“They can choke us so much as they like!”
“Nobody cares. Nobody hears our cry!”
Out of this babel of voices there flashed across Hanneh Hayyeh’s deadened senses the chimera that to her was the one reality of her aspiring soul—“Oi-i-i-i! My beautiful kitchen!” she sighed as in a dream.
The butcher’s face grew red with wrath. His eyes gleamed like sharp, darting steel. “I wouldn’t give that robber the satisfaction to leave your grand painted house,” he said, turning to Hanneh Hayyeh. “I’d smash down everything for spite. You got nothing to lose. Such a murderer! I would learn him a lesson! ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’”
Hanneh Hayyeh, hair disheveled, clothes awry, the nails of her fingers dug in her scalp, stared with the glazed, impotent stare of a madwoman. With unseeing eyes she rose and blindly made her way to her house.
As she entered her kitchen she encountered her husband hurrying in.
“Oi weh! Oi weh!” he whined. “I was always telling you your bad end. Everybody is already pointing their fingers on me! and all because you, a meshugeneh yideneh, a starved beggerin, talked it into your head that you got to have for yourself a white-painted kitchen alike to Mrs. Preston. Now you’ll remember to listen to your husband. Now, when you’ll be laying in the street to shame and to laughter for the whole world.”
“Out! Out from my sight! Out from my house!” shrieked Hanneh Hayyeh. In her rage she seized a flat-iron and Jake heard her hurl it at the slammed door as he fled downstairs.
It was the last night before the eviction. Hanneh Hayyeh gazed about her kitchen with tear-glazed eyes. “Some one who got nothing but only money will come in here and get the pleasure from all this beautifulness that cost me the blood from my heart. Is this already America? What for was my Aby fighting? Was it then only a dream—all these millions people from all lands and from all times, wishing and hoping and praying that America is? Did I wake myself from my dreaming to see myself back in the black times of Russia under the czar?”
Her eager, beauty-loving face became distorted with hate. “No—the landlord ain’t going to get the best from me! I’ll learn him a lesson. ‘An eye for an eye’—”