Katerina Read Online Free PDF

abandon my baby, but I didn’t have the strength to get up. The old woman wasn’t happy, but she didn’t drive me away. She stood by my bedside and told me about her distant youth, her husband and children. Her husband had departed as a young man, and her daughters hadn’t taken the right path. They had been ruined in the city. Now she had nothing in the world but these four walls.
    “And where do you work?” she asked suddenly.
    “For Jews.”
    “Is this the Jews’?”
    “It’s from our kind,” I said. “Ours.”
    In the evening, she softened and tried to console me. The nuns in the convent would raise her and call her Angela.Sometimes it was good for a person not to have any memory of father or mother. He draws faith straight from the heavens. We were all made in sin. You have suffered enough. From now on the church will take care. In the church everything is clean and quiet. Our lives here pass in turmoil, and there is sublime tranquility. You have nothing to worry about. You’re doing the right thing. Without noticing, I had closed my eyes and fallen asleep.
    The baby girl nursed without letup and wore me out. If she hadn’t worn me out, perhaps I would have stayed longer. For a week I sheltered and nursed her. At the end of the week, my strength failed. I asked the old woman to bring me the basket so I could cushion it on the bottom with my own hands. The old woman helped me quietly. Thus my sinful deed ended. The next day, while darkness was still spread over the meadows, I placed the baby in the basket. The baby was asleep, at rest, and she didn’t make a sound. I crossed the fields with long strides, and at the convent gate, I summoned up my courage and left the basket on the stoop.
    Sometimes during the long winter nights I see her at a distance, tall and thin, wrapped in many veils of light, as beautiful as the paintings in a church. We have gone a long way, I say to myself, and I sense that soon we shall be face to face, without barriers. My faith in the world to come sometimes floods me like a warm wave.

5
    I RETURNED AND SANK INTO my work as though into oblivion. Strange is the life of the Jews. Over the years I learned to observe them. They are fearfully diligent. After morning prayers, the master of the house goes out to work in his store, not a large shop, on the edge of the market, and later his wife joins him, and they work together without a break and without having a drink until the evening. I am in the house, cleaning and straightening up. The house is as full of books as a convent. My cousin Maria informed me once that on the eighth day they circumcise the boy babies, so as to heighten their virility when they mature. One needn’t believe every word that leaves Maria’s lips. She mostly exaggerates or makes things up, but she isn’t a complete liar. She, for example, isn’t afraid of Jews. She assured me that no ill would befall me with them.
    The trip to Moldovitsa was forgotten. Had it not been for my dreams at night, life would have gone smoothly for me then. In dreams, my sins lay spread out before me, the way only sins can lie open, in all their searing hues. Morethan once I heard Angela’s voice: “Mommy, Mommy, why did you abandon me?” But in daylight, the slate was wiped clean. I learned to work without talking much. In the village people say that the Jews are chatterboxes, splitting hairs about every little thing to cheat you. They don’t know Jews. Speech is only for practical needs. Speech for its own sake doesn’t exist with them. There’s a kind of compulsion in their industry.
    Is theirs a good life? Are they happy? I asked myself more than once. “A person should do his allotted task and ask for no reward,” the lady of the house once told me. Still they aspire to greatness. They don’t deprive themselves of the pleasures of this world, but there’s no avidity in seeking them. The Jews keep taverns, but they themselves don’t get drunk.
    Not only was I