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 the
shifting light of a lantern and the sleepy cackling of geese. At the far
end of the deep narrow court hung the pulley chains and bucket of a
roofed well. Clara went through a spacious subterranean passage, dark as
a pocket and filled with the odour of paint. It was crowded with stacks
of trunks, finished and unfinished, but she steered clear of them
without having to feel her way.
A door swung open, revealing a dimly lighted low-ceiled interior. The
odour of sleep mingled with the odours of paint and putty.
"Is that you, Tamara?" asked a tall, erect, half-naked old woman in
Yiddish, Tamara being the Jewish name which had been arbitrarily
transformed, 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," she
rejoined, "'sleep is one sixtieth of death.' Life is better, mamma
dear."
"I have not studied any of your Gentile books, yet I know enough to
understand that to be alive is better than to be dead," the tall, erect
old woman said without smiling. "But if you want to be alive you must
sleep. Go to bed, go to bed."
There were between them relations of quizzical comradeship, implying
that each treated the interests of the other with patronising levity,
with the reservation of a common ground upon which they met on terms of
equality and ardent friendship.
"By the way," the old woman added, yawning, "Volodia was here. He wants
to 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 shirt
open at the neck and exposing a hairy breast, burst from an open side
door.
"How can one sleep when one is not allowed to?" he fired out. "May she
sink into the earth, her ungodly books and all. I'll break every unclean
bone 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 their
bed-room, much as she would a child.
The family occupied one large basement room, the better part of which
was used as a trunk-maker's shop and a kitchen, two narrow strips of its
space having been partitioned off for bed-rooms. It was Hannah, Clara's
mother, who conducted the trunk business. The bare wooden boxes came
from a carpenter's shop and she had them transformed into trunks at her
house. Clara's father spent his days and evenings in a synagogue,
studying the Talmud "for its own sake." There were other such scholars
in Miroslav, the wife in each case supporting the family by engaging in
earthly business, while her husband was looking after their common
spiritual welfare in the house of God. Clara's mother was generally
known as "Hannah the trunk-maker," or "Hannah the Devil." In her very
humble way she was a shrewd business woman, tireless, scheming, and not
over-scrupulous, but her nickname had originated long before she was old
enough to be a devil on Cucumber Market. She was a little girl when
there appeared in the neighbourhood what Anglo-Saxons would call "Jack
the Window-Smasher." Window-pane after window-pane was cracked without
there being the remotest clue to the source of the mischief. The
bewigged old women said it was an evil spirit, and engaged a "master of
the name" to exorcise it from the community; but the number of broken
windows continued to grow. The devil proved to be Hannah, and the most
startling thing about the matter, according to the bewigged women of the
neighbourhood, was this, that when caught in the act, she did not even
cry, but just lowered her eyes and frowned saucily.
Rabbi Rachmiel, as Clara's father was addressed by strangers, was
innocent of "things of the world" as an infant--a hot-tempered,
simple-minded scholar, with the eyes and manner of a tiger and the heart
of a dove. His wife tied his shirt-strings, helped him on with his socks
and boots, and generally took care of him as she might of a baby. When
he spoke of worldly things to her, she paid no heed to his talk. When he
happened to drop a saying from the Talmud she would listen reverently
for more, without understanding a word of what he said.
Had Clara been a boy her father would have sooner allowed her to be
burned alive than to be taught "Gentile wisdom." But woman is out of the
count in the Jewish church, so he neither interfered nor tried to
understand the effect that Gentile education was having on her.
Father, mother and daughter represented three distinct worlds, Clara
being as deeply engrossed in her "Gentile wisdom" as Rabbi Rachmiel was
in his Talmud, or as her mother in her trunks. That the girl belonged to
a society that was plotting against the Czar the old people had not the
remotest idea, of course.
Besides Clara and her married sister the old couple had two sons, one of
them 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 a
piece of wire to work the wick up and down), which had been left burning
for 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 wooden
block, on a heap of sheet-iron, and on several rows of old Talmudic
folios which lined the stretch of wall between Clara's partition and one
of the two windows.