Champagne
Gruna
Whole nights through I didn’t sleep. I pored over the Kav Hayoshir and other holy books in Yiddish-Deutsch, and in the morning I would run and repeat it to her—and add some of my own to it, God forgive me the sin!
Dvorah
Why forgive?
Gruna
For the lies! Out of three devils I made ten, from one lash, a whole whipping-post! I poured fire like a furnace broken loose! And a weak child it was, anyway, a weak, pure, helpless little thing. It allowed itself to be led. She is her father to an eye,—pale, without a drop of blood, and so good; such soft, moist eyes—only then she was prettier, much prettier…
Dvorah
You speak, God save us, as if she were dead!
Gruna
And you think she’s alive! I tell you she doesn’t live! She scraped together a little dowry, and I got her a husband. She cried, poor little thing; she didn’t want him, he was too coarse, too crude for her. But a learned man doesn’t take a servant girl, especially with thirty rubles dowry. I thanked God, whoever it was! A tailor boy is a tailor boy. Well, he lived with her a year, took her little money with the rest of her strength, and off he went. Bare and naked he left her—with a lung sickness. She spits blood. It is nothing but a shadow already—not a human being at all.
12
