I did not behave then as I would behave now. I lost all control. I screamed and flung the door back. I realised why Shura had shown me such kindness, why Katya’s time with me had become so limited, why she and Shura never spoke when they met at Esau’s. I had been betrayed.
I recall only the emotions; the way in which the blood became a drum in my brain, in which my hot hand gripped the cool ivory of the stick as I advanced on Shura. He scrambled up with a yell, laughed at me, became terrified, tried to protect Katya, threw a pillow at me. I raised the stick. His naked body flew at me and caught me below the waist. I struck his back, his buttocks. I fell over. The fight had no proper end. I lost the stick. We became exhausted. I remember Katya weeping. ‘Can’t you see I loved you.’
Shura sat panting against a wall down which, as if to witness the drama, cockroaches climbed. ‘She loved us both, Xima. I love you both.’
I said the usual things about treachery, trickery, double-dealing. I have been betrayed too many times since then to recall anything specific. Katya wanted Shura’s maturity and my innocence. Fundamentally she was a whore. She could not resist any of us. There were probably other lovers, as opposed to customers. I think she was one of those kindly, slightly frightened girls who gives in to the slightest pressure then spends her life trying to reconcile everyone, far too afraid to tell the truth which would extricate her from such situations. It is a characteristic of our good-natured Slav girls, particularly in Ukraine. There are even Jewish girls who are like it. They are incapable of scheming, but weave the most impossible webs of deception. These girls are so frequently treated as femmes fatales when, in fact, they are the very opposite. None of this occurred to my fourteen-year-old self. Drained by a drug which in later years would prove beneficial, exhausted by an unequal physical encounter, weeping with misery at the terrible thing done to me by my little Katya, I lay in a corner and picked cobwebs and dust off my fine suit, while my cousin Shura, trying to mollify me, got dressed, and Katya wailed, wishing she had never met either of us.
Shura suggested we go for a drink. I accepted. We went to Esau’s where Shura cracked and chewed sun-flower seeds and talked about ‘the world’ and how he had been going to tell me but that Katya had been afraid it would hurt my feelings. Slowly the onus was transferred onto the woman in the case. Two or three glasses of vodka made it seem we had both been badly deceived by a little bitch. Another two or three glasses and I was close to weeping. I told Shura I had nearly killed him. Shura said it was appalling how trollops like Katya could make two friends fight so savagely. We drank to the doom of all women. We drank to eternal comradeship. When the question arose as to which of us was to stop seeing Katya we were both insistent we had ‘no rights’; then insistent that each had ‘greater rights’ because of ‘loving her more’. And so it went on, with recriminations creeping back and Shura rising and turning his shoulder to me, and me deciding to go to see Katya to demand from her a guarantee she would dismiss Shura for good. We left Esau’s. We both had the same destination. We stopped at the corner of her alley. A woman went past, leading two cows (still kept for fresh milk in cities in those days) and we were separated by them. Both of us dashed past the beasts and tried to reach the ironmonger’s first. This ludicrous and undignified scene resulted in the pair of us reeling drunkenly into stacks of pots and pans which we knocked onto the cobbles. Out of the shop came the middle-aged Jewish proprietor, screaming and waving his arms and cursing the lust of men and the venality of women. Why had God decided that he, a respectable shop-keeper, must support his impeccably virtuous family by letting rooms to women of easy virtue (I knew that an ‘extra’ on his exorbitant rent was an afternoon every week with Katya’s mother)? We demanded he step aside and let us through.
‘To have my shop destroyed by drunks!’ He took a great axe from his display. ‘To bring the police down on my poor head! Wonderful! Cossacks in the Moldovanka! Let’s have a new pogrom, eh! Stand back, both of you, or I’ll give the police fair cause to visit me. I’ll split your heads and hang myself rather than let you in.’
Katya’s orange-haired sluttish mother appeared behind him. She was pulling on a grubby Chinese robe. ‘Shura? Maxim? What’s the matter with you? Where’s Katya?’
‘We have come to see her,’ I said. ‘She has to choose between us.’
‘But she left half-an-hour ago.’
‘Where did she go?’ asked Shura.
‘To Esau’s, I thought.’
‘Was she laughing?’ I asked significantly.
‘Not that I noticed. What do you want with her? You boys shouldn’t quarrel over a girl. She likes you both.’
‘She’s a deceiver,’ I said. ‘A liar.’
‘She’s a bit weak, that’s all,’ said Shura. ‘I told her...’
‘I won’t have such discussions in my street, outside my shop.’ The Jew advanced with the axe. We retreated.
Katya’s mother shook her head. ‘Calm down. Go for a walk together. Go for a swim.’ She seemed unaware that it was winter.
‘She was not frank with me,’ I said.
‘Frank? What is frank?’ asked the shop-keeper. He gestured with his huge axe. ‘Jews are not the bogatyrs of Kiev. They have no room for such podvig luxuries.’
‘They have a great penchant for hypocrisy instead,’ I retorted.
He smiled, ‘If we are here to indulge in some rabbinical discussion, some orgy of self-criticism, let us settle down around the book, my young Litvak.’
Did he think I was a Jew? I was shocked. I looked at his dirty skin, his stringy beard, his hooked nose and thick lips and realised what a terrible mistake I had made. To believe that Jews could be my friends, that I could exist in their company without some of their traits rubbing off on me! I backed away. I began to run through the alleys of the ghetto, knocking aside old men and children, treading on cats and dogs, breaking down washing lines, kicking cans of milk, until I was back at Uncle Semya’s house, bedraggled, my coat flapping, my hat missing, my ivory cane lost in the struggle at Katya’s. Straight up the steps and into the front door. Up the stairs and into my room. I lay on my bed weeping and swearing never again to have anything to do with Jews, with the Moldovanka, with my cousin Shura, with coarse, corrupt, vulgar Odessa.
When Wanda came in, she found me recovered from the worst of my rage but still weeping, still dressed in what was left of my finery. ‘What happened, Maxim? An accident?’
I looked up at her warm, fat body, her plain, concerned face. I decided that Wanda was the girl I needed. Wanda would never make herself available to more than one man. She would be grateful that she had a man at all.
‘Only in love,’ I replied heavily. ‘A girl turned out to be unfaithful.’
‘That’s terrible. Dear Maxim!’ Feminine sympathy seeped from her pores like sweat. ‘Who on earth could do such a thing to you? What a bitch she must be.’
I remember a pang or two at this description, but when I considered the situation I decided Katya had been more cynical than I had guessed. I made some attempt to defend her, remembering Shura’s words. ‘She’s just weak ...’
‘Don’t you believe it, Maxim dear. Not a word. Weakness is a wall women hide behind. And it’s a wall, I assure you, as strong as steel. You’ve been deceived.’