The Story of a Life Read Online Free PDF Page B

things.”
    “What?”
    “I’ll show you right now,” she said. Holding both my feet, she quickly took off my shoes and socks and crammed my toes into her mouth. “Tasty, very tasty,” she said.
    The touch was pleasant but made me shiver a bit. “Now let’s give this handsome young man something very tasty,” she said, and took a bar of chocolate out of her little purse. The chocolate—a cheap brand wrapped in simple paper, whose brand name was Healthy and Tasty—was a byword for cheapness and vulgarity in our home.
    “Don’t you want to taste it?”
    “No,” I said, and laughed.
    “It’s very good,” she said, taking off the wrapping and showing me the brown bar. “Taste it. I like this chocolate.”
    “No, thanks.”
    “So—what chocolate do you like, my spoiled little sweetie?”
    “Suchard,” I told her truthfully.
    “Suchard. That’s fancy chocolate—chocolate without taste. Chocolate should be heavy and full of nuts.”
    She immediately lifted me up again, swung me around, and squeezed me to her large body. “Suchard is chocolate for the rich, but it’s chocolate that’s finished too quickly. Now, we like lots of chocolate. You see?”
    I didn’t understand, but I nodded as if I did.
    “When does the train stop?” I asked for some reason.
    “It’s the express. The express stops only at the last stop, and the last stop is Czernowitz,” she said, baring her square teeth and continuing to stroke the soles of my feet.
    “Nice?” she asked.
    “Very,” I couldn’t help telling her.
    “I’ll keep you amused until the morning,” she said, and laughed. And as she was kneading my body, kissing and pinching me, the door of the tiny room opened, and there stood Mother at the doorway.
    “What are you doing here?” Her eyes opened wide.
    “Nothing at all; we’re playing. Erwin was bored and wanted to play.”
    “Erwin never gets bored,” my mother corrected her.
    “You were sleeping and Erwin got bored. One shouldn’t let a handsome little boy like Erwin get bored. True?” She turned her face to me. Mother for some reason didn’t take her eyes off me. She wasn’t angry, but her pinched smile bespoke suspicion.
    “Have you been here a long time?” Mother asked. Now I knew that something was amiss. “Let’s go,” she said, holding out her hand.
    “Erwin is a very clever boy,” the waitress said, trying to win Mother over.
    “But not careful enough.” Mother couldn’t restrain herself.
    “Both wise and careful, I swear to you.” The waitress spoke like a peasant woman.
    Mother didn’t react. She pulled me decisively toward the corridor.
    “What did you do?” she asked when we were almost at our seats.
    “We talked.”
    “You should be more careful.”
    “Why?”
    “Because these kinds of people don’t know the meaning of boundaries.”
    The train moved on. The first light of dawn tinted the dark clouds with a rose-pink hue. Mother didn’t speak. Her face became more and more closed off from me. There was no doubt now—she was angry.
    “Mother.”
    “What?”
    “When are we getting home?”
    “In a while.”
    “And Father will be waiting for us at the station?”
    “I expect so.”
    I wanted to placate her, so I said, “Seven times seven is forty-nine.”
    On hearing this, she hugged me.
    “Next week I’ll know the entire multiplication table, I promise.”
    No one was urging me to learn the table by heart, but I apparently thought that this would make Mother happy.
    “But you should be more careful.” She hadn’t forgotten my sin.
    Father was waiting for us at the station. I ran up to him. He tossed me in the air and kissed my cheek.
    “How was the trip?” Father asked gently. “Not bad,” said Mother dryly. “Were there delays?” “No.”
    “What more could one ask?” said Father, in the tone he seemed to have adopted of late.

4
     
    NINETEEN THIRTY-EIGHT was a bad year. Rumors were rife, and it became clear that we were trapped. My father