Katerina Read Online Free Page A

enjoy the snuggling. In fact, nothing bothers you anymore; you lean your head against the wall, close your eyes, and sing.
    One night, while I was still curled up with the drunks, my mother appeared to me, full of dread and anger.
    “How did you get here?” I asked stupidly.
    “You’re asking me?” she answered in anger.
    I wanted to bend my knees and ask her pardon, but she disappeared, just as in her lifetime, furiously and with the rush of a person who doesn’t consider other people’s opinions. The next day I told one of the drunken women about the dream. She dismissed it with a wave of her hand and said, “Don’t listen to her. My mother used to torment me in dreams, too. I don’t believe in anyone, not even the dead. Everybody tries to take advantage of you. I wouldn’t go back to the village for anything. My body’s worthless in my eyes. If anyone wants to sleep with me, I let him. It’s warmer for both of us.”
    So the days passed with no end in sight. The restaurant, for some reason, fired me. Now I didn’t have a penny. I would steal whatever came to hand. I was caught more than once, and more than once they beat me, but I didn’t cry and I didn’t beg for mercy. I just gritted my teeth.
    The promises the boys made to me were untrue. All that autumn they fondled my flesh, but when the cold got more bitter, they cleared out and left me alone with the sick and the old. Old people know when their end is near, and they curl up in a corner and wait for it silently. They say that freezing to death isn’t painful, but I have seen for myself how people writhe with the sting of cold and moan in agony. Who listens to them in a busy railroad station? Everyonegoes his own way. That winter I cursed my father for not giving me a penny to live on.
    But no darkness is absolute, though it sometimes seems so. While I was standing, abandoned in the busy railroad station, a short woman approached me and asked me simply, “Do you want to work for me?” I don’t know what an angel of God looks like, but that woman’s voice sounded to me like a voice from on high. From nearby, I could see that her face, wrapped in a kerchief, wasn’t soft. A kind of sternness was congealed in her eyes. I don’t like short people. They always instill a kind of restlessness and a guilt in me. “If someone gives you shelter in the cold, you have to love him,” I said to myself, and followed her.
    “Where do you come from?” she asked.
    I told her.
    “And have you ever seen Jews?”
    “Occasionally.” I smiled.
    “I’m Jewish. Are you afraid?”
    “No.”
    “But first of all you must have a bath.” It had been months since my body had seen water. My clothes were sodden with the odor of damp, vodka, and tobacco; a person gets so accustomed to filth that he no longer notices it. Now, as I stood naked, fear coursed through my entire body and made me shudder. From every side Jews came up and stood next to me, and they were all in the same image: a thin man with a drawn sword in his hand. I fell to my knees and crossed myself. My sins had reached the high heavens, and now I was about to pay.
    That night I remembered the Jews who used to wander through our village, skipping among the trees and courtyardsor standing next to their improvised stands, living ghosts, talking ghosts, and I remembered the peasants who would appear and crack their whips at them. Now, for some reason, it seemed that they were lighter, skipping over trenches and fences; their earthly weight seemed to have been removed. “You can’t vanquish them,”—I heard Maria’s laugh. “A ghost’s body feels no pain.” The peasants kept on whipping, and Maria’s laughter, her hearty laughter, was swallowed up in the crack of the blows. I awoke.

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    “I’ M WITH THE JEWS, ” I said, and I didn’t know what I was saying. I burned my damp and ragged clothes that night. The cast-off clothes from the lady of the house fit me. They were clean, odorless, and for