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imagine a country that would want to kill him?”
Eilis stepped back but did not reply.
“Well, can you?”
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“The Germans killed everyone belonging to him, murdered every one of them, but we got him out, at least we did that, we got Joshua Rosenblum out.”
“You mean in the war?”
The man did not reply. He moved across the store and found a small footstool onto which he climbed to fetch a book. As he descended he turned towards her angrily. “Can you imagine a country that would do that? It should be wiped off the face of the earth.”
He looked at her bitterly.
“In the war?” she asked again.
“In the holocaust, in the churben.”
“But was it in the war?”
“It was, it was in the war,” the man replied, the expression on his face suddenly gentle.
As he busied himself finding the other two books, he had a resigned, almost stubborn look; by the time he returned to the counter and prepared the bill for her he had come to seem distant and forbidding. She did not ask him any questions as she handed him the money. He wrapped the books for her and gave her the change. She sensed that he wanted her to leave the shop and there was nothing she could do to make him tell her anything more.
She loved unwrapping the law books and placing them on the table beside the notebooks and her books on accountancy and bookkeeping. When she opened the first of them and looked at it she immediately found it difficult, worrying that she should have bought a dictionary as well so she could check the difficult words. She sat until suppertime going through the introduction, no wiser at the end as to what the “jurisprudence” mentioned at the beginning might be.
That evening at supper, when she had noticed that neither Miss McAdam nor Sheila Heffernan was still speaking to her, Eilis thought of asking Patty and Diana if she could go to the dance with them the following night, or meet them before it somewhere. She did not, she realized, want to go at all but she knew that Father Flood would miss her and, since it would be the second week for her not to be there, he would ask about her. There was another girl at supper that evening, Dolores Grace, who had taken Eilis’s old room. She had red hair and freckles and came from Cavan, it emerged, but she was mainly silent and seemed embarrassed to be at the table with them. Eilis learned that this was her third evening among them, but she had missed her at the previous meals because she had been at her lectures.
After supper, as she was settling back down to see if she could follow one of the other two law books any better, a knock came to the door. It was Diana in the company of Miss McAdam, and Eilis thought it was strange to see the two of them together. She stood at her door and did not invite them into her room.
“We need to talk to you,” Diana whispered.
“What’s up now?” Eilis asked almost impatiently.
“It’s that Dolores one,” Miss McAdam butted in. “She’s a scrubber.”
Diana began to laugh and had to put her hand to her mouth.
“She cleans houses,” Miss McAdam said. “And she’s cleaning for the Kehoe woman here to pay part of her rent. And we don’t want her at the table.”
Diana let out what was close to a shriek of laughter. “She’s awful. She’s the limit.”
“What do you want me to do?” Eilis asked.
“Refuse to eat with her when the rest of us do. And the Kehoe woman listens to you,” Miss McAdam said.
“And where will she eat?”
“Out in the street for all I care,” Miss McAdam said.
“We don’t want her, none of us,” Diana said. “If word got around—”
“That this was a house where people like her were staying—” Miss McAdam continued.
Eilis felt an urge to close the door in their faces and go back to her books.
“We’re just letting you know,” Diana said.
“She’s a scrubber from Cavan,” Miss McAdam said as Diana began to laugh again.
“I don’t know what you’re laughing at,” Miss McAdam said, turning to her.
“Oh, God, I’m sorry. It’s just awful. No decent fellow will have anything to do with us.”
Eilis looked at both of them as though they were nuisance customers in Bartocci’s and she was Miss Fortini. Since they both worked in offices, she wondered if they had spoken