April 25, 1919

Tonka watches every slice. It is disgusting, and I pity Alexander. I tell him with my eyes that he must stop eating. But suddenly I am ashamed. The poor boy probably knows that he is eating too much, but he is hungry and cannot restrain himself while there is bread on the table. Thank God, he is going at last.

Tonka follows him with malicious brown eyes. Then she looks at me. What is she going to say now?

“And you know. … Your pop has become terribly untidy. He’s all covered with lice.”

I stare at her with wide-open eyes. Lord, this is too much! I cannot keep up my cheerful face any longer, and I shout indignantly straight at her face with its long, hooked nose:

“No! No! Impossible, impossible!”

“Why impossible, you fool, when he goes to the bathhouse only once a month? You understand, he grudges the money even for a bath. So, they breed. And then there’s the hunger. They crawl all over the floor, over the chairs. I don’t let Tamarochka go inside that place.”

Something like loathing stirs up in me against my own father. … Awful, awful, disgusting! Nothing in the world will make me sleep in the same room with him! I will rather sleep at Tonka’s, on the floor. And how did he come to this? I will grow to hate him.

“Tonechka, dear, I’ll sleep in your room. I can’t stay with him.”

And Tonka lowers her eyes to the table. Fear clutches at my heart. Will she really not let me?

“But we have no room. You see how crowded we are.”

“Tonechka, dear, I’ll manage; somewhere on the floor.”

“Well, then, but we have no room.”

She continues to tell about papa. Twenty times she repeats that he does not trust his own son and that he locks his room. And he starves himself. He has bread; he gets enough from the factory. He has even accumulated a reserve supply and the bread has become moldy. And the herrings have begun to stink. And he starves Alexander completely. Alexander would have given out and dropped dead long ago if she had not given him something now and then. And all this because he cannot get a job. It appears he has been promised the place of assistant janitor at the Hotel Europe. He is to begin there tomorrow.