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With 'fate' so much against him he finally gave up his stewardpships, and his travels, and went into the only sure-fire, money-making business there is. It's honest, it's pleasant, it's easy, it's moral, it's delightful and the profits are enormous. The best families go into it, devout religious people go into it, monasteries make it une specialite de la maison, and most respectable of all, governments go into it. No government would be so foolish as to pass up a chance of making so much money, which after all they need, with so little expenditure of effort.
There, however, lies the difficulty. Once the government of a country discovers this open-pit goldmine, being sefish hogs, they won't allow anyone else to run it. They simply pass a law declaring it illegal to go into this business, and thus keep it all to themselves, and put everyone in jail who dares to flout their monopoly.
The business of course is the liquor business, and grandpa built a still and began making very good whisky. It was illegal of course, but grandpa could sell to the inhabitants of Balobos-chine and nearby villages a large crock for less than teh price of a small bottle from the government liquor store. So there was no danger of being betrayed by the villagers. The constables and headmen of the villages were given a crock or so a week as a friendly gesture, so there was no trouble from that source either. And so for a change the money began to roll in. Father worked in the still, too, his main job being the siphoning of the whiskey from the large vats into the small-mouthed crocks, and not infrequently into his own crock!
If a government inspector happened to be on his way, grandpa was given ample warning by the constable or the Reeve, and all the paraphernalia was hidden away.
I don't remember just how long they indulged in this moonshining but I believe it was quite some time, and they were never caught. But eventually grandpa felt that it was an uneasy business, and one never knew when one's luck would run out, and so he finally sold it and bought a ferryboat on the river at Balobos-chine. From then on he ferried men and cows and horses and carriages across the river by pulling on a cable that stretched from bank to bank.
Now I've said several times that my grandfather was an honest man. These various transactions might of course be interpreted as not quite the acme of probity. But honestly, like justice, is a strange quality. Man is not capable of either, in its purer reaches. He can't always be honest, and he can not always be just. Complete honesty would make life quite impossible.
I have known a few people who considered themselves absolutely honest. Father was one of those. Murray once brought an attractive girl home to meet our parents, and in the course of the evening she said to father, just to make light conversation: "I'm wearing a new had tonight, Mr. Adaskin, do you like it?" Father looked at it and said: "Oh, no! It's awful!" This kind of thing makes for a perfect evening! When Murray later remonstrated with father for being so rude to his girl, father was astonished. He wasn't rude -- she asked him what he thought of her hat and he told her!
Oddly enough, this didn't work both ways. If you told father that something he did was awful, he didn't appreciate your honesty one bit.
I remember meeting a distinguished and well-known Canadian in London, and we sailed home on the same ship. We became very friendly and spent a lot of time together on board. He had served brilliantly in the first war, was much decorated, had been severely wounded and he told me a great many stories about those days. On this trip he was bringing home about a dozen suits and overcoats and topcoats which he had had made in London, and he and his wife spent hours every day cutting out the labels of these garments and sewing in labels from a Montreal tailor so as to do the Canadian Customs out of hundreds of dollars. He was quite frank about it, and he even got away with it.
Such delicate distinctions appear in many guises. Chekhov once told Maxim Gorky of a story he was planning about a very rational woman. "I'm going to write about a schoolteacher," he said. "She will be an atheist, she'll adore Darwin, and be convinced of the necessity of fighting the superstitions and prejudices of the people -- but this will not prevent her from boiling a black cat in the bathhouse at midnight in order to obtain from it a certain bone which is popularly supposed to be a potent love charm."
Now, you could trust such people implicitly -- you could leave your money lying around in heaps and they'd never touch it. They'd never steal a book from a library, they would never cheat at cards and couldn't possibly think of shoplifting. They're what most of us would call honest, and even rational people.
They are just a little inconsistent. When I spoke earlier of madness being endemic in the human race, that is exactly what I meant. A man is rational, and yet, like Chekov's schoolteacher, is irrational at the same time, like precious metals which are never found in the pure state. And separating them from the unwanted material is laborious, time-consuming and costly.
All people (except of course those who are reading these lines) seem to fall into one of three classes: There are the dangerously insane, whom we must put away; the unpleasantly insane, who we try to avoid; and the amiably insane, whom we all love.
When my harmless and amiable grandfather bought the ferryboat, it was Disneyland for his children. The hamlet and the river were in the middle of an immense forest which came right down to the water's edge. In the summer the swimming was fabulous, and the boys would have been in the water all day long if it weren't for Kheder and daily religious services. There were morning prayers and afternoon Tillim reading and evening prayers and bible study and of course the normal study of Hebrew, Jewish and Russian. Facility in reading and writing in all three languages was de rigeur, and in my mother's case she had to study German as well, for she was going to be a teacher in her father's classes. But in none of the languages were they allowed to read anything in any way entertaining, or delightful, or beautiful.