Free The Story of a Life by Aharon Appelfeld

pride at having driven them crazy with lust.
    The vodka, the men, and the ranting would tire her out, and then she would sleep in, sometimes till late in the afternoon. Sleep did her good. She would get out of bed light and youthful and would start to hum. I would serve her a mug of coffee, and she would call me her “foolish lambkin,” for my hair was curly then. Sometimes she would give my bottom an affectionate pinch. I loved her good moods, and I was afraid of her depressions. When she was happy, she would sing, dance, call out the name of Jesus, and say, “My beloved Saviour won’t ever betray me.”
    Maria’s happy spells would fill the hut with a wonderful light, but her depressions were more powerful than her happiness. They were deep and lingering, and they could instantly darken the hut. In one of her black moods she shouted at me, “Bastard, son of bastards! Liar, son of liars! I’ll cut your throat with a kitchen knife!”
    This threat, more than any other, bit into my soul. It was clear: she knew my secret, and when the time came, she would carry out her threat. Were it not for the snow, I would have run away, but even though it was not falling quite as heavily as it had been, it still fell day and night, and it darkened the days.
    Eventually the snowfalls ceased and the rains began. My life emptied of all memory and became as smooth as the slopes of the pasture that surrounded me. Even in my dreams I no longer saw my parents. Sometimes it seemed to me that I had been born in this darkness, that what had existed beforehad been just an illusion. Once I dreamed that I saw my mother, and it seemed as though she saw me but then turned her back on me. This hurt me so much that the next day I vented my anger on the poor beast in the cowshed.
    The end of winter came, but it did not warm my body. The path from the hut to the village had turned into a sticky mire. I would return home totally covered in mud. For some reason, the young men whom Maria loved did not come. In their place came the elderly peasants, heavy and silent, whom Maria called “the old cart horses.” She would lie with them grudgingly and stand her ground relentlessly in the bargaining that followed. Once she struggled with one of them and really scratched him good and proper.
    The days became clearer, but they brought me no peace. I was afraid of Maria. She would down bottle after bottle, curse, and throw things. Even at me. If the sausage or the vodka was not to her liking, she would scratch my face, call me “bastard of bastards,” and hurl curses at me.
    What I feared came to pass, but not as I had imagined. The fierce winds that had beaten against the hut for more than a month eventually brought down the roof and the walls. Apparently the old wooden hut was already rotted through, and it collapsed under the onslaught of the winds. Suddenly, in broad daylight, there we stood, Maria and I, in the midst of the gaping hut. The household objects, and the bed upon which so many peasants had kneaded Maria’s flesh, had been tossed out with one violent gust, as if flung upward. A heavy beam lay across the large quilt that Maria used to wrap herself in.
    At the sight of this destruction, a stream of manic laughter burst out of her.
    “Just look at this,” she shouted. “See what those demons have done to me!”
    It seemed to me that she was really and truly happy about the destruction, as if it had come only to save her from her depression. Yet, no more than a few moments later, the laughter froze on her lips, her eyes glazed over, and a chill rage set her jaw. I knew this anger, and I was afraid of it. I waited for Maria to tell me what to do. It pained me that the hut, whose every corner was familiar to me, had been so totally wrecked. I saw the rafters scattered on the ground. For some reason, I started picking up the plates and the pots and pans that had fallen off the shelves, and I put them on the wooden counter that was used for