All Whom I Have Loved Read Online Free PDF

uttering a sound.
    When the light dimmed I went outside and approached the yard that faced our backyard, where the bearded Jews would gather. Up close, I saw that they were not only different in the way they dressed but in their movements, too. They seemed to have a secret, and to move this secret from hiding place to hiding place. When the secret was well hidden they went inside to pray. Their prayer was noisy and sometimes they shouted. It didn't go on for long, and afterward they gathered again in the yard. Darkness fell and blackened their faces. I very much wanted to go in there and touch their secret, but I was afraid. I feared that if they touched me, I would get a rash, like the one I'd had in the winter.
    I went back and asked Mother about the bearded Jews, and she explained to me that they were old Jews, and that their way of life was different from ours. It was hard for me to really understand her and yet I did pick up some of what she'd said. Mother was so occupied with things at school that her heart, I felt, was no longer with me. She was up till late at night, correcting exercise books and preparing posters. Sometimes she fell asleep in her clothes, without putting out the light.
    Finally, I summoned up the courage to go into the yard of the bearded Jews. Surprised, they gathered around me and asked what my name was and where I lived. I told them my name and pointed to the house.
    “You live right next to us,” they said in amazement. One of them took a piece of candy out of his coat pocket and gave it to me. From up close, they were not so short. They spoke a jumbled language, with a strange pronunciation, and they swallowed their words. But I still understood some of what they were saying.
    “Where are you from?” one of them asked.
    I told him.
    “And how long will you live here?”
    “Always.”
    When they heard this, they were amused, as if I had told them something funny. “And what are you doing?” I asked, and was immediately taken aback by my own question.
    “We are praying. Do you want to pray?”
    “I don't know how.”
    They stared at me and I stared back at them. Eventually one of them said to me, “Go back home, child, your mother must be worried.”
    I went back to the fence, bent down, and put a leg over the post. I was in our yard. It was so different from theirs, it was as if I had returned from another city.
    I told Mother about the visit. She lifted her head up from the notebooks and did not scold me.
    “Are they Jews?” I asked, even though she had told me that they were.
    “That's right.”
    “And what's the difference between the old Jews and the new Jews?”
    “The old Jews believe in God and pray to him.”
    “And new Jews don't believe in God?”
    “No.”
    Usually when Mother explained something she would go into detail, but this time she made do with one word and then buried her head in the pile of notebooks. Ever since she'd started teaching she'd become tired and distracted, and I felt that her enthusiasm had been dampened. But she kept repeating that one can't be tough with the village children, for their lives were harder than ours.

10
    Yesterday Mother turned twenty-nine, and the two of us celebrated her birthday on the porch, at the round table that was covered with a white tablecloth. Mother was in high spirits; she lifted a glass of wine and made a toast: “To living!”
    When Mother is filled with enthusiasm, her beauty shines out, and I feel sad that she has to spend most of the day in school with the unruly peasant children and about the headaches that don't leave her alone. To make her happy, I told her about Halina's feats: how she skipped, and how she imitated things. Mother listened but said nothing, and for a moment it seemed that my words did not touch her. It was a mistake, of course. What I said made her glad, for she immediately promised me that during Christmas vacation we would travel to the Carpathian Mountains.
    “Are there rivers in the