My Childhood (31 page)

But this form of existence did not last long. My stepfather, dismissed for getting into debt, had disappeared again, and mother came back to grandfather, with my little brother Nikolai, and I had to be nurse, for grandmother had gone to live at the house of a rich merchant in the town, where she worked at stitching shrouds.

Mother was so weak and anemic that she could hardly walk, and she had a terrible expression in her eyes as she looked about her. My brother was scrofulous, and covered with painful ulcers, and so weak that he could not even cry aloud and only whimpered when he was hungry. When he had been fed he slumbered, breathing with a strange sound like the soft mewing of a kitten.

Observing him attentively, grandfather said:

"He ought to have plenty of good food; but I have not got enough to feed you all."

Mother, sitting on the bed in the corner, sighed, and said in a hoarse voice:

"He does not want much."

"A little for one and a little for another soon mounts up."

He waved his hand as he turned to me:

"Nikolai must be kept out in the sun--in some sand."

I dragged out a sack of clean sand, turned it out in a heap in a place where the sun was full on it, and buried my brother in it up to his neck, as grandfather told me. The little boy loved sitting in the sand; he cooed sweetly, and flashed his bright eyes upon me --extraordinary eyes they were, without whites, just blue pupils surrounded by brilliant rings.

I became attached to my little brother at once. It seemed to me that he understood all my thoughts as I lay beside him on the sand under the window, whence the sound of grandfather's shrill voice proceeded:

"If he dies--and he won't have much difficulty about it--you will have a chance to live."

Mother answered by a long fit of coughing.

Getting his hands free, the little boy held them out to me, shaking his small white head; he had very little hair, and what there was was almost gray, and his tiny face had an old and wise expression. If a hen or a cat came near us Kolai would gaze at it for a long time, then he would look at me and smile almost significantly. That smile of his disturbed me. Was it possible that he felt that I found it dull being with him, and was longing to run out to the street and leave him there?

The yard was small, close, and dirty; from the gate were built a succession of sheds and cellars ending at the washhouse. All the roofs were made of pieces of old boats--logs, boards, and damp bits of wood which had been secured by the inhabitants of the neighborhood when the ice was breaking on the Oka, or at flood-time--and the whole yard was an unsightly conglomeration of heaps of wood of all sorts, which, being saturated with water, sweated in the sun and emitted an intensified odor of rottenness.

Next door there was a slaughter-house for the smaller kind of cattle, and almost every morning could be heard the bellowing of calves and the bleating of sheep, and the smell of blood became so strong sometimes that it seemed to me that it hovered in the air in the shape of a transparent, purple net.

When the animals bellowed as the butt-end of the ax struck them between the horns, Kolai would blink and blow out his lips, as if he wanted to imitate the sound; but all he could do was to breathe:

"Phoo . . ."

At midday grandfather, putting his head out of the window, would call:

"Dinner!"

He used to feed the child himself, holding him on his knees, pressing potatoes and bread into Kolai's mouth, and smearing them all over his thin lips and pointed chin. When he had given him a little food grandfather would lift up the little boy's shirt, poke his swollen stomach with his fingers, and debate with himself aloud:

"Will that do? Or must I give him some more?"

Then my mother's voice would be heard, proceeding from her dark corner:

"Look at him! He is reaching for the bread."

"Stupid child! How can he possibly know how much he ought to eat?" And again he gave Kolai something to chew.

I used to feel ashamed when I looked on at this feeding business; a lump seemed to rise in my throat and make me feel sick.

"That will do," grandfather would say, at length. "Take him to his mother."

I took Kolai; he wailed and stretched his hands out to the table. Mother, raising herself with difficulty, came to meet me, holding out her hideously dry, fleshless arms, so long and thin--just like branches broken off a Christmas-tree.

She had become almost dumb, hardly ever uttering a word in that passionate voice of hers, but lying in silence all day long in her corner--slowly dying. That she was dying I felt, I knew--yes. And grandfather spoke too often, in his tedious way, of death, especially in the evening, when it grew dark in the yard, and a smell of rottenness, warm and woolly, like a sheep's fleece, crept in at the window.

Grandfather's bed stood in the front corner, almost under the image, and he used to lie there with his head towards it and the window, and mutter for a long time in the darkness:

"Well--the time has come for us to die. How shall we stand before our God? What shall we say to Him? All our life we have been struggling. What have we done? And with what object have we done it?"

I slept on the floor between the stove and the window; I had not enough room, so I had to put my feet in the oven, and the cockroaches used to tickle them. This corner afforded me not a little malicious enjoyment, for grandfather was continually breaking the window with the end of the oven-rake, or the poker, during his cooking operations; and it was very comical to see, and very strange, I thought, that any one so clever as grandfather should not think of cutting down the rake.

One day when there was something boiling in a pot on the fire he was in a hurry, and he used the rake so carelessly that he broke the window-frame, two panes of glass, and upset the saucepan on the hearth and broke it. The old man was in such a rage that he sat on the floor and cried.

"OLord! OLord!"

That day, when he had gone out, I took a bread knife and cut the oven-rake down to a quarter or a third of its size; but when grandfather saw what I had done, he scolded me:

"Cursed devil! It ought to have been sawn through with a saw. We might have made rollingpins out of the end, and sold them, you devil's spawn!"

Throwing his arms about wildly, he ran out of the door, and mother said:

"You ought not to have meddled . . ."

She died one Sunday in August about midday. My stepfather had only just returned from his travels, and had obtained a post somewhere. Grandmother had taken Kolai to him--to a newly done-up flat near the station, and mother was to be carried there in a few days.

In the morning of the day of her death she said to me in a low but a lighter and clearer voice than I had heard from her lately:

"Go to Eugen Vassilev, and ask him to come to me."

Lifting herself up in bed by pressing her hands against the wall, she added:

"Run--quickly!"

I thought she was smiling, and that there was a new light in her eyes.

My stepfather was at Mass, and grandmother sent me to get some snuff for her; there was no prepared snuff at hand, so I had to wait while the shopkeeper got it, then I took it back to grandmother.

When I returned to grandfather's, mother was sitting at the table dressed in a clean, lilac-colored frock, with her hair prettily dressed, and looking as splendid as she used to look.

"You are feeling better?" I asked, with a feeling of inexplicable fear.

Looking at me fixedly, she said:

"Come here! Where have you been? Eh?"

Before I had time to reply, she seized me by the hair, and grasping in her other hand a long, flexible knife, made out of a saw, she nourished it several times and struck me with the flat of it. It slipped from her hands to the floor.

"Pick it up and give it to me. . . ."

I picked up the knife and threw it on the table, and mother pushed me away from her. I sat on the ledge of the stove and watched her movements in a state of terror.

Rising from the chair she slowly made her way towards her own corner, lay down on the bed, and wiped her perspiring face with a handkerchief. Her hands moved uncertainly; twice she missed her face and touched the pillow instead.

"Give me some water. . . ."

I scooped some water out of a pail with a cup, and lifting her head with difficulty, she drank a little. Then she pushed my hand away with her cold hand, and drew a deep breath. Then after looking at the corner where the icon was, she turned her eyes on me, moved her lips as if she were smiling, and slowly let her long lashes droop over her eyes. Her elbows were pressed closely against her sides, and her hands, on which the fingers were weakly twitching, crept about her chest, moving towards her throat. A shadow fell upon her face, invading every part of it, staining the skin yellow, sharpening the nose. Her mouth was open as if she were amazed at something, but her breathing was not audible. I stood, for how long I do not know, by my mother's bedside, with the cup in my hand, watching her face grow frozen and gray.

When grandfather came in I said to him:

"Mother is dead."

He glanced at the bed.

"Why are you telling lies?"

He went to the stove and took out the pie, rattling the dampers deafeningly.

I looked at him, knowing that mother was dead, and waiting for him to find it out.

My stepfather came in dressed in a sailor's peajacket, with a white cap. He noiselessly picked up a chair and took it over to mother's bed, when suddenly he let it fall with a crash to the floor and cried in a loud voice, like a trumpet:

"Yes--she is dead! Look!"

Grandfather, with wide-open eyes, softly moved away from the stove with the damper in his hand, stumbling like a blind man.

A few days after my mother's funeral, grandfather said to me:

"Now, Lexei--you must not hang round my neck. There is no room for you here. You will have to go out into the world."

And so I went out into the world.

THE END

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