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.