منتديات منابر ثقافية - عرض مشاركة واحدة

10-28-2011, 06:11 PM

المشاركة 23

ريم بدر الدين

عضو مجلس الإدارة سابقا

اوسمتي

مجموع الاوسمة: 5

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It was a quiet wedding. When they came back from church they drank tea in a depressed manner, and mother changed her dress directly and went to her own room to pack up. My stepfather came and sat beside me, and said:
“I promised to give you some paints, but there are no good ones to be got in this town, and I cannot give my own away; but I will bring you some from Moscow.”
“And what shall I do with them?”
“Don’t you like drawing?”
“I don’t know how to draw.”
“Well, I will bring you something else.”
Then mother came in.
“We shall soon come back, you know. Your father, there, has to sit for an examination, and when he has finished his studies we shall come back.”
I was pleased that they should talk to me like this, as if I were grown-up; but it was very strange to hear that a man with a beard was still learning,
“What are you learning?” I asked.
“Surveying,” he replied.
I did not trouble to ask what surveying was. The house seemed to be full of a dull quietness; there was a woolly sort of rustling going on, and I wished that the night would make haste and come. Grandfather stood with his back pressed against the stove, gazing out of the window with a frown. The old green woman was helping mother to pack, grumbling and sighing; and grandmother, who had been tipsy since noon, ashamed on that account, had retired to the attic and shut herself up there.
Mother went away early the next morning. She held me in her arms as she took leave of me; lifting me lightly off the ground, and gazing into my eyes with eyes which seemed unfamiliar to me, she said as she kissed me :
“Well good-by.”
“Tell him that he has got to obey me,” said grandfather gruffly, looking up at the sky which was still rosy.
“Do what grandfather tells you,” said mother, making the sign of the Cross over me.
I expected her to say something else, and I was furious with grandfather because he had prevented her.
They seated themselves in the droshky, and mother was a long time angrily trying to free her skirt which had got caught in something.
“Help her, can’t you”? Are you blind?” said grandfather to me.
But I could not help I was too wrapped up in my grief.
Maximov patiently squeezed his long legs, clothed in dark blue trousers, into the droshky, while grandmother put some bundles into his hand. He piled them up on his knees,and keeping them in place with his chin, his white face wrinkled with embarrassment, he drawled : “That ‘s eno ugh !”
In another droshky sat the old green woman with her eldest son, the officer, who was scratching his beard with his sword handle, and yawning.
“So you are going to the war?” said grandfather.
“I am compelled to go.”
“A good thing too ! ... we must beat the Turks.”
They drove off. Mother turned round several times and waved her handkerchief. Grandmother, dissolved in tears, supporting herself by resting her hand against the wall, also waved her hand. Grandfather wiped away the tears from his eyes and muttered brokenly: “No good will come of this.”
I sat on the gate-post and watched the droshky jolting up and down and then they turned the corner and it seemed as if a door in my heart had been suddenly shut and barred. It was very early, the shutters had not been taken from the windows of the houses, the street was empty ; I had never seen such an utter absence of life. In the distance the shepherd could be heard playing irritatingly.
“Come in to breakfast,” said grandfather, taking me by the shoulder. “It is evident that your lot is to live with me; so you are beginning to leave your mark on me like the striking of a match leaves on a brick.”
From morning till night we busied ourselves in the garden ; he laid out beds, tied up the raspberry bushes, stripped the lichen off the apple trees, and killed the caterpillars, while I went on building and decorating my dwelling. Grandfather cut off the end of the burnt beam, made sticks out of it, and stuck them in the earth, and I hung my bird-cages on them; then I wove a close netting with the dried grass, and made a canopy over the seat to keep off the sun and the dew. The result was very satisfactory.
“It is very useful,” said grandfather, “for you to learn how to make the best of things for yourself.”
I attached great importance to his words. Sometimes he lay down on the seat, which I had covered with turf, and taught me, very slowly, as if he had a difficulty in finding words.
“Now you are cut right off from your mother; other children will come to her, and they will be more to her than you are. And grandmother there she has taken to drink.”
He was silent for a long time as if he were listening to something; then again he unwillingly let fall gloomy words:
“This is the second time she has taken to drink; when Michael went for a soldier she started to drink too. And the old fool persuaded me to buy his discharge. . . . He might have turned out quite differently if he had gone for a soldier. . . . Ugh! . . . You . . . ! I shall be dead soon that means that you will be left alone ... all on your own ... to earn your living. Do you understand”? . . . Good! . . . You must learn to work for yourself . . . and don’t give way to others! Live quietly, peaceably and uprightly. Listen to what others say, but do what is best for yourself.”
All the summer, except, of course, when the weather was bad, I lived in the garden, and on warm nights I even slept out there on a piece of felt which grandmother had made me a present of; not infrequently she slept in the garden herself, and bringing out a bundle of hay, which she spread out close to my couch, she would lie down on it and tell me stories for a long time, interrupting her speech from time to time by irrelevant remarks:
“Look! ... A star fell then! That is some pure soul suffering ... a mother thinking of earth ! That means that a good man or woman has just been bom.”
Or she would point out to me :
“There’s a new star appeared; look! It looks like a large eye. . . . Oh, you bright creature of the sky! . . . You holy ornament of God ! . . .”
“You will catch cold, you silly woman!” grandfather would growl, “and have an apoplectic fit. Thieves will come and kill you.”
Sometimes, when the sun set, rivers of light streamed across the sky, looking as if they were on fire, and red-gold ashes seemed to fall on the velvety-green garden; then everything became perceptibly a shade darker, and seemed to grow larger to swell, as the warm twilight closed round. Tired of the sun, the leaves drooped, the grass bowed its head; everything seemed to be softer and richer, and gently breathed out various odors as soothing as music. And music there was, too, floating from the camps in the fields, where they were playing spasmodically.
Night came, and with it there came into one’s heart something vigorous and fresh, like the loving caress of a mother; the quietness softly smoothed one’s heart with its warm, rough hands, and all that ought to be forgotten all the bitterness, the fine dust of the day was washed away. It was enchanting to lie with upturned face watching the stars flaming in the infinite profundity of the sky a profundity which, as it stretches higher and higher, opens out a new vista of stars; to raise yourself lightly from the ground and how strange! either the earth has grown smaller before your eyes, or you yourself, grown wonderfully big, are being absorbed into your surroundings. It grows darker and quieter every moment, but there is a succession of minute, hardly perceptible, prolonged sounds, and each sound whether it be a bird singing in its sleep, or a hedgehog running along, or a human voice softly raised somewhere differs from the sounds of daytime, and has something peculiarly its own, amorously underlying its sensitive quietness.
A harmonium is being played somewhere, a woman’s laugh rings out, a sword rattles on the stone flags of the pavement, a dog yelps but all these sounds are nothing more than the falling of the last leaves of the day which has blossomed and died.
Sometimes in the night a drunken cry would suddenly rise from the field or the street, and the sound of some one running noisily ; but this was a common occurrence, and passed unheeded.
Grandmother never slept long, and as she lay with her head resting on her folded arms, she would begin, at the slightest hint, to tell me a story, obviously not caring whether I was listening to her or not. She was always able to choose stories which would make the night still more precious and beautiful to me.
Under the influence of her measured flow of words I insensibly sank into slumber, and awoke with the birds; the sun was looking straight into my eyes, and, warmed by his rays, the morning air flowed softly round us, the leaves of the apple tree were shaking off the dew, the moist green grass looked brighter and fresher than ever, with its newly acquired crystal transparency, and a faint mist floated over it. High up in the sky, so high as to be invisible, a lark sang, and all the colors and sounds produced by the dew evoked a peaceful gladness, and aroused a desire to get up at once and do some work, and to live in amity with all living creatures.
This was the quietest and most contemplative period of my whole life, and it was during this summer that the consciousness of my own strength took root and developed in me. I became shy and unsociable, and when I heard the shouts of the Ovsyanikov children I had no desire to go to them; and when my cousins came, I was more than a little annoyed, and the only feeling they aroused in me was the fear lest they should destroy my structure in the garden the first work I had ever done by myself.
Grandfather’s conversation, drier, more querulous, and more doleful every day, had lost all interest for me. He had taken to quarreling with grandmother frequently, and to turn her out of the house, when she would go either to Uncle Jaakov’s or to Uncle Michael’s. Once she stayed away for several days and grandfather did all the cooking himself, burned his hands, roared with pain, swore, and smashed the crockery, and developed a noticeable greediness. Sometimes he would come to my hut, make himself comfortable on the turfy seat, and after watching me in silence for some time, would ask abruptly:
“Why are you so quiet?”
“Because I feel like it. Why?’
Then he would begin his sermon :
“We are not gentlefolk. No one takes the trouble to teach us. We have got to find everything out for ourselves. For other folk they write books, and build schools; but no time is wasted on us. We have to make our own way.”
And he fell into a brooding silence sitting motionless, oblivious, till his presence became almost oppressive.
He sold the house in the autumn, and not long before the sale he exclaimed abruptly one morning, over his tea:
“Well, Mother, I have fed and clothed you fed and clothed you but the time has come for you to earn your own bread.”
Grandmother received this announcement quite calmly, as if she had been expecting it a long time. She reached for her snuff-box in a leisurely manner, charged her spongy nose, and said :
“Well, that’s all right! If it is to be like that, so let it be.”
Grandfather took two dark rooms in the basement of an old house, at the foot of a small hill.
When we went to this lodging, grandmother took an old bast shoe, put it under the stove, and, squatting on her heels, invoked the house-demon :
“House-demon, family-demon, here is your sledge; come to us in our new home, and bring us good luck.”
Grandfather looked in at the window from the yard, crying: “I will make you smart for this, you heretic! You are trying to put me to shame.”
“Oie! Take care that you don’t bring harm to yourself, Father,” said grandmother seriously; but he only raged at her, and forbade her to invoke the house-demon.
The furniture and effects were sold by him to a second-hand dealer who was a Tartar, after three days’ bargaining and abuse of each other; and grandmother looked out of the window, sometimes crying and sometimes laughing, and exclaiming under her breath:
“That ‘s right ! Drag them about. Smash them.”
I was ready to weep myself as I mourned for my garden and my little hut.
We journeyed thither in two carts, and the one wherein I was placed, amongst various utensils, jolted alarmingly, as if it were going to throw me out then and there, with a part of the load. And for two years, till close upon the time of my mother’s death, I was dominated with the idea that I had been thrown out somewhere. Soon after the move mother made her appearance, just as grandfather had settled down in his basement, very pale and thin, and with her great eyes strangely brilliant. She stared just as if she were seeing her father and mother and me for the first time, just stared, and said nothing; while my stepfather moved about the room, whistling softly, and clearing his throat, with his hands behind his back and his fingers twitching.
“Lord! how dreadfully you have grown,” said mother to me, pressing her hot hands to my cheeks. She was dressed unattractively in a full brown dress, and she looked very swollen about the stomach.
My stepfather held out his hand to me.
“How do you do, my lad? How are you getting on?” Then sniffing the air, he added: “Do you know it is very damp down here?”
They both looked worn out, as if they had been running for a long time; their clothes were in disorder, and soiled, and all they wanted, they said, was to lie down and rest. As they drank some tea with an air of constraint, grandfather, gazing at the rain-washed windows, asked:
“And so you have lost everything in a fire?”
“Everything !” answered my stepfather in a resolute tone. “We only escaped ourselves by good luck.”
“So! ... A fire is no joke.”
Leaning against grandmother’s shoulder, my mother whispered something in her ear, and grandmother blinked as if the light were in her eyes. The air of constraint grew more noticeable.
Suddenly grandfather said very clearly, in a cool, malicious tone:
“The rumor which came to my ears, Eugen Vassilev, my good sir, said that there was no fire, but that you simply lost everything at cards.”
There was a dead silence, broken only by the hissing of the samovar and the splashing of the rain against the window-panes; at length mother said in a persuasive tone:
“Papasha ”
“What do you mean ‘papasha’?” cried grandfather in a deafening voice. “What next? Didn’t I tell you that a person of thirty does not go well with one of twenty years’? . . . There you are . . . and there he is cunning rogue! A nobleman! . . . What? . . . Well, little daughter?’
They all four shouted at the tops of their voices, and my stepfather shouted loudest of all. I went out to the porch and sat on a heap of wood, stupefied by my amazement at finding mother so changed, so different from what she used to be. This fact had not struck me so forcibly when I was in the room with her, as it did now in the twilight with the memory of what she had been clearly before my mind.
Later on, though I have forgotten the circumstances connected with it, I found myself at Sormova, in a house where everything was new; the walls were bare and hemp grew out of the chinks between the beams, and in the hemp were a lot of cockroaches. Mother and my stepfather lived in two rooms with windows looking on to the street, and I lived with grandmother in the kitchen, which had one window looking out on the roof. On the other side of the roof the chimneys of a factory rose up to the sky, belching forth a thick smoke, and the winter wind blew this smoke over the entire village; and our cold rooms were always filled with the odor of something burning. Early in the morning the wolves howled: “Khvou ou ou ou !”
By standing on a stool one could see through the top window-pane, across the roof, the gate of the factory lit up by lanterns, half-open like the black, toothless mouth of an old beggar, and a crowd of little people crawling into it. At noon the black lips of the gate again opened and the factory disgorged its chewed-up people, who flowed along the street in a black stream till a rough, snowy wind came flying along and drove them into their houses. We very seldom saw the sky over the village; from day to day, over the roofs of the houses, and over the snow-drifts sprinkled with soot, hung another roof, gray and flat, which crushed the imagination, and blinded one with its overwhelming drabness.
In the evenings a dim red glow quivered over the factory, lighting up the chimney-pots, and making the chimneys look, not as if they rose from the earth to the sky, but as if they were falling to the earth from that smoky cloud ; and as they fell they seemed to be breathing out flames, and howling.
It was unbearably tedious to look at all this, and the monotony of it preyed evilly on my heart. Grandmother did the work of a general servant, cooked, washed the floors, chopped wood, and fetched water from morning till night, and came to bed weary, grumbling, and sighing. Sometimes when she had finished cooking she would put on her short, padded bodice, and with her skirt well lifted, she would repair to the town.
“I will go and have a look at the old man, and see how he is getting on.”
“Take me with you.”
“You would be frozen. Look how it is snowing!” And she would walk seven versts, by the roads, or across the snowy fields.
Mother, yellow, pregnant, and shivering with cold, went about wrapped in a gray, torn shawl with a fringe.
I hated that shawl, which disfigured the large, well-built body; I hated the tails of the fringe, and tore them off; I hated the house, the factory, and the village. Mother went about in downtrodden felt boots, coughing all the time, and her unbecomingly fat stomach heaved, her gray-blue eyes had a bright, hard gleam in them, and she often stood about against the bare walls just as if she were glued to them. Sometimes she would stand for a whole hour looking out of the window on to the street, which was like a jaw in which half the teeth were blackened and crooked from age, and the other half had quite decayed and had been replaced by false ones.
“Why do we live here?” I asked.
“Ach! . . . You hold your tongue, can’t you?” she answered.
She spoke very seldom to me, and when she did speak it was only to order me about :
“Go there! . . Come here! . . Fetch this!”
I was not often allowed out in the street, and on each occasion I returned home bearing signs of having been knocked about by other boys ; for fighting was my favorite, indeed, my only enjoyment, and I threw myself into it with ardor. Mother whipped me with a strap, but the punishment only irritated me further, and the next time I fought with childish fury and mother gave me a worse punishment. This went on till one day I warned her that if she did not leave off beating me I should bite her hand, and run away to the fields and get frozen to death. She pushed me away from her in amazement, and walked about the room, panting from exhaustion as she said:
“You are getting like a wild animal !”
That feeling which is called love began to blossom in my heart now, full of life, and tremulous as a rainbow; and my resentment against every one burst out oftener, like a dark blue, smoky flame, and an oppressive feeling of irritation smoldered in my heart a consciousness of being entirely alone in that gray, meaningless existence.
My stepfather was severe with me, and hardly ever speaking to mother, went about whistling or coughing, and after dinner would stand in front of a mirror and assiduously pick his uneven teeth with a splinter of wood. His quarrels with mother became more frequent angrily addressing her as “you” (instead of “thou”), a habit which exasperated me beyond measure. When there was a quarrel on he used to shut the kitchen door closely, evidently not wishing me to hear what he said, but all the same the sound of his deep bass voice could be heard quite plainly. One day he cried, with a stamp of his foot:
“Just because you are fool enough to become pregnant, I can’t ask any one to come and see me you cow!”
I was so astonished, so furiously angry, that I jumped up in the air so high that I knocked my head against the ceiling and bit my tongue till it bled.
On Saturdays workmen came in batches of ten to see my stepfather and sell him their food-tickets, which they ought to have taken to the shop belonging to the works to spend in place of money; but my stepfather used to buy them at half-price. He received the workmen in the kitchen, sitting at the table, looking very important, and as he took the cards he would frown and say:
“A rouble and a half!”
“Now, Eugen Vassilev, for the love of God ”
“A rouble and a half!”
This muddled, gloomy existence only lasted till mother’s confinement, when I was sent back to grandfather. He was then living at Kunavin, where he rented a poky room with a Russian stove, and two windows looking on to the yard, in a two-storied house on a sandy road, which extended to the fence of the Napolno churchyard.
“What’s this?” he cried, squeaking with laughter, as he met me. “They say there ‘s no better friend than your own mother; but now, it seems, it is not the mother but the old devil of a grandfather who is the friend. Ugh you!”
Before I had time to look about my new home grandmother arrived with mother and the baby. My stepfather had been dismissed from the works for pilfering from the workmen, but he had gone after other employment and had been taken on in the booking-office of the railway station almost at once.
After a long, uneventful period, once more I was living with mother in the basement of a storehouse. As soon as she was settled mother sent me to school and from the very first I took a dislike to it.
I went thither in mother’s shoes, with a coat made out of a bodice belonging to grandmother, a yellow shirt, and trousers which had been lengthened. My attire immediately became an object of ridicule, and for the yellow shirt I received “The ace of diamonds.”
I soon became friendly with the boys, but the master and the priest did not like me.
The master was a jaundiced-looking, bold man who suffered from a continuous bleeding of the nose; he used to appear in the schoolroom with his nostrils stopped up with cotton-wool, and as he sat at his table, asking us questions in snuffling tones, he would suddenly stop in the middle of a word, take the wool out of his nostrils and look at it, shaking his head. He had a flat, copper-colored face, with a sour expression, and there was a greenish tint in his wrinkles; but it was his literally pewter-colored eyes which were the most hideous feature of it, and they were so unpleasantly glued to my face that I used to feel that I must brush them off my cheek with my hands.
For several days I was in the first division, and at the top of the class, quite close to the master’s table, and my position was almost unbearable. He seemed to see no one but me, and he was snuffling all the time :
“Pyesh kov, you must put on a clean shirt. Pyesh kov, don’t make a noise with your feet. Pyesh kov, your bootlaces are undone again.”
But I paid him out for his savage insolence. One day I took the half of a frozen watermelon, cut out the inside, and fastened it by a string over a pulley on the outer door. When the door opened the melon went up, but when my teacher shut the door the hollow melon descended upon his bald head like a cap. The janitor was sent with me with a note to the head-master’s house, and I paid for my prank with my own skin.
Another time I sprinkled snuff over his table, and he sneezed so much that he had to leave the class and send his brother-in-law to take his place. This was an officer who set the class singing: “God save the Czar!” and “Oh, Liberty! my Liberty!” Those who did not sing in tune he rapped over the head with a ruler, which made a funny, hollow noise, but it hurt.
The Divinity teacher, the handsome, young, luxuriant-haired priest, did not like me because I had no Bible, and also because I mocked his way of speaking. The first thing he did when he entered the classroom was to ask me:
“Pyeshkov, have you brought that book or not? Yes. The book!”
“No,” I answered, “I have not brought it. Yes.”
“What do you mean yes?”
“No.”
“Well, you can just go home. Yes home, for I don’t intend to teach you. Yes! I don’t intend to do it.”
This did not trouble me much. I went out and kicked my heels in the dirty village street till the end of the lesson, watching the noisy life about me.
This priest had a beautiful face, like a Christ, with caressing eyes like a woman’s, and little hands gentle, like everything about him. Whatever he handled a book, a ruler, a penholder, whatever it might be he handled carefully, as if it were alive and very fragile, and as if he loved it and were afraid of spoiling it by touching it. He was not quite so gentle with the children, but all the same they loved him.
Notwithstanding the fact that I learned tolerably well, I was soon told that I should be expelled from the school for unbecoming conduct. I became depressed, for I saw a very unpleasant time coming, as mother was growing more irritable every day, and beat me more than ever.
But help was at hand. Bishop Khrisanph l paid an unexpected visit to the school. He was a little man, like a wizard, and, if I remember rightly, was humpbacked.
Sitting at the table, looking so small in his wide black clothes, and with a funny hat like a little pail on his head, he shook his hands free from his sleeves and said :
“Now, children, let us have a talk together.”
And at once the classroom became warm and bright, and pervaded by an atmosphere of unfamiliar pleasantness.
J The author of the famous work, in three volumes, entitled “Religions of the Ancient World,” and the article on “Egyptian Metempsychosis,” as well as several articles of public interest such as “Concerning Marriage, and Women.” That last article made a deep impression on me when I read it in my youth. It seems to me that I have not remembered its title correctly, but it was published in some theological journal in the seventies.
Calling me to the table, after many others had had their turns, he asked me gravely:
“And how old are you? Is that all? Why, what a tall boy you are ! I suppose you have been standing out in the rain pretty often, have you? Eh?”
Placing one dried-up hand with long, sharp nails on the table, and catching hold of his sparse beard with the fingers of the other, he placed his face, with its kind eyes, quite close to mine, as he said :
“Well, now tell me which you like best of the Bible stones.”
When I told him that I had no Bible and did not learn Scripture history, he pulled his cowl straight, saying :
“How is that? You know it is absolutely necessary for you to learn it. But perhaps you have learned some by listening? You know the Psalms? Good! And the prayers? ... There, you see! And the lives of the Saints too? ... In rhyme? . . . Then I think you are very well up in the subject.”
At this moment our priest appeared flushed and out of breath. The Bishop blessed him, but when he began to speak about me, he raised his hand, saying :
“Excuse me ... just a minute. . . . Now, tell me the story of Alexei, the man of God.
“Fine verses those eh, my boy?” he said, when I came to a full stop, having forgotten the next verse.
“Let us have something else now something about King David. ... Go on, I am listening very attentively.”
I saw that he was really listening, and that the verses pleased him. He examined me for a long time, then he suddenly stood up and asked quickly:
“You have learned the Psalms? Who taught you? A good grandfather, is he? Eh? Bad? You don’t say so! . . . But aren’t you very naughty?”
I hesitated, but at length I said :
“Yes.”
The teacher and the priest corroborated my confession garrulously, and he listened to them with his eyes cast down; then he said with a sigh:
“You hear what they say about you? Come here!”
Placing his hand, which smelt of cypress wood, on my head, he asked:
“Why are you so naughty?”
“It is so dull learning.”

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