“You must thank him,” I heard a strange low voice behind me.

The boy nodded his head rapidly.

“Thank you. Thank you.”

A thick cloud of fibrous dust was floating through the cellar, and with difficulty I distinguished on the stove the disheveled head, the disfigured face of the woman, the gleam of her teeth, the involuntary, indestructible smile.

“How do you do?”

“How do you do?” the woman repeated. Her nasal voice sounded muffled but jaunty, almost cheerful. She looked at me squinting and mockingly, as it were.

Lenka, oblivious of me, munched the gingerbread and hummed, as he carefully opened the boxes. His eyelashes cast a shadow on his cheeks, emphasizing the rings under his eyes. The sun, dull, like the face of an old man, peered through the dirty windowpanes, and a mild light fell upon the boy’s reddish hair. His shirt was unbuttoned, showing his chest, and I saw how the heart was beating behind the thin bones, lifting the skin and the barely perceptible nipple.

His mother climbed down from the stove, moistened a towel in the wash-basin, and coming over to Lenka took his left hand.

“He’s run away! Stop him! He’s run away!” he shouted. And with his whole body he began to thresh about in the box, throwing the smelly rags around, baring his blue inert legs. The woman burst out laughing, fumbling among the rags, and shouted too:

“Catch him!”

Having caught the bug, she placed him on her palm, examined him with her lively eyes, the color of a cornflower, and said to me in the tone of an old acquaintance:

“There are lots of those.”

“Don’t you crush it!” her son warned her sternly. “Once when she was drunk she sat on my menagerie—and crushed a lot of them!”

“Try and forget it, darling.”

“I had to do a lot of burying.…”

“But I caught some others for you afterwards.”

“Others! The ones you crushed were trained ones, silly-billy! The ones that croaked I buried under the stove; I’d crawl out and bury them—I have a cemetery there. You know, I once had a spider, Minka, he looked just like one of Mammy’s lovers, the one who’s in prison, the fat jolly one.…”

“Oh, my precious darling,” said the woman, stroking her son’s curls with a small, dark stumpy-fingered hand. Then, nudging me with her elbow, she asked, her eyes smiling:

“He’s pretty, my little son? Look at those eyes, eh?”

“You can have one of my eyes, but give me legs,” suggested Lenka, smiling and examining a bug. “He’s an…iron one! So fat! Mom, he looks like the monk, the one for whom you made the ladder—remember?”

“Sure I do.”