منتديات منابر ثقافية - عرض مشاركة واحدة

10-28-2011, 06:09 PM

المشاركة 22

ريم بدر الدين

عضو مجلس الإدارة سابقا

اوسمتي

مجموع الاوسمة: 5

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Chapter XII

ONE day I fell asleep before the evening, and when I woke up I felt that my legs had waked up too. I put them out of bed, and they became numb again; but the fact remained that my legs were cured and that I should be able to walk. This was such glorious news that I shouted for joy, and put my feet to the floor with the whole weight of my body on them. I fell down, but I crawled to the door and down the staircase, vividly representing to myself the surprise of those downstairs when they should see me.
I do not remember how I got into mother’s room on my knees; but there were some strangers with her, and one, a dried-up old woman in green, said sternly, drowning all other voices:
“Give him some raspberry syrup to drink, and cover up his head.”
She was green all over: her dress, and hat, and her face, which had warts under the eyes; even the tufts of hair on the warts were like grass. Letting her lower lip droop, she raised the upper one and looked at me with her green teeth, covering her eyes with a hand in a black thread mitten.
“Who is that?” I asked, suddenly growing timid.
Grandfather answered in a disagreeable voice:
“That ‘s another grandmother for you.”
Mother, laughing, brought Eugen Maximov to me.
“And here is your father !”
She said something rapidly which I did not understand, and Maximov, with twinkling eyes, bent towards me and said:
“I will make you a present of some paints.”
The room was lit up very brightly; silver candelabra, holding five candles each, stood on the table, and between them was placed grandfather’s favorite icon “Mourn not for me, Mother.” The pearls with which it was set gave forth an intermittent brilliancy as the lights played on them flickeringly, and the gems in the golden crown shone radiantly; heavy, round faces like pancakes were pressing against the window-panes from outside, flattening their noses against the glass, and everything round me seemed to be floating. The old green woman felt my ears with her cold fingers and said:
“By all means! By all means!”
“He is fainting,” said grandmother, and she carried me to the door.
But I was not fainting. I just kept my eyes shut, and as soon as she had half-dragged, half-carried me up the staircase, I asked:
“Why wasn’t I told of this’?”
“That will do. ... Hold your tongue !”
“You are deceivers all of you!”
Laying me on the bed, she threw herself down with her head on the pillow and burst into tears, shaking from head to foot; her shoulders heaved, and she muttered chokingly:
“Why don’t you cry?”
I had no desire to cry. It was twilight in the attic, and cold. I shuddered, and the bed shook and creaked; and ever before my eyes stood the old green woman. I pretended to be asleep, and grandmother went away.
Several uneventful days, all alike, flowed by like a thin stream. Mother had gone away somewhere after the betrothal, and the house was oppressively quiet.
One morning grandfather came in with a chisel and began to break away the cement around the attic window-frames which were put in for the winter; then grandmother appeared with a basin of water and a cloth, and grandfather asked softly:
“Well, old woman, what do you think of it?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, are you pleased, or what?”
She answered him as she had answered me on the staircase :
“That will do. ... Hold your tongue !”
The simplest words had a peculiar significance for me now, and I imagined that they concealed something of tremendous import and sorrow of which no one might speak, but of which every one knew.
Carefully taking out the window-frame, grandfather carried it away, and grandmother went to the window and breathed the air. In the garden the starling was calling; the sparrows chirped; the intoxicating odor of the thawing earth floated into the room. The dark blue tiles of the stove seemed to turn pale with confusion ; it made one cold to look at them. I climbed down from the bed to the floor.
“Don’t go running about with your feet bare,” said grandmother.
“I am going into the garden.”
“It is not dry enough there yet. Wait a bit!”
But I would not listen to her; in fact the very sight of grown-up people affected me unpleasantly now. In the garden the light green spikes of young grass were already pushing their way through, the buds on the apple trees were swelling and ready to break, the moss on the roof of Petrovna’s cottage was very pleasing to the eye in its renewed green; all around were birds, and sounds of joy, and the fresh, fragrant air caused a pleasant sensation of giddiness. By the pit, where Uncle Peter cut his throat, there was long grass red, and mixed up with the broken snow. I did not like looking at it; there was nothing spring-like about it. The black chimney-stack reared itself up dejectedly, and the whole pit was an unnecessary eyesore. I was seized with an angry desire to tear up and break off the long grass, to pull the chimney-stack to pieces brick by brick, and get rid of all that useless muck, and to build a clean dwelling for myself in the pit, where I could live all the summer without grown-up people.
I had no sooner thought of it than I set myself to do it, and it immediately diverted my mind from what went on in the house, and kept it occupied for a long time; and although many things occurred to upset me, they became of less importance to me every day.
“What are you sulking about?” mother and grandmother used to ask me; and it made me feel awkward when they asked this question, for I was not angry with them it was simply that every one in the house had become a stranger to me. At dinner, at evening tea, and supper the old, green woman often appeared looking just like a rotten paling in an old fence. The eyes seemed to be sewn on her face with invisible threads, and looked as if they would easily roll out of their bony sockets, as she turned them rapidly in every direction, seeing and taking notes of everything raising them to the ceiling when she talked of God, and looking down her nose when she spoke of household matters. Her eyebrows looked exactly as if they had been cut out of pieces and stuck on. Her large, protruding teeth noiselessly chewed whatever she put in her mouth with a funny curve of her arm, and her little finger stuck out; while the bones about her ears moved like little round balls, and the green hairs on her warts went up and down as if they were creeping along her yellow, wrinkled, disgustingly clean skin.
She was always so very clean like her son, and it was unpleasant to go near them. The first day she put her dead hand against my lips, it smelled strongly of yellow Kazan soap and incense, and I turned away and ran off. She said to her son very often :
“That boy is greatly in need of discipline; do you understand that, Jenia?”
Inclining his head obediently, he would frown and remain silent. Every one frowned in the presence of the green woman.
I hated the old woman, and her son too, with an intense hatred, and many blows did that feeling cost me. One day at dinner she said, rolling her eyes horribly:
“Oh Aleshenka, why do you eat in such a hurry, and take such big pieces’? Give it up, my dear!”
I took the piece out of my mouth, put it on the fork again, and handed it to her.
“Take it only it is hot.”
Mother took me away from the table, and I was ignominiously banished to the attic, where grandmother joined me, trying to keep her giggling from being heard by placing her hand over her mouth.
“Lor ! you are a cheeky young monkey. Bless you !”
It irritated me to see her with her hand over her mouth, so I ran away, climbed on the roof of the house, and sat there a long time by the chimney. Yes, I wanted to be insolent and to use injurious words to them all, and it was hard to fight against this feeling, but it had to be fought against.
One day I covered the chair of my future stepfather with grease, and that of my new grandmother with cherry-gum, and they both stuck to their seats; it was very funny, but when grandfather had hit me, mother came up to me in the attic, and drawing me to her, pressed me against her knees saying:
“Listen now ! Why are you so ill-natured? If you only knew how miserable it makes me.” And her eyes overflowed with bright tears as she pressed my head against her cheek.
This was very painful; I had rather she had struck me. I told her I would never again be rude to the Maximovs never again, if only she would not cry.
“There, there!” she said softly. “Only you must not be impudent. Very soon we shall be married, and then we shall go to Moscow ; afterwards we shall come back and you will live with us. Eugen Vassilivitch is very kind and clever, and you will get on well with him. You will go to a grammar school, and afterwards you shall be a student like he is now ; then you shall be a doctor whatever you like. You may study whatever you choose. Now run and play.”
These “afterwards” and “thens” one after the other seemed to me like a staircase leading to some place deep down and far away from her, into darkness and solitude a staircase which led to no happiness for me. I had a good mind to say to my mother:
“Please don’t get married. I will earn money for your keep.”
But somehow the words would not come. Mother always aroused in me many tender thoughts about herself, but I never could make up my mind to tell them to her.
My undertaking in the garden was progressing; I pulled up the long grass, or cut it down with a knife, and I built, with pieces of brick, against the edge of the pit where the earth had fallen away, a broad seat, large enough, in fact, to lie down upon. I took a lot of pieces of colored glass and fragments of broken crockery and stuck them in the chinks between the bricks, and when the sun looked into the pit they all shone with a rainbow effect, like one sees in churches.
“Very well thought out!” said grandfather one day, looking at my work. “Only you have broken off the grass and left the roots. Give me your spade and I will dig them up for you; come, bring it to me!”
I brought him the yellow spade ; he spat on his hands, and making a noise like a duck, drove the spade into the earth with his foot.
“Throw away the roots,” he said. “Later on I will plant some sunflowers here for you, and some raspberry bushes. That will be nice very nice!” And then, bending over his spade, he fell into a dead silence.
I looked at him ; fine tear-drops were falling fast from his small, intelligent, doglike eyes to the ground.
“What is the matter?”
He shook himself, wiped his face with his palms, and dimly regarded me.
“I was sweating. Look there what a lot of worms !”
Then he began to dig again, and after a time he said abruptly :
“You have done all this for nothing for nothing, my boy. I am going to sell the house soon. I must sell it before autumn without fail. I want the money for your mother’s dowry. That ‘s what it is ! I hope she will be happy. God bless her!”
He threw down the spade, and with a gesture of renunciation went behind the washhouse where he had a forcing-bed, and I began to dig; but almost at once I crushed my toes with the spade.
This prevented me from going to the church with mother when she was married; I could only get as far as the gate, and from there I saw her on Maximov’s arm, with her head bowed, carefully setting her feet on the pavement and on the green grass, and stepping over the crevices as if she were walking on sharp nails

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