Читать книгу Five Silver Daughters - Louis Golding - Страница 20

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Mrs. Silver could not wear her house round her neck, the night it became her house. But she could wear her pearl necklace. She had not worn it since the day her daughter, Esther, got married, in the spring of nineteen hundred and ten. How could she, the wife of an anarchist, go about wearing pearl necklaces? But she wore it more often during the years to come.

The necklace consisted of five strings of pearls. They were not good pearls. They were of a bad colour, and about as regular in shape as the crumbs in a handful of gravel. But they were important to Hannah Silver. In a sense they were important to her before she was born; and they kept their importance when she possessed whole boxes of necklaces, as fine as any in Lancashire. On really grand occasions, she never neglected to wear them whatever other jewels she might wear.

Her mother had worn them as a fifteen-year-old bride, when she married Feivel Dobkin, the richest and handsomest young Jew in Terkass. It was a grand wedding. The Jews in the Dnieper villages talked about it for many a day, and not the Jews only, for there were many Gentiles present, merchants from Terkass itself, and farmers from the neighbourhood of the Dobkin farm at Prolensk, some twenty versts away.

For Feivel Dobkin’s father, Hannah Silver’s grandfather, was a big farmer, as well as a big business-man. In Terkass, he dealt in wine. He imported wine from Kishinev, as his father had done before him, and stored it in great casks in the mysterious cellar under his own house.

The cellar figured as often in Hannah Silver’s reminiscences of her girlhood as the pearl necklace itself, and the apricot-tree in the orchard. There were deep bays in it, and sudden declivities; odd rumblings overhead, and whiffs of sharp air to right and left. Her two elder brothers made her go down with them and play hide-and-seek among the barrels, though she suspected they were almost as frightened as she was.

“Ho! Ho!” the boys cried, like bandits, as they sought for her high and low, poking with their sticks in the dark places.

“And, do you know, once,” Mrs. Silver used to tell them, “there was a whole heap of sacks left in a big hole, away, away, right at the back of the cellar. And I hid under the sacks. And they couldn’t find me anywhere. And they got so frightened, you have no idea how frightened they got. ‘Ho! Ho!’ they shouted, louder and louder. And then Leon suddenly starts crying like a baby. Then I start crying. Oh, we had great times in that cellar!”

“Ho! Ho!” shouted Silver cavernously in the Oleander Street kitchen, in the days when the Silver daughters were still young enough for such horseplay.

“Ho! Ho!” they boomed back at him, making trumpets out of their hands.

“Such a big cellar,” said Mrs. Silver. “You could hide a whole synagogue in it. It went all the way back under the orchard. There was a trap-door there, just near the apricot-tree.”

“Ho! Ho!” said Sarah, her daughter, to this day, making semi-gruff noises at her borrowed babies, in Doomington, a long way from Terkass.

But the Dobkins not only had a cellar where they stored wine. They had barns where they stored wheat and rye, and deep pits where they buried it in the winter, under warm turves. For the father of Feivel Dobkin, being a younger son, had gone off to the wars for the first Nicholas, and had served him well for the full term of twenty-five years. And on his return from the campaign against the revolted Hungarians in the middle of the century, a grateful Tsar permitted him, Jew that he was, to own land and to farm it. This was near Prolensk, some twenty versts from Terkass, where his elder brother was a wine-merchant.

Feivel Dobkin, the soldier’s son, and Hannah Silver’s father-to-be, was ten years old when he went to Prolensk to be a farmer’s boy. But when he inherited the farm, being then a young man of twenty-five, he inherited the house and the wine-business in Terkass too, for the Terkass wine-merchant uncle had died without offspring.

It was all a little confusing to the other Silver daughters, but Susan kept track of it keenly. She was an intelligent student of the whole Russian ferment—that is to say, not only of the forces of revolution, but of those forces which generated them, which irritated or outraged them into activity. She was interested in the component limbs of the vast Russian carcass, if you could speak so organically of the Ukrainians, the White Russians, the Tartars, the many other smaller nationalities. And for that reason—she was quite certain it was for no other reason at all—she was interested in the Jews, too.

It followed logically that, being interested for that academic reason in the Jewish unit among the Russian agglomeration, she should permit herself to be interested in her own family in Russia, so far as she could trace its origins and render its present aspects to her imagination. She did not need to assure herself that the motive of her interest was not that vulgar bourgeois curiosity which compels the enriched draper to accept the services of a genealogist who will establish a pedigree for him. For she would have found an inquiry into her father’s origins much more to her purpose, if she could have pursued it, than her inquiry into the history of her mother’s family. She could not disguise from herself there was an almost regrettable element of picturesqueness in the history of her mother’s family, as bourgeois as it might be. Her father’s family history, on the other hand, was so purely proletarian that there was practically nothing of it. He seemed rather to have happened than to have been born of parents. She reconciled herself with ill grace to the lack of data her father’s rootlessness involved.

There was a big family album in the cupboard, which Susan, more often than her sisters, rooted out from time to time, and studied intently. It was as important a document as many another that Polednik brought in to add to their dossiers. Here, in an almost completely faded daguerreotype, was the Tsar’s man, the soldier, her mother’s grandfather. The Tsar had asked from him twenty-five years of his life, and at the end of them allowed him to settle upon a parcel of marshy acres. This was an act of god-like grace; for the creature was a Jew—a little subhuman, therefore.

There were one or two photographs of the grandfather, Feivel Dobkin, farmer and wine-merchant. He was an important personage, with a fine full beard, and heavy gold chain stretched across his stomach. One photograph of him was taken in the summer-time, out of doors. You saw the famous orchard. Perhaps this was the very apricot-tree, though mother was not quite sure of that. You also saw a corner of the house, with both the inner and the outer windows flung wide open, and the fretted lintels over them. Grandfather wore a skull-cap, and an alpaca coat twisted and bellied a little by the wind.

This photograph was taken a year or two before the departure of his daughter and her young man for Doomington, and went back about a quarter of a century. There was quite a recent photograph of him in the album, and he seemed hardly to have changed at all. There was a nest of whiteness in the full black beard, and the shoulders were not quite upright. That was all. Still that slightly self-satisfied air. Still that heavy gold chain stretched across the stomach.

Here was mother’s mother, taken upon her wedding-day, a fifteen-year-old bride. Malkeh was her name. You could make out the historic pearls; or it did not occur to you that you could not, for mother had pointed them out so often. No photograph in the album was more dim than this; not merely had time faded it, it was almost obliterated by Mrs. Silver’s tears.

Little Hannah had been the apple of her mother’s eye, for, after having given birth to one boy and another boy in the two years that followed her marriage, seven years had passed before Malkeh had given birth to a girl-child. She was so young a mother that she was almost frightened of the two boys. They were too much for her. But Hannah was her doll, her darling, her princess. Malkeh died when her child was only eight years old. Those years of her childhood were a milky dream, a dim ambience of bliss. Susan did not find it strange that a girl treated in her childhood as if she were a feathery flake from a cherub’s wing should develop as a woman into so impalpable a housekeeper as her mother was to show herself in Oleander Street.

The two boys, Alex and Leon, who were so much older than Hannah was, were fond of her, but had little use for her, except for an occasional game of “Ho! Ho!” in the cellar. Alex was an outdoor lad, who spent most of his time over at the farm. He would have liked to go off to be a soldier like his grandfather, excepting that it wouldn’t have been good enough for him to be a private. He had a good seat on a horse. You wouldn’t have thought him a Jew boy, at all. He might have been the son of a Kossack hetman, brought up on the steppe. He wanted to be an officer in the cavalry.

Leon was more for the books. He was going to take over the wine-business when he grew old enough. He played the fiddle too, and Alex played the flute. It was lovely of a summer evening when the two boys played under the blossoming trees, and the neighbours came in, and grandfather opened up a bottle of his special wine that came from the Caucasus.

And little Hannah said not a word in the orchard there. She sat on a stool leaning up against her mother’s knee. The flute called to the fiddle, and the fiddle sang back again. Now and again a petal came down upon your hair. Or it might be mother’s fingers playing in it, they were so gentle. On high days and holidays, mother wore the pearl necklace. “Do they look well on me?” she would say. “You like them with my new satin dress? Come, baby, come! How do they look on you? There, my sweet! Look, Feivel, look at your daughter! An angel, not a baby! That will be the day, little daughter, when you go under the canopy, the loveliest little bride in all Russia! And you shall wear your pearls, and he shall wear a great diamond in his tie! And Leon will play the fiddle—no, no, of course not! We shall have hired musicians....”

Feivel Dobkin didn’t remain a widower long after his first wife died. After all, could you expect it? He was only forty himself. He had two sons and a daughter to look after, and two businesses. He married Shevka, a widow with one daughter. Perhaps he had found the first wife a little too elf-like for so serious and important a man of affairs as himself.

The second wife was no elf. She was a handsome woman, with a good head for business, a good appetite, and a good bosom. There was a photograph of her in the album, plated round with some dress of a thick rich material—brocade, perhaps. A couple of stout gold chains hung over the massif of her bosom, and were caught up again on the chinward slope of the shelf into a true lovers’ knot.

She had been wearing something round her neck when the photograph was taken; a necklace of pearls, in fact. It was Hannah’s mother’s necklace—Hannah’s necklace. Hannah had scratched the pearls out of the photographs, no one knew when, long long ago, in some dark fit of desolation. The step-mother had a daughter, Gallia by name, three or four years older than Hannah. Here she was, standing beside her seated mother, her hand reaching with difficulty to the further shoulder. Two fair ringlets spiralled down beside each cheek.

In course of time, Shevka gave birth to several more children. Hannah did not hate any of these as she hated Gallia. Of course, these were the children of her own father, and Gallia was a stranger. But it was not only that. It was Gallia’s nose, which turned up a little, and her smell, which was like cheap soap, and her silk dresses with sashes; and she got the first ripe apricots, and she and the step-mother used to share the same fork, with which they poked into the dish of cut-up chicken and lifted all the best bits before anybody else had a chance.

Not that a stranger coming into the Dobkin house would have known without being told that the same man had fathered this lusty brood of infants squalling on the floor, and the pale Hannah in the corner, sitting solitary. And Alex and Leon were not unkind, but they were both so busy. Alex was in charge of the farm now, and, when he was not working, he’d be out in the countryside, riding, cracking his whip. He was a grand young man, with his riding and his flute-playing. He went dancing, even in Gentile houses. Here he was, his astrakhan cap raked jauntily to one side. There was an astrakhan collar to his coat too—a very tight coat, and trim at the waist. The coat was open, to give you a glimpse of riding-breeches a prince might wear. The leggings shone like water. It was a carefully synthetic photograph. If he had only worn his dancing-shoes too, you would have had a résumé of him in all his elegances.

There was no photograph of Leon. He remained a rather shadowy person, with his spectacles and his ledgers. He remembered Hannah’s existence more often than Alex, though that was not often. He went out of his way to be kind to her, and bought her sweets, even when she was a big girl of sixteen.

Things were sometimes very gay in the Dobkin house on Saturday nights in the winter. The step-mother thought it good for the business to have young people in—dancing, and drinking a little and getting merry. It was also a good thing for her daughter, Gallia. Shevka looked very handsome, presiding over the samovar, and making a sort of punch, with spirits and sugar and tea and lemon and spices.

She wore the pearls. She wore the pearls of the dead wife who had died so young. “She wore my pearls!” said Hannah Silver, the tears starting in her eyes, even to-day, so many years later, with the pearls safe upstairs in a padded cardboard box in her tin trunk. She stared and stared at the big red woman wearing the stolen pearls, till her eyes felt as hot as coals.

For, of course, she had stolen them. Had not my mother said they would be mine on my wedding-day? Mine? Were they not mine now, now that she was dead?

Feivel Dobkin said something on the subject once or twice, and so did Alex, when Shevka first appropriated the pearls. But Hannah was only nine or ten at the time, and it was obviously not seemly for a girl of nine or ten to go about roped round with pearls. So the girl looked on dumb with misery and anger, while the woman sat twiddling the necklace, smiling this way and that on the young men who came to dance with Gallia, and lift their glasses to Gallia. Alex and Leon got married in course of time, and had other things to think of than Hannah’s pearls. But to Hannah the pearls grew and grew till they were strung about her horizon like the rings of Saturn.

She felt loneliest of all when there was dancing and singing those long winter Saturday nights. Shevka had always treated her as if her fingers were made of putty. She was never allowed to get busy with the blintsies and varennikis in the kitchen beforehand; nor to pour out tea or mix punch or carry round the glasses while the party was going on; nor to do anything at all but sit moping up against the oven, staring at the pearls that dimmed and glimmered in the lamplight.

But sometimes she would remember the beggars that were gathered over against the fence, their faces big and pale like toadstools. They had come out of their infested shanties, hearing from far off the sound of the rich man’s music and smelling his baked meats. They came on crutches, on sore feet bound with coverings of rags and bast. They stood against the fence there, and gaped, and mourned.

So, secretly, she filled her apron with cakes and dainties, and crept out to them and bestowed on them what she had. They blessed her, saying she would be rich with children, and with money, in the fulfilment of time. But it was only her pearls she wanted, which her dead mother had worn once. And the beggars fluttered away in the night like limp moths.

Then at length came the night of her supreme bitterness, the night when she hit her head against the tree-trunks and cried out: “That I might die! That I might die!”

But it was not to be a night of death for her, this helpless maid crying in the forest. There would be for her a blowing forth of seed on the wind, to take root, to bud and blossom more strangely than any maid, glad or sorry, had ever known in all that country before, or is likely, it may be, to know again.

That night a rich youth was brought to Feivel Dobkin’s house to pay official court for the hand of Gallia, his step-daughter. She was decked out in every finery of silk and gold and jewel. And she wore also the pearl necklace of Hannah’s dead mother. She had not worn it before. She seemed as if she would never again, never again remove it from her hell-witch’s neck.

Hannah tried to speak, but her tongue was dry leather. She looked wildly into her father’s eyes, into the eyes of her two brothers. But there was no response, no flicker of awareness. Then a voice cried out in her: “You are worse, my father, than that woman and her daughter. You were her husband and took her to your bed, a fifteen-year-old child. She was a child, Oh my brothers, and she was in labour with you, and you—you have forgotten. For this night’s forgetting, evil will come to you all!”

“What’s the matter, girl?” Leon said to her, peering through his spectacles. “You look hot to-night!”

“Hello, Hannah! What’s wrong?” asked the lordly Alex.

But she did not answer. She rushed out of the big room, out through the front door, across the small bridge that crossed the grassy ditch. She rushed out into the street, and ran, and ran, falling into the big holes, but not knowing she fell. She ran and ran, beyond the edge of the town where the tumbledown shanties of the poor Jews were, out into the open country, and came to the forest at length.

She did not know how long she had lain among the tree-roots, crying her heart out. And when she heard a voice comforting her, for a little time she thought it was her mother, so spent her wits were and the voice was so gentle; so gentle, indeed, that when she realised it was a young man, a stranger, she was not frightened of him.

“Come, now, dyevushka!” he whispered. “There now! What is it? Who has been hurting you?”

“They have——” she started. “They have—they have stolen my pearls!” Then she broke down again and cried and cried, and turned her face away towards the hard tree-trunk.

“Indeed!” said the stranger fiercely. “I will get them back for you! You see if I don’t!” vowed the stranger, shaking his fist into the darkness.

The name of this young man was Shloime Silver; Sam Silver they called him in the city of Doomington some time later. He was a wandering tailor, who had wandered up the country from Odessa to Ekaterinoslav and Kremenchug, and so from village to village up the river till he should get to Kiev and thence to Vilna. He believed he had an uncle in Vilna, and thought of settling there. But he met Hannah in the wood, and went to Doomington instead.

For they became lovers, it may have been that same night in the wood, or it may have been a few nights later. It did not seem right or wrong to Sam Silver. He had held no other girl in his arms before, and that he should take this one was of the same order of propriety to him as that it should rain or that flowers should grow or bees go about among flowers. To Hannah, on the other hand, it seemed wrong. Often, when she came from being with him, she wept till her pillow was soaked; but it was a sweet weeping, and she smiled as she wept.

Then she felt the child stir within her, and terror awoke at that same moment. She thought of her father, his thick red lip above the beard, and of her step-mother’s cruel bosom. She saw Alex coming in with his riding-whip, and heard him crack it with contempt about her ears. Leon blinked at her through his spectacles, and turned away muttering. The children mocked at her—her half-sister and the three half-brothers. But most of all she was afraid of Gallia, who would sit and say nothing, and turn up still further her odious turned-up nose.

So they determined to leave Russia, as many Jews were doing at that time, for the bad times had begun. “We shall go to a town—they call it Doomington. I have friends there, from Odessa.” And when the time came nearer, Hannah, with a fearful sinking of the heart, asked him if he had forgotten the thing he had vowed to her.

“I have not forgotten,” said Sam Silver. So he worked out a plan for the stealing, the only dishonest act he had done, or, in the knowledge that he did it, was ever to do at all.

It was the evening of the Ninth of Ab, the fast-day on which they commemorate the destruction of the Temple. All the elder Dobkins were at the synagogue, excepting Alex, who was at the farm. Shevka was there, and Leon, and Gallia, and one or two of the children. And Hannah, of course. On Sabbaths and feast-days, Shevka wore the pearls. But that night she did not, for one must not wear fine things when that sad tale is told.

It was fortunate that Alex was not there when Hannah said she was half dead with headache and must go home to lie down. For Alex was a cavalier, even to his sister, sometimes; and he might have volunteered to see her safely home. The others had no such thought. So Hannah went back, and struck three matches in her bedroom. And Sam, who had climbed the fence, and was waiting beside the apricot-tree, called like a night-owl when he saw the tiny flame spurt three times. Then Hannah, silent as a ghost, opened the window and let him through, and took him to the locked drawer where the pearls were. He was no adept at lock-picking. They both died several deaths of fright during the burglary. But at length he had forced the lock. He had the pearls safe in his pocket.

“Come, my sweet!” he said.

So each with a small bag ran and ran the five miles to the station at Terkass, till the sweat poured from their faces, and the stones poked through their shoes. They got into the train there, and got out at Slutsk and boarded a caravan drawn by four horses. And they got to Doomington at length, and there they had five daughters.