The Dogs and the Wolves Read Online Free PDF

the same exquisite yet somewhat painful pleasure she’d felt when she looked at the beautiful house and the sky. She spoke this strange, mysterious name, with its unique and noble sound, as if it were a kiss.

5
    Nastasia washed the windows once a year, just before Passover. The rest of the time, they remained grubby, soiled by the rain on the outside and by children’s breath and dirty hands on the inside. Even on the most beautiful days, the rooms were half in darkness. Ada, however, never noticed this until the year she and Ben were ill at the same time and had to stay in bed for nearly a month in Ada’s room.
    It was an attic room with a yellow-painted floor and wallpaper decorated with Chinese figures. During their fever, Ada and Ben passed the hours by quietly counting to themselves the number of people they could see from their bed. The Chinamen wore large straw hats and had bare legs; leaning on their canes, they watched coy Chinese women with parasols. Some of the parasols were red and some blue, but because of a nearby drainpipe, dark stains of damp had blurred the colours, merging them into a shade of purple that faded from plum to the colour of amaranth. Just above each bed, the children’s frustrated little fingers had torn away the paper and they’d used crayons to draw faces and animals on the bare plaster. In a corner of the room, a spider’s web hung from the ceiling and, before the Passover spring clean, it swayed in the draft that endlessly wafted in from the kitchen. The doorat the back of the flat was always left open so that Nastasia’s lovers could come up whenever they wanted.
    Whenever Ada and Ben were ill, Aunt Raissa would heat a little pork fat mixed with turpentine over the flame of a candle and, with her thin, dry hands, rub it over the children’s backs and chests. Then she would make them drink gallons of boiling hot tea, and when the symptoms seemed really serious, she would place a hot compress to their necks and make them swallow a spoonful of castor oil. To ease the terrible taste of the medicine, Lilla secretly brought them little buns filled with hard-boiled egg which she bought in town, along with sticky sweets that had spent over a week in the pockets of her admirers. And so Ben and Ada usually welcomed illness. But this time it was really lasting too long. Their fever, sluggishness, sore throats and painful ears seemed interminable. After all, they couldn’t sleep all the time, nor cut out endless puppets from bits of paper: it was too boring. Finally, towards the end of the third week, Ben had a brilliant idea, which transformed their gloomy days.
    They had begun by playing the game of ‘islands’, dividing imaginary lands between them, as all children do; but that wasn’t enough. Later on, they couldn’t remember which of them had been the first to invent what they called ‘the game’, the one that replaced all others. This is how it went: under the supervision of Ada and Ben, all children had to meet one morning and leave in search of a foreign land (one they would of course find), and there they would live entirely alone, without a single adult ever being allowed in. They would have their own laws, their own army, their own government. The masons’ children would build the cities; the painters’ children would certainly know how to decorate the walls. The place had to be inaccessible, protected by high rocks, even though no one would ever dream of coming to look for them; the grown-ups would be only too happy, or so they thought, to be rid of all the children! Well, didn’t they hear theirparents moaning endlessly? Everything was so expensive! Clothing, food, education . . . And when they were older, they had to provide dowries for the girls, help the boys set up in business. There was so much to worry about . . . Surely they would be delighted to know they were alive and well, far away.
    Eyes closed, her cheeks flushed with fever, Ada imagined them leaving. It