She clawed at the gurgling runoff and scraped up a handful of earth and gravel and leaf mold and hurled it at Frau Lyubanarov’s head. We heard it rattle and slap against the dvornik’s hut. Frau Lyubanarov had shielded her face with her hand, but a stream of dirty water came flowing out of her hair onto her forehead. Before her opponent could reach into the gutter a second time, she shot forward and threw herself on the other woman. In the process she knocked Herr Adamowski’s arm off the wall he had been leaning against and sent him tumbling. The two women grabbed each other by the hair, tangling themselves into a knot; they clawed each other to shreds and bit each other with a venomous rage, such as we had never seen before and thank goodness never would see again. Howling, shrieking, and screeching like cats, the two women rolled over each other on the ground until the coachman, who had heard the noise, came running up and tried to separate them the way you would separate fighting dogs, with a bucket of water. But that didn’t help; they only became more and more entangled. Shaggy locks of hair clogged their mouths, bloody welts marked their faces, and their eyes rolled back into their heads out of pain and rage. All the household servants came running outside; the women’s fingers had to be pried apart, their feet had to be held so that they wouldn’t keep striking blindly at the other, and they were lifted or dragged away, Frau Lyubanarov returning to the dvornik’s hut, Widow Morar into the street. Their screaming and howling brought the entire neighborhood out of their houses.
Our mother and Aunt Elvira, who had also come outside, chased us back into the house. For the first time in our life Mama lost her composure in front of us; she shooed us in and threatened us with terrible punishments, even spankings, all because we had been involuntary witnesses of the horrible scene. We were locked in our rooms, had to eat supper late, and by ourselves, and were immediately sent to bed. The storm at home raged for days, bringing with it the dreaded arguments between our parents, behind closed doors that were suddenly opened and slammed shut. Our aunts looked at us as if we were to blame for everything that had happened. Uncle Sergei deliberately stayed out of the house as much as possible. Only Herr Tarangolian, who once again stopped by for some black coffee, treated us with the same affectionate and attentive politeness as always, and invited us, as compensation for the outing that had been canceled on that ill-starred day, to a long ride in his carriage, which was a great treat for us, especially as it was crowned by a lavish visit to the Kucharczyk Café and Confectionary.
We were the only ones who knew of the conversation between the two furies that had set off the fight, and we kept that to ourselves.
The second incident I have to report before I go on to events that also affected other people was so cruel it made the first one pale by comparison. It was not quite as violent, to be sure, but the pain was greater for having been inflicted on us in a blindly unfeeling and incomprehensible act of stupidity.
Clearly the preceding episode took its toll on us, though it would take a far greater shock before an actual illness manifested itself. Meanwhile it was only thanks to our school that we were able to withstand the psychological burden as well as the physical stress: there our friendship with Blanche Schlesinger and the irrepressible vitality of Solly Brill allowed us to escape the chaos at home completely for part of the day, and we felt liberated and very happy.
Madame Aritonovich decided that the school should put on a ballet performance for parents and guests; in later years the gratitude we always felt for her made us think that she came up with the idea just for us, and above all for Tanya, who danced with enthusiasm and talent. Nor can this supposition be entirely mistaken. Madame Aritonovich was too close to the prefect and Uncle Sergei not to know every detail of what went on in our house. She probably knew more than we did at the time, for instance about the heated arguments with Aunt Paulette, who stood accused, justifiably, of having opened the house up to Herr Adamowski. At the same time, no one had any idea of the content of Adamowski’s conversation with Frau Lyubanarov, which was the actual cause of the fight between her and Widow Morar. But Herr Adamowski was mixed up in it somehow, and that was bad enough, according to the entirely proper view that even an innocent bystander at such occurrences bears some responsibility. In other words: “That kind of thing just shouldn’t happen to you, regardless of whether you were involved or not.” Naturally Herr Adamowski never came to our house again; instead, Aunt Paulette began to visit him.
In any event, the prospect of the school ballet recital excited us, along with all of our classmates. We began rehearsing the snowflake scene from Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker. Tanya danced the part of the Snow Queen, while a handsome and talented boy from a higher grade played the Snow King; Blanche, to our delight — and this seems to confirm our suspicion that the plan was devised with us in mind — was given the part of Clara, while the rest of us, as part of the corps de ballet, were to be plain snowflakes, albeit exceedingly eager ones. Solly was cast as a comical snowball with his own special choreography. Turning to her inexhaustible supply of assorted odd, highly original, and skillful acquaintances, Madame Aritonovich assembled a small orchestra. Other instruction was reduced to the bare essentials. Costumes were sewn; Tanya was given a genuine tutu. We were in heaven.
Our parents continued to insist that we never go to or from school unaccompanied. Until then, our coachman had always driven us in the morning, and Aunt Paulette had usually met us after school and walked back home with us through the Volksgarten. That had been very fun on occasion. But ever since she had hit our sister, Tanya, Aunt Elvira picked us up. Aunt Elvira was in her forties, and to us she seemed ancient and unbending. In addition, she had been “left on the shelf,” that is, she hadn’t found a husband, which also may have soured her. She was the oldest of four sisters — after her came, at significant intervals, our mother, our late Aunt Aida, and Aunt Paulette — and so she commanded a certain degree of authority in the family. We always considered her a terrible party-pooper. For like many unlucky women who have missed their natural vocation as mothers with families of their own, and who though not entirely without work lack much that is truly theirs, being forced to live with relatives, she clung to the illusion that our family was nothing more than an extension of her parent’s home, and kept a jealous eye out to make sure that everything was done in the same way and according to the same views as had been practiced there. This led to frequent conflicts with our father — so-called crises — that split the house into factions. At first glance, such divisions do much harm to family life, but frequently they are the only thing that makes us aware that there is such a thing as “family life” in the first place.
I have already mentioned that we didn’t concern ourselves with the religion of our new friends — nor in fact that of most of our classmates — though it’s hard to say whether this was intentional or an unconscious decision. But I would be straying far indeed from the truth if I were to claim we didn’t know what kind of instruction we were receiving every week from a certain Dr. Aaron Salzmann. We had never discussed or planned our participation; we simply took it for granted that we would take part in that course, just like the majority of our classmates, and above all like our close friends Blanche Schlesinger and Solly Brill. There were so few Catholics in the Institut d’Éducation that the school did not offer special instruction for them. We had been told at the outset that one afternoon in the week we were expected to visit the priest of the Herz-Jesu Church, Deacon Mieczysław Chmielewski, who had a hard time ridding us of the Anglican notions we had acquired thanks to Miss Rappaport. Similarly, the larger group of Lutherans, the occasional Eastern Orthodox or Greek Catholic, the Armenians, and Calvinist students went to their churches for instruction every Wednesday afternoon, and kept away from Dr. Salzmann’s class, which was the last one of the day at the institute. So it didn’t really attract any attention if we took part in that course; besides, no one at home paid much attention to our schedule.