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But I cannot tell why I had said the opposite. Then Marusya curtly dismissed the representatives of the suitor. I decided not to part from the two unhappy women just then and leave them alone with their misfortune. But Heaven willed otherwise. The Crimean War had been decided upon, and our regiment was the first to be sent to the front.
Marusya loved me as a sister loves a brother, and the fire of her eyes ate into my heart. Jacob kept preaching to me that it was wrong to accept favors from Gentiles, and that we had to fight for our faith. Serge became my bitter enemy from the time he betrayed our scheme of "honest stealing." To top it all, my sergeant tried to put me through the paces of the military drill, and succeeded.
In the end it turned out that there was a deeper purpose at the bottom of the whole affair. That scamp, Serge Ivanovich, understood very well that in every respect Marusya was above the rest of the village girls, and he made up his mind to marry her.
Whenever Jacob came to see me, and Marusya happened to be in the room, she would walk out immediately, and would not return before he was out of the house. I rather liked it. I could not be giving in to both of them at the same time. Such were the surroundings that shaped my life during those days. Peter befriended me; but Anna kept on worrying me and making me miserable.
But when I reminded myself of Joseph the righteous, I felt my heart sink at the thought of what Marusya had done to me. I could not deny that the good looks of the Gentile girl were endearing her to me, that out of her hands I would eat pork ten times a day, and that in fact I myself was trying to put up a defense of her. I took all the responsibility on myself.
Then I noticed that Anna was watching Marusya's bed. I saw she was afraid Marusya might overhear what was not intended for her ears. She put on her night robe, came to my bed, and began in a whisper: "Are you sleeping? Get up, my boy, wake up!" I did "wake up," and put on a frightened appearance. "What did you cry about?" she asked. "I dreamt something terrible."
In short, I was divided against myself: I had two wishes, one excluding the other. Suddenly the door opened, and on the threshold was standing do you know who? Marusya! Yes, dear God, it was Marusya. She was standing at the right of the sergeant. With one hand he was playing with her locks, and in the other he was holding both her hands.
Everybody jumped away from the table in disgust and anger. I met Marusya's eye, and was ashamed to look into it. Anna got up, boiling with rage, and took me by the ear, and pulled me outside: "Get out of here, you dirty Zhid; and don't you dare enter my house any more!" Well, she chased me out. Peter and Marusya kept quiet.
So Anna disliked her relations for having caused her remorse, homesickness, and perhaps shame. Once her tongue was loosed, she did not stop until she had poured out the proverbial nine measures given to woman as her share of the ten measures of speech in the world. She spoke Yiddish even in the presence of Marusya and of Jacob, who used to visit me once in a while.
Well, I had fallen into debt; and my two creditors were very hard to satisfy. Jacob had offered, though vainly, to sacrifice his skin for mine and suffer the lashes intended for me. Marusya took the trouble to walk all the way to the sergeant's house and talk with him, to save me from punishment. Thus I was indebted to both of them, but with a difference.
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