The Family Moskat by Isaac Bashevis Singer Page B

home."
    "Abram! You ought to be ashamed of yourself!"
    "What's there to be ashamed about? Back to her father, the rabbi, shell certainly not go. I hear that Akiba will be divorcing her any day now, and, God willing, she'll be married to Hertz Yanovar according to the law of Moses and Ishmael--I mean Israel."
    "I don't know what'll happen later. All I know is that now it's a scandal and disgrace. Why should you drag the young man into a swamp like that?"
    -51-"Nonsense. It's a
    fine, lively place. All of Warsaw's Jewish intelligentsia congregate there. It's a real salon. I'd hang around there myself--if not for the bedbugs."
    "Abram, I asked you not to talk that way," Dacha called out angrily. The story about Gina, her husband, Akiba, and Hertz Yanovar was not for the ears of the eighteen-year-old Hadassah.
    Rosa Frumetl put down her teacup and raised her eyes, full of curiosity. Adele leafed the album pages more vigorously.
    When Hadassah and Asa Heshel had left the living-room Adele got up from her chair and walked over to the window. Twilight was coming on. The first snow of the winter was falling, wet and soft, the snowflakes swirling in the wind, melting away before they touched the ground. The smoke rising from the chimneys merged into the white mistiness. Birds, singly and in flocks, flew by. At the other side of the street stood a dray loaded with sacks and covered with a canvas. The two squat draft horses with their scarred hides were huddled together, their ears cocked. From time to time they turned their heads to each other as though whispering some equine secret. Adele stood at the window, her warm forehead pressing against the pane, and it suddenly came to her that her mother was right, there was no reason for her to go away--and there was no one to whom she would be going. She was tired of reading books, tired of thinking of her father, who had died too soon, of the Brody love affair that she had broken off out of pride, and of her entire uneventful life. She regretted now that she had been so sharp with the homeless youth from Tereshpol Minor and that she had needlessly irritated Abram and Dacha.
    "I could have tutored him, too," she thought. "Anything rather than always be alone."
    3
    Hadassah's room was long and narrow. The window gave on the courtyard. The wallpaper was light-colored. Some landscapes and family photographs hung on the walls, among them one of Hadassah. At one side of the room stood a metal bed covered with an embroidered spread. A needlepoint cushion lay against the pillow. In a small rectangular aquarium bedded with moss, three tiny goldfish swam about. From the window the rays of the setting sun shone into the room, heightening the color of the -52-gold-framed pictures, throwing patches of light on the wallpaper, the polished floor, and the gold-stamped bindings of the books on the bookshelves. On a round table stood a volume and a vase of faded blue flowers. Hadassah crossed the room quickly, took the book from the table, and put it into a dresser drawer.
    "These are my books," she said, pointing to the shelves. "If you like you can look at them."
    Asa Heshel looked them over. Most of them were school books --a grammar, a Russian history, a geography, a world history, a Latin dictionary. Przybyszewski The Outcry leaned against a copy of Mickiewicz Pan Tadeusz . Strindberg Confession of a Fool reposed next to a thick novel that bore the title Pharaoh . Asa Heshel picked up some of the books, glanced at the title pages, leafed them, and put them back on the shelves. "The trouble is," he said, "I'd like to read all of them."
    "I'll be glad to lend them to you. Whichever you want."
    "Thank you."
    "Maybe you'd like to light a lamp--although I love this half-light, between day and night."
    "I like it too."
    "Tell me what you'd like to study. I'm very weak in mathematics."
    "Well, I want to take the university examinations--as an extern."
    "Then you'll need a tutor. I didn't get through them