I arrived at the broken-down house in the alley where Katya lived. The front, used by the ironmonger, had not yet opened, but I knew a trick of jerking the door open, even when it was locked. I entered the dark, cluttered interior of the shop and tip-toed through to the narrow stair leading to Katya’s room. She would have got rid of any customer by this time, but I did not want to risk embarrassing her. Determined to go away if a man was with her, I crept up the stairs and opened the door a fraction. I saw a form huddled in the bed with its arms around my Katya. I suppressed my jealousy. Then I realised I recognised the shoulder. It was young. A boy’s shoulder. It was, of course, Shura’s shoulder.
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
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.
