My Childhood (4 page)

My uncles began to abuse each other, but grandfather all at once grew calm, put a poultice of grated potatoes on his finger, and silently went out, taking me with him.

They all said that Uncle Michael was to blame. I asked naturally if he would be whipped, or get a hiding.

"He ought to," answered grandfather, with a sidelong glance at me.

Uncle Michael, striking his hand upon the table, bawled at my mother: "Varvara, make your pup hold his jaw before I knock his head off."

"Go on, then; try to lay your hands on him!" replied my mother. And no one said another word.

She had a gift of pushing people out of her way, brushing them aside as it were, and making them feel very small by a few brief words like these. It was perfectly clear to me that they were all afraid of her; x even grandfather spoke to her more quietly than he spoke to the others. It gave me great satisfaction to observe this, and in my pride I used to say openly to my cousins: "My mother is a match for all of them." And they did not deny it.

But the events which happened on Saturday diminished my respect for my mother.

By Saturday I also had had time to get into trouble. I was fascinated by the ease with which the grown-up people changed the color of different materials; they took something yellow, steeped it in black dye, and it came out dark blue. They laid a piece of gray stuff in reddish water and it was dyed mauve. It was quite simple, yet to me it was inexplicable. I longed to dye something myself, and I confided my desire to Sascha Yaakovitch, a thoughtful boy, always in favor with his elders, always good-natured, obliging, and ready to wait upon every one.

The adults praised him highly for his obedience and his cleverness, but grandfather looked on him with no favorable eye, and used to say:

"An artful beggar that!"

Thin and dark, with prominent, watchful eyes, Sascha Yaakov used to speak in a low, rapid voice, as if his words were choking him, and all the while he talked he glanced fearfully from side to side as if he were ready to run away and hide himself on the slightest pretext. The pupils of his hazel eyes were stationary except when he was excited, and then they became merged into the whites. I did not like him. I much preferred the despised idler, Sascha Michailovitch. He was a quiet boy, with sad eyes and a pleasing smile, very like his kind mother. He had ugly, protruding teeth, with a double row in the upper jaw; and being very greatly concerned about this defect, he constantly had his fingers in his mouth, trying to loosen his back ones, very amiably allowing any one who chose to inspect them. But that was the only interesting thing about him. He lived a solitary life in a house swarming with people, loving to sit in the dim corners in the daytime, and at the window in the evening; quite happy if he could remain without speaking, with his face pressed against the pane for hours together, gazing at the flock of jackdaws which, now rising high above it, now sinking swiftly earthwards, in the red evening sky, circled round the dome of Uspenski Church, and finally, obscured by an opaque black cloud, disappeared somewhere, leaving a void behind them. When he had seen this he had no desire to speak of it, but a pleasant languor took possession of him.

Uncle Jaakov's Sascha, on the contrary, could talk about everything fluently and with authority, like a grown-up person. Hearing of my desire to learn the process of dyeing, he advised me to take one of the best white tablecloths from the cupboard and dye it blue.

"White always takes the color better, I know," he said very seriously.

I dragged out a heavy tablecloth and ran with it to the yard, but I had no more than lowered the hem of it into the vat of dark-blue dye when Tsiganok flew at me from somewhere, rescued the cloth, and wringing it out with his rough hands, cried to my cousin, who had been looking on at my work from a safe place:

"Call your grandmother quickly."

And shaking his black, dishevelled head ominously, he said to me:

"You 'll catch it for this."

Grandmother came running on to the scene, wailing, and even weeping, at the sight, and scolded me in her ludicrous fashion:

"Oh, you young pickle! I hope you will be spanked for this."

Afterwards, however, she said to Tsiganok: "You need n't say anything about this to grandfather, Vanka. I 'll manage to keep it from him. Let us hope that something will happen to take up his attention."

Vanka replied in a preoccupied manner, drying his hands on his multi-colored apron:

"Me? I shan't tell: but you had better see that that Sascha does n't go and tell tales."

"I will give him something to keep him quiet," said grandmother, leading me into the house.

On Saturday, before vespers, I was called into the kitchen, where it was all dark and still. I remember the closely shut doors of the shed and of the room, and the gray mist of an autumn evening, and the heavy patter of rain. Sitting in front of the stove on a narrow bench, looking cross and quite unlike himself, was Tsiganok; grandfather, standing in the chimney corner, was taking long rods out of a pail of water, measuring them, putting them together, and flourishing them in the air with a shrill whistling sound. Grandmother, somewhere in the shadows, was taking snuff noisily and muttering:

"Now you are in your element, tyrant!"

Sascha Jaakov was sitting in a chair in the middle of the kitchen, rubbing his eyes with his knuckles, and whining like an old beggar in a voice quite unlike his usual voice:

"Forgive me, for Christ's sake. . . .!"

Standing by the chair, shoulder to shoulder, like wooden figures, stood the children of Uncle Michael, brother and sister.

"When I have flogged you I will forgive you," said grandfather, drawing a long, damp rod across his knuckles.

"Now then . . . take down your breeches!"

He spoke very calmly, and neither the sound of his voice nor the noise made by the boy as he moved on the squeaky chair, nor the scraping of grandmother's feet, broke the memorable stillness of that almost dark kitchen, under the low, blackened ceiling.

Sascha stood up, undid his trousers, letting them down as far as his knees, then bending and holding them up with his hands, he stumbled to the bench. It was painful to look at him, and my legs also began to tremble.

But worse was to come, when he submissively lay down on the bench face downwards, and Vanka, tying him to it by means of a wide towel placed under his arms and round his neck, bent under him and with black hands seized his legs by the ankles.

"Lexei!" called grandfather. "Come nearer! Come! Don't you hear me speaking to you? Look and see what a flogging is. . . . One!"

With a mild flourish he brought the rod down on the naked flesh, and Sascha set up a howl.

"Rubbish!" said grandfather. "That's nothing! . . . But here 's something to make you smart."

And he dealt such blows that the flesh was soon in a state of inflammation and covered with great red weals, and my cousin gave a prolonged howl.

"Is n't it nice?" asked grandfather, as his hand rose and fell. "You don't like it? . . . That's for the thimble!"

When he raised his hand with a flourish my heart seemed to rise too, and when he let his hand fall something within me seemed to sink.

"I won't do it again," squealed Sascha, in a dreadfully thin, weak voice, unpleasant to hear. "Did n't I tell--didn't I tell about the tablecloth?"

Grandfather answered calmly, as if he were reading the "Psalter":

"Tale-bearing is no justification. The informer gets whipped first, so take that for the tablecloth."

Grandmother threw herself upon me and seized my hand, crying: "I won't allow Lexei to be touched! I won't allow it, you monster!" And she began to kick the door, calling: "Varia! Varvara!"

Grandfather darted across to her, threw her down, seized me and carried me to the bench. I struck at him with my fists, pulled his sandy beard, and bit his fingers. He bellowed and held me as in a vice. In the end, throwing me down on the bench, he struck me on the face.

I shall never forget his savage cry: "Tie him up! I 'm going to kill him!" nor my mother's white face and great eyes as she ran along up and down beside the bench, shrieking:

"Father! You mustn't! Let me have him!"

Grandfather flogged me till I lost consciousness, and I was unwell for some days, tossing about, face downwards, on a wide, stuffy bed, in a little room with one window and a lamp which was always kept burning before the case of icons in the corner. Those dark days had been the greatest in my life. In the course of them I had developed wonderfully, and I was conscious of a peculiar difference in myself. I began to experience a new solicitude for others, and I became so
,s
keenly alive to their sufferings and my own that it was almost as if my heart had been lacerated, and thus rendered sensitive.

For this reason the quarrel between my mother and grandmother came as a great shock to me--when grandmother, looking so dark and big in the narrow room, flew into a rage, and pushing my mother into the corner where the icons were, hissed:

"Why did n't you take him away?"

"I was afraid."

"A strong, healthy creature like you! You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Varvara! I am an old woman and I am not afraid. For shame!"

"Do leave off, Mother; I am sick of the whole business."

"No, you don't love him! You have no pity for the poor orphan!"

"I have been an orphan all my life," said my mother, speaking loudly and sadly.

After that they both cried for a long time, seated on a box in a corner, and then my mother said:

"If it were not for Alexei, I would leave this place --and go right away. I can't go on living in this hell, Mother, I can't! I haven't the strength."

"Oh! My own flesh and blood!" whispered grandmother.

I kept all this in my mind. Mother was weak, and, like the others, she was afraid of grandfather, and I was preventing her from leaving the house in which she found it impossible to live. It was very unfortunate. Before long my mother really did disappear from the house, going somewhere on a visit.

Very soon after this, as suddenly as if he had fallen from the ceiling, grandfather appeared, and sitting on the bed, laid his ice-cold hands on my head.

"How do you do, young gentleman? Come! answer me. Don't sulk! Well? What have you to say?"

I had a great mind to kick away his legs, but it hurt me to move. His head, sandier than ever, shook from side to side uneasily; his bright eyes seemed to be looking for something on the wall as he pulled out of his pocket a gingerbread goat, a horn made of sugar, an apple and a cluster of purple raisins, which he placed on the pillow under my very nose.

"There you are! There 's a present for you."

And he stooped and kissed me on the forehead. Then, stroking my head with those small, cruel hands, yellow-stained about the crooked, claw-like nails, he began to speak.

"I left my mark on you then, my friend. You were very angry. You bit me and scratched me, and then I lost my temper too. However, it will do you no harm to have been punished more severely than you deserved. It will go towards next time. You must learn not to mind when people of your own family beat you. It is part of your training. It would be different if it came from an outsider, but from one of us it does not count. You must not allow outsiders to lay hands on you, but it is nothing coming from one of your own family. I suppose you think I was never flogged? Oleysha! I was flogged harder than you could ever imagine even in a bad dream. I was flogged so cruelly that God Himself might have shed tears to see it. And what was the result? I--an orphan, the son of a poor mother--have risen in my present position--the head of a guild, and a master workman."

Bending his withered, well-knit body towards me, he began to tell me in vigorous and powerful language, with a felicitous choice of words, about the days of his childhood. His green eyes were very bright, and his golden hair stood rakishly on end as, deflecting his high-pitched voice, he breathed in my face.

"You traveled here by steamboat . . . steam will take you anywhere now; but when I was young I had to tow a barge up the Volga all by myself. The barge was in the water and I ran barefoot on the bank, which was strewn with sharp stones. . . . Thus I went from early in the morning to sunset, with the sun beating fiercely on the back of my neck, and my head throbbing as if it were full of molten iron. And sometimes I was overcome by three kinds of ill-luck . . . my poor little bones ached, but I had to keep on, and I could not see the way; and then my eyes brimmed over, and I sobbed my heart out as the tears rolled down. Ah! Oleysha! it won't bear talking about.

"I went on and on till the towing-rope slipped from me and I fell down on my face, and I was not sorry for it either! I rose up all the stronger. If I had not rested a minute I should have died.

"That is the way we used to live then in the sight of God and of our Blessed Lord Jesus Christ. This is the way I took the measure of Mother Volga three times, from Simbirsk to Ribinsk, from there to Saratov, as far as Astrakhan and Markarev, to the Fair-- more than three thousand versts. And by the fourth year I had become a free water-man. I had shown my master what I was made of."

As he spoke he seemed to increase in size like a cloud before my very eyes, being transformed from a small, wizened old man to an individual of fabulous strength. Had he not pulled a great gray barge up the river all by himself1? Now and again he jumped up from the bed and showed me how the barges traveled with the towing-rope round them, and how they pumped water, singing fragments of a song in a bass voice; then, youthfully springing back on the bed, to my ever-increasing astonishment, he would continue hoarsely and impressively.

"Well, sometimes, Oleysha, on a summer's evening when we arrived at Jigulak, or some such place at the foot of the green hills, we used to sit about lazily cooking our supper while the boatmen of the hill-country used to sing sentimental songs, and as soon as they began the whole crew would strike up, sending a thrill through one, and making the Volga seem as if it were running very fast like a horse, and rising up as high as the clouds; and all kinds of trouble seemed as nothing more than dust blown about by the wind. They sang till the porridge boiled over, for which the cook had to be flicked with a cloth. 'Play as much as you please, but don't forget your work,' we said."