Jealousies, each of the other, burned fiercely, and, aged three,
they scratched blood from one another over the favor of the shoemaker's
tot of a girl. And once, to her soul-sickness, Nikolai, the black one,
had found out the vodka and drunk of it until she discovered him in a
little stupor beside the cupboard.
Yet--and Sara would recount with her eyes full of more tears than they
could hold the often-told tale of how Schmulka, who could bear no
injustice, championed the cause of little Mottke, the butcher's son,
against the onslaught of his drunken father, beating back the lumbering
attack with small fists tight with rage; of little Nikolai, who fell
down the jagged wall of a quarry and endured a broken arm for the six
hours until his father came home rather than burden his mother with what
he knew would be the agony of his pain.
Red and black were Sara's sons in pigment. But by the time they were
four, almost identical in passion, inflammable both to the same angers,
the impulsive and the judiciary cunningly distributed in them.
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