ONE day, towards evening, I fell asleep, and when I woke up I felt my legs had woken up too. But as soon as I lowered them over the side of the bed, they gave way again. All the same, I was convinced that my legs were sound and I would be able to walk again. I felt so overjoyed at this certainty that I cried out with joy, put the whole weight of my body on the floor and at once fell down. But I managed to crawl to the door and downstairs. I imagined the look of surprise on their faces when they saw me.
I don’t remember how, but I ended up in Grandmother’s lap in my mother’s room. There were some people there I’d never seen before, and a dried-up looking woman in green was saying in a stern voice, which drowned everybody else’s:
‘Make him some raspberry tea and wrap him up from the head downwards.’
She was green all over – her dress, her hat and her face with a wart just under one eye. Even the small tuft of hair on the wart looked like grass. She dropped her lower lip, raised the upper, and looked at me with her green teeth, half covering her eyes with a hand in a black lace mitten.
‘Who’s that?’ I asked timidly. Grandfather answered in an unpleasant voice:
‘That’s another grandmother for you.’
Mother laughed and pushed Yevgeny Maximov towards me.
‘And this is your new father….’
She started speaking very quickly, so I couldn’t understand. Maximov blinked, leaned over to me and said: ‘I’ll buy you some paints….’
The room was very bright, and on a table in the corner near the windows stood some silver candelabra, each with five lighted candles. Between them was Grandfather’s favourite icon, ‘Weep not for me, Mother!’ The inlaid pearls glittered and melted in the candlelight, and flashes of fire came from the raspberry-coloured jewels set in the gold of the haloes. From outside in the street dim, round pancake faces pressed against the dark windows and flattened noses stuck to the glass. Everything around began to swim and the old woman in green felt around the back of my ears with her old fingers and said: ‘By all means, by all means….’
‘He’s fainted,’ Grandmother said and carried me to the door. But I hadn’t fainted, only closed my eyes – and when she was taking me upstairs I asked:
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘You keep quiet!’
‘You’re a lot of cheats….’
When she’d put me on the bed, she buried her head in the pillow and broke into a convulsive sobbing. Her shoulders trembled violently as she said, choking with tears:
‘Go on, you have a good cry as well.’
But I didn’t want to. It was gloomy and dark in the attic and I was shivering. The bed shook and creaked, and the old woman in green seemed to be standing right in front of me. I pretended to be asleep and Grandmother left me.
Some uneventful days passed by in a thin stream of monotony.
After the engagement Mother went away somewhere and the house became depressingly quiet.
One morning Grandfather came in with a chisel, went up to the window, and started chipping away the putty from the outer window frame. Then Grandmother appeared with a bowl of water and some rags. Grandfather asked her in a quiet voice: ‘Well, old woman?’
‘Well what?’
‘Are you pleased?’
In the same way as she spoke to me on the stairs she said:
‘You keep quiet now!’
These simple words seemed to have a special meaning and concealed something very important and distressing which everyone knew about and didn’t want to discuss.
When he’d carefully removed the frame Grandfather took it away and Grandmother flung open the windows. A starling whistled in the garden and the sparrows were chirping; the heady smell of thawed earth filled the room; at first I didn’t recognize the bluish tiles in the stove, as they’d turned a faded white and it made me feel cold to look at them. I climbed out of bed.
‘Don’t walk about in your bare feet,’ said Grandmother.
‘I’m going into the garden.’
‘It’s not dry enough yet, you’ll have to wait a few days.’
I didn’t want to listen to her. Even the sight of grown-ups was unpleasant. The bright green needles of young grass had already pushed their way through the earth; buds swelled and burst open on the apple trees and the moss on Petrovna’s roof had turned a lovely green. Everywhere there were birds.
These cheerful sounds and the fresh, fragrant air brought a pleasant dizziness to my head. In the pit where Uncle Peter had cut his throat lay a reddish-brown heap of high tangled grass, crushed by the snow. It was a nasty sight, and there was nothing springlike about the glossy black stumps of the charred beams. The whole pit was annoyingly out of place, serving no purpose at all. I felt a great longing to tear up the grass, drag out the pieces of brick, the beams, and to clear away everything that was dirty and useless and then build myself a neat little den where I could live in the summer without any grown-ups disturbing me. Immediately I got to work and at once completely forgot everything in the house. Although I was still smarting from the wrongs I’d suffered there, every day I thought less and less about them.
Now and again Grandmother or Mother would ask: ‘What’s all this sulking for?’ It was an awkward question, as I wasn’t really angry with them, only everything to do with the house had become so foreign to me. That old green woman would often join us for tea, supper and dinner, and she reminded me of a rotten post in a fence. Her eyes seemed sewn to her face by invisible threads. They rolled about easily and quickly in their bony sockets, seeing and taking note of everything, turning up to the ceiling when she talked about God and dropping towards her cheeks when the conversation was about more earthly matters, like the house. Her eyebrows looked as if they were made of bran which had been stuck on with glue. Her bare, wide teeth sank noiselessly into everything she shoved into her mouth with a hand comically bent and her little finger stuck out. Near her ears small bony lobes worked up and down, and the ears moved as well as the green hairs on her wart, which crept over her yellow, wrinkled and hideously clean skin. She was as immaculately clean as her son and I hated coming into physical contact with either of them. When she first came to the house she would press her dead hand against my lips. It smelled of yellow carbolic soap and incense, which made me jump back and run away. Often she said to her son: ‘That boy needs educating, do you understand, Zhenya?’
He would obediently bow his head, frown and say nothing. That green woman made everyone frown.
I hated her and her son as well, so intensely that it brought me many a beating. Once over dinner she said, her eyes horribly protruding:
‘Alexei, why do you bolt your food down. Such large mouthfuls. You’ll choke yourself, dear.’
I took a piece of food from my mouth, stuck it on the tip of my fork and offered it to her. ‘You can have it, if you want it so much.’
Mother hauled me away from the table and I was sent in disgrace to the attic, where Grandmother joined me later, roaring with laughter and holding her hand over her mouth. ‘Heavens, what a sauce you’ve got!’
I didn’t like to see her press her hand over her mouth, and I ran off, climbed up on the roof and sat for a long time by the chimney. Yes, I wanted to be rude and say spiteful things to everyone, and it was difficult to overcome this desire. But I had to keep up the struggle. Once I smeared my future father’s and grandmother’s chairs with cherry paste and they both got stuck. This was extremely funny, but when Grandfather had finished beating me, Mother came to the attic, drew me over to her, firmly held me between her knees and asked: ‘Listen to me. Why are you so naughty? You don’t know how hard it makes things for me!’
Her eyes filled with bright tears and she pressed my head to her cheek, which was so unbearable I’d rather she’d hit me. I promised never to insult the Maximovs again – at least, if she stopped crying.
‘Yes, all right,’ she said softly. ‘But you mustn’t be naughty.
We’re going to be married soon, then we’re going to Moscow and when we come back you’re going to live with me. Yevgeny Vassilyevich is very kind and clever and you’ll get on well together. You’ll go to the high school and then you’ll become a student – like he is now, and then a doctor, or anything you like. An educated man can be anything he wants. Go and play now.’
Those ‘thens’, strung out one after the other, seemed to form a ladder which led somewhere far away from me, into darkness and loneliness, and held out no happiness for me. I dearly wanted to tell her:
‘Please don’t get married, I’ll look after you.’
But the words didn’t come. My mother always aroused tender feelings of affection in me and I didn’t feel ready to speak my mind.
My project in the garden was going very well. I’d pulled up and cut down all the grass with a scythe, and made a border round the pit, where the earth had fallen in, with pieces of brick. I’d made a wide seat which you could even lie on. I collected a lot of coloured glass and bits of broken crockery, smeared them with clay and set them in between the bricks. When the sun shone everything glittered with the rainbow colours of stained glass in a church.
‘Very nice!’ Grandfather said one day as he inspected my work. ‘Only the grass will grow again if you don’t get it out by the roots. Get me the spade and I’ll dig them up for you!’
I fetched the iron spade, and he spat on his hands and with loud grunts started pushing the spade into the thick earth.
‘You must get rid of those roots! Tomorrow I’ll put some hollyhocks in and sunflowers – you see how pretty it’ll look… really pretty.…’
Suddenly he bent over the spade and stopped talking. He stood quite still. I peered closely at him and could see small tears streaming down from his little, clever, doglike eyes.
‘What’s the matter?’
He started, wiped his face with the palm of his hand and looked vaguely at me.
‘The sweat’s just pouring off. So many worms!’
He set about with the spade again and suddenly said:
‘You’ve wasted your time making all this. Just wasted it. I’ve got to sell the house soon. Probably towards the autumn. Mother needs the money for her dowry. Let her at least have a decent life.…’
He threw the spade down and, with a wave of his hand, went behind the bath house, in another corner of the garden, where his hot-beds were. I started digging again and right away cut my toe badly. As a result I couldn’t go to the wedding and I just managed to walk to the gates and watched Mother walking arm in arm with Maximov down the street, her head bowed. Carefully she picked her way – just as if she were walking on sharp nails – over the grass which poked up between the pavement stones.
It was a quiet wedding. When they came back from church they all sat grimly drinking tea. Mother changed at once and went off to her room to pack, while my stepfather sat down beside me and said: ‘I promised you a painting set, didn’t I, but I couldn’t find any good ones here. I’ll send you one from Moscow.’
‘And what do I need that for?’
‘Don’t you like painting?’
‘I don’t know how to.’
‘In that case I’ll send you something else.’
Mother came in.
‘We’ll be back soon. When your father’s taken his examination and finished his course….’
It was pleasant to hear them talking to me as though I were a grown-up, but it struck me as very strange that a man with a beard should still be a student.
‘What are you studying?’ I asked.
‘Surveying.’
I felt too lazy to ask what that was. The house was filled with a weary silence and faint woolly rustling sounds. I prayed for night to come. Grandfather stood with his back to the stove and looked through the window with his eyes screwed up. The old green woman was helping Mother to pack and kept sighing and groaning. Grandmother, who had been drunk since midday, had been locked away in the attic so she wouldn’t disgrace us.
Early next morning Mother left. She hugged me goodbye, lifted me high off the ground and stared into my eyes with a strange look. She kissed me and said: ‘Goodbye, then….’
‘Tell him to do as he’s told,’ said Grandfather sullenly, as he gazed at the sky, still tinted with pink.
‘Do what Grandfather tells you,’ Mother said as she made the sign of the Cross over me. I was expecting her to say something else and was furious with Grandfather for butting in. They got into the droshky. Mother’s skirt caught on something and for a long time she sat there angrily trying to unhook it.
‘Help her, or are you blind?’ Grandfather said to me. But I didn’t go, and felt bound down by heavy chains of despair.
Maximov carefully arranged his long legs with their narrow blue trousers in the carriage and Grandmother shoved some parcels into his hands, which he laid out on his knees and held with his chin. ‘E-enough!’ he drawled, nervously, wrinkling his pale face.
The old woman in green took her place in the other droshky with her elder son – the officer. She sat there stiff as a dummy, while he scratched his beard with the hilt of his sabre and yawned.
‘So you’re off to the wars?’ Grandfather asked.
‘Of course!’
‘It’s a good cause. We must beat the Turks.’
They drove off. Mother turned round several times, waving her handkerchief, and Grandmother leaned against the wall, shook her hand in the air and cried. Grandfather also brushed the tears away from his eyes and muttered short broken phrases: ‘No good will come of it, no good…’
I sat on the kerb and watched the droshky bounce away: as it disappeared round the corner, something within me banged shut, closed up…. .
It was early. Windows were still shuttered and the street was deserted and dead – deserted as I’d never seen it before. In the distance came the tiresome sound of a shepherd’s pipe.
‘Let’s go and have some tea,’ said Grandfather as he took me by the shoulders. ‘It looks like you’re fated to live with me – you keep scraping against me like a match on a brick!’
From morning until night we both worked in the garden without saying a word to each other. Grandfather dug the flowerbeds, tied up the raspberry bushes, cut the lichen off the apple trees and squashed caterpillars, while I continued beautifying my sanctuary. Grandfather chopped off the ends of the charred beams, and put sticks in the earth for me to hang my bird cages on. I plaited together the dry grass and made a thick canopy which I hung over the seat I’d made, to keep off the sun and dew. Now it was a most delightful retreat.
Grandfather said: ‘It’s very useful if you know how to make things for yourself.’
I valued his words very much. Sometimes he would lie down on the seat I’d made and covered with turf, and slowly and deliberately, as if he had difficulty in getting the words out, would instruct me about life.
‘Now you’re a piece of flesh cut off from your mother. She’ll have more children, and she’ll love them more than you. As you see, your grandmother’s started drinking again.’ He’d stop for a long time, as though he were listening for something, then the heavy words would fall again from his grudging lips. ‘That’s the second time she’s taken to drink. The first was when Mikhail was called up. And she persuaded me, the old fool, to buy him out…. Perhaps he’d have turned out differently if he’d gone in…. Ah, what’s the use?… And I haven’t long now, which means you’ll soon be left all alone. Understand? You must learn to be your own master and not work for anyone else! Live quietly, don’t make any trouble, but be firm in all you do. Listen first to what people say, but then do what seems best to you….’
Excepting, of course, those days when the weather was bad, I lived in the garden the whole summer – even sleeping there on warm nights on a piece of sheep’s-wool felt Grandmother had given me. Often she would sleep outside too: she’d bring an armful of hay and spread it near my bed, lie down, and for hours on end she’d tell me stories which she interspersed with sudden exclamations like:
‘Look, there’s a falling star! That’s some poor lost soul feeling homesick for mother earth. It means a good person’s just been born somewhere.’
Or she’d point her finger and say: ‘Look, there’s a new star. Like a great big eye! Oh, dearest heaven, God’s bright robe…’
Grandfather would mumble: ‘You fools’ll be catching your death of cold or give yourselves a stroke. You’ll get strangled by burglars!’
There were days when the sun would set and the sky overflowed with fiery rivers which would burn out, letting their golden-red ashes settle on the velvet green of the garden. Then one could feel everything grow darker, wider, and swell out, flooded by the warm darkness. Leaves heavy with sun would droop, the grass bent over to the ground and everything would grow softer, richer, and the air would be filled with light, caressing smells, just like music which floated in from the distant fields. Last post would sound from the camp. Then night approached and filled the breast with freshness and vigour, and like a fond mother’s embrace, silence gently smoothed the heart with a warm, furry hand and erased everything from the memory that was best forgotten all the corrosive, fine dust of the day. It was delightful lying face towards the sky; those great depths, receding further and further and revealing new constellations, imperceptibly lifted you from the earth and it was impossible to tell whether the whole earth had shrunk to your size, or if you had miraculously grown larger and swelled out until you mingled with all around you. Although it grew darker and quieter, invisible, sensitive strings would stretch out in all directions and each sound, whether a sleeping bird, a scuttling hedgehog or the soft sudden rise and fall of a human voice, had a sonority that wasn’t heard during the day and was emphasized by that friendly, resonant silence.
A guitar being played, a woman’s laughter, the clinking of a sword on the pavement, or a dog’s bark – all these sounds were out of place here, and were only the last falling leaves of a faded day.
And there were nights when a sudden drunken shout in the street or the fields or the sound of someone running and tramping with heavy feet didn’t seem at all out of the ordinary and aroused no interest in me at all.
Grandmother didn’t sleep long and lay with her hands under her head. Holding back her excitement, she would tell me things, clearly not caring whether I listened or not. And always she managed to choose a story that gave the night even more meaning and beauty. The rhythmic flow of her words would send me off to sleep and I would awake to the sound of the birds. The sun would be looking into my face, the morning air would waft gently as it grew warmer, the leaves of the apple tree would shake off their dew and the moist green grass shine brighter and brighter until it became transparent like a crystal, while a thin vapour rose from it. The rays of the sun would fan out across the sky which grew a deeper and deeper lilac. Somewhere, unseen, high above, a lark would sing and every flower and sound seeped like dew into my heart, filling me with a calm joy and making me want to get up right away, start work and live in close friendship with every living thing.
This was the most peaceful and impressionable period of my life, and in that summer a feeling of confidence in my own powers was born in me and strengthened from day to day.
I ran wild and avoided people. I listened to the Ovsyannikovs’ children shouting, but had no desire to go and play with them, and wasn’t at all pleased to see the three brothers. On the contrary, I was worried in case they damaged my garden-sanctuary – my first independent creation.
In addition, Grandfather’s sermons didn’t hold my interest: they seemed to get emptier and were nothing more than a long string of petty complaints. He now had frequent arguments with Grandmother, chased her out of the house, so she’d go to Uncle Yakov’s or Mikhail’s. Sometimes she didn’t come back for several days and Grandfather would do the cooking himself, burn his fingers, curse and shout, break the dishes and each day become more and more greedy.
At times he would come to my hut, sit himself comfortably on the turf, watch me for a long time without saying a word, then suddenly pop a question like:
‘Why don’t you say something?’
‘What do you want me to say?’
Then he’d start his sermons all over again. ‘You know we’re not high-class people. Nobody’s taught us anything, we’ve had to learn it all ourselves. Books have been written for other people to learn from, schools built, but we’ve had nothing like that. We’ve had to take everything we could get….’
Then he’d lose himself in thought, dry up, and sit there motionless and dumb, making me feel very awkward.
In the autumn he sold the house and not long before it changed hands, one morning when we were having tea, he suddenly announced to Grandmother in a sullen, decisive voice:
‘Well, I’ve kept you long enough. You must fend for yourself now.’ This didn’t surprise Grandmother at all, and she seemed to have known for a long time that it was coming. Slowly she took her snuff box out of her pocket, filled her spongy nostrils and said:
‘All right then. What can’t be cured must be endured!’
Grandfather took two dingy little rooms in the basement of an old house, in an alley at the foot of a hill. When they moved, Grandmother took hold of an old bast shoe, flung it into the fire, squatted and started invoking the hearth spirit. ‘Hoblin goblin. Here’s a sleigh for you. Come with us to our new home, where we hope we’ll be happy.’
Grandfather stared through the window from the yard and shouted:
‘Heretic! Just you try taking it with us! You’ll bring shame on us all!’
‘We’ll have bad luck if we don’t,’ she warned seriously. But Grandfather flew into a temper and forbade her to bring the spirit.
The next three days he spent selling off our furniture and odds and ends to some Tartar secondhand dealers with whom he had angry arguments, while Grandmother looked out of the window, crying and laughing, and calling out softly: ‘Take it all. Break it up!’
The thought of leaving my garden hide-out brought me near to tears. We went in two carts, and mine, which was crammed full with bits of furniture and crockery, shook so violently that it seemed to be doing its best to throw me off. And this feeling that someone was persistently trying to throw me off somewhere stayed with me for two years, right up to Mother’s death.
Soon after Grandfather had settled in the basement, Mother arrived, all pale, much thinner and with enormous passionate eyes burning with surprise. She was continually staring at something and looked at her father and mother just as if she were seeing them for the first time. While she stood there without saying a word, my stepfather paced the room, whistling softly to himself, giving little coughs, and twiddling his fingers behind his back.
‘Heavens, how you’re growing!’ Mother said to me, pressing my cheeks with her hot palms. She wore an ugly dress – broad and reddish and bulging out round her stomach. My stepfather offered his hand.
‘Well, how are you? Eh?’
He sniffed and said: ‘You know, it’s very damp in here!’
They both seemed as if they’d been running about for a long time and in their creased, worn clothes looked worn out and ready to drop.
We had a boring tea. Grandfather watched the rain running down the windows and asked: ‘Everything was lost in the fire then?’
‘Everything,’ my stepfather replied in a determined voice. ‘We only just managed to escape ourselves.’
Mother leant on Grandmother’s shoulder and whispered something into her ear, which made her blink as if blinded by the light. I felt more and more bored.
Suddenly Grandfather shouted out in a spiteful, but calm voice: ‘It’s come to my hearing, Yevgeny Vassilyev, sir, that there wasn’t any fire at all and that you lost everything playing cards.’
The room become as silent as the grave. The samovar puffed, and the rain lashed against the windows. Then Mother said: ‘Papa….’
‘What do you mean, Papa?’ Grandfather shouted in a deafening voice. ‘What’s going to happen next? Didn’t I tell you thirty and twenty don’t go together. He’s a fine one! Made you into a lady! Well, what have you got to say for yourself?’
All four started shouting, my stepfather loudest of all. I went outside and sat down on a pile of firewood, utterly stunned. Mother must have been changed for someone else, she looked so different.
In the room this was less noticeable, but here, in the dark, I could clearly remember exactly the way she looked before.
And then, quite mysteriously, I found myself in a house in Sormovo where everything was new and the walls bare of paper. The joints between the beams were lined with hemp and infested with cockroaches. Mother and my stepfather lived in two rooms facing the street, while I was with Grandmother in the kitchen, which had one window on to the roof. Beyond the roof, black factory chimneys stuck out obscenely towards the sky, belching out thick curly smoke, which the winter wind scattered all over the town. In our cold rooms there was always a strong smell of burning. Early in the mornings the factory howled like a wolf: ‘Oooooo!’
If I stood on a bench I managed to see through the top windowpane and across the roofs to the factory gates, brightly lit by lamps and wide open, like the toothless black mouth of an old beggar. Into it poured a dense crowd of little people. At midday, the hooter sounded again, the black lips opened, revealing a deep hole through which the factory vomited up chewed-up people, who poured out into the street in a black stream. The snowy, rough wind swept down the street, driving the people into their houses. The sky was rarely to be seen above the town. Day in and day out another kind of roof, grey and flat, hung over the houses and the soot-stained snowdrifts. It weighed down on the mind and blinded the eyes with its wearying monotony.
In the evenings a dim red glow quivered over the factory. It lit up the tips of the chimneys, and it seemed that instead of having their foundations on solid ground, they were suspended from that smoky cloud, and pointed downwards towards the earth, breathing red flames, howling and screeching.
It made me unbearably sick to look at all this and an insidious boredom gnawed away at me. Grandmother took over the duties of cook – she got all the food ready, washed the floor, cut the firewood, fetched the water. She worked from morning till night, and went to bed moaning and groaning from exhaustion. Sometimes, when she’d done the cooking, she would put on her short, quilted jacket, tuck her skirt up high and go off to the town.
‘Must see how the old man’s getting on!’
‘Take me with you!’
‘You’ll catch your death of cold. Just look at that blizzard!’
And she would walk about four miles along a road lost in fields of snow. Mother, her skin yellow from her pregnancy, would wrap herself round in a ragged grey frilled shawl to keep the cold out. I hated that shawl which destroyed the shape of her large, graceful body and detested the little tufts on the frill, and used to pull them off. And I hated the house, the factory and the village. Mother used to walk about coughing in tattered old felt boots, shaking her hideously large swollen belly. Her grey-blue eyes flashed angrily and would often stare emptily at the bare walls as though glued to them. Sometimes for hours on end she would look out into the street, which resembled a jaw in which some of the teeth had gone black, and twisted with age, while some had fallen out and had clumsily been replaced with new ones, which were too big.
‘Why do we have to live here?’ I asked.
Mother answered: ‘Oh, shut up.’
She didn’t say very much to me now, and only gave me orders: ‘Get that, bring me this, fetch me some…’
They didn’t let me go out very often, as each time I returned beaten up by the street urchins. But fighting was my only pleasure and I gave myself up to it body and soul.
Mother would flog me with a strap, but the punishment only put me in a worse rage and the next time I fought even more violently and as a result was punished more severely. And then I warned Mother that if she didn’t stop beating me I would bite her hand and run away into the fields to freeze. This made her push me from her in amazement, and she walked up and down the room, her breath coming in weary gasps, and said: ‘Little beast!’
That living, throbbing gamut of feelings called love slowly faded in me and in its place there flared up, more and more often, smouldering blue fires of ill will against everyone. Discontent festered in my heart and a feeling of utter isolation in that grey, lifeless and ridiculous world dragged me down.
My stepfather was strict with me, said little to Mother and never stopped whistling or coughing. After dinner he used to stand in front of the mirror and carefully clean his teeth with a pick. His quarrels with Mother became more and more frequent and he talked to her as he would do to a stranger, which made me furious. During these quarrels he would shut the kitchen door tight, obviously not wanting me to hear what he was saying. All the same, I managed to hear his gruff, deep voice bawling away.
Once he stamped his foot and shouted out:
‘Because of your blasted belly I can’t invite anyone home, you old cow!’
In my astonishment and blind fury, I jumped up from the top of the stove so suddenly that I hit my head on the ceiling and bit my tongue so hard that it bled.
On Saturdays dozens of workers used to come to my stepfather to sell food coupons which they were meant to use in the factory shop. They were issued with these instead of wages and my stepfather bought them at half price. He would sit at the kitchen table, looking very stern and important as he took the coupons from them and said:
‘One and a half roubles.’
‘Yevgeny Vassilyev, for the love of God!’
‘One and a half roubles.’
That senseless, obscure existence didn’t go on for very long. Before Mother had her baby I was taken to Grandfather’s. Now he was living in the Kunavino district, where he’d taken a tiny room with a stove and two windows looking on to a yard. The two-storeyed house was in Peschany Street, which ran downhill to the wall of the Napolyni churchyard.
‘What?’ he said with a squeaky laugh when he saw me. ‘They used to say a boy’s best friend is his mother, but now it looks like we’ll have to say: not his mother, but his old devil of a grandfather. Ugh!’
I’d hardly had time to look round my new home before Mother and Grandmother arrived with the baby. My stepfather had been sacked by the factory for swindling the workers but he went off somewhere and managed to get a job as a ticket clerk in a station.
Many empty days passed and once again I was moved to the basement of a stone house where I lived with Mother again. She immediately sent me off to school. From the very first day it aroused nothing but loathing in me. I arrived wearing a pair of Mother’s shoes, an overcoat made from Grandmother’s jacket, a yellow shirt and long trousers, which right from the start made me the laughing-stock of the school. The yellow shirt earned me the nickname of ‘ace of diamonds’. I soon hit it off with the other boys, but my teacher and the priest took an immediate dislike to me.
My teacher was bald, with a sallow complexion and his nose was continually bleeding. He would come into class with cotton wool stuffed up his nose, sit at his table, question us in a snuffling voice, and suddenly stop in the middle of a word to take out the cotton wool and inspect it, shaking his head all the time. His face was featureless, coppery, sour, and the wrinkles harboured a kind of green mould. Especially ugly were his leaden eyes, which didn’t seem to deserve a place there at all, and they focused themselves so unpleasantly on me when he looked in my direction that I always wanted to wipe my cheek with the palm of my hand.
For a few days I sat in the front row, right in front of the teacher’s desk. This I found unbearable. He seemed to see no one else except me, and kept on saying in his snuffling voice:
‘Peshko-ov, change your shirt! Peshko-ov, keep your feet still! Peshko – o – v, your shoes have made a puddle again!’
I got my own back by the most daring tricks: once I laid my hands on half a frozen water-melon. I scooped it out and tied it to the top of the door in the dark vestibule. When the door opened the melon was lifted up and when my teacher shut it, it fell on his bald head just like a hat. The night porter hauled me off home with a note for my parents, and I paid for my mischief with a sound whipping.
Another time I sprinkled snuff in his drawer. He had such a fit of sneezing that he had to leave the room and sent as his deputy his son-in-law, who turned out to be an officer and made the whole class sing ‘God Save the Tsar’ and ‘Ah Freedom, My Freedom’. Those who sang out of tune were rapped on the head with a ruler, in a way that didn’t really hurt, but made a loud noise and which we found funny.
The teacher who took us for religious instruction was a handsome young priest with a thick growth of hair. He took a dislike to me because I didn’t have a copy of Sacred Stories from the Old and New Testaments and because I mimicked the way he spoke.
When he came into the room the first thing he did was to ask:
‘Peshkov, have you brought that book or not? Yes. The book?’
‘No. I haven’t. Yes.’
‘What do you mean yes?’
‘No.’
‘Then go home. Yes. Home. I’ve got no time to waste on you. Yes. None at all.’
This didn’t worry me too much, and I would stroll around the dirty streets of the quarter where we lived, closely observing its noisy life.
The priest had a fine, Christ-like face, warm feminine eyes and small hands, that seemed to fondle everything they touched. Whether it was a book, a ruler or a pen, he handled everything with loving care, as if what he touched was alive, and he was frightened of damaging it through carelessness. Even though he wasn’t so gentle with children, they still loved him.
In spite of the fact I got on reasonably well in class I was soon told that I would be expelled for unsatisfactory behaviour. I became very depressed, as it threatened very unpleasant consequences: at home Mother was becoming more and more irritable and the beatings got more and more frequent.
But unexpected salvation appeared in the form of Bishop Chrysanth, a hunchback if I remember rightly, who once paid a visit to the school.* When that small man in his wide black robes sat at the table, pulled up his long sleeves to free his hands and said: ‘Well, my children, let’s have a little chat, shall we?’ the atmosphere became suddenly relaxed and gay, and the whole room was filled with something strangely pleasant. After he’d talked to the others he called me out and asked seriously:
‘You, how old are you? That all? Tall for your age, aren’t you? Must have stood in the rain a long time, eh?’
He put one thin, skinny hand with its long, sharp nails on the table, ran his fingers through his thin beard with the other, stared at me with his kind eyes and suggested:
‘Well now, tell me a story from the Bible – any one you like.’
When I told him I didn’t have a book and couldn’t learn anything from the Scriptures, he straightened his hood and asked:
‘How’s that? But you must learn the Bible. Perhaps you can recite something you’ve heard. The Psalms? That’s fine. And your prayers. There, I said so! And the lives of the saints? In verse! So you’re very learned after all!’
In came our priest, red-faced and breathless. The Bishop blessed him, but when the priest started telling him about me, he raised his hand and interrupted:
‘If you don’t mind, one moment. Come, tell us about that holy man Alexei.’
‘Beautiful poetry, isn’t it, my child,’ he said when I stopped, having forgotten a line. ‘Anything else? King David? I’d love to hear it!’
I could see he really was listening and that he liked poetry. He questioned me for a long time, then suddenly stopped, and inquired:
‘Did you learn from the Psalter? Who taught you? Your good grandfather? Your wicked grandfather? Really now! I’ve heard you’re a very mischievous boy.’
I could hardly get the words out, but I answered yes. The teacher and priest confirmed this confession in long wordy phrases. The bishop listened, his eyes downcast, then he said with a sigh:
‘Did you hear what they said? Come here.’
He put his hand, which smelled of cypress wood, on my head.
‘Why are you so naughty?’ he asked.
‘Learning from books is boring.’
‘Boring? That’s not so. If school were boring for you, then you’d be a bad pupil. But your teachers say you’re good at learning things. It must be something else then.’
He took a small notebook from his breast pocket and wrote down.
‘Peshkov, Alexei. Good. You’d better behave yourself in future and keep a tight hold on yourself and don’t play about. A few pranks here and there don’t matter, but all things in moderation. Otherwise you begin to upset people. Isn’t that so, boys?’
A chorus of gay voices answered: ‘Yes!’
‘And of course you don’t get up to mischief yourselves?’
The boys smiled and said:
‘Oh yes we do! Lots and lots!’
The Bishop leaned back in his chair, drew me towards him and what he said came so much as a surprise that even the teacher and priest laughed: ‘Don’t think I didn’t get into trouble when I was a boy! But what makes us misbehave?’
The children laughed, and he started cross-examining them, getting them to say what they didn’t mean and contradict themselves, which made the atmosphere even gayer. Finally he stood up and said:
‘I’m sorry to have to leave you rascals, but its time for me to go.’
He raised his arm, tossed back his sleeves to his shoulder, made the sign of the Cross in wide, sweeping movements and blessed us:
‘In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, blessed be your labours. Goodbye.’
Everyone shouted: ‘Goodbye, sir! Come and see us again.’
He nodded with his hood and said:
‘Of course I’ll come. Of course! I’ll bring you some books!’
As he sailed out of the classroom he said to the teacher:
‘Let them all have a half-holiday!’
Then he took me by the arm and led me into the hall, where he leaned over to me and said softly:
‘Now don’t forget, behave yourself. I know well enough why you get up to mischief! Goodbye!’
I was very disturbed by this remark and it left me feeling strange inside, as if something was boiling over. Even when the teacher had dismissed the class and kept me behind to tell me he expected me to be ‘quieter than water’ and ‘lower than grass’, I listened eagerly to every word he said.
In a kind, humming voice he said:
‘Now you must come to my lessons. Yes. Without fail. And you must sit quietly. Yes. Quietly.’
After that things improved for me at school, but at home something very nasty happened. I stole a rouble from Mother. This was no premeditated crime: one evening she went out somewhere, leaving me at home with the baby. Out of sheer boredom I opened one of my stepfather’s books – Memoirs of a Doctor, by Dumas Père - and between some pages discovered a ten-rouble and a one-rouble banknote. The book was too hard for me to follow, and as I closed it, the idea suddenly struck me that for one rouble I could buy not only Stories from the Bible, but Robinson Crusoe as well. I’d heard about this book not long before, at school. One frosty day, during break, I’d started telling the boys a fairy story when one of them suddenly said sneeringly:
‘Fairy tales are rubbish! But Robinson Crusoe – there’s a real story for you!’
Some of the others had also read Robinson Crusoe and found it very good, and I was very offended that Grandmother’s story wasn’t to their taste at all. There and then I decided to read Robinson Crusoe, just so I would be able to say, like them, ‘That’s rubbish!’
Next day I took with me to school the Stories from the Bible and two tattered little volumes of Andersen’s Fairy Tales, three pounds of white bread and a pound of sausage. In a dim, tiny bookshop near St Vladimir’s Church I found Robinson Crusoe, a thick book bound in yellow, with a picture of a bearded man in a fur cap and a wild animal’s skin on his shoulders in the front. This I didn’t like at all, but the fairy tales appealed to me at once, in spite of their tattered binding.
In the dinner-break I shared out the bread and sausage and we began reading that marvellous story The Nightingale, which had us all enthralled from the first page.
‘In China all the people are Chinese, and the Emperor himself is a Chinaman.’ I remember how that phrase enchanted me not only by its simple, laughing music but by something which was wonderful and good besides.
There was no time to finish The Nightingale in school-time and when I got home I found Mother frying eggs over the stove.
In a strange, faded voice she asked:
‘Did you take that rouble?’
‘Yes, I did. Look at these books.’
She gave me a thorough hammering with the frying pan, took away the volumes of Andersen and hid them away for good, which I found a lot more painful than the beating.
For some days I was away from school and during this time my stepfather must have told his friends at work about my exploit, and they in turn apparently told their children.
One of the boys carried the story to school and when I turned up for lessons I was welcomed with a new nickname – thief. It was a short and simple word, but unfair: after all, I hadn’t tried to cover up the theft. When I tried to explain this, nobody believed me, and this made me go home and tell Mother I’d never go to school again. A grey figure, with frenzied, tormented eyes, and once again heavy with child, she sat by the window feeding my brother Sasha and looking at me with her mouth opened wide, like a fish.
‘You’re lying,’ she said. ‘No one could have known you took the rouble.’
‘Go and ask them.’
‘You must have told them somehow. I want the truth. It was you, wasn’t it? Tomorrow I’ll find out who let the whole school know!’
I told her the boy’s name. Her face wrinkled up in a pathetic frown and tears welled down her cheeks.
I went into the kitchen, lay down on my bed, made from some boxes over the stove, and listened to my mother quietly sobbing in the next room: ‘My God, my God.’
I couldn’t stand the foul smell of hot greasy rags round me any more and I got up and made for the yard. But my mother heard me and shouted:
‘Where are you going? Come here!’
We sat down on the floor. Sasha lay in Mother’s lap, pulling at the buttons on her dress and nodding his head backwards and forwards as though he were bowing.
‘Bunnons,’ he said, trying to pronounce ‘buttons’.
I pressed close to Mother’s side and she embraced me and said:
‘We’re very poor, and every copeck – every copeck….’
But she never finished whatever she was saying and would squeeze me with her burning hands.
‘That swine… that wicked swine….’ she said suddenly in words I’d already heard her say before.
‘Sine….’ repeated Sasha.
He was a strange child : clumsy and with a big head, he gazed at everything around him with beautiful blue eyes, showing by his gentle smile that he was waiting for something to happen. He started speaking very early, never cried, and lived in a perpetual state of quiet joy. He was very delicate, could hardly crawl, but always appeared very pleased when he saw me, made me take him in my arms, and loved to crumple my ears with his soft little fingers, which had a mysterious smell of violets. Quite suddenly he died, without having been ill at all. The day he died he was his normal happy self, but by the time evening came, when the bells were ringing for vespers, he was already laid out on the table. This happened soon after the second baby, Nikolai, was born.
Mother carried out her promise, and once more everything went smoothly at school.
But then they packed me off again to live with Grandfather.
One evening when I was going from the yard to the kitchen for my tea, I heard my mother give a heart-rending scream:
‘Yevgeny, I beg of you. I beg of you….’
‘Nonsense,’ my stepfather replied.
‘But I know that you’re seeing her….’
‘Well, what of it?’
For a few seconds neither said anything, then Mother cleared her throat and said, ‘You filthy scum.’
I heard him strike her and rushed into the room. Mother was on her knees propping herself up against a chair by her back and one elbow, her breast thrust out and her head thrown back; she was panting and her eyes shone with a terrifying light. And he was there, standing over her, in his bright, smart new uniform, kicking her on the breast with his long leg. I seized the bread knife with the ivory and silver handle which was lying on the table – the only thing of my father’s left to her – and lunged at my stepfather’s side as hard as I could.
Fortunately my mother managed to push him away so that the knife merely ripped open his coat and grazed his skin. With a loud groan he tore out of the room holding his side while Mother caught hold of me, lifted me up and with a shriek threw me down on the floor. My stepfather came back and took me away.
Late that evening, when he’d left the house, Mother came to my bed behind the stove and carefully hugged me and kissed me, and wept.
‘Forgive me, I’m the guilty one. But darling, how could you? With a knife!’
Knowing full well what I was saying, I told her straight out that I was going to cut my stepfather’s throat and then my own, and I really meant it. And I think I would have at least tried to do this. Even now I can see that hateful, long leg, with shining braid running down the middle of the trousers, dangling in the air, the tip of its boot kicking a woman’s breast.
When I try to recall those vile abominations of that barbarous life in Russia, at times I find myself asking the question: is it worth while recording them? And with ever stronger conviction I find the answer is yes, because that was the real loathsome truth and to this day it is still valid.
It is that truth which must be known down to the very roots, so that by tearing them up it can be completely erased from the memory, from the soul of man, from our whole oppressive and shameful life. And there is still another, more positive reason which compels me to describe these horrible things. Although they arouse disgust in us, and crush the life out of many fine noble souls, the Russian man in the street is sufficiently healthy and young in spirit to overcome them – and overcome them he will.
Life is always surprising us – not by its rich, seething layer of bestial refuse – but by the bright, healthy and creative human powers of goodness that are for ever forcing their way up through it. It is those powers that awaken our indestructible hope that a brighter, better and more humane life will once again be reborn.