عرض مشاركة واحدة
قديم 10-28-2011, 06:08 PM
المشاركة 21
ريم بدر الدين
عضو مجلس الإدارة سابقا

اوسمتي

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افتراضي
“I went to grandfather and said : ‘Go and talk to the Inspector while I go and wait for our sons to tell them what evil has befallen us.’
“He dressed himself, all of a tremble, muttering: T knew how it would be! This is what I expected.’
“All lies ! He knew nothing of the kind. Well, I met my children with my hands before my face. Fear sobered Mischka at once, and Jaashenka, the dear boy, let the cat out of the bag by babbling: ‘I don’t know anything about it. It is all Michael’s doing. He is the eldest.’
“However, we made it all right with the Inspector. He was a very nice gentleman. ‘Oh,’ he says, ‘but you had better take care; if anything bad happens in your house I shall know who is to blame.’ And with that he went away.
“And grandfather went to Maxim and said: ‘Thank you! Any one else in your place would not have acted as you have done that I know! And thank you, daughter, for bringing such a good man into your father’s house.’ Grandfather could speak very nicely when he liked. It was after this that he began to be silly, and keep his heart shut up like a castle.
“We three were left together. Maxim Savatyevitch began to cry, and became almost delirious. ‘Why have they done this to me? What harm have I done them? Mama . . . why did they do it?’ He never called me ‘mamasha,’ but always ‘mama,’ like a child . . . and he was really a child in character. ‘Why ... ?’ he asked.
“I cried too what else was there for me to do? I was so sorry for my children. Your mother tore all the buttons off her bodice, and sat there, all dishevelled as if she had been fighting, calling out: ‘Let us go away, Maxim. My brothers are our enemies; I am afraid of them. Let us go away!’
“I tried to quieten her. ‘Don’t throw rubbish on the fire,’ I said. ‘The house is full of smoke without that.’
“At that very moment that fool of a grandfather must go and send those two to beg forgiveness; she sprang at Mischka and slapped his face. ‘There ‘s your forgiveness!’ she said. And your father complained: ‘How could you do such a thing, brothers? You might have crippled me. What sort of a workman shall I be without hands’?’
“However, they were reconciled. Your father was ailing for some time; for seven weeks he tossed about, and got no better, and he kept saying: Ekh! Mama, let us go to another town; I am weary of this place.’
“Then he had a chance of going to Astrakhan; they expected the Emperor there in the summer, and your father was entrusted with the building of a triumphal arch. They sailed on the first boat. It cut me to the heart to part from them, and he was grieved about it too, and kept saying to me that I ought to go with them to Astrakhan; but Varvara rejoiced, and did not even try to hide her joy the hussy! And so they went away . . . and that is all!”
She drank a drop of vodka, took a pinch of snuff, and added, gazing out of the window at the dark blue sky:
“Yes, your father and I were not of the same blood, but in soul we were akin.”
Sometimes, while she was telling me this, grandfather came in with his face uplifted, sniffed the air with his sharp nose, and looking suspiciously at grandmother, listened to what she was saying and muttered :
“That’s not true! That’s not true!”
Then he would ask, without warning:
“Lexei, has she been drinking brandy here?”
“No.”
“That ‘s a lie, for I saw her with my own eyes !” And he would go out in an undecided manner.
Grandmother would wink at him behind his back and utter some quaint saying:
“Go along, Avdye, and don’t frighten the horses.”
One day, as he stood in the middle of the room, staring at the floor, he said softly:
“Mother?”
“Aye?”
“You see what is going on?”
“Yes, I see!”
“What do you think of it?”
“There’ll be a wedding, Father. Do you remember how you used to talk about a nobleman?”
“Yes.”
“Well here he is!”
“He ‘s got nothing.”
“That ‘s her business.”
Grandfather left the room, and conscious of a sense of uneasiness, I asked:
“What were you talking about?”
“You want to know everything,” she replied querulously, rubbing my feet. “If you know everything when you are young, there will be nothing to ask questions about when you get old.” And she laughed and shook her head at me.
“Oh, grandfather! grandfather! you are nothing but a little piece of dust in the eyes of God. Lenka now don’t you tell any one this, but grandfather is absolutely ruined. He lent a certain gentleman a large sum of money, and now the gentleman has gone bankrupt.”
Smiling, she fell into a reverie, and sat without speaking for a long time ; and her face became wrinkled, and sad, and gloomy.
“What are you thinking about?”
“I am thinking of something to tell you,” she answered, with a start. “Shall we have the story about Evstignia ? Will that do? Well, here goes then.
“A deacon there was called Evstignia,
He thought there was no one more wise than he,
Be he presbyter, or be he boyard ;
Not even a huntsman knew more than he.
Like a spike of spear grass he held himself,
So proud, and taught his neighbors great and small ;
He found fault with this, and grumbled at that ;
He glanced at a church ‘Not lofty enough !’
He passed up a street ‘How narrow !’ he said.
An apple he plucked ‘It not red !’ he said.
The sun rose too soon for Evstignia!
In all the world there was nothing quite right!”
Grandmother puffed out her cheeks, and rolled her eyes; her kind face assumed a stupid, comical expression as she went on in a lazy, dragging voice :
“ ‘There is nothing I could not do myself,
And do it much better, I think,’ he said,
‘If I only had a little more time !’ ”
She was smilingly silent for a moment, and then she continued:
“To the deacon one night some devils came ;
‘So you find it dull here, deacon?’ they said.
‘Well, come along with us, old fellow, to hell,
You’ll have no fault to find with the fires there.’
Ere the wise deacon could put on his hat
The devils seized hold of him with their paws
And, with titters and howls, they dragged him down.
A devil on each of his shoulders sat,
And there, in the flames of hell they set him.
‘Is it all right, Evstignyeushka ?’
The deacon was roasting, brightly he burned,
Kept himself up with his hands to his sides,
Puffed out his lips as he scornfully said :
‘It ‘s dreadfully smoky down here in hell !’ ”
Concluding in an indolent, low-pitched, unctuous voice, she changed her expression and, laughing quietly, explained :
“He would not give in that Evstignia, but stuck to his own opinion obstinately, like our grandfather. . . . That ‘s enough now ; go to sleep ; it is high time.”
Mother came up to the attic to see me very seldom, and she did not stay long, and spoke as if she were in a hurry. She was getting more beautiful, and was dressed better every day, but I was conscious of something different about her, as about grandmother; I felt that there was something going on which was being kept from me and I tried to guess what it was.
Grandmother’s stories interested me less and less, even the ones she told me about my father; and they did not soothe my indefinable but daily increasing alarm.
“Why is my father’s soul not at rest?” I asked grandmother.
“How can I tell?” she replied, covering her eyes. “That is God’s affair ... it is supernatural . . . and hidden from us.”
At night, as I gazed sleeplessly through the dark blue windows at the stars floating so slowly across the sky, I made up some sad story in my mind in which the chief place was occupied by my father, who was always wandering about alone, with a stick in his hand, and with a shaggy dog behind him.