Julius Read Free

grumble, shaking his shoulders, and Mère would begin to scold shrilly, complaining of this, complaining of that, until the room was full of her and the old man, but in a new key, different to what had been before.
    Père would be silent, like a lean wolf, caring for none of them, and sitting down in the corner he would eat by himself, goading them to fury by his imperturbability; and when he had finished he would reach to a shelf for his flute and sway backwards and forwards in the rocking-chair, his eyes closed, a lock of black hair falling over his face. Sometimes he gazed at Julius, who, with stained pinafore and swollen eyes, cried for his bed, and then he turned to Grandpère and Mère, his teeth bared in a strange smile, more like a wolf than ever, and he said, ‘You want to make a brute of him, do you, a glutton, a little pig? You wish to teach him to live like a beast?’
    They looked back at him, their faces flushed and resentful, Grandpère with his mouth wide open in surprise, his pipe hanging from his lips, and Mère, one hand on her hip, the other picking a piece of meat from her tooth with a brooch.
    ‘What do you think you are doing, mixing yourself in matters that don’t concern you?’ she scolded. ‘Can’t he enjoy himself, poor little soul? Hasn’t he the right to eat? Who pays for his food? Answer me that. Is it you?’ and Grandpère added his voice to hers, rumbling, jeering, letting forth a flow of words pointed and coarse. ‘Stay quiet in your corner and leave your brat alone. Aren’t we all beasts, my poor boy; weren’t you a beast when you lay with his mother? Would the child have been born but for that? Let him learn to enjoy his belly and to enjoy other things, like his father before him.’ Then he laughed, a vast roar that shook the table once more, laughing until he choked, and his daughter had to lean across and pat his back while he spat on his plate, she too laughing, her breasts shaking.
    ‘Go on with you,’ she said; ‘you’re nothing but a filthy old man.’ They looked at each other, both red, both fat, fair-haired, blue-eyed, ridiculously alike, and once more she filled her mouth with the garlic sausage, and he smacked his lips, a thin trickle of wine dribbling from his chin to his blouse. The old man waved his fork in the direction of his son-in-law, ‘Jew,’ he sneered, ‘nothing but a miserable Jew.’Then Paul Lévy stretched out his legs, closing his eyes once more, and lifting the flute to his lips he breathed upon it, calling forth a queer plaintive tune that rose in the air like a cry from the wilderness, and Julius, half asleep on his mother’s lap, would gaze across at his father, so white and strange in the candlelight, and it seemed to him that the song was his, and the cry was his, and these things and the face of Père vanished into nothingness, and were Julius himself.The music went into him and sent him to sleep, carrying him away to some distant place belonging only to dreams and not to the waking day, and he would be aware of an enchantment known only to himself and to Père. Unconscious of the world he was carried to bed, fast wrapped in his secret city, and later when he awoke in the middle of the night, and listened to the harsh splitting snores of Grandpère, asleep in his cupboard of a room, the city would be forgotten, and turning on his side he felt for the large comforting breast of Mère, physical and tangible, nearer to him now than the faint music lost in the air; and the still figure at the other end of the bed was not a magician who called to him and who understood, but only the limp body of Père, a poor thing and a Jew. So Julius smiled to himself in the darkness, curling himself round the body of his mother, and it seemed to him as he fell asleep once more that this feeling of her was more satisfactory than the whisper of a dream heard at odd moments, not fully understood. There were many things to puzzle the mind of a child, and the