Have I Got a Story for You by Ezra Glinter

Author:Ezra Glinter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

II

ABA STEPPED QUICKLY through unfamiliar fields. All around him uninhabited tracts of land seemed to flow together in a cascade, and there was no one, no one who might notice the red of his coachman’s belt from a distance. The day—cloudy and dark, shrunken, was very much like a short Friday—a day that waits for a snowfall, and no snow falls. The tracts also seemed shrunken. As Aba approached the large village through the fields, something wintry and deathly glanced at him. A strange silence had descended upon the houses, gardens and lanes, as though someone had just died in the middle of the day, and the whole village was waiting and listening for church bells to begin tolling. They glanced at Aba even more silently in the wheelwright’s half-gentile, half-Jewish little dwelling.

The wheelwright and his wife were both seated on a small sofa near the tepid stove, the soles of their shoes outspread, and it seemed as though it was a fast day in the house. No one was cooking breakfast. The window shades were lowered, although it was daytime. The children played off to one side, dejected and speaking in whispers, as though they had been admonished by parents who were observing the seven days of mourning after a death.

“Quiet! Quieter . . . Look how cheerful this one is.”

And when they finally said something to him, Aba, it sounded indifferent and aggrieved.

“So where are you headed, ha? Aba . . . The devil is driving you to your bride in the middle of such a calamity?”

“Stay here, you ass! You’ll leave your head on the road. They are murdering people everywhere around Yanovke and Granov.” And their sad eyes looked not at Aba, but at the lowered window shades across from them.

“Listen to what happened to the molasses maker, will you?”

And his stubbornness made Aba unyielding.

“I’m going on. I don’t give a damn about it!”

But it seemed that he knew the molasses maker. He lived in a house with a tin roof, a mile or so from the village. The day before, the molasses maker and his son-in-law had been found murdered behind the house, and Molly, his mute daughter, had suddenly begun to speak. She had run barefoot into the nearby woods with her infant in her arms. At night she rapped on the priest’s door and said: “I want to convert to Christianity.” But when he opened the door for her, she was no longer there. Peasants are saying that she knocks on their doors at night and says: “Open up, I am barefoot with my child in my arms.” And when they open the door for her, she is no longer there. She disappears. She has lost her mind . . .

“And the murderers are free as birds. They are right here in the village.”

From time to time someone in the wheelwright’s house raised a window shade a tiny bit to watch the petlurovtses, 56 who were gathering on the square across the way.

“The scoundrels—they keep coming.

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