Soumchi Read Free Page A

Castelnuovos' guests. Moreover, the door of the hallway between the drawing room and the oblong dining room was guarded balefully night and day by Caesario, a large woollen dog, stuffed with seaweed and glowering at you with black buttons in place of eyes.
    In the dining room itself stood an enormous table made of mahogany, wearing what looked like felt stockings on each of its thick legs. And on the wall of the dining room in letters of gold, this inscription appeared:
Who shall ascend unto the hill of the Lord? Who shall stand in His holy place?
The answer to that question,
He who has clean hands and a pure heart
—which happened also to be the Castelnuovo family motto—was to be found on the opposite wall encircling the family crest, a single blue gazelle, each of its horns a Star of David.
    From the dining room, a glass door led to a little cubbyhole called "The Smoking Room." An enormous painting hid one wall entirely. It showed a woman in a delicate muslin dress, a silk scarf concealing all her face except for her two black eyes, while, with one white hand, she held out to a beggar a golden coin so bright and shining it sprayed small sparks in all directions, like sparks from a fire. But the beggar himself continued to sit there peacefully. He wore a clean white cloak, his beard too was white, his eyes closed, his face radiant with happiness. Beneath the picture on a small copper plaque was engraved the single word
CHARJIY
.
    I marvelled so often in this house. At Louisa, for instance, the Armenian nanny who looked after Aldo; a dark and very polite girl of sixteen or seventeen whom I never saw without a clean white apron on top of her blue dress, both dress and apron looking newly ironed. She could talk Italian with Aldo, yet obeyed his order without question, She was also exceedingly courteous to me, calling me "the young gentleman," in a strange, almost dreamlike, Hebrew until sometimes, even to myself, I began to seem like a real young gentleman. Could she be the daughter of the woman in that great picture in the smoking room; and if not, why the likeness between them? And then, was
CHARITY
the name of the picture? Or the name of the woman in the picture? Or even the name of the painter who had painted it? Our teacher in Class Two had been called Margolit Charity. It was she who had given Aldo the Hebrew name "Aided." But who could give a name like Aided to a boy in whose house there was a room just for smoking?
    (My parents' flat, with its two rooms and kitchen, separated by a short corridor, had only plain wooden tables and chairs with rush seats. Anemones or sprays of almond blossom flowered there in yoghourt jars in spring, while in summer and autumn the same jars sprouted branches of myrtle. The picture on the wall of the larger of our rooms showed a pioneer carrying a hoe and looking, for no obvious reason, towards a row of cypresses.)
    At the far end of the smoking room was a strange low door. We went through it and down five steps to the wing of the house which contained Aldo's room. His window looked out on the crowded red roofs of the Mea Shearim quarter, and beyond them, eastwards, onto church towers and mountains.
    "Now," said Aldo, as if about to perform some kind of magic, "now, just take a look at this."
    And at that, he bent down and pulled from a large and brightly patterned box, section after section of dismantled railway track, several small stations and a railway official made of tin. There followed the most marvellous blue engine, with a quantity of red carriages. Then we lay down on the floor and began to put it all together, the track layout, the signaling system, even the scenery. (It too was made of brightly painted tin; hills and bridges, lakes and tunnels; tiny cows had even been painted on the hillsides, grazing peacefully alongside the steep track.)
    And when at last all was ready, Aldo connected the electric plug and the whole enchanted world sprang instantly to life. Engines