The Road Read Free Page B

over him on her maddened stallion and, behind her, as if pushing her on, the battalion had hurtled forward.
    What had remained was
it.
It, now, was to blame for everything. And Vavilova was lying there defeated, while
it
kicked its little hoofs victoriously. It was living inside her.
    Before Magazanik went out to work in the morning, when his wife was serving him breakfast and at the same time trying to drive away the flies, the children, and the cat, he said quietly, with a sideways glance at the wall of the requisitioned room, “Give her some tea—damn her!”
    It was as though he were bathing in the sunlit pillars of dust, in all the smells and sounds—the cries of the children, the mewing of the cat, the muttering of the samovar. He had no wish to go off to the workshop. He loved his wife, his children, and his old mother; he loved his home.
    Sighing, he went on his way, and there remained in the house only women and children.
    The cauldron of the Yatki went on bubbling all through the day. Peasant men traded birch logs as white as chalk; peasant women rustled strings of onions; old Jewish women sat above downy hillocks of geese tied together by their legs. Every now and then a seller would pluck from one of these splendid white flowers a living petal with a snaking, twisting neck—and the buyer would blow on the tender down between its legs and feel the fat that showed yellow beneath the soft warm skin.
    Dark-legged lasses in colorful kerchiefs carried tall red pots brimming with wild strawberries; as if about to run away, they cast frightened looks at the buyers. People on carts sold golden, sweating balls of butter wrapped in plump burdock leaves.
    A blind beggar with the white beard of a wizard was stretching out his hands and weeping tragically and imploringly, but no one was touched by his terrible grief. Everyone passed by indifferently. One woman, tearing the very smallest onion off her string, threw it into the old man’s tin bowl. He felt it, stopped praying, and said angrily, “May your children be as generous to you in your old age!” And he again began intoning a prayer as ancient asthe Jewish nation.
    People bought and sold, poked and prodded, raising their eyes as if expecting someone from the tender blue sky to offer them counsel: Should they buy the pike or might they be better off with a carp? And all the time they went on cursing, screeching, scolding one another, and laughing.
    Vavilova tidied and swept her room. She put away her greatcoat, her sheepskin hat, and her riding boots. The noise outside was making her head thump, while inside the apartment the little Tuters were all shouting and screaming, and she felt as though she were asleep and dreaming somebody else’s bad dream.
    In the evening, when he came back home from work, Magazanik stopped in the doorway. He was astounded: his wife, Beila, was sitting at the table—and beside her was a large woman in an ample dress, with loose slippers on her bare feet and a bright-colored kerchief around her head. The two women were laughing quietly, talking to each other, raising and lowering their large broad hands as they sorted through a heap of tiny undershirts.
    Beila had gone into Vavilova’s room during the afternoon. Vavilova had been standing by the window, and Beila’s sharp feminine eye had made out the swollen belly partly concealed by Vavilova’s height.
    “Begging your pardon,” Beila had said resolutely, “but it seems to me that you’re pregnant.”
    And Beila had begun fussing around her, waving her hands about, laughing and lamenting.
    “Children,” she said, “children—do you have any idea what misery they bring with them?” And she squeezed the youngest of the Tuters against her bosom. “Children are such a grief, such a calamity, such never-ending trouble. Every day they want to eat, and not a week passes by but one of them gets a rash and another gets a boil or comes down with a fever. And Doctor Baraban—may God