the most refined quality.

Varvara Stepanovna had gotten her job in the following way. Count de Saint-Blin was a rich and enterprising French industrialist who owned shares in a number of Russian factories and visited Russia several times a year. His wife, a heavy, rotund woman, famous in her youth for parries and wild sprees, usually stayed home, either in Paris or at their castle in the provinces, giving herself over to pious exercises such as knitting jerseys for the poor or subjecting herself to treatments for illnesses she did not have. But it happened once that the countess got the idea of touring her Russian properties, and off she went. Naturally she was accompanied by a staff: chambermaids, servants, coachmen, and a secretary for her philanthropic activities as well as two lady’s companions and a Swedish masseuse, Mlle. Norcelius.

The countess spent two weeks in the Ekaterinoslav province and a month in the Kherson province, visited St. Petersburg, and stopped for a while in Moscow before, excited and enchanted by everything she had seen, in particular our people—“ils sont si soumis, les russes”—she started making arrangements to return home.

All of a sudden, the Swedish masseuse announced she was staying. In Mertvovodsk she had met a compatriot who owned a fish store, and she was marrying him. So shaken was the countess by the girl’s untoward behavior that for a whole week she could not knit a single charitable jersey. But somehow she managed to calm down and initiated a search for a replacement. Varvara Stepanovna had been chosen.

The countess immediately took a strong liking to her. First of all, she was pliant—soumise—and second of all she excelled in her work. Or at least so the countess said; indeed, she declared, never had anyone given her so good a massage as this petite russe. When the moment came to pack for home, she found she could not let go of Varvara Stepanovna, not for anything in the world; trebling her salary, she took her back to her castle.

_____________

Varvara Stepanovna’s duties occupied her for exactly one hour each day, from nine to ten in the morning. The rest of her time was hers to dispose of as she would. But how to spend it, she did not know. She had carried from home a few issues of Virgin Soil magazine and a volume of Vonliarskii’s writings, and though she was no lover of books, she now spent long hours reading. But that could hardly fill up an entire day, and when the writings had been read, Klobukova quickly became bored.

She strolled in the park, vast and strikingly beautiful; she took long walks to neighboring villages; she spent hours feeding the swans in the village pond and the rabbits in their sheds. All the while, she never ceased being bored. She could more or less understand French—she had studied it back home at her progymnasium, where her education had safely ended—but she spoke it very badly. Still, when she had to, she was capable of expressing herself and making some sort of conversation, and the countess had made her solemnly swear not to engage with any of the castle’s staff. “Mlle. Norcelius used to chat with everyone,” the countess complained. “She was a socialist, and I’m very happy she’s finally gone. You, I hope, are not a socialist?”

Klobukova reassured the countess. Her father, she said, was a retired captain and prison warden, her brother a police officer, and she herself professed quite moderate beliefs.

“Je vous en félicite,” the countess responded, adding that in November her grandchildren with two governesses would be arriving and then Klobukova would have people to talk to, for they would all have breakfast and lunch together. But in the meantime, Varvara Stepanovna had to sit alone, and she was unbearably lonely. Nor did she find palatable the suprême de volaille à l’Elysée or the aromatic fine wines she was served. She longed for the sweet taste of cabbage, for dried salty fish. At home in Mertvovodsk, she had known how to fill her day—visiting clients, doing things around the house, mending, embroidering—and was never bored. On summer evenings she would walk to the main boulevard where officers and post-office clerks courted her, in winter she would go skating or visit friends or attend balls at the club.

Never before had she been away from her hometown or her family. Now she languished in the grip of sadness. The alien French faces, so different from the Russian type; the quick, nasal speech, which made it hard to discern what was being said; the cheery beauty of the landscape; the strangeness of the peasants’ garb—“The devil knows them, why do they need wooden shoes?” Day after day, she grew more sullen and grim. She lost weight and became pale. She even wept a few times.

“I’m such a fool,” she would say, trying to stop herself: “a twenty-two-year-old crying like a school girl.” But admonitions did not help. Tears streamed down her face as she climbed into her huge rosewood bed a little after nine in the evening, thinking angrily and bitterly how lousy her life was. For the sake of a few hundred francs she had left her native land and all of her loved and dear ones, parted with all her old habits and customs, gone God knows where to live with God knows whom, sold herself into servitude. In her dreams, when she finally fell asleep, she saw Mertvovodsk—the market square littered with horse manure; a soldier standing in the watch tower; pigs strolling on the boulevard; the tipsy sexton, Lavrentii; the firm, oak-brown legs of Gorpyna the dishwasher; and other people, vistas, and objects close to her heart. If, of a nighttime, Russia or things Russian failed to fill her dreams, she would arise in the morning more subdued and somber than ever.

All around her lay objects more beautiful, more graceful, more fanciful, more costly, and more pleasurable than any in Russia, and still they elicited only vexation, ennui, and longing. “When the governesses come I’ll feel better, happier,” she tried to console herself. But she knew that the governesses could not help her condition, and that the longer she stayed, the more acute and unbearable her yearnings would become. Every day she wrote lengthy letters—even to people she wasn’t close to—counting the days ahead and marking down when she should expect a reply. “Leave everything, run away!” would sometimes flash in her head. But then she would immediately recall her family’s dire finances, soon to worsen when her brother Vasia went to university, and her parents’ little old house, mortgaged and remortgaged and upon the very point of foreclosure. And, gathering all her strength and courage, Varvara Stepanovna would chase away the thought of escaping and go on bearing her cross.

_____________

II

One day, after breakfast, she took a walk in a meadow, along the bank of a stream. It had just rained, and tousled scraps of storm clouds, black-blue and soft silver, rushed across the sky, ceaselessly changing shades and shapes. Now the sun hid away, now it emerged, causing light effects that followed each other in stark rapidity. First the poplars lining the stream’s banks sparkled in the bright sunshine, while the pine forest behind them was enveloped in gloomy, listless shadow; a moment later, hot rays of light fell upon the forest, while the poplars grew dusky and almost black. But the landscape’s brighter and happier hues escaped Varvara Stepanovna’s notice; her longing soul was fixed on the gloom of the cold shadows. “God, how unbearable,” she said with a sigh. “A penal colony . . . worse than any penal colony.”

“Comment?” Unexpectedly, someone spoke from the other side of some tall blackberry bushes girding the stream. Varvara Stepanovna raised her head. Sitting on the bank, angling, was a decrepit old man wearing brown satin trousers and a navy blue shirt. Klobukova muttered something and made as if to continue on her way. Removing his hat, the old man greeted her.

“Bonjour, mademoiselle! Taking a walk? Well, the weather today isn’t too shabby. Would you care to do some fishing? Please, have a seat next to an old man.”

He spoke fast, mumbling and lisping as old people do, and Varvara Stepanovna was unable to follow his words. “If only this were old Nikanorych!” she thought. Neither sitting down nor leaving, she stared with distaste at his foreign face, beardless as an actor’s.

“Here, I’ll set up a rod for you,” said the old man merrily. “It’s a rather amusing thing, fishing. You, I suppose, are pretty bored here, right?”

“Vee,” Varvara Stepanovna replied with a sad smile.

“Sure! A foreign place. . . .” The old man glanced quickly at the water before lifting his eyes to Klobukova. “You see, I think this: our country isn’t bad, but if one isn’t from here, one has got to be pretty bored.”

Varvara Stepanovna stood in silence. . . .

“Yes. I, for instance, am about to be eighty-three years old, and I’ve never been farther than 50 kilometers from my village. The town of Chaumont is only six kilometers away, and yet I haven’t been there more than ten times. You know, home’s best.”

The old man chewed his lips and fell silent for an instant. Varvara Stepanova still stood beside him. “But tell me please, mademoiselle, how does one get to your country? By way of Spain?”

Varvara Stepanovna explained the route from there to Russia.

“Oh, I see! Well, Austria is okay, too. A nice place. What isn’t good is being away from home. My son Ernest has been abroad—in Prussia, as a prisoner of war. And what do you think? He wants some grape vodka, and he cannot say to a Prussian: ‘grape vodka.’ A Prussian wouldn’t get it, he has a totally different word for it. And fish, for instance, isn’t fish to him, but something else. Everything’s different.”

A bitter smirk twisted Varvara Stepanovna’s mouth. The gentle words of this compassionate oldster had given her a surge of warmth, but also pain.

“Mademoiselle,” he started again. “Have you met your countrymen in town?”

“Comment?” Varvara Stepanovna asked, listening more closely.

“Your countrymen, in Chaumont. Have you met them already?”

What’s he saying? Klobukova thought, alarmed. Are there Russians in Chaumont?

“Ah, you don’t know?” the old man sang out. “I can’t believe they haven’t told you. Oh, those people at the castle! They don’t even know what to tell a person. Of course, you have fellow countrymen living in Chaumont: the Russians.”

“Pas possible!” Varvara Stepanovna exclaimed. “Are you sure?”

The old man made a face and shrugged his shoulders.

“Parbleu! On Sunday I was in their shop buying hats for my grandchildren. Why don’t you go see? Go to the square where the prefecture is, and there on your left is Rue Sadi Carnot. Walk up the street, past a dozen houses or so, and there, opposite the lycée, there’s a millinery.”

In agitation Varvara Stepanovna stared at the old man. Russians?, she thought. In Chaumont? Oh, my God! This cannot be true. What would they be doing in Chaumont, a nothing little town in central France? No, this is nonsense. The old man has it all wrong.

“Yes, and the hats are splendid, too. Expensive, but very good, real felt. These countrymen of yours were banished from Russia,” grunted the old man, stretching his legs, which had fallen asleep. “They were banished and they came to live here. From your country they chase away the Israelites. They don’t want them, but we don’t mind. We let them stay.”

“Oh, they’re kikes!” Varvara Stepanovna drew it out in her mind: “yids.” And suddenly taking umbrage, she started to walk away.

“We let them stay,” the old man repeated, studying the surface of the water. “Nothing wrong with it, selling hats. Why should we kick them out? Real felt. They charged me an arm and a leg, but they gave me real felt, shiny. When I sell them fish, I’ll charge them an arm and a leg.”

Having taken five or six steps, Varvara Stepanovna composed herself. She felt that she had acted discourteously. Turning toward the fisherman and trying to sound friendly, she yelled out, “au revoir!”

_____________

One could not say that Varvara Stepanovna hated Jews. She had never had a significant encounter with one; never observed them closely; did not associate them with any specific bad thing; could not justly feel any animosity toward them. But she found them ridiculous and worthy of contempt if not revulsion: they were repulsive, chafing creatures. Along with her father—and probably all of Mertvovodsk—she knew and could explain to you that Jews cared about nothing but commerce and money-lending, that they ate garlic and something called kugel, that they emitted a foul smell and had crooked noses, and, finally, that the Russian people suffered on their account. If she ever saw a ragged Jew on the street she would hold her nose and think to herself, “dirty Jew,” and when she came across smartly-dressed Jews promenading on the boulevard or at the club she would mock their lack of taste and remind herself that their silks and velvets had been paid for with stolen cash.

And now, under the label of fellow countrymen, she was to be served up these same stinking Jews? For the rest of the day Klobukova felt a depressing mixture of chagrin, bitterness, and a gnawing disappointment. It was as if she had read in the newspaper that she had won the lottery and then it turned out to be a misprint, she hadn’t won anything at all. . . .

Still, she thought, what if it had really happened that Russians were living here? Yes, a remote corner of the world, the sticks, the countryside—but didn’t she, Klobukova, end up here? So why couldn’t others? And how good that would be, how fortunate! She would have someone to talk to, to give her heart a rest. She could visit these Russians in town, and they would come to see her in the castle. Life would assume a totally different course! She could stay longer with the countess then: a year, even two. After all, no matter how you looked at it, life here was comfortable, and the pay was excellent. She could order books on embroidery, study French, subscribe to a Russian magazine. Sure, Klobukova concluded, I could arrange my life here better if there were people, Russians, even a single family. Otherwise I’ll die of longing.

Up until today it had never even occurred to her that there might be Russians in Chaumont; now, the lack of them struck her as strange, almost unfair. She was getting angry. Jews: they’re all over, you find them everywhere. But Russians? They’re afraid to move; they sit behind their stoves and never venture forth as much as a single step.

At night, before sleep, Varvara Stepanovna sat on her bed and cried. She was thinking about her family, who just like that had let her go off to a foreign land. They should have struggled, suffered, borrowed money, done anything, but they should never have sent her so far away, to this cursed castle. They had acted greedily, selfishly.

It took a letter six days to reach Russia, crossing three borders and all of Switzerland and Austria. What if she were to die here? It could happen—no one was insured against death—and there would be none to bury her. “I’ll go to town, to see those kikes!” Klobukova suddenly decided. She was overcome by a desire to spite someone, to have her revenge. “What’s the big deal! I swear I’ll go. By God I’ll go.”

The windows of her bedroom lay open to the park. The moon shone brightly; listless shadows fell along the loopy paths and across the lawns. The pond slept; so did the trees and birds; and everywhere around there reigned a deep, untroubled silence.

Like a cemetery, Klobukova thought, and I’m all alone. She got down from the bed, put out the candle, and sat by the window. “The town lies just beyond this forest. On foot, I could get there in an hour and a half.” She sat still, her eyebrows raised, and stared out, at the forest and at the road to Chaumont that flanked it like a magical, shining stripe. Varvara Stepanovna could not take her eyes off that stripe. “Zdravstvuite,” she suddenly said in Russian, smiling softly. And then, changing pitch and her tone of voice, “Hello.”

Tomorrow she might hear somebody else say this same word to her. And: “What good fortune brings you here!” And many other such things. And she would speak Russian, a lot, and for a long time! “Why shouldn’t I go see them?” she asked herself. “Why not? Of course I’ll go.”

In the morning, when she awoke, her first thought was that today she would be going to town to see the Jews. “Kikes, so what? Even so, they’re almost my own people. And what if they turn out to be decent? There are, occasionally, decent Jews. Take Dr. Morgulis: all of Mertvovodsk receives him, the best homes, he even gets invited to General Skripitsyn’s Christmas party. A very decent person, no worse than your average Russian.”

From nine to ten in the morning she gave the countess her massage. Immediately thereafter, she started to ready herself for her journey. But since the mailman did not make his second round of the day until two in the afternoon, and since she had marked in her notebook that today, October 18, two letters were due—one from Semen Ivanovich and one from her aunt Anfisa—she decided to wait. She ate her lunch with appetite, her face considerably less gloomy than before. She couldn’t stop thinking about the Jews who lived in Chaumont, whom she envisioned looking exactly like Dr. Morgulis—neatly dressed, not rolling their r’s too badly, their noses not at all crooked.

The mailman came at the usual hour, but there were no letters. This small misfortune, which recurred almost daily and customarily plunged her into a black mood, left Klobukova unmoved. “No problem. Tomorrow I’ll have three letters, including one from Vasia.”

Hurriedly she put on her hat and veil and headed to town.

_____________

III

The road traversed several hamlets. The peasants were threshing grain, and everywhere one could hear the rumbling whistle of the machines. Every so often huge carts clattered by carrying loads of straw or bags of grain. The fat, strong horses, harnessed in teams of four, sometimes six, stepped slowly, tranquilly, effortlessly. Along the way, the peasants bowed to Varvara Stepanovna and struck up a conversation. She spoke to them cheerfully, bravely, even if she did get confused and pause after every phrase, and she laughed loudly when, failing to comprehend something or other, she answered them at random.

She was in a strange mood. She felt happy, and she knew that the best and most interesting part lay ahead. But at the same time she was still vaguely offended at the idea that here she was, going to see Jews. She was doing something wild, insensible; somehow, it humiliated her in her own eyes.

“If I have to associate with kikes, I wish they’d come to see me first. But there they are, sitting at home, happy as clams, and I’m running after them.”

Her thoughts ruffled and confused her, and with all her strength she chased away these gusts of flaming anger. “What can you do,” she asked herself. “No wonder the Ukrainians have a saying: ‘In a foreign city, seeing a dog is almost as good as seeing your own father.’ And besides, they couldn’t really come to see me. How would they have known I’m here? Plus, they wouldn’t dare. And anyway, it’s only me who’s such a ninny as to need fellow countrymen. Someone else in my place wouldn’t even want to see them.”

As she approached the town, her offense gave way to a pleasant rush of anticipation. Funny, isn’t it, she thought, an uncontrollable smile appearing on her lips: How strange! How terribly strange! And then, entering the town, crossing a railroad bridge, she had a new and jarring idea. What if the Jews decline to see me? What if they treat me coldly or even rudely? Didn’t they emigrate from Russia because things were bad for them there, because they were oppressed? That must mean they don’t like Russia and Russians. They could, perhaps, insult me.

They wouldn’t dare! Varvara Stepanova was becoming angry again, though she realized her anger was misplaced. Why shouldn’t they, after all? What’s to hold them back? Here they have nothing to fear. And suddenly she herself was overcome by fear. More than ever before, she felt lonely, abandoned, forgotten. And Aunt Anfisa isn’t writing, and Vasia isn’t, either.

She stopped. Her eyes, fixed on the tall building of the prefect of police, filled with sadness and self-pity. For a couple of minutes she stood stock still. “No, it’s okay. I’m going!” She shook off her stupor. “I’m going. What will be, will be!”

She hastened across the square in front of the prefecture, her heart trembling as she saw a dark blue sign, “Rue Sadi Carnot,” on the yellowish wall of the tall corner building. She stared at the white letters, which seemed to smile and bow in her direction. Strange, she thought, walking up the street, so strange.

In about a hundred steps Varvara Stepanovna approached the lycée. The building was set back from the street, surrounded by a large garden, and she could see only heavy gates and an ornate fence. Klobukova walked along the length of the fence as shadows from its wrought-iron ornaments swam across her face and bodice. At the end she saw a large house, gray, with balconies. Next to it stood another house, white. Across the road, in a squat brick building, there was a glass door and over the door a sign: “Chapellerie moderne.”

“Of course, it’s here,” Varvara Stepanovna said out loud. “Here!”

_____________

She ran across the street and, climbing the front steps, peered inside. A short, stooped, scrawny man, his hair completely gray, stood behind the counter, staring sorrowfully at the street through the window. He had only one eye, a blemish that was imperfectly concealed by the big round spectacles sitting athwart his short, fleshy nose. With his left hand he grasped a shelf cluttered with hat boxes while his right hand drummed lazily on the counter.

“Well, isn’t this strange?” Varvara Petrovna said to herself. “It’s as though he were uncle Afanasii Petrovich, and I’m about to surprise him by turning up.” She pushed open the door and, hardly over the threshold, called in a resounding voice: “Zdravstvuite! Well, hello!”

The gray-haired man behind the counter made a strange, jerking motion. His glasses jumped, the large round lenses sparkling.

“Oy . . . what’s that?” he exclaimed, startled. He froze for a moment. Then he swiftly turned his face to the dark-red curtain behind the counter and yelled for all he was worth: “Dvoira! Dvoira! Come here right away, Dvoira! Oy, look what’s happening here!” He was speaking in Yiddish, and Varvara Stepanovna smiled inwardly at the guttural sounds that she could not understand but recognized so well.

“You’re Russian? You’re from Russia? When did you come from Russia?” The old man threw himself at Klobukova. “Oh, how wonderful! So you’re from Russia! Where from? What province? Taurida? No? From Kherson? Oh, my God! That’s incredible! That’s so precious!”

With both hands he shook Varvara Stepanovna’s small hand, still shouting in agitation: “You know, we’ve been here eleven years now, and this is only the third time I’ve seen a Russian person. Only the third time. In eleven years! Kha! What do you say to that? Dvoira! Come now! Come, look, just look who’s here!”

Well, no, they won’t hurt me, Varvara Stepanovna thought, smiling gently at the agitated Jew. How excited he is to see me! What a funny little fellow! The red curtain fluttered, and Dvoira entered, a short plump woman wearing a dark-brown dress. Hers was a typical Jewish face, with a large curved nose and big beady eyes. Tranquilly, carrying herself with cold pride, she bowed to Klobukova and stood by the counter.

“Russian, you see! She’s Russian!” the excited old man pointed to Varvara Stepanovna.

Dvoira made a wry face. “What are you so happy about?” she asked him in a half-whisper, in Yiddish. “Did you receive an inheritance, or what?”

The old man regarded his wife in bafflement, then turned again to Varvara Stepanovna and started rattling: “My name’s Shapiro. We’re from Russia. . . . Of course, we’re from Krivaia Balka. Oh yes! We used to live in Krivaia Balka. And you, permit me to ask you: here visiting? Passing through town? And how much longer will you stay? Oh, what a wonderful thing! Simply incredible! But please come into the room. Why are we standing here? Please, please come in!”

“She’s fine where she is,” Dvoira grumbled in Yiddish, angrily pursing her lips. “She can go back where she came from.”

Bewildered, Shapiro glanced at his wife. “Ah, you’d better be quiet,” he mumbled softly but very dramatically. “My God, what’s come over you?”

“Please, come into the dining room,” he called out to Varvara Stepanovna, dashing to the curtain and pulling it open with an energetic motion. “Oh, how did it all happen, that you went away so far from home? Here, please, sit here, in the armchair, by the light, by the window, please! Dvoira, invite her, nu!”

“Well, sit down,” Dvoira said gloomily as if forcing herself to speak. “I guess we can sit for a while.”

All three entered the dining room and sat, and Varvara Stepanovna started to tell them the story of where she was from and how she found herself in France.

“Ah, forgive me, please,” Shapiro suddenly jumped up from his chair. “Forgive me for interrupting—just for a minute. I should call for a samovar.”

“Why a samovar?” Dvoira confronted her husband in a deep low voice. “No need—the water boils faster with gas.”

“Oh no, Dvoirochka! Gas? Don’t you get it? This is a Russian person. She needs tea from a samovar!

“We don’t have any coal,” Dvoira muttered.

“No coal?” Shapiro grabbed his head with both hands and made a comically pitiful face. “Oy, what a misfortune! It isn’t possible to find coal in this town? It really isn’t possible? In the whole town they’ve burned up all the coal? Georgette! Georgette!” he dashed to the door. “Georgette, run quick to Monsieur Petitjean’s shop and bring some coal. And put on the samovar, quick! And do it in one minute, in one second!” He was speaking in some extraordinary, homegrown, French-Russian-Yiddish dialect. Varvara Stepanovna couldn’t help smiling.

This little old Jew is all right, rushed through her head: hospitable, kind, it seems. But her feelings were moving faster than her thoughts, and her feelings did not care for her mind’s condescending tone. Her entire being was drawn to this noisily bustling Jew and even to his gloomy, pouty wife. Happy, excited, she continued her tale about life at the castle, speaking with complete openness, concealing nothing, and all the while feeling as though she were addressing members of her own family or people she had known for a long time.

Dvoira maintained her harsh expression, but her husband could not tear his eyes away from Varvara Stepanovna; nor, like her, could he stop smiling. At times he lost his self-control, exclaiming “Oh, my God,” “Nu! Nu!” or “That’s wonderful!” And these exclamations reflected not so much the stories Varvara Stepanovna told as the marvelously delightful and joyful state that had suddenly gripped his heart and soul.

Turning to the subject of her loneliness and longing, Klobukova tried to sound humorous, but Shapiro, it seemed, knew well the bitterness and anguish that lay hiding beneath. Sorrowfully he looked at Varvara Stepanovna, sighing with compassion and rocking his head. “Of course, of course,” he said under his breath. “What do you expect—so far from home. And besides, it’s your first time. And you are still a child. A child, no less. When a person is thrown like this into a foreign place, surely he is the most miserable individual in the whole wide world. . . .”

_____________

IV

Then Shapiro started telling in turn about his business and his children. Their son Solomon worked as a chef d’atelier at “the biggest” hat factory in Lyon. Their daughter was doing well in school and, God willing, would become a doctor. Now Dunechka was visiting her brother in Lyon, but in a few days she was coming back “and you’ll see for herself what a beauty she is and how well educated.” As he talked about their children, his wife Dvoira’s face became less gloomy, and she even put in a few words. Cheered, her husband brightened still more and began to speak even more openly and loudly.

“Why did you leave Russia?” Varvara Stepanovna asked.

Shapiro became flustered. “It just turned out that way.” An embarrassed, guilty smile appeared on his face. “Do I know why? Silliness. I got it into my head and I left.”

“Did you have a hard life in Krivaia Balka?”

“Hard?” Shapiro curled his eyebrows. “Not hard, but you know. . . . We lived the way everybody does. But you know, well, how could I explain this to you? Oh, yes, for instance: fish seek deeper waters, and man—”

“—Why are you telling tales?” Dvoira suddenly interrupted, noisily pulling up her chair and pressing both elbows to the table. “ ‘Fish seek deeper waters. . . .’ Did she ask you about fish? We escaped from Krivaia Balka because of the pogroms. There’s the answer for you!”

“Please, Dvoira. Leave it be!” Shapiro said in a shrill, almost frightened voice. “Leave it be. This isn’t the right time.”

“It’s always the right time! What kind of secrets are these? Why leave it out? You think we had a sweet life there? We suffered, we endured, our entire life we were just trying to survive. And then came the good people—your Russian people—and made a pogrom, and everything we had in the house they destroyed instantly.”

“So, they destroyed it. So, so what’s to do about it now?” Shapiro beseeched his wife. “Please let’s not talk about it.”

“And they whacked him in the eye with an iron,” Dvoira raised her voice. “And he’s been blind ever since. He lost his eye. Why would we stay there after that? Tell me, please. So they could torment us some more? You think it wasn’t enough? I think we’d had plenty. So that’s why we left. We were going to America, but on our way my brilliant husband’s other eye started to hurt—the eyes are connected, and when one hurts, the other responds—and he nearly went totally blind. So we couldn’t go any further, and when we got to Chaumont he had to be hospitalized. And I and my two children were left on the pavement. And it looked like our only option was to lie down and die, or else throw ourselves under the train. What else? What to do? But let me tell you, maybe the people here aren’t as nice as in Russia . . . don’t interrupt!” Dvoira yelled, casting a furious glance at her husband. “Don’t interrupt, I’m telling you, be quiet! I, thank God, haven’t gone mad yet! I too am allowed to say a few words!

“Here the people didn’t take out our eyes, you know,” she went on, turning toward Varvara Stepanovna. “And they didn’t rob us; oh, no. They gave us shelter and a job—sewing visors on hats. My Solomon and I, we worked day and night, first visors, then ribbons, and when this president of mine came out of the hospital, not only did we have food on the table but we also had an apartment and had managed to save up seventy francs. You see?”

Dvoira sat with her arms akimbo and proudly nodded her head. “Could we possibly have had all this in Russia? What do you think? And so we settled here, and thank God, we’re happy here.”

“Happy, eh?” Shapiro sang out in a quiet voice, looking sadly at the plush frames holding pictures of Chaumont that were hanging on the wall in front of him.

“Yes, happy! Just so you know, we’re happy. In Russia he was a tailor. There we were always hungry. And now, look at our store. This is no small thing! And no one abuses us or hurts us, and no one makes our life miserable, no one yells ‘stinking kike!’ at us. We’re treated like people here, you see!”

And Dvoira again spread her arms in an expressive gesture and leaned back against the chair. Having gotten everything off her chest in front of Varvara Stepanova, she evidently felt relieved: the poutiness in her expression had disappeared, and instead she shone with an air of independence and proud contentment.

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Varvara Stepanovna looked at the Jewish woman cautiously, out of the corner of her eye. For the first time in her life, she had had a long conversation with Jews; for the first time, she had listened carefully and seriously, without a desire to mock. Dvoira’s seething words made her feel quiet and sad, and dimly self-reproachful.

“But tell me please,” Shapiro asked in a small voice. “You probably know how things are now in our Kherson province, are the crops good?”

“Bad, I think. Everything got scorched.”

“Scorched again!”

Dvoira quaked her shoulders contemptuously.

“So what’s going to happen now?” the old man continued, as if thinking out loud. “Well, in Krivaia Balka they do have some retail stores—although now, of course, what sort of sales can they expect? But what’s going to happen in the villages? In Korenikha, for instance? Or in Chervonnoe, in Starye Krinitsy?”

He grew silent for a minute. Then he sighed. “People are going to die,” he answered his own question.

“Vey!” Dvoira burst in, derisively pressing her lips together. “What’s the great sorrow? Let them.”

Shapiro swiftly raised his head. “Dvoira!” he moaned, folding his hands on his chest. “Why now? Why, I ask you?” And turning to Varvara Stepanovna he said: “You know—it’s all a show. You’re sitting here, a Russian, and she wants to show you that she’s angry with the Russians and cannot stand them. But in actuality,” Shapiro glanced at his wife with a sad smile. “In actuality, it’s she who started calling our daughter ‘Dunia,’ ‘Dunechka.’ ”

“That means nothing,” Dvoira said, taken aback.

“In Russia we called our little girl by her Jewish name, Branka. And the Russian urchins would yell: ‘banker,’ ‘wanker,’ ‘tanker,’ and other rhymes they’d come up with.”

“When a Russian needs to offend a Jew, he knows how to find good rhymes,” Dvoira added.

“But no matter how much they insulted our little girl, we paid no heed and continued to call her our way: Branka. But since we went abroad, my wife started calling her Dunia, Dunechka. What? Isn’t it true?”

Dvoira was silent. A sorrowing smile played faintly on her full lips. Varvara Stepanovna looked at Shapiro, then at his wife. She wanted to say something nice, tender, warm, but for some reason she felt awkward, and the words would not come. But then Georgette rolled into the room, a round old French lady in a white apron and bonnet, and set a samovar and glasses on the table.

“Nous voici à Moscou maintenant,” she burbled in a kindly voice. “Du thé, le samovar, une belle demoiselle russe. . . . Ah, que j’aime la jeunesse!”

Dvoira poured. No doubt she was tired of being dour, and her husband’s words had knocked the wind out of her sails. Gradually her face lost its final traces of grimness; she was becoming more and more friendly. Ceremoniously, with a certain affectation, she waited on Varvara Stepanovna, insisting that she take four—no fewer than four—lumps of sugar with her tea, and diligently spooning first cherry and then apricot preserves onto her plate, followed by brown pastries with honey that she had baked herself. As the conversation grew livelier, they jumped from topic to topic, but no matter what they talked about—people, buildings, weather, hatmaking—everything was connected with Russia and Russians. Dvoira’s tongue was finally untied, and she jabbered loudly in a singsong. Varvara Stepanovna’s face, a typical, good Russian face, white with rosy cheeks, clear blue eyes, and a fresh, affectionately smiling mouth, was an invitation to open up, and within a half-hour Dvoira no longer held any secrets from her guest. She was emptying her whole heart.

And Varvara Stepanovna also talked, talked and smiled, listening to her own voice and her words in quiet wonderment. How unexpected this all was! How strange! How unusual! And how long it was since she had been in such pleasant and entertaining company!

Now Shapiro was the only one with little to say. Three times he returned to the store to wait on customers, and when he returned he sat quietly and listened to the women talk. His expression had grown pensive, gently doleful, and now and then a quiet, forgiving smile surfaced on his bloodless lips.

Dvoira took Klobukova to look at Dunechka’s room, showed her her daughter’s photograph, her books and notebooks, and then started taking her trousseau out of the closets and trunks. Already she had put away four eiderdown comforters, and a fifth was in the works; there were dozens of different undershirts and blouses, cuts of silk and satin. “She says she doesn’t need all this,” Dvoira said. “All she worries about are her studies. Does a child understand? She wants to be a doctor. With pleasure! But a down comforter cannot hurt.”

“Haven’t you had enough?” Shapiro stopped his wife. “Put away the rags, why don’t you talk of something else?”

“No, about this, about this,” Varvara Stepanovna yelled playfully, digging into a new pile of lingerie. “If you would please not interrupt us. This is women’s business.”

“That’s right!” Dvoira agreed. “Women’s business. And you—sit here and listen, philosopher!”

For a while longer the women went through clothes and chatted away. Varvara Stepanovna liked Dvoira more and more. She now thought that, both in appearance and in character, this new acquaintance resembled her cousin twice removed Vasilisa Efremovna, wife of the rural deacon from Novopokrovsk. Her cheeks, too, were chubby and red, and her waist started under her shoulder blades, and she laughed just the same way, raucously and heartily. A little funny but dear, very dear.

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V

About an hour and a half later, Klobukova picked up her hat and announced she was leaving. But Dvoira, bowing ceremoniously and pulling a face, tried to remove the hat from her hands. “Let’s say,” she said in a sugary falsetto, “let’s say we won’t let you go, and you’ll stay for supper. Today, by the way, is Friday.”

The invitation both gladdened and confused Varvara Stepanovna. She had no desire whatsoever to hurry back to the castle, but she didn’t want to take advantage of her new acquaintances’ hospitality. “It will be too late to return,” she objected indecisively.

“And why should you return late, when you can return early?” Shapiro asked with a sly smile.

Varvara Stepanovna thought she knew what he meant, but it only added to her embarrassment. “Yes, exactly,” the old man went on. “Your countess gets up at nine, so if you sleep over and leave here bright and early, you’ll surely make it back in time.”

“Ah, that’s wonderful!” Dvoira splashed the air with her hands. “That’s the best thing to do. Makes the most sense. You’ll sleep in Dunechka’s room.”

A half-hour later all three settled around the festively set table. Six candles stood lit in new nickel-plated candlesticks, and in front of them, under a starched, snow-white napkin, loomed two large challahs. Customarily the Shapiros’ Friday evening meal was accompanied by solemn rituals, but this time, for the sake of their guest, Shapiro simplified matters considerably, and after a brief prayer he sat down at the head of the table. A fish course was served—stuffed carp—followed by a traditional broth with noodles, then chicken and compote.

“And where’s the kugel?” Varvara Stepanovna inquired.

Dvoira explained that one ate kugel on Saturday, at midday, and that the tasty dish in question was still baking in the oven. “There’s no kugel for you,” Shapiro chimed in, “but you will get to sing zemiros.”

“What’s that, zemiros?”

“They’re Sabbath songs. We sing them between courses, in Hebrew, the ancient Jewish tongue.”

“Oh, please sing, please!”

“Will you help with the high notes?”

“Yes, yes. Please start.”

Shapiro cleared his throat, rubbed the outside of his windpipe with a finger as if to clear it, and led an ornate oriental-sounding song in a trembling, goaty voice:

He who sanctifies the Sabbath properly,

He who observes it unprofaned,

Will have a great reward. . . .

“Sing along, go ahead,” said Dvoira, who didn’t understand a single word of Hebrew, nudging Klobukova. Varvara Stepanovna opened her mouth and sang with an expression of timidity and reverence. For a minute or two, a wondrous cacophony filled the room. Then the old man’s voice climbed somewhere very high and, halting suddenly, he started to laugh.

“We don’t have a conductor, that’s why,” he explained.

They rose late from the table; it was after nine. Varvara Stepanovna felt both tired and almost intoxicated from all these new and unexpected impressions. She was pleased, amused, and also a bit melancholy. She thought of her own family, of her longing to see them, and of her recent despair. “Dear, dear,” she thought, looking at the shortish Dvoira, so wishing to pour tenderness upon her, to hug and to kiss her.

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VI

Georgette put out the candles, wished her employers good night, and retired.

Dvoira lay in bed, stretching with pleasure. It was quiet. The dense white curtains swallowed the moonlight, and a transparent, pale green dusk permeated the room. “Well? What do you say to this whole business?” she asked in a half-whisper.

Shapiro sat on an ottoman by the window. Light fell on him from behind; his expressive, sorrowful face was covered in thick shadow. “All sorts of encounters happen,” he replied vaguely. “So this one had to happen too.”

“Such a remarkable person,” Dvoira put in, speaking with passion but without raising her voice. “So gentle, so polite. Just like our own child, I swear!”

“She must be well educated,” Shapiro said. “You know, they torment us, but their young people, when they’re well educated, they’re so good, so good, there are none better in the whole world.”

“So modest, so tender!”

“Remember, in Krivaia Balka, Vasyl Ivanovich, the priest’s son . . . he was later exiled to Siberia?”

“When she saw Dunechka’s corsets, the ones embroidered in silk and lace, she sighed with awe,” Dvoira recalled, dreamily staring at the ceiling. “That’s okay, it’s good for her to know.”

Shapiro didn’t reply. He sat, his hands resting on his knees, his head tilted to the side. Several minutes passed in silence. At the lycée across the street the clock tolled the eleventh hour, slowly, with long pauses. The final beat was especially long and sad, as if sighing after the somber place of its birth even while slipping from the narrow and suffocating clocktower and flying up toward the bright moon and the free sky.

“You know, Dvoirenu, what I’m thinking right now?” Shapiro lifted up his head.

“What?”

“I’m thinking this: suppose back then, you and I had suffered through everything and never left Krivaia Balka. Then, say, for instance, our grandchildren, or even our great-grandchildren—would they be able to live there safely, like human beings?”

Startled, Dvoira stirred in bed. “Oh, the old song!” she said in vexation.

Shapiro didn’t reply. “Sure, it’s old,” he acknowledged after a pause. “Old is right.” He sat still, his head tilted toward his left shoulder.

“In front of the little house where our heder stood, there was always a swampy patch,” he spoke again, unhurriedly, smiling a quiet, clumsy, pained smile. “And whenever it rained, a sort of pond would form there, and the boys used to go wading. They would roll up their trousers to the groin and roam around in it. Me, too. And my grandmother would drag me out and beat me. I would weep, and my grandmother would weep, and she would give me a cookie. I had scrofula on my legs, and when I waded in that water it got inflamed. I wonder if the little house is still there, and that swamp.”

“Please, go to bed already,” Dvoira whispered with irritation. “Sleep!”

Shapiro didn’t move. Something knocked against the ceiling: upstairs, in Dunechka’s room, Varvara Stepanovna was throwing off her boots.

“Fifty years we lived and worked there,” the old man went on sorrowfully. “Our fathers, grandfathers, great-grandfathers are all buried there. . . . And four children.”

Dvoira turned noisily to the wall. “So what do you want? Why all this now? Now he’s going to drag it out and drag it out again. Go to bed, I’m telling you!” Strangled tears could be heard in her trembling voice.

Shapiro sighed loudly. “If the time came . . . if only for the grandchildren, for the great-grandchildren,” he muttered.

Dvoira no longer responded. “They’ll get hit on the head with a log,” her heart was crying out. But she suppressed the words and lay without moving, her head covered with the blanket.

Shapiro looked over at his wife; he wanted to say more, but he took pity. Quietly he got up and went out into the yard. There, near the cellar, in a broad band of shadow, stood a large planter and in it a short, stocky boxwood tree. The French are fond of these shrubs, which are in leaf throughout the year and provide green branches for decorating headstones. Earlier in the evening the little tree had been watered, and now, under the bright rays of the moon, the green drops on its dark branches sparkled like firebugs.

Shapiro sat on the edge of the wooden planter and turned his face to the sky. With his lone eye he gazed mournfully at the clear, docile moon pouring its light on this alien Chaumont as well as on that distant, sorrowful country where they had taken out his eye, where his dear ones were buried, a country to which he felt such a solid, such a sacred claim. He gazed, and in his despondent heart he sang again the old, old song: if only for the grandchildren, if only for the great-grandchildren, if only one day. . . .

—Paris, 1902

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Translator’s Notes

Page 30. Varvara Stepanovna Klobukova: Varvara is the Russian equivalent of Barbara, and it points directly to “barbarian” (varvar). Klobukova derives from klobuk, referring to the headgear of an Orthodox monk.

Mertvovodsk: a fictitious name; literally, “[Town] of Dead Waters.”

Saint-Blin: the name of a French village in the Haute-Marne region where Aizman and his wife, a physician, lived from 1898 to 1902.

Ekaterinoslav: now Dnepropetrovsk, in Ukraine.

Ils sont si soumis, les russes: “they are so pliant, the Russians.”

Page 31. Vonliarskii, Vasilii (1814-1852): a popular belletrist of the 1840’s-1850’s.

Page 32. Chaumont: town in the Haute-Marne region of France.

Page 35. Krivaia Balka: like Varvara’s Mertvovodsk, the Shapiros’ Krivaia Balka is an invented name. Most likely it refers to Krivoi Rog, a town in the Kherson province of the Russian empire, presently in Ukraine, where anti-Jewish violence took place in 1883; the name also evokes Balta, a town in the former Podolia province where a pogrom erupted in 1882.

Page 37. Dunia, Dunechka: diminutives of the Russian Christian name Evdokiia.

Nous voici à Moscou, etc.: “Here we are now in Moscow. Tea, a samovar, a young Russian beauty. . . . Oh, how I love youth!”

Page 38. “He who sanctifies”: the opening of the first of the melodies traditionally sung at the Sabbath meal.

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