The White Terror and The Red: A Novel of Revolutionary Russia

  CHAPTER XVI.

  CLARA AT HOME.

  At Boyko's Court the chilly dawn lit up a barricade of wheels, axles,and bodies of peasant waggons. Through wide cracks of a fence came theshifting light of a lantern and the sleepy cackling of geese. At the farend of the deep narrow court hung the pulley chains and bucket of aroofed well. Clara went through a spacious subterranean passage, dark asa pocket and filled with the odour of paint. It was crowded with stacksof trunks, finished and unfinished, but she steered clear of themwithout having to feel her way.

  A door swung open, revealing a dimly lighted low-ceiled interior. Theodour of sleep mingled with the odours of paint and putty.

  "Is that you, Tamara?" asked a tall, erect, half-naked old woman inYiddish, Tamara being the Jewish name which had been arbitrarilytransformed, at Vladimir's instance, into Clara.

  "Yes, mamma darling," Clara replied.

  "Master of the universe! You get no sleep at all."

  The girl kissed her mother gayly. "You know what papa says," sherejoined, "'sleep is one sixtieth of death.' Life is better, mammadear."

  "I have not studied any of your Gentile books, yet I know enough tounderstand that to be alive is better than to be dead," the tall, erectold woman said without smiling. "But if you want to be alive you mustsleep. Go to bed, go to bed."

  There were between them relations of quizzical comradeship, implyingthat each treated the interests of the other with patronising levity,with the reservation of a common ground upon which they met on terms ofequality and ardent friendship.

  "By the way," the old woman added, yawning, "Volodia was here. He wantsto see you."

  "I know. I found him at the gate."

  "Very well, then, go to bed, go to bed."

  "Is father asleep?"

  At this a red-bearded little man in yellow drawers and a white shirtopen at the neck and exposing a hairy breast, burst from an open sidedoor.

  "How can one sleep when one is not allowed to?" he fired out. "May shesink into the earth, her ungodly books and all. I'll break every uncleanbone in you. Who ever heard of a girl roaming around as late as that?"

  "Hush," his wife said with a faint smile, as she urged him back to theirbed-room, much as she would a child.

  The family occupied one large basement room, the better part of whichwas used as a trunk-maker's shop and a kitchen, two narrow strips of itsspace having been partitioned off for bed-rooms. It was Hannah, Clara'smother, who conducted the trunk business. The bare wooden boxes camefrom a carpenter's shop and she had them transformed into trunks at herhouse. Clara's father spent his days and evenings in a synagogue,studying the Talmud "for its own sake." There were other such scholarsin Miroslav, the wife in each case supporting the family by engaging inearthly business, while her husband was looking after their commonspiritual welfare in the house of God. Clara's mother was generallyknown as "Hannah the trunk-maker," or "Hannah the Devil." In her veryhumble way she was a shrewd business woman, tireless, scheming, and notover-scrupulous, but her nickname had originated long before she was oldenough to be a devil on Cucumber Market. She was a little girl whenthere appeared in the neighbourhood what Anglo-Saxons would call "Jackthe Window-Smasher." Window-pane after window-pane was cracked withoutthere being the remotest clue to the source of the mischief. Thebewigged old women said it was an evil spirit, and engaged a "master ofthe name" to exorcise it from the community; but the number of brokenwindows continued to grow. The devil proved to be Hannah, and the moststartling thing about the matter, according to the bewigged women of theneighbourhood, was this, that when caught in the act, she did not evencry, but just lowered her eyes and frowned saucily.

  Rabbi Rachmiel, as Clara's father was addressed by strangers, wasinnocent of "things of the world" as an infant--a hot-tempered,simple-minded scholar, with the eyes and manner of a tiger and the heartof a dove. His wife tied his shirt-strings, helped him on with his socksand boots, and generally took care of him as she might of a baby. Whenhe spoke of worldly things to her, she paid no heed to his talk. When hehappened to drop a saying from the Talmud she would listen reverentlyfor more, without understanding a word of what he said.

  Had Clara been a boy her father would have sooner allowed her to beburned alive than to be taught "Gentile wisdom." But woman is out of thecount in the Jewish church, so he neither interfered nor tried tounderstand the effect that Gentile education was having on her.

  Father, mother and daughter represented three distinct worlds, Clarabeing as deeply engrossed in her "Gentile wisdom" as Rabbi Rachmiel wasin his Talmud, or as her mother in her trunks. That the girl belonged toa society that was plotting against the Czar the old people had not theremotest idea, of course.

  Besides Clara and her married sister the old couple had two sons, one ofthem a rabbi in a small town and the other a merchant in the same place.

  Clara put out the smoky light of a crude chimneyless little lamp (with apiece of wire to work the wick up and down), which had been left burningfor her. A few streaks of raw daylight crept in through the shutters,falling on a pair of big rusty shears fastened to the top of a woodenblock, on a heap of sheet-iron, and on several rows of old Talmudicfolios which lined the stretch of wall between Clara's partition and oneof the two windows.