She was then, of a
sudden, immensely fluent, explaining that her husband--"a most
excellent husband to me in every way one might say"--had been dead
fifteen years now, that her two sons were both fighting for the
Austrians, that she looked after the school assisted by her daughter.
These were her grandchildren.... Such a terrible year she, in all her
long life, had never remembered. She....
The arrival of the rest of the Oboz silenced her. She remained, with
wide-open staring eyes, her hand at her breast, watching, saying
absent-mindedly to the children: "Now Katya.... Now Anna.... See what
you're about!"
The school was spotlessly clean. In the schoolroom the rough benches
were marked with names and crosses. On the whitewashed walls were
coloured maps of Galicia and tables of the Austrian kings and queens;
on the blackboard still an unfinished arithmetical sum and on the
master's desk a pile of exercise books.
In a moment everything was changed; the sanitars had turned the
schoolroom into a dormitory, another room was to be our dining-room,
another a bedroom for the Sisters.
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