Minotaur by Benjamin Tammuz

Author:Benjamin Tammuz [Tammuz, Benjamin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Europa
Published: 2013-05-07T00:00:00+00:00

2.

Abram Alexandrovitch Abramov was the son and grandson of timber and corn merchants who had warehouses and branches throughout the Dnieper region of Ukraine. In his youth he had been educated by private tutors who lived in his parents’ house; he studied French and excelled in mathematics. On his own initiative, and because his mother was an example, he wanted to learn to play the piano, and although this was usually reserved for girls, they did not refuse, because he was his parents’ only son and the apple of his mother’s eye. In his teens he spent three years at the Kharkov Polytechnic and was awarded a diploma in forestry, which was supposed to prepare him for the family business. He spent nearly twenty years in business, but about a year after the death of his father his mother also died and he saw himself free to spread his wings and go out into the other world, which was not Russian, which was not suffocating and melancholy, and where there were not so many muddy and dusty paths, where everything—carts, souls, and desires—sinks with amazing resignation, uttering a mournful note and disappearing. These things had not been to his liking for a long time.

He left a sum of money to the Russian woman who had given him two daughters without the blessing of matrimony, and dried her tears with a batiste handkerchief fragrant with the scent of a French perfume, which he had taken out of his pocket and then replaced after carefully refolding it.

It was the second year of the twentieth century and Abram Alexandrovitch, then forty years old, headed for Switzerland, put his financial affairs in order, and went to Paris. He was as sturdy and as healthy as a young bull; he knew how to appreciate the delicacies of French cuisine and once he even went to a show where forty girls waved their legs in the air to the sound of shouts of joy from the orchestra and the clapping of hands. Nonetheless he didn’t want to settle down for good in Paris, as his soul longed for the whole of the Western world. The forty years he had spent in Russia led him to believe that only now did he truly begin to live and no matter was so urgent that it could not wait until he had seen what the world had to offer him. His next stop was Germany and there, in Munich, he came across a nice bit of business. Sixty wagons loaded with railway sleepers had got stuck on their way to customers in Russia when the owner went bankrupt and the authorities seized them. Abramov redeemed the sleepers and sent them on to their destination and then he realized that in Germany it was possible to earn in one week what in Russia he had pocketed in about six months. So the Western world met up to all the hopes he had hung on it, and Germany seemed a place

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