I threatened him then with the
fat and good-natured policeman who always guarded the confused junction
of the Morskaia and Nevski, and he was frightened and moved on. I sighed
as I remembered the days not so long before, when that same coachman
would have thought it an honour to drive me for half a rouble. Down the
Sadovya we slipped, bumping over the uneven surface of the snow, and the
shops grew smaller and the cinemas more stringent, and the women and men
with their barrows of fruit and coloured notepaper and toys more
frequent. Then through the market with the booths and the church with
its golden towers, until we stood before the hooded entrance to the
Jews' Paradise. I paid him, and without listening to his discontented
cries pushed my way in. The Jews' Market is a series of covered arcades
with a square in the middle of it, and in the middle of the square a
little church with some doll-like trees. These arcades are Western in
their hideous covering of glass and the ugliness of the exterior of the
wooden shops that line them, but the crowd that throngs them is Eastern,
so that in the strange eyes and voices, the wild gestures, the laughs,
the cries, the singing, and the dancing that meets one here it is as
though a new world was suddenly born--a world offensive, dirty, voluble,
blackguardly perhaps, but intriguing, tempting, and ironical.
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