He took fire. “I don’t know what you are hinting at, Madame Oginska,” he said. Asking her to introduce him to Nihilists seemed out of the question.
“I am hinting at those ‘circles,’ prince. You probably belong to one of them; that’s what I am hinting at. Don’t you, now?”
“I don’t belong to any circles. Nor do I know what you mean, madame.”
“Well, well. You have come to ask me not to be offended with you, and now it seems to be my turn to ask you not to be angry with me. Don’t be uneasy, prince. I shan’t write to your mother. Indeed, she couldn’t afford to be in correspondence with me at all. However, if you really aren’t yet mixed up in those dreadful things”—there was a dubious twinkle in her eye—“you had better keep out of them in the future, too. Think of your charming mother and take care of yourself, prince. Well, I have got to go. It’s barbaric of me to leave you, but I’ll soon be back. Here are some books and magazines. Or wait, I have another occupation for you. I want you to meet the best Jew in the world. I want you to examine him in ‘Gentile lore,’ as his people would put it. They would kill me, his people, if they knew he came to read my ‘Gentile books.’”
“He is a brainy fellow,” she went on, leading the way through a labyrinth of rooms and corridors, “chockful of that Talmud of theirs, don’t you know. Now that he is married they are trying to make a business man of him, but he prefers worldly wisdom and that sort of thing. I let him use my library, the only place he has for his ‘unholy’ studies, in fact. He is supposed to come on business here. He lives in a small town a mile from here.”
She was speaking in Russian now, a language she had perfect command of, but which she spoke with a strong Polish accent, making it sound to Pavel as though she was declaiming poetry. Twelve years ago, before she inherited this estate, and when she still lived in Poland, her birthplace, she could scarcely speak it at all.
She took him into a room whose walls were lined with books, mostly old and worn, and whose two windows looked out upon a frozen pond in front of a snow-covered clump of trees.
“Monsieur Parmet, Prince Boulatoff,” she said, as a man sprang to his feet with the air of one startled from mental absorption. He was of strong, ungainly build, with the peculiar stamp of rabbinical scholarship on a plump, dark-bearded face. “See how much he knows, prince. He thinks he can take the examination for a certificate of maturity and enter the university. But then he thinks he knows everything.” With this she left them to themselves.
Pavel was in a whirl of embarrassment and annoyance, but the abashed smile of the other mollified him. “What I need more than anything else is to be examined in Latin and Greek,” Parmet said. “I haven’t had my exercises looked over for a long time, and it may be all wrong for all I know.” His Russian had a Yiddish accent. He spoke in low, purring tones that seemed to soften the heavy outline of his figure. He was a lumbering mass of physical strength, one of those bearlike giants whom village people will describe as bending horseshoes like so many blades of grass or driving nails into a wall with their bare knuckles for a hammer. His dark-brown eyes shone meekly.