En smakbit ur Spinning silver

Söndag och dags för en smakbit ur vad jag läser just nu.

Smakbitarna samlas hos Flukten fra virkeligheten idag.

Sidan 103:

There wasn’t Oleg to hire anymore, so the next morning I Went and stood on the market road. When a likely carter came driving past with a big sledge laden with barrels of salt herring from the sea, I waved him down, and offered him five pennies if he would take me all the way to Vysnia, I could have offered more, but I had learned my lesson. This time I had waited for an older man in an older cart, and my good dress with its fur collar and cuffs was hidden: I had put on my father’s old worn-out woollen overcoat, which i had meant to use for rags now that I had bought him a good new one made of fur.

The old carter was talking to me as we drove of his granddaughters, and wanted to know my age; he was pleased that his girl a year younger than I was already married when I wasn’t, and asked me if I was going to town to get a husband. ”We’ll see”, I said, and then I laughed aloud in sudden real relief, because it was so ridiculous. Me sitting in a fish cart with my muddy boots, scarecrow in my father’s patched overcoat: what would a Staryk lord want with me? I wasn’t a princess, or even a golden-haired peasant girl. I suppose it would’t make a difference to him that I was a Jew, but I was short and bony and sallow, and my nose was humped in the middle and too big for my face. In fact I wasn’t married yet on on purpose: my grandfather had told me judiciously to wait another two years to go to the matchmaker, so I woud grow a bit fatter, and meanwhile my dowry would plump up alongside me, to help bring me a husband with the good sense to want a wife who brought more to the marriage than beauty, but not so greedy he didn’t care for her appearance at all.

Här tillbringas söndagsmorgon och -förmiddag!