Sitting at the table like two enormous white peonies, they had the replete, lazy, slow-moving demeanour of contented matrons, and the scornful pout and hard, implacable eyes of women who are too rich, too happy. The two younger ones were unmarried aunts; they dressed in the English style – straight skirts in a coarse, masculine material, linen blouses with starched collars, as stiff as a yoke – and had the mannerisms of that younger generation of Jewish millionaires: more ‘lady-like’ than was natural, with an affectation of simplicity and austerity, as if they wished each of their gestures to say, ‘You see how I wish to go unnoticed, inconspicu-ous as they say in English. I wish to blend in with mere mortals so they may forget who I really am.’

At the sight of Ben and Ada, everyone stopped eating. Lorgnettes were raised and dropped again. Voices cried out: ‘What on earth is going on?’

As Ben started speaking, Harry grew pale and stopped eating. He looked at the messy little boy with his bleeding knees, and the pale little girl whose dishevelled hair was so matted with dust and sweat that it fell in a thick tangle over her eyebrows.

Ben noticed him looking at them and deliberately began to embellish his story; at first it had been more or less accurate, but now, with exquisite pleasure, he started to add gory details about blood, dead bodies, and at least a dozen disembowelled women. Harry pushed his plate away and stood, white and trembling, behind his seat.

Ben stopped to catch his breath.

‘Please,’ said Ada weakly, ‘can you give us something to eat?’

She started to walk towards the table, but the women all leapt up at once and stood in front of Harry to shield him with their bodies.

‘Stop her! She mustn’t come near us! They might be dirty. They might be diseased. Don’t come any closer, child! Stay where you are. We’ll give you something to eat. Dolly, take them into the kitchen.’

‘We’re not dirty,’ cried Ada. ‘If you’d spent the whole night hiding in a trunk, your faces would be all dusty and your beautiful dresses would get all torn, too.’

‘And I hope it does happen to you one day,’ she thought, but she didn’t say it.

The maid was ordered to take ‘these urchins’ into the kitchen, give them some bread and tea and wait for further instructions. Harry, meanwhile, had slipped off his chair and disappeared. The children were being led out when Harry came back, followed by an elderly gentleman who bore a strong resemblance to Ada’s grandfather; they could have been brothers. Everyone fell silent. He was the master of the house, Sinner senior, so rich that every Jew imagined only Rothschild surpassed him in status and wealth (Tzar Nicholas II came third).

He had a thin, rough, sallow face, a large, oddly-shaped nose, as if some fist had smashed it in two, a crease down his brow so darkly coloured it looked almost purple (the most definite sign, it was said, that he was being ravaged by cancer), greenish eyes streaked with fine, sinuous red lines, and a piercing, unpleasant expression. But his white beard, his shiny, bald, egg-like head, his supple back, his long, dry fingers with their curved, yellow nails, hard as horn, his sharp, drawling Yiddish accent – all these were familiar to Ben and Ada. This wealthy Sinner looked like the old men in the ghetto, the sellers of second-hand goods, the ironmongers, the shoemakers in their stalls. The children were overwhelmed by respect and admiration as they stood before him, but they weren’t afraid.

Once again, it was Ben who recounted their adventures. Ada stood a little to the side; she felt weak and ill and suddenly indifferent to her fate. Nevertheless, it occurred to her that she should probably faint. Whenever a child fainted in books, someone immediately came to her rescue; she was given food; she was put to bed – she quivered with desire at the very idea – a clean, warm bed. She closed her eyes so tightly that her head was suddenly filled with a soft, echoing sound, like the sea. She waited a few moments, but she didn’t faint; regretfully, she opened her eyes and found herself leaning against the wall once more, her hands crossed tightly in front of her waist, looking at the people around her. The women seemed terribly angry and upset; they were all talking at once, looking at the children with an expression full of terror, almost hate.

‘They’re mean,’ thought Ada. However, as sometimes happened, she was filled with two different feelings both at once: one was naïve, childlike, and the other more mature, understanding and wise. She felt that two Adas lived within her, and one of them understood why she was being sent away, why they spoke to her with such hostility: the famished children stood before these wealthy Jews as an eternal reminder, a shameful and atrocious memory of what they themselves had once been or might have been. No one dared to add: ‘what they could become again some day’.

Ada hid behind the curtain and immediately fell half-asleep. Every now and again she put her hand into her mouth and gently bit down on it in order to stay awake. Then the silk folds of the curtains would part, her pale, sleepy face would appear, and, thinking no one could see her, she would carefully lean forward and stick out her tongue at the women.

When she was pulled out of her hiding place, she was almost sleepwalking.