been killed in the
night on the pontoon bridge-before I grasped that the night was last night,
and the watchman was that very watchman, and the pontoon bridge was that
very same bridge on which he had lain with outstretched arms. I jumped up,
rushed to my mother and cried out. She took me in her arms. She must have
thought I had taken fright. But I was already "speaking"...
If only I had been able to speak then!
I wanted to tell her everything, absolutely everything-how I had stolen
away to the Sands to catch crabs and how the dark man with the walking stick
had appeared in the gap in the ramparts and how he had sworn and ground his
teeth and then spat in the fire and gone off. No easy thing for a boy of
eight who could barely utter two or three inarticulate words.
"The children are upset too," Aunt Dasha said with a sigh when I had
stopped, thinking I had made myself clear, and looked at Mother.
"It isn't that. He wants to tell me something. Is there something you
know, Sanya?"
Oh, if only I could speak! I started again, describing what I had seen.
Mother understood me better than anyone else, but this time I saw with
despair that she did not understand a word. How could she? How far removed
from that scene on the pontoon bridge were the attempts of that thin, dark
little boy to describe it, as he flung himself about the room, clad in
nothing but his shirt. At one moment he threw himself upon the bed to show
how soundly his father had slept that night, the next he jumped on to a
chair and raised tightly clenched fists over a puzzled-looking Aunt Dasha.
After a while she made the sign of the cross over me. "The boys must
have been beating him."
I shook my head vigorously.
"He's telling how they arrested his father," said Mother. "How the
policeman threatened him. Isn't that right, Sanya?"
I started to cry, my face buried in her lap. She carried me to the bed
and I lay there for a long time, listening to them talking and thinking how
to communicate to them my amazing secret.
CHAPTER THREE THE PETITION
I am sure that in the long run I would have managed it somehow, if
Mother hadn't taken ill the next morning. She had always seemed a bit queer
to me, but I had never seen her so queer before.
Previously, when she would suddenly start standing at the window for
hours on end, or jumping up in the middle of the night and sitting at the
table in her nightdress until the morning. Father would take her back to the
home village for a few days, and she would come back recovered. But Father
wasn't there any more, and, besides, it was doubtful whether the trip would
have helped her now.
She stood in the passage, bareheaded and barefooted, and did not even
turn her head when somebody came into the house. She was silent all the
time, except when she uttered two or three words in a distracted manner.
What's more, she seemed to be afraid of me, somehow. When I started to
"speak", she stopped up her ears with a tortured expression. She passed a
hand over her eyes and forehead as if trying to recollect something. She was
so queer that even Aunt Dasha crossed herself furtively when Mother, in
answer to her pleadings, turned and fixed her with a dreadful stare.
It must have been a fortnight before she came round. She still had fits
of absent-mindedness, but little by little she began to talk, go outside
into the yard and work. Ever more often now the word "petition" was on her
lips. The first to utter it was old Skovorodnikov, then Aunt Dasha picked it
up, and after her the whole yard. A petition must be lodged!
That day Mother went out and took us with her-me and my sister. We were
going to the "Chambers" to hand in a petition. The "Chambers" were a dark
building behind tall iron railings in Market Square.
My sister and I waited for a long time, sitting on an iron seat in the
dimly lit high-ceilinged corridor. Messengers hurried to and fro with
papers, doors slammed. Then Mother came back, seized my sister's hand, and
we all started off at a run. The room we went into was barriered off, and I
couldn't see the person to whom Mother was speaking and bowing humbly. But I
heard a cold indifferent voice, and this voice, to my horror, was saying
something which I alone in all the world could disprove.
"Ivan Grigoriev..." I heard the rustle of pages being turned over.
"Article 1454 of the Criminal Code. Premeditated murder. What do you want,
my dear woman?"
"Your Honour," my mother said in a tense unfamiliar voice, "he's not
guilty. He never killed anyone."
"The court will go into that."
I had been standing all the time on tiptoes, my head thrown back so far
that it bade fair to drop off, but all I could see across the barrier was a
hand with long dry fingers, in which a pair of spectacles was being slowly
dangled.
"Your Honour," Mother said again, "I want to hand in a petition to the
court. Our whole yard has signed it."
"You may lodge a petition on payment of one ruble stamp duty."
"It's been paid. It wasn't his knife they found, Your Honour."
Knife? Had I heard aright?
"On that point we have the evidence of the accused himself."
"Maybe it was a week since he lost it."
Looking up, I could see Mother's lips trembling.
"Someone would have picked it up, my dear woman. Anyway, the court will
go into that."
I heard nothing more. At that moment it dawned on me why my father had
been arrested. It wasn't he, it was me who had lost that knife-an old
clasp-knife with a wooden handle. The knife I had searched for the morning
after the murder. The knife which could have dropped out of my pocket when I
bent over the watchman on the pontoon bridge. The knife on whose handle
Pyotr Sko-vorodnikov had burned out my name with a magnifying glass.
Looking back on it now I begin to realise that the officials who sat
behind high barriers in dimly-lit halls would not have believed my story
anyway. But at the time! The more I thought about it the heavier it weighed
on my mind. It was my fault, then, that they had arrested Father. It was my
fault that we were now going hungry. It was my fault that Mother had had to
sell the new cloth coat for which she had been saving a whole year, my fault
that she had had to go to the "Chambers" and speak in such an unfamiliar
voice and bow so humbly to that unseen person with the long, horrible, dry
fingers in which there slowly dangled a pair of spectacles.
Never before had I felt my dumbness so strongly.
CHAPTER FOUR THE VILLAGE
The last of the rafts had passed down the river. The lights in the
rafters' drifting huts were no longer visible at night when I woke up. There
was emptiness on the river, emptiness in the yard and emptiness in the
house.
Mother did washing in the hospital. She left the house first thing in
the morning while we were still asleep, and I went to the Skovorodnikovs and
listened to the old man swearing to himself.
Grey and unkempt, in steel-rimmed glasses, he sat on a low
leather-covered stool in the little dark kitchen, stitching boots. When he
was not stitching boots he was making nets or carving figures of birds and
horses out of aspen wood. He had brought this trade with him from the Volga,
where he had been born.
He was fond of me, probably because I was the only person he could talk
to without being answered back. He cursed doctors, officials, tradesmen,
and, with especial virulence, priests.
"If a man be dying, dare he murmur against it? The priests say no. But
I say yes! What is murmuring?"
I didn't know what murmuring meant.
"Murmuring is discontent. And what is discontent? It's wanting more
than's been allotted to you. The priests say you mustn't. Why?"
I didn't know why.
"Because 'dust thou art and to dust thou shalt return'. To the earth,
that is."
He gave a bitter laugh.
"And what does the earth need? No more than is allotted to it."
So it was autumn now, and even the crabs, which had lately become a
staple item in our domestic fare, had hidden themselves away in their holes
and refused to be enticed out by my frogs. We were going hungry, and Mother
finally decided to send me and my sister to the village.
I had never been in the country, but I knew that my father had a farm
there. A farm! How disappointed I was on discovering that this was simply a
cottage with a household plot, a little, overgrown vegetable garden in the
middle of which stood a few aged apple trees.
The house was a small one, which having once slumped on its side,
remained leaning sideways. The roof was tilted, the window-panes were
smashed and the base logs were bent. The Russian stove seemed to be all
right until we started a fire in it. Smoke-blackened benches were ranged
around the walls, and in one corner hung an icon, on whose grimy panels a
face could just be made out.
Whatever its faults, it was our house, and we undid our bundles,
stuffed out mattresses with straw, glazed the windows and settled down to
live in it.
Mother stayed with us only about three weeks, then went back to town.
Grandma Petrovna agreed to take her place. She was Father's aunt, and that
made her a sort of grandmother to us. She was a kind-hearted old'woman, even
though it was hard to get used to her grey beard and moustache. The only
drawback was that she herself needed looking after. In fact, my sister and I
looked after her all the winter, carrying water and heating her stove, since
her cottage, which was little better than ours, was quite close.
That winter I grew attached to my sister. She was getting on for eight.
Everyone in our family was dark, but she was fair, with fuzzy little
pigtails and blue eyes. We were all rather taciturn, especially Mother, but
my sister would start off talking the moment she opened her eyes. I never
saw her cry, and it was the easiest thing in the world to make her laugh.
Her name was Sanya, too, the same as mine-1 being Alexander and she
Alexandra. Aunt Dasha had taught her to sing, and every evening she sang
long songs in such a serious, thin little voice that you couldn't help
laughing.
And how handy she was at housekeeping, and she only seven, mind you! Of
course, running the house was a simple affair-in one corner of the attic lay
potatoes, in another beets, cabbages, onions and salt. For bread we went to
Petrovna's.
So there we were, two children in an empty house, in a remote snowed-up
village. Every morning we used to tread a path in the snow to Petrovna's
cottage. Only in the evenings did we feel a bit scared. It was so quiet you
could almost hear the soft sound of the falling snow, and amidst this
stillness the wind would suddenly start moaning in the chimney.
CHAPTER FIVE
DOCTOR IVAN IVANOVICH.
I LEARN TO SPEAK
Then one evening, when we had just gone to bed and my sister had just
fallen silent, dropping off to sleep as she always did with the last uttered
word, and that saddening hush fell upon the world, with the wind beginning
to moan in the chimney, I heard a tap on the window.
A tall bearded man in a sheepskin coat and cap with ear-flaps stood
there; he was so stiff with cold that when I lit the lamp and let him in he
could not even close the door behind him. Screening the light with my hand,
I noticed that his nose was quite white-frost-nipped. He bent to take off
his knapsack and suddenly sat down on the floor.
That was how he first appeared before me, the man I am indebted to for
being able to write this story-frozen almost to death, crawling towards me
on all fours. He tried to put his trembling fingers into his mouth, and sat
on the floor breathing heavily. I started to help him off with his coat. He
muttered something and slumped over on his side in a dead faint.
I had once seen Mother lying in a faint and Aunt Dasha had breathed
into her mouth. I did exactly the same now. My visitor was lying by the warm
stove and I don't know what it was in the end that brought him round; I only
knew that I blew like mad till I felt dizzy. However that may be, he came
to, sat up and began warming himself up vigorously. The colour returned to
his nose. He even attempted a smile when I poured him out a mug of hot
water.
"Are you children alone here?"
Before Sanya could answer "Yes," the man was asleep. He dropped off so
suddenly that I was afraid he had died. But as though in answer to my
thoughts he started to snore.
He came round properly the next day. I woke up to find him sitting on
the stove ledge with my sister and they were talking. She already knew that
his name was Ivan Ivanovich, that he had lost his way, and that we were not
to say a word about him to anyone, otherwise they'd put him in irons. I
remember that my sister and I grasped at once that our visitor was in some
sort of danger and we tacitly decided never to breathe a word about him to
anyone. It was easier for me, of course, to keep quiet, than it was for
Sanya.
Ivan Ivanovich sat on the stove ledge with his hands tucked under him,
listening while she chattered away. He had been told everything:
that Father had been put in prison, that we handed in a petition, that
Mother had brought us here and gone back to town, that I was dumb, that
Grandma Petrovna lived here-second house from the well-and that she, too,
had a beard, only it was smaller and grey.
"Ah, you little darlings," said Ivan Ivanovich, jumping down from
the stove.
He had light-coloured eyes, but his beard was black and smooth. At
first I thought it strange that he made so many unnecessary gestures; it
seemed as if at any moment he would reach for his ear round the back of his
head or scratch the sole of his foot. But I soon got used to him. When
talking, he would suddenly pick something up and begin tossing it in the air
or balancing it on his hand like a juggler.
"I say, children, I'm a doctor, you know," he said one day. "You just
tell me if there's anything wrong with you. I'll put you right in
a tick."
We were both well, but for some reason he refused to go and see the
village elder, whose daughter was sick.
But in such a position
I'm in a terrible funk
In case the Inquisition
Is tipped off by the monk,
he said with a laugh,
It was from him that I first heard poetry. He often quoted verses,
sometimes even sang them or muttered them, his eyebrows raised as he
squatted before the fire Turkish fashion.
At first he seemed pleased that I couldn't ask him anything, especially
when he woke up in the night at the slightest sound of steps outside the
window and lay for a long time leaning on his elbow, listening. Or when he
hid himself in the attic and sat there till dark-he spent a whole day there
once, I remember. St. George's Day it was. Or when he refused to meet
Petrovna.
But after two or three days he became interested in my dumbness.
"Why don't you speak? Don't you want to?"
I looked at him in silence.
"I tell you, you must speak. You can hear, so you ought to be able to
speak. It's a very rare case yours-I mean being dumb but not deaf. Maybe
you're deaf and dumb?"
I shook my head.
"In that case we're going to make you speak."
He took some instruments from his knapsack, complained about the light
being poor, though it was a bright sunny day, and started fiddling about
with my ear.
"Ear vulgaris," he remarked with satisfaction. "An ordinary ear."
He withdrew to a corner and whispered: "Sap."
"Did you hear that?"
I laughed.
"You've got a good ear, like a dog's." He winked at Sanya who was
staring at us open-mouthed. "You can hear splendidly. Why the dickens don't
you speak then?"
He took my tongue between his finger and thumb and pulled it out so far
that I got frightened and made a croaky sound.
"What a throat you have, my dear chap! A regular Chaliapin. Well,
well!"
He looked at me for a minute, then said gravely: "You'll have to learn,
old chap. Can you talk to yourself at all? In your mind?"
He tapped my forehead.
"In your head-get me?"
I mumbled an affirmative.
"What about saying it aloud then? Say out loud whatever you can.' Now,
then, say 'yes'."
I could hardly say anything. Nevertheless I did bring out a "yes".
"Fine! Try again."
I said it again.
"Now whistle."
I whistled.
"Now say 'oo'."
I said "oo".
"You're a lazybones, that's what the matter with you! Now, then, repeat
after me..."
He did not know that I spoke everything in my mind. I'm sure that's the
reason why I have remembered my earliest years so distinctly. But my dumb
mental speech fell far short of all those "ees", '"os" and "yoos", of all
those unfamiliar movements of lips, tongue and throat in which the simplest
words got stuck. I managed to repeat after him separate sounds, chiefly
vowel sounds, but putting them together and uttering them smoothly, without
"barking", the way he bade me, was some job.
Three words I coped with at once: they were "ear", "mamma" and "stove".
It was as if I had pronounced them before and merely had to recall them. As
a matter of fact that's how it was. Mother told that I had begun to speak at
the age of two and then had suddenly gone dumb after an illness.
My teacher slept on the floor, slipping some shiny metallic object
under his mattress and using his sheepskin coat as a blanket, but I kept
tossing about, drinking water, sitting up in bed and gazing at the frostwork
on the window. I was thinking of how I would go home and start talking to
Mother and Aunt Dasha. I recollected the moment when I first realised that I
couldn't speak: it was in the evening, and Mother thought I was asleep;
pale, erect, with black plaits hanging down in front, she gazed at me for a
long time. It was then that there first occurred to me the bitter thought
that was to poison my early years: "I'm not as good as others, and she's
ashamed of me."
I kept repeating "åå", "î", "óîî" all night, too happy to go to sleep I
did not doze off until dawn. Sanya woke me when the day was full.
"I've been over to Grandma's, and you're still asleep," she rattled
off. "Grandma's kitten has got lost. Where's Ivan Ivanovich?"
His mattress lay on the floor and you could still see the depressions
where his head, shoulders and legs had been. But Ivan Ivanovich himself was
not there. He used to put his knapsack under his head, but that too was
missing. He used to cover himself with his sheepskin coat, but that too was
gone.
"Ivan Ivanovich!"
We ran up into the attic, but there was nobody there.
"I swear to God he was asleep when I went to Grandma's. I remember
looking at him and thinking: while he's asleep I'll run over to Grandma's.
Oh, Sanya, look!"
On the table lay a little black tube with two round knobs at the ends,
one of them flat and slightly bigger, the other small and deeper. We
remembered that Ivan Ivanovich had taken this from his knapsack together
with other instruments when he had looked into my ear.
Where had he gone? Ivan Ivanovich!
He had vanished, gone without saying a word to anyone!
CHAPTER SIX
FATHER 'S DEATH.
I REFUSE TO SPEAŠ
All through the winter I practised speaking. First thing in the
morning, barely awake, I uttered loudly six words which Ivan Ivanovich had
instructed me to say every day: "hen", "saddle", "box", "snow", "drink" and
"Abraham". How difficult it was! And how well, how differently my sister
pronounced these words.
But I kept at it. I repeated them a thousand times a day, like an
incantation that was to help me somehow. I even dreamed them. I dreamed of
some mysterious Abraham putting a hen in a box or going out of the house in
a hat, carrying a saddle on his shoulder.
My tongue would not obey me, my lips barely stirred. Many a time I felt
like hitting Sanya, who could not help laughing at me. In the night I woke
up, heavy with misery, feeling that II would never learn to speak and would
always remain a freak, as my Mother had once called me. The next moment I
was trying to pronounce that word too-"freak". I remember succeeding at last
and falling asleep happy.
The day when, on waking up, I did not utter my six magic words, was one
of the saddest in my life.
Petrovna woke us early that day, which was odd in itself, because it
was we who usually went to her in the mornings to light the fire and put on
the kettle. She came in, tapping her stick and stopped in front of the icon.
She stood there for some time, muttering and crossing herself. Then she
called to my sister and bade her laght the lamp.
Years later, a grown-up man, I saw a picture of Baba-Yaga in a
fairy-tale book. She was the image of Petrovna-the same bent, bearded figure
leaning on a gnarled stick. But Petrovna was a kind Baba-Yaga, and that day
... that day she sat down on a bench with a heavy sigh, and I even thought I
saw tears rolling down her beard. "Get down, Sanya!" she said. "Come to me."
I went up to her.
"You're a big boy now, Sanya," she went on, patting me on the head.
"Yesterday a letter came from your mother saying that Ivan is ill."
She wept.
"He was taken very bad in prison. His head and legs have swollen up.
She writes that she doesn't know whether he's still alive or not." My sister
started crying.
"Ah well, it's God's will," Petrovna said. "God's will," she repeated
with angry vehemence and looked up at the icon again.
She had only told us that Father had fallen ill, but that evening, in
church, I realised that he was dead. Grandma had taken us to church to "pray
for his health", as she said.
Oddly enough, after three months spent in the village, I hardly knew
anybody except two or three boys with whom I went: skiing. I never went
anywhere because I was ashamed of my handicap. And now, in church, I saw our
whole village-a crowd of women and old men, poorly dressed, silent and as
cheerless as we were. They stood in darkness; candles were burning only in
the front, where thie priest was reading prayers in a long-drawn-out manner.
Many people were sighing and crossing themselves.
They were doing this because he was dead, and my sister and I were
standing in the darkness of the church because he had died. And we were
standing and "praying for his health" because he was dead.
Petrovna took my sister back with her, and I went home and sat on for a
long time without lighting the lamp. The cockroaches, which Grandma had
brought to us on purpose-for good luck-rustled on the cold stove. I ate
potatoes and wept.
Dead, and I would never see him again! There they were, carrying him
out of the Chambers, out of that room where Mother and I had handed in the
petition... I stopped eating and clenched my teeth at the memory of that
cold voice and the hand with the long dry fingers slowly dangling a pair of
spectacles. You wait! I'll pay you back for this! Some day you'll be bowing
to me, and I'll tell you: "My dear man, the court will go into this..."
There they were, bearing the coffin down the corridor, while messengers
hurried past with papers and nobody sees or cares to see him being carried
out. Only Aunt Dasha comes forward to meet it in a black shawl, like a nun.
She comes forward, weeping. Then we stop, someone stands at the door, the
coffin sways in the men's hands and is lowered to the floor. Mother bows,
and looking up, I can see her lips quivering.
I came to myself at the sound of my own voice. I must have been
feverish, because I was uttering some incoherent nonsense, cursing myself
and also, for some reason, my mother, and carrying on a conversation with
Ivan Ivanovich, although I knew perfectly well that he had left long ago and
that even his tracks in the field had kept for only two days until the snow
had covered them up.
But I had spoken-spoken loudly and clearly! I could now speak and
explain what had happened that night on the pontoon bridge;
I could show that knife was mine, that I had lost it when I bent over
the murdered man. Too late! A whole lifetime too late; he was now beyond any
help of mine.
I lay in the dark with my head in my hands. It was cold indoors, my
feet were chilled, but I stayed like that till morning. I decided that I
would not speak any more. Why should I? All the same he was dead and I would
never see him again. It did not matter any more.
CHAPTER SEVEN MOTHER
I have no very clear memory of the February Revolution, and until our
return to town I did not understand that word. But I do remember associating
all the strange excitement and puzzling talk around me with my nocturnal
visitor who had taught me to speak.
Spring passed before I was aware of it. But summer began on the day
when the Neptune, hooting and backing in a menacing way, moored alongside
the warf where Mother and us two had been waiting for it since the morning.
We were going back to town. Mother was taking us home. She looked thinner
and younger, and was wearing a new coat and a new brightly coloured shawl.
I had often thought, during the winter, of how astonished she would be
to hear me speak. But she only embraced me and laughed. She had changed a
lot during the winter. All the time she was thinking about something-I could
tell that by the quick changes of expression in her face: at one moment she
looked anxious and was silent, the next she smiled, all to herself. Petrovna
decided that she was going mad, and one day she asked her about it. Mother
smiled and said she wasn't. In our presence she rarely mentioned Father, but
whenever she spoke kindly to me I knew she was thinking of him. My sister
she had always loved.
On the boat her mind was busy all the time. She kept raising her
eyebrows and shaking her head, as if arguing with somebody mentally.
How poor and neglected our yard seemed to me when we got home! That
year nobody had seen to the drain ditches, and the muddy water with bits of
wood floating on it, had remained standing under every porch. The low sheds
looked more ramshackle than ever, and the gaps in the fence were wide enough
to drive a cart through, while back of the Skovorodnikovs' house a mountain
of stinking bones, hoofs and scraps of hides lay piled up.
The old man was making glue. "Everybody thinks this is just ordinary
glue," he said to me. "It's an all-purpose glue. It'll fix anything-iron,
glass, even bricks, if anyone's fool enough to want to glue bricks together.
I invented it myself. Skovorodnikov's Skin Glue. And the stronger it stinks
the stronger it sticks."
He regarded me suspiciously over the top of his glasses.
"Well, let's hear you say something."
I spoke. He nodded approvingly.
"Ah, that's too bad about Ivan!"
Aunt Dasha was away, and did not come back before a couple of weeks. If
there was anyone I gladdened-and frightened too-it was she! We were sitting
in the kitchen in the evening, and she kept asking me how we had lived in
the village, and answered her own questions.
"Poor things, you must have felt pretty lonesome out there, all on your
own. Who cooked for you? Petrovna? Petrovna."
"No, not Petrovna," I said suddenly. "We did our own cooking."
I shall never forget the look on Aunt Dasha's face when I uttered those
words. Her mouth fell open and she shook her head and hiccupped.
"And we weren't lonely," I added, laughing heartily. "We missed you,
though, Aunt Dasha. Why didn't you come to see us?"
She hugged me.
"My darling, what's this? You can speak? You're able to speak? And he
keeps quiet, pretending, the young rascal! Well, tell me all about it."
And I told her about the freezing doctor who had knocked at our cottage
one night, how we had hidden him for three days and nights, how he had
taught me to say "åå", "î" and "yoo" and the word 'ear'
CHAPTER EIGHT
PYOTR SKOVORODNIKOV
Aunt Dasha said that I had changed a lot since I had begun to speak. I
felt this myself too. The previous summer I had shunned the other boys,
restrained by a painful sense of my own deficiency. I was morbidly shy,
sullen, and very sad. Now I was so different it was hard to believe.
In two or three months I had caught up with the boys of my own age.
Pyotr Skovorodnikov, who was twelve, became my best friend. He was a lanky,
ginger boy with a will of his own.
It was at Pyotr's that I saw books for the first time in my life. They
were Tales of Derringdo in Previous Wars, Yuri Miloslavsky and A Guide to
Letter Writing on the cover of which was a picture of a bewhiskered young
man in a red shirt with a pen in his hand, and above him, in a pale-blue
oval frame, young woman.
It was over this Guide to Letter Writing which we read together, that
we became friends. There was something mysterious about those different
modes of address: "My dear friend", or "Dear Sir". I was reminded of the
navigating officer's letter and recited it aloud for the first time.
We were sitting in Cathedral Gardens. Across the river we could see OUT
yard and the houses, looking very small, much smaller than they really were.
There was tiny Aunt Dasha coming out onto her doorstep and sitting down
there to clean fish. I could almost see the silvery scales flying about and
falling glistening at her feet. And there was Karlusha, the town's madman,
always scowling or grinning, walking along the bank and stopping at our
gate-to talk to Aunt Dasha, probably.
I kept looking at them all the time I was reciting the letter. Pyotr
listened attentively.
"Gee, isn't that smashing!" he said. "What a memory. I knew it, too,
but I'd forgotten it." Unfortunately, we rarely spent our time together so
well. Pyotr was busy; he was employed "selling cigarettes for the Chinese".
The Chinese, who lived in the Pokrovsky quarter, made cigarettes and
employed boys to sell them. I can see one of them as if he were before me
now, a man named Li-small, sallow, with a weazened face, but fairly
good-natured: he was considered more generous with the "treat" allowance
than the other Chinese. This allowance formed our clear wage (later I, too,
took up this trade). We were allowed to treat everyone-"Please, have a
smoke"-but the customer who was naive enough to accept the invitation always
paid cash down for it. This money was ours. The cigarettes were packed in
boxes of two hundred and fifty, labelled "Katyk", "Alexander III", and we
sold them at the railway station, alongside the trains, and on the
boulevards.
The autumn of 1917 was drawing near, and I should not be telling the
truth if I tried to make out that I saw, felt or in the least understood the
profound significance of those days for me, for the entire country and the
world at large. I saw nothing and understood nothing. I had even forgotten
the vague excitement which I had experienced in the spring, when we were
living in the country. I simply lived from day to day, trading in cigarettes
and catching crabs-yellow, green and grey crabs, with never any luck for a
blue one.
This easy life was to end all too soon, however.
CHAPTER NINE
STROKE, STROKE, STROKE, FIVE, TWENTY, A HUNDRED...
He must have been coming to our place before we got back to town,
because everyone in the yard knew him, and that attitude of faint amusement
towards him on the part of the Skovorodnikovs and Aunt Dasha had already
taken shape. But now he began to call nearly every day. Sometimes he brought
something, but, honestly, I never ate a single of his plums, or his pods, or
his caramels.
He had curly hair-even his moustache was curly-and he was pie-faced,
but fairly well-built. He had a deep voice, which I found very unpleasant.
He was taking treatment for black-heads, which were very noticeable on his
swarthy skin. But for all his pimples and curls, for all his deep repulsive
voice, Mother, unfortunately, had taken a fancy to him. Why else should he
be visiting us almost every day? Yes, she liked him. She became quite a
different woman when he was there, laughing and almost as talkative as he
was. Once I found her sitting by herself, smiling, and I guessed from her
face that she was thinking of him. On another occasion, when talking to Aunt
Dasha, she said of someone: "Ever so many abnormalities." Those words were
his.
His name was Timoshkin, but for some reason he called himself
Scaramouch-to this day I can't make out what he meant by it. I only remember
that he liked to tell my mother that "life had tossed him about like a
twig". In saying this he would put on a meaningful look and gaze at Mother
with an air of fatuous profundity.
And this Scaramouch now visited us every evening. Here is one such
evening.
The kitchen lamp hangs on the wall and my shock-headed shadow covers
the exercise book, ink-well and my hand as it moves the squeaky pen
laboriously across the paper.
I am sitting at the table, my tongue pushing out my cheek with the
effort of concentration, and tracing strokes with my pen-one stroke, a
second, a third, a hundredth, a thousandth. I must have made a million
strokes, because my teacher had declared that until they are "popindicular",
I cannot make any further progress. He is sitting beside me, teaching me,
with now and again an indulgent glance at Mother. He teaches me not only how
to write, but how to live, too, and those endless stupid moralisings make me
feel dizzy. The strokes come out wonky, pot-bellied, anything but straight
and "popindicular".
"Every man's keen to snatch his titbit from life," he said. "And that's
what everyone should go after, it's only natural, man is made that way. But
will such a titbit guarantee security-that's another matter."
Stroke, stroke, stroke, five, twenty, a hundred...
"Now take me. I got into a difficult atmosphere from a child, and I
could never count on my mother's labour power. That was out of the question.
On the contrary, when our domestic affairs went to wrack and ruin and my
father, accused of horse-stealing, was sentenced to imprisonment, it was I,
and no other, who was obliged to become the breadwinner."
Stroke, stroke, fat one, thin one, crooked one, five, twenty, a
hundred...
"The saddest thing of all was that my father, on coming out of prison,
took to drink, and when a man indulges in liquor his house goes to wrack and
ruin. Then death struck him down, most sudden and untimely, being the result
of his skinning the carcass of a horse."
I know exactly what happened afterwards to my teacher's father. He
became bloated and "the coffin they'd started to make had to be altered in a
hurry, because the figure of the dead man was three times its living size".
I once dreamt of this horrid death.
Stroke, stroke, stroke... The pen squeaks, stroke, blot...
"And so our family hearth became desolated. But I did not lose heart
and did not become a burden to my mother at the age of eleven."
My teacher looks at me. Though I'm only ten, I begin to fidget uneasily
on my stool.
"I entered the employ of a restaurant, and became a servant and
errand-boy, but was no longer an extra mouth living on my mother's
earnings."
My mother is sitting at the same table, listening to him spellbound.
She is mending shirts-Father's shirts-and I know who she is mending them
for. It is with presentiment of ill that I look up at my mother's pale face,
at her black hair parted in the middle, at her slim hands-and turn back to
my strokes. I feel like drawing one long line through the strokes, they
would make a lovely fence-but I mustn't. The strokes must be "popindicular".
"Meanwhile," Scaramouch goes on, "my mother became noticeably addicted
to acts of charity. What do I do? Seeing that this tendency was adversely
affecting my development I turned to my uncle Nikita Zuyev of
never-to-be-forgotten memory, and asked him to influence my mother."
This was the hundredth time I was hearing about that uncle of
never-to-be-forgotten memory, and I pictured a fat old man with the same
pimply face arriving in the village in a wide country sledge, taking off his
yellow sheepskin coat as he comes in, and crossing himself in front of the
icon. He beats the mother, while little Scaramouch stands by and calmly
watches his mother being beaten.
Strokes, strokes... But the fence is there already-done long ago, and
though I know very well what I am in for, I quickly draw the sun, some birds
and clouds above the fence. Scaramouch glances at me as he talks, and I
hastily cover up the sun and the birds with my sleeve. Too late! He picks up
my exercise book. His eyebrows go up. I stand up.
"Now just have a look, Aksinya Fyodorovna, what your dear little son
has been doing!"
And my mother, who had never beaten us children while Father was alive,
seizes my ear and bangs my head on the table.
My lessons came to an end the day that Scaramouch moved into our house.
The day before that there had been the wedding, which Aunt Dasha, pleading
illness, did not attend. I remember how smart Mother looked at the wedding.
She wore a jacket of white velvet, a gift from the bridegroom, and had her
hair done like a girl's, with braids wound crosswise round her head. She
talked and drank and smiled, but every now and then she passed her hand
across her face with a strange expression. Scaramouch made a speech in which
he drew attention to the service he was rendering the poor family, which was
"definitely heading for ruin inasmuch as its erstwhile breadwinner had left
behind him a scene of devastation", and mentioned, among other things, that
he had opened to me the door of "general education", by which he evidently
meant those "popindicular" strokes of his.
I don't think Mother heard the speech at all. She sat with lowered head
at her bridegroom's side, and then, with a sudden frown, stared in front of
her with a look of perplexity.
Skovorodnikov, who had been drinking heavily, went up to her and
slapped her on the shoulder.
"Ah, Aksinya, you've given a lark to catch a..."
She smiled weakly, hastily.
For about two months after the wedding my stepfather worked in the
wharf office, and though it was very painful to see him come in and sprawl
in the place where my father used to sit, and eat with his spoon from his
plate, life was bearable so long as I kept to myself, ran away and did not
return home until he was asleep. But shortly he was kicked out of the office
for some shady business, and then life became unbearable. The unhappy idea
of taking in hand our upbringing, my and my sister's, entered that muddled
head of his, and from then on I did not have a moment to myself.
Looking back, I realise that he had been employed in his youth as a
servant. Obviously, he must have seen somewhere all those absurd and queer
things he was making me and my sister perform.
First of all, he demanded that we come and greet him in the morning,
though we slept on the floor within two paces of his bed. And we did so. But
no power on earth could force me to say: "Good morning. Daddy!" It wasn't a
good morning, and he wasn't Daddy. We dare not sit down at the table before
him, and we had to ask permission to get up. We had to thank him, though
Mother still did the washing at the hospital, and my sister cooked the
dinner, which was bought with Mother's money and mine. I remember the
despair that seized me when poor Sanya ros