“IN OUR VILLAGE”
IN our village, you may come across all sorts of people and all sorts of things—such people as are unknown to the other villages of Lithuanian Russia. And, more than that, we know each other through and through, as one might say. It is as if we were all one large family of brothers and sisters. There is no ceremony whatever necessary, in our village. If you want to talk to a man, you stop him in the street, and plunge into your argument, without as much as shaking hands with him. And if you want to go into his house, you do not wait to be invited. You simply lift the latch, or push open the hall-door, and walk in. What can be simpler than our way of living? And what can be more pleasant?
And besides all this, the people themselves are exceedingly interesting—origi- nal in character, I assure you. There is, for instance, Zelda the Dark One. She lives with her grandson, Solomon, in the middle of the village. She despises every thing Jewish, and has even changed her name to Sonya. And, indeed, she looks so like a Malo-Russian, with her short, broad features, and her snub nose, that no one would ever dream she was a Jewess, if one did not know it before- hand. The only thing is that she protests too often and too loudly that she is a Russian, which proves conclusively that she is not. Zelda’s energy knows no bounds. She feels that she must do something to regenerate her country, but we go on calling her Zelda in spite of every thing. But, really, you never can tell what she is going to do next. She opens her door at an early hour of the morning, and looks about her with lowered eyebrows, as if she expected to find a diamond lying at her feet. The truth is, however, that she is only waiting for someone to pounce on—someone on whom to let out the wrath and the energy which were pent up within her all the night.
It offends her that the chickens are on the window-ledge. She puts them off, shaking her apron to a few in front of them. Next, she bangs the door with a loud crash, and rushes into where Solomon is asleep. Shouting at the top of her voice, and shaking him vigorously, she at last succeeds in waking him up. His snoring ceases. He rubs his eyes again and again, yawns, asks her what time it is, and immediately starts apologizing for having overslept himself. He always maintains that he was not asleep; but that he was awake at the dawn, and only just dozed off because it was too early to get up.
And do you think Zelda has no more to do after she she has awakened the boy from his sleep? Such is by no means the case. Being a widow of many years standing she has a great deal to do to support herself and her scamp of a grandson, who does nothing all day but climb fences, and steal the green peas, or whatever else he comes upon in the different gardens he visits. That is what comes of one’s grandmother proclaiming herself a Russian. \
As to Velvallè the Advocate—no one can convince him that he is no more than an ordinary man with a gift for talking rapidly. He thinks he knows all the laws that were enacted in Russia ever since the world began. At the time of the Dreyfus case, he quoted so many laws and their numbers and the various codes to which they belonged that even the most passionate lover of justice was ready to swear the Captain’s life away rather than have Velvallè bore the whole village to death by his unending chatter. And if you think that Velvallè did nothing but talk all day long, you are mistaken. He deliberately set out to question minutely every government official he came across on the remotest point of the Russian Law, and their possible connection wth the French Code.