The Dogs and the Wolves Read Free Page B

to go down into the shop, the manuscript under his arm and carrying a small pot of ink and his pen. An oil lamp burned on the table, while the stove, filled with logs, roared, spreading warmth and casting a reddish glow throughout the room. Ada, whose father had gone back to town, would leave Nastasia in the arms of her soldier, and go downstairs to sit beside her grandfather, rubbing her heavy, tired eyes. She would slide silently on to a chair next to the wall. Her grandfather would read or write. An icy draught slipped through the crack in the door and made the end of his long beard flutter. These winter nights, full of tranquil melancholy, were the sweetest moments of Ada’s life. But they were about to be lost because of the arrival of Aunt Raissa and her children.
    Aunt Raissa was a thin, energetic, dry woman with a pointy nose and chin, a scathing tongue and eyes as sharp and shining as the point of a needle. She was rather vain about her slim figure, which she made look even slimmer by wearing a narrow buckled belt and the full corset popular at the time. She was a redhead; the contrast between her flamboyant hair and her thin, aging bodywas strange and painful to behold. She wore her hair like the French cabaret singer Yvette Guilbert, with thousands of tiny red curls falling on to her forehead and temples. She stood up very straight, her small bosom thrust slightly back in her effort to stand tall. She had thin, tight lips, darting eyes beneath half-closed lids, and a piercing, frightening expression that missed nothing. When she was in a good mood, she had a peculiar way of puffing herself up and slightly moving her shoulders that made her look like a long, thin insect flapping its wings. Because of her slimness, her vivacity and jaunty maliciousness, she resembled a wasp.
    In the days of her youth, Aunt Raissa had had many admirers – at least, that was what she implied with her little sighs. She was an ambitious creature; her husband had been the owner of a printing works, and she felt that her widowhood had forced her down into a lower social class. She , who had met intellectuals, she would say with a proud little scornful smile hovering about her lips, she was now no more than a poor relation! She’d been taken in out of charity. She had to live, supreme indignity, in the Jewish quarter, above a miserable shop.
    ‘But really, Isa,’ she would say to her brother-in-law, ‘don’t you owe it to your good name to raise your children somewhere cleaner, with a better reputation? You seem to have forgotten, but as long as I live, I will never forget that my poor husband’s name, and yours as well, is Sinner.’
    Ada listened to her, sitting in her usual place, on the old settee, between her cousins, Lilla and Ben. It must have been shortly after Aunt Raissa’s arrival. It was one of Ada’s earliest memories. They were drinking their evening tea. Her grandfather, her father and Aunt Raissa were sitting on cane chairs with dark wooden backs that were called, she never knew why, ‘Viennese chairs’, even though they’d been bought second-hand from the man on the square, while the children sat on the brown leather settee with its tall, stiff back. To Ada, the house had always seemed dark andunwelcoming, which it was, to tell the truth . . . It was an old building; its four rooms led off to small, dimly-lit corridors with large cupboards, and the rooms were all on different levels so that in order to walk around the entire house, you had to go up and down rickety staircases, and through icy spaces paved with brick and serving no particular purpose. When night fell they were lit by the pale, flickering light of a street lamp out in the courtyard. Ada often felt afraid in this house, but the settee was a haven to her: she loved it there. It was where she waited for her father, where she fell asleep at night while everyone around her talked, not thinking to send her to bed. Behind the cushions, she hid old