طفولتي/ مكسيم جوركي - منتديات منابر ثقافية

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Chapter II

THEN began and flowed on with astonishing rapidity an intense, varied, inexpressibly strange life. It reminded me of a crude story, well told by a good-natured but irritatingly truthful genius. Now, in recalling the past, I myself find it difficult to believe, at this distance of time, that things really were as they were, and I have longed to dispute or reject the facts the cruelty of the drab existence of an unwelcome relation is too painful to contemplate. But truth is stronger than pity, and besides, I am writing not about myself but about that narrow, stifling environment of unpleasant impressions in which lived aye, and to this day lives the average Russian of this class.
My grandfather’s house simply seethed with mutual hostility; all the grown people were infected and even the children were inoculated with it. I had learned, from overhearing grandmother’s conversation, that my mother arrived upon the very day when her brothers demanded the distribution of the property from their father. Her unexpected return made their desire for this all the keener and stronger, because they were afraid that my mother would claim the dowry intended for her, but withheld by my grandfather because she had married secretly and against his wish. My uncles considered that this dowry ought to be divided amongst them all. Added to this, they had been quarreling violently for a long time among themselves as to who should open a workshop in the town, or on the Oka in the village of Kunavin.
One day, very shortly after our arrival, a quarrel broke out suddenly at dinner-time. My uncles started to their feet and, leaning across the table, began to shout and yell at grandfather, snarling and shaking themselves like dogs; and grandfather, turning very red, rapped on the table with a spoon and cried in a piercing tone of voice, like the crowing of a cock: “I will turn you out of doors !”
With her face painfully distorted, grandmother said : “Give them what they ask, Father; then you will have some peace.”
“Be quiet, simpleton !” shouted my grandfather with flashing eyes; and it was wonderful, seeing how small he was, that he could yell with such deafening effect.
My mother rose from the table, and going calmly to the window, turned her back upon us all.
Suddenly Uncle Michael struck his brother on the face with the back of his hand. The latter, with a howl of rage, grappled with him; both rolled on the floor growling, gasping for breath and abusing each other. The children began to cry, and my Aunt Natalia, who was with child, screamed wildly; my mother seized her round the body and dragged her somewhere out of the way; the lively little nursemaid, Eugenia, drove the children out of the kitchen; chairs were knocked down; the young, broad-shouldered foreman, Tsiganok, sat on Uncle Michael’s back, while the head of the works, Gregory Ivanovitch, a bald-headed, bearded man with colored spectacles, calmly bound up my uncle’s hands with towels.
Turning his head and letting his thin, straggly, black beard trail on the floor, Uncle Michael cursed horribly, and grandfather, running round the table, exclaimed bitterly: “And these are brothers! . . . Blood relations! . . . Shame on you!”
At the beginning of the quarrel I had jumped on to the stove in terror; and thence, with painful amazement, I had watched grandmother as she washed Uncle Jaakov’s battered face in a small basin of water, while he cried and stamped his feet, and she said in a sad voice: “Wicked creatures! You are nothing better than a family of wild beasts. When will you come to your senses’?”
Grandfather, dragging his torn shirt over his shoulder, called out to her: “So you have brought wild animals into the world, eh, old woman?”
When Uncle Jaakov went out, grandmother retired to a corner and, quivering with grief, prayed : “Holy Mother of God, bring my children to their senses.”
Grandfather stood beside her, and, glancing at the table, on which everything was upset or spilled, said softly :
“When you think of them, Mother, and then of the little one they pester Varia about . . . who has the best nature?”
“Hold your tongue, for goodness sake! Take off that shirt and I will mend it. . . .” And laying the palms of her hands on his head, grandmother kissed his forehead; and he so small compared to her pressing his face against her shoulder, said:
“We shall have to give them their shares, Mother, that is plain.”
“Yes, Father, it will have to be done.”
Then they talked for a long time; amicably at first, but it was not long before grandfather began to scrape his feet on the floor like a cock before a fight, and holding up a threatening finger to grandmother, said in a fierce whisper :
“I know you ! You love them more than me. . . . And what is your Mischka? a Jesuit ! And Jaaschka a Freemason! And they live on me. . . . Hangers-on ! That is all they are.”
Uneasily turning on the stove, I knocked down an iron, which fell with a crash like a thunder-clap.
Grandfather jumped up on the step, dragged me down, and stared at me as if he now saw me for the first time.
“Who put you on the stove? Your mother?”
“I got up there by myself.”
“You are lying!”
“No I ‘m not. I did get up there by myself. I was frightened.”
He pushed me away from him, lightly striking me on the head with the palm of his hand.
“Just like your father ! Get out of my sight !”
And I was only too glad to run out of the kitchen.
I was very well aware that grandfather’s shrewd, sharp green eyes followed me everywhere, and I was afraid of him. I remember how I always wished to hide myself from that fierce glance. It seemed to me that grandfather was malevolent ; he spoke to every one mockingly and offensively, and, being provocative, did his best to put every one else out of temper.
“Ugh! Tou!” he exclaimed frequently.
The long-drawn-out sound “U-gh !” always reminds me of a sensation of misery and chill. In the recreation hour, the time for evening tea, when he, my uncles and the workmen came into the kitchen from the workshop weary, with their hands stained with santaline and burnt by sulphuric acid, their hair bound with linen bands, all looking like the dark-featured icon in the corner of the kitchen in that hour of dread my grandfather used to sit opposite to me, arousing the envy of the other grandchildren by speaking to me oftener than to them. Everything about him was trenchant and to the point. His heavy satin waistcoat embroidered with silk was old; his much-scrubbed shirt of colored cotton was crumpled ; great patches flaunted themselves on the knees of his trousers; and yet he seemed to be dressed with more cleanliness and more refinement than his sons, who wore false shirtfronts and silk neckties.
Some days after our arrival he set me to learn the prayers. All the other children were older than myself, and were already being taught to read and write by the clerk of Uspenski Church. Timid Aunt Natalia used to teach me softly. She was a woman with a childlike countenance, and such transparent eyes that it seemed to me that, looking into them, one might see what was inside her head. I loved to look into those eyes of hers without shifting my gaze and without blinking; they used to twinkle as she turned her head away and said very softly, almost in a whisper: “That will do. ... Now please say ‘Our Father, which art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy name. . . .’ ” And if I asked, “What does ‘hallowed be Thy name’ mean?” she would glance round timidly and admonish me thus: “Don’t ask questions. It is wrong. Just say after me ‘Our Father . . .’ ’
Her words troubled me. Why was it wrong to ask questions’? The words “hallowed be Thy name” acquired a mysterious significance in my mind, and I purposely mixed them up in every possible way.
But my aunt, pale and almost exhausted, patiently cleared her throat, which was always husky, and said, “No, that is not right. Just say fallowed be Thy name.’ It is plain enough.”
But my aunt, pale and almost exhausted, patiently irritated me, and hindered me from remembering the prayer.
One day my grandfather inquired:
“Well, Oleysha, what have you been doing today? ,. Playing? The bruises on your forehead told me as much. Bruises are got cheaply. And how about ‘Our Father? Have you learnt it?”
“He has a very bad memory,” said my aunt softly.
Grandfather smiled as if he were glad, lifting his sandy eyebrows. “And what of it? He must be whipped ; that ‘s all.”
And again he turned to me.
“Did your father ever whip you?”
As I did not know what he was talking about, I was silent, but my mother replied:
“No, Maxim never beat him, and what is more, forbade me to do so.”
“And why, may I ask?”
“He said that beating is not education.”
“He was a fool about everything that Maxim. May God forgive me for speaking so of the dead!” exclaimed grandfather distinctly and angrily. He saw at once that these words enraged me. “What is that sullen face for?’ he asked. “Ugh! . . . Ton! . . .” And smoothing down his reddish, silver-streaked hair, he added:’ “And this very Saturday I am going to give Sascha a hiding.”
“What is a hiding?” I asked.
They all laughed, and grandfather said: “Wait a bit, and you shall see.”
In secret I pondered over the word “hiding.” Apparently it had the same meaning as to whip and beat. I had seen people beat horses, dogs and cats, and in Astrakhan the soldiers used to beat the Persians; but I had never before seen any one beat little children. Yet here my uncles hit their own children over the head and shoulders, and they bore it without resentment, merely rubbing the injured part; and if I asked them whether they were hurt, they always answered bravely :
“No, not a bit.”
Then there was the famous story of the thimble.
In the evenings, from tea-time to supper-time, my uncles and the head workman used to sew portions of dyed material into one piece, to which they affixed tickets. Wishing to play a trick on half-blind Gregory, Uncle Michael had told his nine-year-old nephew to make his thimble red-hot in the candle-flame. Sascha heated the thimble in the snuffers, made it absolutely red-hot, and contriving, without attracting attention, to place it close to Gregory’s hand, hid himself by the stove; but as luck would have it, grandfather himself came in at that very moment and, sitting down to work, slipped his finger into the red-hot thimble.
Hearing the tumult, I ran into the kitchen, and I shall never forget how funny grandfather looked nursing his burnt finger as he jumped about and shrieked:
“Where is the villain who played this trick?”
Uncle Michael, doubled up under the table, snatched up the thimble and blew upon it; Gregory unconcernedly went on sewing, while the shadows played on his enormous bald patch. Then Uncle Jaakov rushed in, and, hiding himself in the corner by the stove, stood there quietly laughing; grandmother busied herself with grating up raw potatoes.
“Sascha Jaakov did it!” suddenly exclaimed Uncle Michael.
“Liar!” cried Jaakov, darting out from behind the stove.
But his son, from one of the corners, wept and wailed :
“Papa! don’t believe him. He showed me how to do it himself.”
My uncles began to abuse each other, but grandfather all at once grew calm, put a poultice of grated potatoes on his finger, and silently went out, taking me with him.
They all said that Uncle Michael was to blame. I asked naturally if he would be whipped, or get a hiding.
“He ought to,” answered grandfather, with a side-long glance at me.
Uncle Michael, striking his hand upon the table, bawled at my mother : “Varvara, make your pup hold his jaw before I knock his head off.”
“Go on, then; try to lay your hands on him!” replied my mother. And no one said another word.
She had a gift of pushing people out of her way, brushing them aside as it were, and making them feel very small by a few brief words like these. It was perfectly clear to me that they were all afraid of her; even grandfather spoke to her more quietly than he spoke to the others. It gave me great satisfaction to observe this, and in my pride I used to say openly to my cousins : “My mother is a match for all of them.” And they did not deny it.
But the events which happened on Saturday diminished my respect for my mother.
By Saturday I also had had time to get into trouble. I was fascinated by the ease with which the grown-up people changed the color of different materials; they took something yellow, steeped it in black dye, and it came out dark blue. They laid a piece of gray stuff in reddish water and it was dyed mauve. It was quite simple, yet to me it was inexplicable. I longed to dye something myself, and I confided my desire to Sascha Yaakovitch, a thoughtful boy, always in favor with his elders, always good-natured, obliging, and ready to wait upon every one.
The adults praised him highly for his obedience and his cleverness, but grandfather looked on him with no favorable eye, and used to say:
“An artful beggar that!”
Thin and dark, with prominent, watchful eyes, Sascha Yaakov used to speak in a low, rapid voice, as if his words were choking him, and all the while he talked he glanced fearfully from side to side as if he were ready to run away and hide himself on the slightest pretext. The pupils of his hazel eyes were stationary except when he was excited, and then they became merged into the whites. I did not like him. I much preferred the despised idler, Sascha Michailovitch. He was a quiet boy, with sad eyes and a pleasing smile, very like his kind mother. He had ugly, protruding teeth, with a double row in the upper jaw; and being very greatly concerned about this defect, he constantly had his fingers in his mouth, trying to loosen his back ones, very amiably allowing any one who chose to inspect them. But that was the only interesting thing about him. He lived a solitary life in a house swarming with people, loving to sit in the dim corners in the daytime, and at the window in the evening; quite happy if he could remain without speaking, with his face pressed against the pane for hours together, gazing at the flock of jackdaws which, now rising high above it, now sinking swiftly earthwards, in the red evening sky, circled round the dome of Uspenski Church, and finally, obscured by an opaque black cloud, disappeared somewhere, leaving a void behind them. When he had seen this he had no desire to speak of it, but a pleasant languor took possession of him.
Uncle Jaakov’s Sascha, on the contrary, could talk about everything fluently and with authority, like a grown-up person. Hearing of my desire to learn the process of dyeing, he advised me to take one of the best white tablecloths from the cupboard and dye it blue.
“White always takes the color better, I know,” he said very seriously.
I dragged out a heavy tablecloth and ran with it to the yard, but I had no more than lowered the hem of it into the vat of dark-blue dye when Tsiganok flew at me from somewhere, rescued the cloth, and wringing it out with his rough hands, cried to my cousin, who had been looking on at my work from a safe place:
“Call your grandmother quickly.”
And shaking his black, dishevelled head ominously, he said to me:
“You’ll catch it for this.”
Grandmother came running on to the scene, wailing, and even weeping, at the sight, and scolded me in her ludicrous fashion:
“Oh, you young pickle ! I hope you will be spanked for this.”
Afterwards, however, she said to Tsiganok: “You needn’t say anything about this to grandfather, Vanka. I’ll manage to keep it from him. Let us hope that something will happen to take up his attention.”
Vanka replied in a preoccupied manner, drying his hands on his multi-colored apron :
“Me? I shan’t tell: but you had better see that that Sascha doesn’t go and tell tales.”
“I will give him something to keep him quiet,” said grandmother, leading me into the house.
On Saturday, before vespers, I was called into the kitchen, where it was all dark and still. I remember the closely shut doors of the shed and of the room, and the gray mist of an autumn evening, and the heavy patter of rain. Sitting in front of the stove on a narrow bench, looking cross and quite unlike himself, was Tsiganok; grandfather, standing in the chimney corner, was taking long rods out of a pail of water, measuring them, putting them together, and flourishing them in the air with a shrill whistling sound. Grandmother, somewhere in the shadows, was taking snuff noisily and muttering:
“Now you are in your element, tyrant!”
Sascha Jaakov was sitting in a chair in the middle of the kitchen, rubbing his eyes with his knuckles, and whining like an old beggar in a voice quite unlike his usual voice:
“Forgive me, for Christ’s sake. . . . !”
Standing by the chair, shoulder to shoulder, like wooden figures, stood the children of Uncle Michael, brother and sister.
“When I have flogged you I will forgive you,” said grandfather, drawing a long, damp rod across his knuckles.
“Now then . . . take down your breeches !”
He spoke very calmly, and neither the sound of his voice nor the noise made by the boy as he moved on the squeaky chair, nor the scraping of grandmother’s feet, broke the memorable stillness of that almost dark kitchen, under the low, blackened ceiling.
Sascha stood up, undid his trousers, letting them down as far as his knees, then bending and holding them up with his hands, he stumbled to the bench. It was painful to look at him, and my legs also began to tremble.
But worse was to come, when he submissively lay down on the bench face downwards, and Vanka, tying him to it by means of a wide towel placed under his arms and round his neck, bent under him and with black hands seized his legs by the ankles.
“Lexei!” called grandfather. “Come nearer! Come! Don’t you hear me speaking to you? Look and see what a flogging is. ... One !”
With a mild flourish he brought the rod down on the naked flesh, and Sascha set up a howl.
“Rubbish!” said grandfather. “That’s nothing! . . . But here ‘s something to make you smart.”
And he dealt such blows that the flesh was soon in a state of inflammation and covered with great red weals, and my cousin gave a prolonged howl.
“Isn’t it nice?” asked grandfather, as his hand rose and fell. “You don’t like it? ... That’s for the thimble!”
When he raised his hand with a flourish my heart seemed to rise too, and when he let his hand fall something within me seemed to sink.
“I won’t do it again,” squealed Sascha, in a dreadfully thin, weak voice, unpleasant to hear. “Didn’t I tell didn’t I tell about the tablecloth?”
Grandfather answered calmly, as if he were reading the “Psalter” :
“Tale-bearing is no justification. The informer gets whipped first, so take that for the tablecloth.”
Grandmother threw herself upon me and seized my hand, crying: “I won’t allow Lexei to be touched! I won’t allow it, you monster!” And she began to kick the door, calling: “Varia! Varvara!”
Grandfather darted across to her, threw her down, seized me and carried me to the bench. I struck at him with my fists, pulled his sandy beard, and bit his fingers. He bellowed and held me as in a vice. In the end, throwing me down on the bench, he struck me on the face.
I shall never forget his savage cry: “Tie him up! I ‘m going to kill him !” nor my mother’s white face and great eyes as she ran along up and down beside the bench, shrieking:
“Father ! You mustn’t ! Let me have him !”
Grandfather flogged me till I lost consciousness, and I was unwell for some days, tossing about, face downwards, on a wide, stuffy bed, in a little room with one window and a lamp which was always kept burning before the case of icons in the corner. Those dark days had been the greatest in my life. In the course of them I had developed wonderfully, and I was conscious of a peculiar difference in myself. I began to experience a new solicitude for others, and I became so keenly alive to their sufferings and my own that it was almost as if my heart had been lacerated, and thus rendered sensitive.
For this reason the quarrel between my mother and grandmother came as a great shock to me when grandmother, looking so dark and big in the narrow room, flew into a rage, and pushing my mother into the corner where the icons were, hissed :
“Why didn’t you take him away?”
“I was afraid.”
“A strong, healthy creature like you! You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Varvara! I am an old woman and I am not afraid. For shame !”
“Do leave off, Mother; I am sick of the whole business.”
“No, you don’t love him! You have no pity for the poor orphan!”
“I have been an orphan all my life,” said my mother, speaking loudly and sadly.
After that they both cried for a long time, seated on a box in a corner, and then my mother said :
“If it were not for Alexei, I would leave this place and go right away. I can’t go on living in this hell, Mother, I can’t! I haven’t the strength.”
“Oh ! My own flesh and blood !” whispered grandmother.
I kept all this in my mind. Mother was weak, and, like the others, she was afraid of grandfather, and I was preventing her from leaving the house in which she found it impossible to live. It was very unfortunate. Before long my mother really did disappear from the house, going somewhere on a visit.
Very soon after this, as suddenly as if he had fallen from the ceiling, grandfather appeared, and sitting on the bed, laid his ice-cold hands on my head.
“How do you do, young gentleman? Come! answer me. Don’t sulk! Well”? What have you to say?”
I had a great mind to kick away his legs, but it hurt me to move. His head, sandier than ever, shook from side to side uneasily ; his bright eyes seemed to be looking for something on the wall as he pulled out of his pocket a gingerbread goat, a horn made of sugar, an apple and a cluster of purple raisins, which he placed on the pillow under my very nose.
“There you are ! There ‘s a present for you.”
And he stooped and kissed me on the forehead.
Then, stroking my head with those small, cruel hands, yellow-stained about the crooked, claw-like nails, he began to speak.
“I left my mark on you then, my friend. You were very angry. You bit me and scratched me, and then I lost my temper too. However, it will do you no harm to have been punished more severely than you deserved. It will go towards next time. You must learn not to mind when people of your own family beat you. It is part of your training. It would be different if it came from an outsider, but from one of us it does not count. You must not allow outsiders to lay hands on you, but it is nothing coming from one of your own family. I suppose you think I was never flogged? Oleysha! I was flogged harder than you could ever imagine even in a bad dream. I was flogged so cruelly that God Himself might have shed tears to see it. And what was the result? I an orphan, the son of a poor mother have risen in my present position the head of a guild, and a master workman.”
Bending his withered, well-knit body towards me, he began to tell me in vigorous and powerful language, with a felicitous choice of words, about the days of his childhood. His green eyes were very bright, and his golden hair stood rakishly on end as, deflecting his high-pitched voice, he breathed in my face.
“You traveled here by steamboat . . . steam will take you anywhere now; but when I was young I had to tow a barge up the Volga all by myself. The barge was in the water and I ran barefoot on the bank, which was strewn with sharp stones. . . . Thus I went from early in the morning to sunset, with the sun beating fiercely on the back of my neck, and my head throbbing as if it were full of molten iron. And sometimes I was overcome by three kinds of ill-luck . . . my poor little bones ached, but I had to keep on, and I could not see the way; and then my eyes brimmed over, and I sobbed my heart out as the tears rolled down. Ah ! Oleysha ! it won’t bear talking about.
“I went on and on till the towing-rope slipped from me and I fell down on my face, and I was not sorry for it either! I rose up all the stronger. If I had not rested a minute I should have died.
“That is the way we used to live then in the sight of God and of our Blessed Lord Jesus Christ. This is the way I took the measure of Mother Volga three times, from Simbirsk to Ribinsk, from there to Saratov, as far as Astrakhan and Markarev, to the Fair more than three thousand versts. And by the fourth year I had become a free waterman. I had shown my master what I was made of.”
As he spoke he seemed to increase in size like a cloud before my very eyes, being transformed from a small, wizened old man to an individual of fabulous strength. Had he not pulled a great gray barge up the river all by himself? Now and again he jumped up from the bed and showed me how the barges traveled with the towing-rope round them, and how they pumped water, singing fragments of a song in a bass voice; then, youthfully springing back on the bed, to my ever-increasing astonishment, he would continue hoarsely and impressively.
“Well, sometimes, Oleysha, on a summer’s evening when we arrived at Jigulak, or some such place at the foot of the green hills, we used to sit about lazily cooking our supper while the boatmen of the hill-country used to sing sentimental songs, and as soon as they began the whole crew would strike up, sending a thrill through one, and making the Volga seem as if it were running very fast like a horse, and rising up as high as the clouds; and all kinds of trouble seemed as nothing more than dust blown about by the wind. They sang till the porridge boiled over, for which the cook had to be flicked with a cloth. ‘Play as much as you please, but don’t forget your work,’ we said.”
Several times people put their heads in at the door to call him, but each time I begged him not to go.
And he laughingly waved them away, saying, “Wait a bit.”
He stayed with me and told me stories until it was almost dark, and when, after an affectionate farewell, he left me, I had learned that he was neither malevolent nor formidable. It brought the tears into my eyes to remember that it was he who had so cruelly beaten me, but I could not forget it.
This visit of my grandfather opened the door to others, and from morning till night there was always somebody sitting on my bed, trying to amuse me; I remember that this was not always either cheering or pleasant.
Oftener than any of them came my grandmother, who slept in the same bed with me. But it was Tsiganok who left the clearest impression on me in those days. He used to appear in the evenings square-built, broad-chested, curly headed, dressed in his best clothes a gold-embroidered shirt, plush breeches, boots squeaking like a harmonium. His hair was glossy, his squinting, merry eyes gleamed under his thick eyebrows, and his white teeth under the shadow of his young mustache ; his shirt glowed softly as if reflecting the red light of the image-lamp.
“Look here !” he said, turning up his sleeve and displaying his bare arm to the elbow. It was covered with red scars. “Look how swollen it is; and it was worse yesterday it was very painful. When your grandfather flew into a rage and I saw that he was going to flog you, I put my arm in the way, thinking that the rod would break, and then while he was looking for another your grandmother or your mother could take you away and hide you. I am an old bird at the game, my child.”
He laughed gently and kindly, and glancing again at the swollen arm, went on :
“I was so sorry for you that I thought I should choke. It seemed such a shame! . . . But he lashed away at you!”
Snorting and tossing his head like a horse, he went on speaking about the affair. This childish simplicity seemed to draw him closer to me. I told him that I loved him very much, and he answered with a simplicity which always lives in my memory.
“And I love you too ! That is why I let myself be hurt because I love you. Do you think I would have done it for any one else”? I should be making a fool of myself.”
Later on he gave me whispered instructions, glancing frequently at the door. “Next time he beats you don’t try to get away from him, and don’t struggle. It hurts twice as much if you resist. If you let yourself go he will deal lightly with you. Be limp and soft, and don’t scowl at him. Try and remember this; it is good advice.”
“Surely he won’t whip me again !” I exclaimed.
“Why, of course!” replied Tsiganok calmly. “Of course he will whip you again, and often too!”
“But why?”
“Because grandfather is on the watch for you.” And again he cautiously advised me: “When he whips you he brings the rod straight down. Well, if you lie there quietly he may possibly hold the rod lower so that it won’t break your skin. . . . Now, do you understand? Move your body towards him and the rod, and it will be all the better for you.”
Winking at me with his dark, squinting eyes, he added: “I know more about such matters than a policeman even. I have been beaten on my bare shoulders till the skin came off, my boy !”
I looked at his bright face and remembered grandmother’s story of Ivan–Czarevitch and Ivanoshka-dourachka.

10-28-2011, 05:34 PM

المشاركة 3

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Chapter III

WHEN I was well again I realized that Tsiganok occupied an important position in the house-hold. Grandfather did not storm at him as he did at his sons, and would say behind his back, half — closing his eyes and nodding his head :
“He is a good workman Tsiganok. Mark my words, he will get on; he will make his fortune.”
My uncles too were polite and friendly with Tsiganok, and never played practical jokes on him as they did on the head workman, Gregory, who was the object of some insulting and spiteful trick almost every evening. Sometimes they made the handles of his scissors red-hot, or put a nail with the point upwards on the seat of his chair, or placed ready to his hand pieces of material all of the same color, so that when he, being half blind, had sewed them all into one piece, grandfather should scold him for it.
One day when he had fallen asleep after dinner in the kitchen, they painted his face with fuchsin, and he had to go about for a long time a ludicrous and terrifying spectacle, with two round, smeared eyeglasses looking out dully from his gray beard, and his long, livid nose drooping dejectedly, like a tongue.
They had an inexhaustible fund of such pranks, but the head workman bore it all in silence, only quackling softly, and taking care before he touched either the iron, the scissors, the needlework or the thimble, to moisten his fingers copiously with saliva. This became a habit with him, and even at dinner-time before he took up his knife and fork he slobbered over his fingers, causing great amusement to the children. When he was hurt, his large face broke into waves of wrinkles, which curiously glided over his forehead, and, raising his eyebrows, vanished mysteriously on his bald cranium.
I do not remember how grandfather bore himself with regard to his sons’ amusements, but grandmother used to shake her fist at them, crying :
“Shameless, ill-natured creatures!”
But my uncles spoke evil of Tsiganok too behind his back; they made fun of him, found fault with his work, and called him a thief and an idler.
I asked grandmother why they did this. She explained it to me without hesitation, and, as always, made the matter quite clear to me. “You see, each wants to take Vaniushka with him when he sets up in business for himself; that is why they run him down to each other. Say they, ‘He ‘s a bad workman’ ; but they don’t mean it. It is their artfulness. In addition to this, they are afraid that Vaniushka will not go with either of them, but will stay with grandfather, who always gets his own way, and might set up a third workshop with Ivanka, which would do your uncles no good. Now do you understand?” She laughed softly. “They are crafty about everything, setting God at naught; and grandfather, seeing their artfulness, teases them by saying: ‘I shall buy Ivan a certificate of exemption so that they won’t take him for a soldier. I can’t do without him.’ This makes them angry; it is just what they don’t want; besides, they grudge the money. Exemptions cost money.”
I was living with grandmother again, as I had done on the steamer, and every evening before I fell asleep she used to tell me fairy stories, or tales about her life, which were just like a story. But she spoke about family affairs, such as the distribution of the property amongst the children, and grandfather’s purchase of a new house, lightly, in the character of a stranger regarding the matter from a distance, or at the most that of a neighbor, rather than that of the person next in importance to the head of the house.
From her I learned that Tsiganok was a foundling; he had been found one wet night in early spring, on a bench in the porch.
“There he lay,” said grandmother pensively and mysteriously, “hardly able to cry, for he was nearly numb with cold.”
“But why do people abandon children?”
“It is because the mother has no milk, or anything to feed her baby with. Then she hears that a child which has been born somewhere lately is dead, and she goes and leaves her own there.”
She paused and scratched her head; then sighing and gazing at the ceiling, she continued :
“Poverty is always the reason, Oleysha; and a kind of poverty which must not be talked about, for an unmarried girl dare not admit that she has a child people would cry shame upon her.
“Grandfather wanted to hand Vaniushka over to the police, but I said ‘No, we will keep him ourselves to fill the place of our dead ones. For I have had eighteen children, you know. If they had all lived they would have filled a street eighteen new families ! I was married at eighteen, you see, and by this time I had had fifteen children, but God so loved my flesh and blood that He took all of them all my little babies to the angels, and I was sorry and glad at the same time.”
Sitting on the edge of the bed in her nightdress, huge and dishevelled, with her black hair falling about her, she looked like the bear which a bearded woodman from Cergatch had led into our yard not long ago.
Making the sign of the cross on her spotless, snow-white breast, she laughed softly, always ready to make light of everything.
“It was better for them to be taken, but hard for me to be left desolate, so I was delighted to have Ivanka but even now I feel the pain of my love for you, my little ones! . . . Well, we kept him, and baptized him, and he still lives happily with us. At first I used to call him ‘Beetle,’ because he really did buzz sometimes, and went creeping and buzzing through the rooms just like a beetle. You must love him. He is a good soul.”
I did love Ivan, and admired him inexpressibly. On Saturday when, after punishing the children for the transgressions of the week, grandfather went to vespers, we had an indescribably happy time in the kitchen.
Tsiganok would get some cockroaches from the stove, make a harness of thread for them with great rapidity, cut out a paper sledge, and soon two pairs of black horses were prancing on the clean, smooth, yellow table. Ivan drove them at a canter, with a thin splinter of wood as a whip, and urged them on, shouting :
“Now they have started for the Bishop’s house.”
Then he gummed a small piece of paper to the back of one of the cockroaches and sent him to run behind the sledge.
“We forgot the bag,” he explained. “The monk drags it with him as he runs. Now then, gee-up!”
He tied the feet of another cockroach together with cotton, and as the insect hopped along, with its head thrust forward, he cried, clapping his hands :
“This is the deacon coming out of the wine-shop to say vespers.”
After this he showed us a mouse which stood up at the word of command, and walked on his hind legs, dragging his long tail behind him and blinking comically with his lively eyes, which were like black glass beads.
He made friends of mice, and used to carry them about in his bosom, and feed them with sugar and kiss them.
“Mice are clever creatures,” he used to say in a tone of conviction. “The house-goblin is very fond of them, and whoever feeds them will have all his wishes granted by the old hob-goblin.”
He could do conjuring tricks with cards and coins too, and he used to shout louder than any of the children; in fact, there was hardly any difference between them and him. One day when they were playing cards with him they made him “booby” several times in succession, and he was very much offended. He stuck his lips out sulkily and refused to play any more, and he complained to me afterward, his nose twitching as he spoke :
“It was a put-up job! They were signaling to one another and passing the cards about under the table. Do you call that playing the game? If it comes to trickery I ‘m not so bad at it myself.”
Yet he was nineteen years old and bigger than all four of us put together.
I have special memories of him on holiday evenings, when grandfather and Uncle Michael went out to see their friends, and curly headed, untidy Uncle Jaakov appeared with his guitar while grandmother prepared tea with plenty of delicacies, and vodka in a square bottle with red flowers cleverly molded in glass on its lower part. Tsiganok shone bravely on these occasions in his holiday attire. Creeping softly and sideways came Gregory, with his colored spectacles gleaming; came Nyanya Eugenia pimply, red-faced and fat like a Toby-jug, with cunning eyes and a piping voice; came the hirsute deacon from Uspenski, and other dark slimy people bearing a resemblance to pikes and eels. They all ate and drank a lot, breathing hard the while; and the children had wineglasses of sweet syrup given them as a treat, and gradually there was kindled a warm but strange gaiety.
Uncle Jaakov tuned his guitar amorously, and as he did so he always uttered the same words :
“Well, now let us begin !”
Shaking his curly head, he bent over the guitar, stretching out his neck like a goose; the expression on his round, careless face became dreamy, his passionate, elusive eyes were obscured in an unctuous mist, and lightly touching the chords, he played something disjointed, involuntarily rising to his feet as he played. His music demanded an intense silence. It rushed like a rapid torrent from somewhere far away, stirring one’s heart and penetrating it with an incomprehensible sensation of sadness and uneasiness. Under the influence of that music we all became melancholy, and the oldest present felt themselves to be no more than children. We sat perfectly still lost in a dreamy silence. Sascha Michailov especially listened with all his might as he sat upright beside our uncle, gazing at the guitar open-mouthed, and slobbering with delight. And the rest of us remained as if we had been frozen, or had been put under a spell. The only sound besides was the gentle murmur of the samovar which did not interfere with the complaint of the guitar.
Two small square windows threw their light into the darkness of the autumn night, and from time to time some one tapped on them lightly. The yellow lights of two tallow candles, pointed like spears, flickered on the table.
Uncle Jaakov grew more and more rigid, as though he were in a deep sleep with his teeth clenched; but his hands seemed to live with a separate existence. The bent fingers of his right hand quivered indistinctly over the dark keyboard, just like fluttering and struggling birds, while his left passed up and down the neck with elusive rapidity.
When he had been drinking he nearly always sang through his teeth in an unpleasantly shrill voice, an endless song:
“If Jaakove were a dog
He ‘d howl from morn to night.
Oie! I am a-weary!
Oie! Life is dreary!
In the streets the nuns walk,
On the fence the ravens talk.
Oie! I am a-weary!
The cricket chirps behind the stove
And sets the beetles on the move. Oie! I am a-weary!
One beggar hangs his stockings up to dry,
The other steals it away on the sly.
Oie! I am a-weary! Yes ! Life is very dreary !”
I could not bear this song, and when my uncle came to the part about the beggars I used to weep in a tempest of ungovernable misery.
The music had the same effect on Tsiganok as on the others ; he listened to it, running his fingers through his black, shaggy locks, and staring into a corner, half-asleep.
Sometimes he would exclaim unexpectedly in a complaining tone, “Ah ! if I only had a voice. Lord ! how I should sing.”
And grandmother, with a sigh, would say: “Are you going to break our hearts, Jaasha? . . . Suppose you give us a dance, Vanyatka?”
Her request was not always complied with at once, but it did sometimes happen that the musician suddenly swept the chords with his hands, then, doubling up his fists with a gesture as if he were noiselessly casting an invisible something from him to the floor, cried sharply :
“Away, melancholy! Now, Vanka, stand up!”
Looking very smart, as he pulled his yellow blouse straight, Tsiganok would advance to the middle of the kitchen, very carefully, as if he were walking on nails, and blushing all over his swarthy face and simpering bashfully, would say entreatingly :
“Faster, please, Jaakov Vassilitch !”
The guitar jingled furiously, heels tapped spasmodically on the floor, plates and dishes rattled on the table and in the cupboard, while Tsiganok blazed amidst the kitchen lights, swooping like a kite, waving his arms like the sails of a windmill, and moving his feet so quickly that they seemed to be stationary; then he stooped to the floor, and spun round and round like a golden swallow, the splendor of his silk blouse shedding an illumination all around, as it quivered and rippled, as if he were alight and floating in the air. He danced unweariedly, oblivious of everything, and it seemed as though, if the door were to open, he would have danced out, down the street, and through the town and away . . . beyond our ken.
“Cross over!” cried Uncle Jaakov, stamping his feet, and giving a piercing whistle ; then in an irritating voice he shouted the old, quaint saying:
“Oh, my ! if I were not sorry to leave ray spade I ‘d from my wife and children a break have made.”
The people sitting at table pawed at each other, and from time to time shouted and yelled as if they were being roasted alive. The bearded chief workman slapped his bald head and joined in the uproar. Once he bent towards me, brushing my shoulder with his soft beard, and said in my ear, just as he might speak to a grown-up person :
“If your father were here, Alexei Maximitch, he would have added to the fun. A merry fellow he was always cheerful. You remember him, don’t you?”
“No.”
“You don’t? Well, once he and your grandmother but wait a bit.”
Tall and emaciated, somewhat resembling a conventional icon, he stood up, and bowing to grandmother, entreated in an extraordinarily gruff voice:
“Akulina Ivanovna, will you be so kind as to dance for us as you did once with Maxim Savatyevitch? It would cheer us up.”
“What are you talking about, my dear man? What do you mean, Gregory Ivanovitch?” cried grandmother, smiling and bridling. “Fancy me dancing at my time of life! I should only make people laugh.”
But suddenly she jumped up with a youthful air, arranged her skirts, and very upright, tossed her ponderous head and darted across the kitchen, crying :
“Well, laugh if you want to! And a lot of good may it do you. Now, Jaasha, play up !”
My uncle let himself go, and, closing his eyes, went on playing very slowly. Tsiganok stood still for a moment, and then leaped over to where grandmother was and encircled her, resting on his haunches, while she skimmed the floor without a sound, as if she were floating on air, her arms spread out, her eyebrows raised, her dark eyes gazing into space. She appeared very comical to me, and I made fun of her; but Gregory held up his finger sternly, and all the grown-up people looked disapprovingly over to my side of the room.
“Don’t make a noise, Ivan,” said Gregory, and Tsiganok obediently jumped to one side, and sat by the door, while Nyanya Eugenia, thrusting out her Adam’s apple, began to sing in her low-pitched, pleasant voice :
“All the week till Saturday She does earn what e’er she may, Making lace from morn till night Till she ‘s nearly lost her sight.”
Grandmother seemed more as if she were telling a story than dancing. She moved softly, dreamily; swaying slightly, sometimes looking about her from under her arms, the whole of her huge body wavering uncertainly, her feet feeling their way carefully. Then she stood still as if suddenly frightened by something; her face quivered and became overcast . . . but directly after it was again illuminated by her pleasant, cordial smile. Swinging to one side as if to make way for some one, she appeared to be refusing to give her hand, then letting her head droop seemed to die ; again, she was listening to some one and smiling joyfully . . . and suddenly she was whisked from her place and turned round and round like a whirligig, her figure seemed to become more elegant, she seemed to grow taller, and we could not tear our eyes away from her so triumphantly beautiful and altogether charming did she appear in that moment of marvelous rejuvenation. And Nyanya Eugenia piped :
“Then on Sundays after Mass Till midnight dances the lass, Leaving as late as she dare, Holidays with her are rare.”
When she had finished dancing, grandmother returned to her place by the samovar. They all applauded her, and as she put her hair straight, she said :
“That is enough ! You have never seen real dancing. At our home in Balakya, there was one young girl I have forgotten her name now, with many others but when you saw her dance you cried for joy. To look at her was a treat. You didn’t want anything else. How I envied her sinner that I was!”
“Singers and dancers are the greatest people in the world,” said Nyanya Eugenia gravely, and she began to sing something about King David, while Uncle Jaakov, embracing Tsiganok, said to him:
“You ought to dance in the wine-shops. You would turn people’s heads.”
“I wish I could sing!” complained Tsiganok. “If God had given me a voice I should have been singing ten years by now, and should have gone on singing if only as a monk.”
They all drank vodka, and Gregory drank an extra lot. As she poured out glass after glass for him, grandmother warned him :
“Take care, Grisha, or you’ll become quite blind.”
“I don’t care ! I ‘ve no more use for my eyesight,” he replied firmly.
He drank, but he did not get tipsy, only becoming more loquacious every moment; and he spoke to me about my father nearly all the time.
“A man with a large heart was my friend Maxim Savatyevitch ...”
Grandmother sighed as she corroborated :
“Yes, indeed he was a true child of God.”
All this was extremely interesting, and held me spell-bound, and filled my heart with a tender, not unpleasant sadness. For sadness and gladness live within us side by side, almost inseparable ; the one succeeding the other with an elusive, unappreciable swiftness.
Once Uncle Jaakov, being rather tipsy, began to rend his shirt, and to clutch furiously at his curly hair, his grizzled mustache, his nose and his pendulous lip.
“What am I?” he howled, dissolved in tears. “Why am I here?” And striking himself on the cheek, forehead and chest, he sobbed: “Worthless, degraded creature ! Lost soul !”
“A ah ! You ‘re right !” growled Gregory.
But grandmother, who was also not quite sober, said to her son, catching hold of his hand :
“That will do, Jaasha. God knows how to teach us.”
, When she had been drinking, she was even more attractive; her eyes grew darker and smiled, shedding the warmth of her heart upon every one. Brushing aside the handkerchief which made her face too hot, she would say in a tipsy voice:
“Lord! Lord! How good everything is! Don’t you see how good everything is?”
And this was a cry from her heart the watchword of her whole life.
I was much impressed by the tears and cries of my happy-go-lucky uncle, and I asked grandmother why he cried and scolded and beat himself so.
“You want to know everything!” she said reluctantly, quite unlike her usual manner. “But wait a bit. You will be enlightened about this affair quite soon enough.”
My curiosity was still more excited by this, and I went to the workshop and attacked Ivan on the subject, but he would not answer me. He just laughed quietly with a sidelong glance at Gregory, and hustled me out, crying:
“Give over now, and run away. If you don’t I’ll put you in the vat and dye you.”
Gregory, standing before the broad, low stove, with vats cemented to it, stirred them with a long black poker, lifting it up now and again to see the colored drops fall from its end. The brightly burning flames played on the skin-apron, multi-colored like the chasuble of a priest, which he wore. The dye simmered in the vats; an acrid vapor extended in a thick cloud to the door. Gregory glanced at me from under his glasses, with his clouded, bloodshot eyes, and said abruptly to Ivan:
“You are wanted in the yard. Can’t you see?”
But when Tsiganok had gone into the yard, Gregory, sitting on a sack of santaline, beckoned me to him.
“Come here!”
Drawing me on to his knee, and rubbing his warm, soft beard against my cheek, he said in a tone of reminiscence :
“Your uncle beat and tortured his wife to death, and now his conscience pricks him. Do you understand? You want to understand everything, you see, and so you get muddled.”
Gregory was as simple as grandmother, but his words were disconcerting, and he seemed to look through and through every one.
“How did he kill her?” he went on in a leisurely tone. “Why, like this. He was lying in bed with her, and he threw the counterpane over her head, and held it down while he beat her. Why”? He doesn’t know himself why he did it.”
And paying no attention to Ivan, who, having returned with an armful of goods from the yard, was squatting before the fire, warming his hands, the head workman suggested:
“Perhaps it was because she was better than he was, and he was envious of her. The Kashmirins do not like good people, my boy. They are jealous of them. They cannot stand them, and try to get them out of the way. Ask your grandmother how they got rid of your father. She will tell you everything; she hates deceit, because she does not understand it. She may be reckoned among the saints, although she drinks wine and takes snuff. She is a splendid woman. Keep hold of her, and never let her go.”
He pushed me towards the door, and I went out into the yard, depressed and scared. Vaniushka overtook me at the entrance of the house, and whispered softly :
“Don’t be afraid of him. He is all right. Look him straight in the eyes. That ‘s what he likes.”
It was all very strange and distressing. I hardly knew any other existence, but I remembered vaguely that my father and mother used not to live like this; they had a different way of speaking, and a different idea of happiness. They always went about together and sat close to each other. They laughed very frequently and for a long time together, in the evenings, as they sat at the window and sang at the top of their voices; and people gathered together in the street and looked at them. The raised faces of these people as they looked up reminded me comically of dirty plates after dinner. But here people seldom laughed, and when they did it was not always easy to guess what they were laughing at. They often raged at one another, and secretly muttered threats against each other in the corners. The children were subdued and neglected; beaten down to earth like the dust by the rain. I felt myself a stranger in the house, and all the circumstances of my existence in it were nothing but a series of stabs, pricking me on to suspicion, and compelling me to study what went on with the closest attention.
My friendship with Tsiganok grew apace. Grandmother was occupied with household duties from sunrise till late at night, and I hung round Tsiganok nearly the whole day. He still used to put his hand under the rod whenever grandfather thrashed me, and the next day, displaying his swollen fingers, he would complain :
“There ‘s no sense in it ! It does not make it any lighter for you, and look what it does to me. I won’t stand it any longer, so there !”
But the next time he put himself in the way of being needlessly hurt just the same.
“But I thought you did not mean to do it again?” I would say.
“I didn’t mean to, but it happened somehow. I did it without thinking.”
Soon after this I learned something about Tsiganok which increased my interest in and love for him.
Every Friday he used to harness the bay gelding Sharapa, grandmother’s pet a cunning, saucy, dainty creature to the sledge. Then he put on his fur coat, which reached to his knees, and his heavy cap, and tightly buckling his green belt, set out for the market to buy provisions. Sometimes it was very late before he returned, and the whole household became uneasy. Some one would run to the window every moment, and breathing on the panes to thaw the ice, would look up and down the road.
“Isn’t he in sight yet?’
“No.”
Grandmother was always more concerned than any of them.
“Alas !” she would exclaim to her sons and my grandfather, “you have ruined both the man and the horse. I wonder you aren’t ashamed of yourselves, you conscienceless creatures! Ach! You family of fools, you tipplers ! God will punish you for this.”
“That is enough!” growled grandfather, scowling. “This is the last time it happens.”
Sometimes Tsiganok did not return till midday. My uncles and grandfather hurried out to the yard to meet him, and grandmother ambled after them like a bear, taking snuff with a determined air, because it was her hour for taking it. The children ran out, and the joyful unloading of the sledge began. It was full of pork, dead birds, and joints of all kinds of meat.
“Have you bought all we told you to?” asked grandfather, probing the load with a sidelong glance of his sharp eyes.
“Yes, it is all right,” answered Ivan gaily, as he jumped about the yard, and slapped his mittened hands together, to warm himself.
“Don’t wear your mittens out. They cost money,” said grandfather sternly. “Have you any change?”
“No.”
Grandfather walked quietly round the load and said in a low tone :
“Again you have bought too much. However, you can’t do it without money, can you? I’ll have no more of this.” And he strode away scowling.
My uncles joyfully set to work on the load, whistling as they balanced bird, fish, goose-giblets, calves’ feet, and enormous pieces of meat on their hands.
“Well, that was soon unloaded!” they cried with loud approval.
Uncle Michael especially was in raptures, jumping about the load, sniffing hard at the poultry, smacking his lips with relish, closing his restless eyes in ecstasy. He resembled his father; he had the same dried-up appearance, only he was taller and his hair was dark.
Slipping his chilled hands up his sleeves, he inquired of Tsiganok :
“How much did my father give you?”
“Five roubles.”
“There is fifteen roubles’ worth here! How much did you spend ?”
“Four roubles, ten kopecks.”
“Perhaps the other ninety kopecks is in your pocket. Haven’t you noticed, Jaakov, how money gets all over the place?’
Uncle Jaakov, standing in the frost in his shirt-sleeves, laughed quietly, blinking in the cold blue light.
“You have some brandy for us, Vanka, haven’t you?” he asked lazily.
Grandmother meanwhile was unharnessing the horse.
“There, my little one! There! Spoiled child! There, God’s plaything!”
Great Sharapa, tossing his thick mane, fastened his white teeth in her shoulder, pushed his silky nose into her hair, gazed into her face with contented eyes, and shaking the frost from his eyelashes, softly neighed.
“Ah ! you want some bread.”
She thrust a large, salted crust in his mouth, and making her apron into a bag under his nose, she thoughtfully watched him eat.
Tsiganok, himself as playful as a young horse, sprang to her side.
“He is such a good horse, Grandma! And so clever !”
“Get away! Don’t try your tricks on me!” cried grandmother, stamping her foot. “You know that I am not fond of you today.”
She afterwards explained to me that Tsiganok had not bought so much in the market as he had stolen. “If grandfather gives him five roubles, he spends three and steals three roubles’ worth,” she said sadly. “He takes a pleasure in stealing. He is like a spoiled child. He tried it once, and it turned out well; he was laughed at and praised for his success, and that is how he got into the habit of thieving. And grandfather, who in his youth ate the bread of poverty till he wanted no more of it, has grown greedy in his old age, and money is dearer to him now than the blood of his own children! He is glad even of a present! As for Michael and Jaakov . . .”
She made a gesture of contempt and was silent a moment; then looking fixedly at the closed lid of her snuff-box, she went on querulously:
“But there, Lenya, that ‘s a bit of work done by a blind woman . . . Dame Fortune . . . there she sits spinning for us and we can’t even choose the pattern. . . . But there it is! If they caught Ivan thieving they would beat him to death.”
And after another silence she continued quietly:
“Ah ! we have plenty of principles, but we don’t put them into practice.”
The next day I begged Vanka not to steal any more. “If you do they’ll beat you to death.”
.

10-28-2011, 05:35 PM

المشاركة 4

ريم بدر الدين

عضو مجلس الإدارة سابقا

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“They won’t touch me ... I should soon wriggle out of their clutches. I am as lively as a mettlesome horse,” he said, laughing; but the next minute his face fell. “Of course I know quite well that it is wrong and risky to steal. I do it . . . just to amuse myself, because I am bored. And I don’t save any of the money. Your uncles get it all out of me before the week is over. But I don’t care! Let them take it. I have more than enough.”
Suddenly he took me up in his arms, shaking me gently.
“You will be a strong man, you are so light and slim, and your bones are so firm. I say, why don’t you learn to play on the guitar? Ask Uncle Jaakov! But you are too small yet, that ‘s a pity ! You ‘re little, but you have a temper of your own ! You don’t like your grandfather much, do you?”
“I don’t know.”
“I don’t like any of the Kashmirins except your grandmother. Let the devil like them !”
“What about me?”
“You? You are not a Kashmirin. You are a Pyeshkov. . . . That’s different blood a different stock altogether.”
Suddenly he gave me a violent squeeze.
“Ah!” he almost groaned. “If only I had a good voice for singing! Good Lord! what a stir I should make in the world! . . . Run away now, old chap. I must get on with my work.”
He set me down on the floor, put a handful of fine nails into his mouth, and began to stretch and nail damp breadths of black material on a large square board.
His end came very soon after this.
It happened thus. Leaning up against a partition by the gate in the yard was placed a large oaken cross with stout, knotty arms. It had been there a long time. I had noticed it in the early days of my life in the house, when it had been new and yellow, but now it was blackened by the autumn rains. It gave forth the bitter odor of barked oak, and it was in the way in the crowded, dirty yard.
Uncle Jaakov had bought it to place over the grave of his wife, and had made a vow to carry it on his shoulders to the cemetery on the anniversary of her death, which fell on a Saturday at the beginning of winter.
It was frosty and windy and there had been a fall of snow. Grandfather and grandmother, with the three grandchildren, had gone early to the cemetery to hear the requiem; I was left at home as a punishment for some fault.
My uncles, dressed alike in short black fur coats, lifted the cross from the ground and stood under its arms. Gregory and some men not belonging to the yard raised the heavy beams with difficulty, and placed the cross on the broad shoulders of Tsiganok. He tottered, and his legs seemed to give way.
“Are you strong enough to carry it?” asked Gregory.
“I don’t know. It seems heavy.”
“Open the gate, you blind devil!” cried Uncle Michael angrily.
And Uncle Jaakov said:
“You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Vanka. You are stronger than the two of us together.”
But Gregory, throwing open the gate, persisted in advising Ivan:
“Take care you don’t break down! Go, and may God be with you !”
“Bald-headed fool !” cried Uncle Michael, from the street.
All the people in the yard, meanwhile, laughed and talked loudly, as if they were glad to get rid of the cross.
Gregory Ivanovitch took my hand and led me to the workshop, saying kindly:
“Perhaps, under the circumstances, grandfather won’t thrash you today.”
He sat me on a pile of woolens ready for dyeing, carefully wrapping them round me as high as my shoulders; and inhaling the vapor which rose from the vats, he said thoughtfully:
“I have known your grandfather for thirty-seven years, my dear. I saw his business at its commencement, and I shall see the end of it. We were friends then in fact, we started and planned out the business together. He is a clever man, is your grandfather! He meant to be master, but I did not know it. However, God is more clever than any of us. He has only to smile and the wisest man will blink like a fool. You don’t understand yet all that is said and done, but you must learn to understand everything. An orphan’s life is a hard one. Your father, Maxim Savatyevitch, was a trump. He was well-educated too. That is why your grandfather did not like him, and would have nothing to do with him.”
It was pleasant to listen to these kind words and to watch the red and gold flames playing in the stove, and the milky cloud of steam which rose from the vats and settled like a dark blue rime on the slanting boards of the roof, through the uneven chinks of which the sky could be seen, like strands of blue ribbon. The wind had fallen; the yard looked as if it were strewn with glassy dust; the sledges gave forth a sharp sound as they passed up the street; a blue smoke rose from the chimneys of the house; faint shadows glided over the snow . . . also telling a story.
Lean, long-limbed Gregory, bearded and hatless, large-eared, just like a good-natured wizard, stirred the boiling dye, instructing me the while.
“Look every one straight in the eyes. And if a dog should fly at you, do the same; he will let you alone then.”
His heavy spectacles pressed on the bridge of his nose, the tip of which was blue like grandmother’s and for the same reason.
“What is that?” he exclaimed suddenly, listening; then closing the door of the stove with his foot, he ran, or rather hopped, across the yard, and I dashed after him. In the middle of the kitchen floor lay Tsiganok, face upwards; broad streaks of light from the window fell on his head, his chest, and on his feet. His forehead shone strangely; his eyebrows were raised; his squinting eyes gazed intently at the blackened ceiling; a red-flecked foam bubbled from his discolored lips, from the corners of which also flowed blood over his cheeks, his neck, and on to the floor; and a thick stream of blood crept from under his back. His legs were spread out awkwardly, and it was plain that his trousers were wet; they clung damply to the boards, which had been polished with sand, and shone like the sun. The rivulets of blood intersected the streams of light, and, showing up very vividly, flowed towards the threshold.
Tsiganok was motionless, except for the fact that as he lay with his hands alongside his body, his fingers scratched at the floor, and his stained fingernails shone in the sunlight.
Nyanya Eugenia, crouching beside him, put a slender candle into his hand, but he could not hold it and it fell to the floor, the wick being drenched in blood. Nyanya Eugenia picked it up and wiped it dry, and made another attempt to fix it in those restless fingers. A gentle whispering made itself heard in the kitchen; it seemed to blow me away from the door like the wind, but I held firmly to the door-post.
“He stumbled!” Uncle Jaakov was explaining, in a colorless voice, shuddering and turning his head about. His face was gray and haggard; his eyes had lost their color, and blinked incessantly. “He fell, and it fell on top of him . . . and hit him on the back. We should have been disabled if we had not dropped the cross in time.”
“This is your doing,” said Gregory dully.
“But how . . . ?”’
“JWdidit!”
All this time the blood was flowing, and by the door had already formed a pool which seemed to grow darker and deeper. With another effusion of blood-flecked foam, Tsiganok roared out as if he were dreaming, and then collapsed, seeming to grow flatter and flatter, as if he were glued to the floor, or sinking through it.
“Michael went on horseback to the church to find father,” whispered Uncle Jaakov, “and I brought him here in a cab as quickly as I could. It is a good job that I was not standing under the arms myself, or I should have been like this.”
Nyanya Eugenia again fixed the candle in Tsiganok’s hand, dropping wax and tears in his palm.
“That ‘s right ! Glue his head to the floor, you careless creature,” said Gregory gruffly and rudely.
“What do you mean?”
“Why don’t you take off his cap”?”
Nyanya dragged Ivan’s cap from his head, which struck dully on the floor. Then it fell to one side and the blood flowed profusely from one side of his mouth only. This went on for a terribly long time. At first
I expected Tsiganok to sit up on the floor with a sigh, and say sleepily, “Phew! It is baking hot!” as he used to do after dinner on Sundays.
But he did not rise ; on the contrary he seemed to be sinking into the ground. The sun had withdrawn from him now; its bright beams had grown shorter, and fell only on the window-sill. His whole form grew darker; his fingers no longer moved; the froth had disappeared from his lips. Round his head three candles stood out from the darkness, waving their golden flames, lighting up his dishevelled blue-black hair, and throwing quivering yellow ripples on his swarthy cheek, illuminating the tip of his pointed nose and his blood-stained teeth.
Nyanya, kneeling at his side, shed tears as she lisped : “My little dove ! My bird of consolation !”
It was painfully cold. I crept under the table and hid myself there. Then grandfather came tumbling into the kitchen, in his coat of racoon fur; with him came grandmother in a cloak with a fur collar, Uncle Michael, the children, and many people not belonging to the house.
Throwing his coat on the floor, grandfather cried:
“Riff-raff! See what you have done for me, between you, in your carelessness ! He would have been worth his weight in gold in five years that ‘s certain!”
The coats which had been thrown on the floor hindered me from seeing Ivan, so I crept out and knocked myself against grandfather’s legs. He hurled me to one side, as he shook his little red fist threateningly at my uncles.
“You wolves!”
He sat down on a bench, and resting his arms upon itj burst into dry sobs, and said in a shrill voice:
“I know all about it! ... He stuck in your gizzards! That was it! Oh, Vaniushka, poor fool! What have they done to you, eh? ‘Rotten reins are good enough for a stranger’s horse!’ Mother! God has not loved us for the last year, has He? Mother!”
Grandmother, doubled up on the floor, was feeling Ivan’s hands and chest, breathing upon his eyes, holding his hands and chafing them. Then, throwing down all the candles, she rose with difficulty to her feet, looking very somber in her shiny black frock, and with her eyes dreadfully wide open, she said in a low voice : “Go, accursed ones !”
All, with the exception of grandfather, straggled out of the kitchen.
Tsiganok was buried without fuss, and was soon forgotten

10-28-2011, 05:37 PM

المشاركة 5

ريم بدر الدين

عضو مجلس الإدارة سابقا



Chapter IV

I WAS lying in a wide bed, with a thick blanket folded four times around me, listening to grandmother, who was saying her prayers. She was on her knees; and pressing one hand against her breast, she reverently crossed herself from time to time with the other. Out in the yard a hard frost reigned ; a greenish moonlight peeped through the ice patterns on the window-panes, falling flatteringly on her kindly face and large nose, and kindling a phosphorescent light in her dark eyes. Her silky, luxuriant tresses were lit up as if by a furnace; her dark dress rustled, falling in ripples from her shoulders and spreading about her on the floor.
When she had finished her prayers grandmother undressed in silence, carefully folding up her clothes and placing them on the trunk in the corner. Then she came to bed. I pretended to be fast asleep.
“You are not asleep, you rogue, you are only making believe,” she said softly. “Come, my duck, let ‘s have some bedclothes !”
Foreseeing what would happen, I could not repress a smile, upon seeing which she cried: “So this is how you trick your old grandmother?” And taking hold of the blanket she drew it towards her with so much force and skill that I bounced up in the air, and turning over and over fell back with a squash into the soft feather bed, while she said with a chuckle : “What is it, little Hop o’ my Thumb? Have you been bitten by a mosquito?”
But sometimes she prayed for such a long time that I really did fall asleep, and did not hear her come to bed.
The longer prayers were generally the conclusion of a day of trouble, or a day of quarreling and fighting; and it was very interesting to listen to them. Grandmother gave to God a circumstantial account of all that had happened in the house. Bowed down, looking like a great mound, she knelt, at first whispering rapidly and indistinctly, then hoarsely muttering:
“O Lord, Thou knowest that all of us wish to do better. Michael, the elder, ought to have been set up in the town it will do him harm to be on the river; and the other is a new neighborhood and not overdone. I don’t know what will come of it all ! There ‘s father now. Jaakov is his favorite. Can’t it be right to love one child more than the others’? He is an obstinate old man; do Thou, O Lord, teach him!”
Gazing at the dark-featured icon, with her large, brilliant eyes, she thus counseled God :
“Send him a good dream, O Lord, to make him understand how he ought to treat his children !”
After prostrating herself and striking her broad forehead on the floor, she again straightened herself, and said coaxingly:
“And send Varvara some happiness ! How has she displeased Thee”? Is she more sinful than the others’? Why should a healthy young woman be so afflicted? And remember Gregory, O Lord! His eyes are getting worse and worse. If he goes blind he will be sent adrift. That will be terrible! He has used up all his strength for grandfather, but do you think it likely that grandfather will help him? O Lord! Lord!”
She remained silent for a long time, with her head bowed meekly, and her hands hanging by her sides, as still as if she had fallen asleep, or had been suddenly frozen.
“What else is there?” she asked herself aloud, wrinkling her brows.
“O Lord, save all the faithful! Pardon me accursed fool as I am ! Thou knowest that I do not sin out of malice but out of stupidity.” And drawing a deep breath she would say lovingly and contentedly: “Son of God, Thou knowest all! Father, Thou seest all things.”
I was very fond of grandmother’s God Who seemed so near to her, and I often said:
“Tell me something about God.”
She used to speak about Him in a peculiar manner very quietly, strangely drawing out her words, closing her eyes; and she made a point of always sitting down and arranging her head-handkerchief very deliberately before she began.
“God’s seat is on the hills, amidst the meadows of Paradise ; it is an altar of sapphires under silver linden trees which flower all the year round, for in Paradise there is no winter, nor even autumn, and the flowers never wither, for joy is the divine favor. And round about God many angels fly like flakes of snow; and it may be even that bees hum there, and white doves fly between Heaven and earth, telling God all about us and everybody. And here on earth you and I and grandfather each has been given an angel. God treats us all equally. For instance, your angel will go and tell God: ‘Lexei put his tongue out at grandfather.’ And God says : ‘All right, let the old man whip him.’ And so it is with all of us ; God gives to all what they deserve to some grief, to others joy. And so all is right that He does, and the angels rejoice, and spread their wings and sing to Him without ceasing: ‘Glory be unto Thee, O God ; Glory be unto Thee.’ And He just smiles on them, and it is enough for them and more.” And she would smile herself, shaking her head from side to side.
“Have you seen that?”
“No, I have not seen it, but I know.”
When she spoke about God, or Heaven, or the angels, she seemed to shrink in size; her face grew younger, and her liquid eyes emitted a curious warm radiance. I used to take her heavy, satiny plait in my hands, and wind it round my neck as I sat quite still and listened to the endless but never tedious story.
“It is not given to men to see God their sight is dim! Only the saints may look upon Him face to face. But I have seen angels myself; they reveal themselves sometimes to souls in a state of grace. I was standing in church at an early Mass, and I saw two moving about the altar like clouds. One could see everything, through them, growing brighter and brighter, and their gossamer-like wings touched the floor. They moved about the altar, helping old Father Elia, and supporting his elbows as he raised his feeble hands in prayer. He was very old, and being almost blind, stumbled frequently; but that day he got through the Mass quickly, and was finished early. When I saw them I nearly died of joy. My heart seemed as if it would burst ; my tears ran down. Ah, how beautiful it was! Oh, Lenka, dear heart, where God is whether in Heaven or earth all goes well.”
“But you don’t mean to say that everything goes well here in our house?”
Making the sign of the cross grandmother answered :
“Our Lady be praised everything goes well.”
This irritated me. I could not agree that things were going well in our household. From my point of view they were becoming more and more intolerable.
One day, as I passed the door of Uncle Michael’s room I saw Aunt Natalia, not fully dressed, with her hands folded on her breast, pacing up and down like a creature distraught, and moaning, not loudly, but in a tone of agony :
“My God, take me under Thy protection ! Remove me from here !”
I could sympathize with her prayer as well as I could understand Gregory when he growled:
“As soon as I am quite blind they will turn me out to beg; it will be better than this, anyhow.”
And I wished that he would make haste and go blind, for I meant to seize the opportunity to go away with him so that we could start begging together. I had already mentioned the matter to Gregory, and he had replied, smiling in his beard :
“That ‘s right ! We will go together. But I shall show myself in the town. There ‘s a grandson of Vassili Kashmirin’s there his daughter’s son; he may give me something to do.”
More than once I noticed a blue swelling under the sunken eyes of Aunt Natalia; and sometimes a swollen lip was thrown into relief by her yellow face.
“Does Uncle Michael beat her, then?” I asked grandmother. And she answered with a sigh :
“Yes, he beats her, but not very hard the devil! Grandfather does not object so long as he does it at night. He is ill-natured, and she she is like a jelly!
“But he does not beat her as much as he used to,” she continued in a more cheerful tone. “He just gives her a blow on the mouth, or boxes her ears, or drags her about by the hair for a minute or so; but at one time he used to torture her for hours together. Grandfather beat me one Easter Day from dinner-time till bed-time. He kept on; he just stopped to get his breath sometimes, and then started again. And he used a strap too!”
“But why did he do it?”
“I forget now. Another time he knocked me about till I was nearly dead, and then kept me without food for five hours. I was hardly alive when he had finished with me.”
I was thunderstruck. Grandmother was twice as big as grandfather, and it was incredible that he should be able to get the better of her like this.
“Is he stronger than you, then?” I asked.
“Not stronger, but older. Besides, he is my husband, he has to answer for me to God; but my duty is to suffer patiently.”
It was an interesting and pleasing sight to see her dusting the icon and cleaning its ornamentation ; it was richly adorned with pearls, silver and colored gems in the crown, and as she took it gently in her hands she gazed at it with a smile, and said in a tone of feeling :
“See what a sweet face it is !” And crossing herself and kissing it, she went on : “Dusty art thou, and be-grimed, Mother, Help of Christians, Joy of the Elect! Look, Lenia, darling, how small the writing is, and what tiny characters they are ; and yet it is all quite distinct. It is called The Twelve Holy–Days,’ and in the middle you see the great Mother of God by predestination immaculate ; and here is written : ‘Mourn not for me, Mother, because I am about to be laid in the grave.’ ”
Sometimes it seemed to me as if she played with the icon as earnestly and seriously as my Cousin Ekaterina with her doll.
She often saw devils, sometimes several together, sometimes one alone.
“One clear moonlight night, during the great Fast, I was passing the Rudolphovs’ house, and looking up I saw, on the roof, a devil sitting close to the chimney! He was all black, and he was holding his horned head over the top of the chimney and sniffing vigorously.
There he sat sniffing and grunting, the great, unwieldy creature, with his tail on the roof, scraping with his feet all the time. I made the sign of the Cross at him and said : ‘Christ is risen from the dead, and His enemies are scattered.’ At that he gave a low howl and slipped head over heels from the roof to the yard so he was scattered ! They must have been cooking meat at the Rudolphovs’ that day, and he was enjoying the smell of it.”
I laughed at her picture of the devil flying head over heels off the roof, and she laughed too as she said:
“They are as fond of playing tricks as children. One day I was doing the washing in the washhouse and it was getting late, when suddenly the door of the little room burst open and in rushed lots of little red, green and black creatures like cockroaches, and all sizes, and spread themselves all over the place. I flew towards the door, but I could not get past; there I was unable to move hand or foot amongst a crowd of devils ! They filled the whole place so that I could not turn round. They crept about my feet, plucked at my dress, and crowded round me so that I had not even room to cross myself. Shaggy, and soft, and warm, somewhat resembling cats, though they walked on their hind legs, they went round and round me, peering into everything, showing their teeth like mice, blinking their small green eyes, almost piercing me with their horns, and sticking out their little tails they were like pigs’ tails. Oh, my dear ! I seemed to be going out of my mind. And didn’t they push me about too ! The candle nearly went out, the water in the copper became luke-warm, the washing was all thrown about the floor. Ah! your very breath was trouble and sorrow.”
Closing my eyes, I could visualize the threshold of the little chamber with its gray cobble-stones, and the unclean stream of shaggy creatures of diverse colors which gradually filled the washhouse. I could see them blowing out the candle and thrusting out their impudent pink tongues. It was a picture both comical and terrifying.
Grandmother was silent a minute, shaking her head, before she burst out again :
“And I saw some fiends too, one wintry night, when it was snowing. I was coming across the Dinkov Causeway the place where, if you remember, your Uncle Michael and your Uncle Jaakov tried to drown your father in an ice-hole and I was just going to take the lower path, when there came the sounds of hissing and hooting, and I looked up and saw a team of three raven-black horses tearing towards me. On the coachman’s place stood a great fat devil, in a red nightcap, with protruding teeth. He was holding the reins, made of forged iron chains, with outstretched arms, and as there was no way round, the horses flew right over the pond, and were hidden by a cloud of snow. All those sitting in the sledge behind were devils too; there they sat, hissing and screaming and waving their nightcaps. In all, seven troikas like this tore by, as if they had been fire-engines, all with black horses, and all carrying a load of thoroughbred devils. They pay visits to each other, you know, and drive about in the night to their different festivities. I expect that was a devil’s wedding that I saw.”
One had to believe grandmother, because she spoke so simply and convincingly.
But the best of all her stories was the one which told how Our Lady went about the suffering earth, and how she commanded the woman-brigand, or the “Amazon-chief” Engalichev, not to kill or rob Russian people. And after that came the stories about Blessed Alexei ; about Ivan the Warrior, and Vassili the Wise ; of the Priest Kozlya, and the beloved child of God; and the terrible stories of Martha Posadnitz, of Baba Ustye the robber chief, of Mary the sinner of Egypt, and of sorrowing mothers of robber sons. The fairy-tales, and stories of old times, and the poems which she knew were without number.
She feared no one neither grandfather, nor devils, nor any of the powers of evil; but she was terribly afraid of black cockroaches, and could feel their presence when they were a long way from her. Sometimes she would wake me in the night whispering :
“Oleysha, dear, there is a cockroach crawling about. Do get rid of it, for goodness’ sake.”
Half-asleep, I would light the candle and creep about on the floor seeking the enemy a quest in which I did not always succeed at once.
“No, there’s not a sign of one,” I would say; but lying quite still with her head muffled up in the bed-clothes, she would entreat me in a faint voice :
“Oh, yes, there is one there ! Do look again, please. I am sure there is one about somewhere.”
And she was never mistaken. Sooner or later I found the cockroach, at some distance from the bed; and throwing the blanket off her she would breathe a sigh of relief and smile as she said :
“Have you killed it? Thank God! Thank you.”
If I did not succeed in discovering the insect, she could not go to sleep again, and I could feel how she trembled in the silence of the night; and I heard her whisper breathlessly :
“It is by the door. Now it has crawled under the trunk.”
“Why are you so frightened of cockroaches’?”
“I don’t know myself,” she would answer, reasonably enough. “It is the way the horrid black things crawl about. God has given a meaning to all other vermin : woodlice show that the house is damp ; bugs mean that the walls are dirty; lice foretell an illness, as every one knows ; but these creatures ! who knows what powers they possess, or what they live on?”
One day when she was on her knees, conversing earnestly with God, grandfather, throwing open the door, shouted hoarsely :
“Well, Mother, God has afflicted us again. We are on fire.”
“What are you talking about?” cried grandmother, jumping up from the floor; and they both rushed into the large parlor, making a great noise with their feet. “Eugenia, take down the icons. Natalia, dress the baby.”
Grandmother gave her orders in a stern voice of authority, but all grandfather did was to mutter: Ug h!”
I ran into the kitchen. The window looking on to the yard shone like gold, and yellow patches of light appeared on the floor, and Uncle Jaakov, who was dressing, trod on them with his bare feet, and jumped about as if they had burned him, shrieking :
“This is Mischka’s doing. He started the fire, and then went out.”
“Peace, cur!” said grandmother, pushing him towards the door so roughly that he nearly fell.
Through the frost on the window-panes the burning roof of the workshop was visible, with the curling flames pouring out from its open door. It was a still night, and the color of the flames was not spoiled by any admixture of smoke; while just above them hovered a dark cloud which, however, did not hide from our sight the silver stream of the Mlethchna Road. The snow glittered with a livid brilliance, and the walls of the house tottered and shook from side to side, as if about to hurl themselves into that burning corner of the yard where the flames disported themselves so gaily as they poured through the broad red cracks in the walls of the workshop, dragging crooked, red-hot nails out with them. Gold and red ribbons wound themselves about the dark beams of the roof, and soon enveloped it entirely ; but the slender chimney-pot stood up straight in the midst of it all, belching forth clouds of smoke. A gentle crackling sound like the rustle of silk beat against our windows, and all the time the flames were spreading till the workshop, adorned by them, as it were, looked like the iconostasis in church, and became more and more attractive to me.
Throwing a heavy fur coat over my head and thrusting my feet into the first boots that came handy, I ran out to the porch and stood on the steps, stupefied and blinded by the brilliant play of light, dazed by the yells of my grandfather, and uncles, and Gregory, and alarmed by grandmother’s behavior, for she had wrapped an empty sack round her head, enveloped her body in a horse-cloth, and was running straight into the flames. She disappeared, crying, “The vitriol, you fools! It will explode!”
“Keep her back, Gregory!” roared grandfather. “Aie ! she’s done for !”
But grandmother reappeared at this moment, blackened with smoke, half — fainting, bent almost double over the bottle of vitriolic oil which she was carrying in her stretched-out hands.
“Father, get the horse out!” she cried hoarsely, coughing and spluttering, “and take this thing off my shoulders. Can’t you see it is on fire?”
Gregory dragged the smoldering horse-cloth from her shoulders, and then, working hard enough for two men, went on shoveling large lumps of snow into the door of the workshop. My uncle jumped about him with an ax in his hands, while grandfather ran round grandmother, throwing snow over her ; then she put the bottle into a snowdrift, and ran to the gate, where there were a great many people gathered together. After greeting them, she said:
“Save the warehouse, neighbors ! If the fire fastens upon the warehouse and the hay-loft, we shall be burnt out; and it will spread to your premises. Go and pull off the roof and drag the hay into the garden! Gregory, why don’t you throw some of the snow on top, instead of throwing it all on the ground? Now, Jaakov, don’t dawdle about! Give some axes and spades to these good folk. Dear neighbors, behave like true friends, and may God reward you !”
She was quite as interesting to me as the fire. Illuminated by those flames which had so nearly devoured her, she rushed about the yard a black figure, giving assistance at all points, managing the whole thing, and letting nothing escape her attention.
Sharapa ran into the yard, rearing and nearly throwing grandfather down. The light fell on his large eyes which shone expressively; he breathed heavily as his forefeet pawed the air, and grandfather let the reins fall, and jumping aside called out: “Catch hold of him, Mother!”
She threw herself almost under the feet of the rearing horse, and stood in front of him, with outstretched arms in the form of a cross; the animal neighed pitifully and let himself be drawn towards her, swerving aside at the flames.

10-28-2011, 05:38 PM

المشاركة 6

ريم بدر الدين

عضو مجلس الإدارة سابقا



“Now, you are not frightened,” said grandmother in a low voice, as he patted his neck and grasped the reins, “Do you think I would leave you when you are in such a state? Oh, you silly little mouse !”
And the little “mouse,” who was twice as large as herself, submissively went to the gate with her, snuffling, and gazing at her red face.
Nyanya Eugenia had brought some muffled-up youngsters, who were bellowing in smothered tones, from the house.
“Vassili Vassilitch,” she cried, “we can’t find Alexei anywhere !”
“Go away ! Go away !” answered grandfather, waving his hands, and I hid myself under the stairs so that Nyanya should not take me away.
The roof of the workshop had fallen in by this time, and the stanchions, smoking, and glittering like golden coal, stood out against the sky. With a howl and a crash a green, blue and red tornado burst inside the building, and the flames threw themselves with a new energy on the yard and on the people who were gathered round and throwing spadefuls of snow on the huge bonfire.
The heat caused the vats to boil furiously; a thick cloud of steam and smoke arose, and a strange odor, which caused one’s eyes to water, floated into the yard. I crept out from beneath the stairs and got under grandmother’s feet.
“Get away !” she shrieked. “You will get trampled on. Get away!”
At this moment a man on horseback, with a copper helmet, burst into the yard. His roan-colored horse was covered with froth, and he raised a whip high above his head and shouted threateningly :
“Make way there !”
Bells rang out hurriedly and gaily; it was just as beautiful as a festival day.
Grandmother pushed me back towards the steps.
“What did I tell you ? Go away !”
I could not disobey her at such a time, so I went back to the kitchen and glued myself once more to the window; but I could not see the fire through that dense mass of people I could see nothing but the gleam of copper helmets amongst the winter caps of fur.
In a short time the fire was got under, totally extinguished, and the building submerged. The police drove the onlookers away, and grandmother came into the kitchen.
“Who is this”? Oh, it is you! Why aren’t you in bed? Frightened, eh? There ‘s nothing to be frightened about ; it is all over now.”
She sat beside me in silence, shaking a little. The return of the quiet night with its darkness was a relief. Presently grandfather came in, and standing in the doorway said :
“Mother?”
“Yes?”
“Were you burned?”
“A little nothing to speak of.”
He lit a brimstone match, which lit up his soot-be-grimed face, looked for and found the candle on the table, and then came over swiftly and sat beside grandmother.
“The best thing we can do is to wash ourselves,” she said, for she was covered with soot too, and smelt of acrid smoke.
“Sometimes,” said grandfather, drawing a deep breath, “God is pleased to endue you with great good-sense.” And stroking her shoulder he added with a grin: “Only sometimes, you know, just for an hour or so; but there it is all the same.”
Grandmother smiled too, and began to say something, but grandfather stopped her, frowning :
“We shall have to get rid of Gregory. All this trouble has been caused by his neglect. His working days are over. He is worn out. That fool Jaaschka is sitting on the stairs crying; you had better go to him.”
She stood up and went out, holding her hand up to her face and blowing on her fingers; and grandfather, without looking at me, asked softly :
“You saw it all from the beginning of the fire, didn’t you”? Then you saw how grandmother behaved, didn’t you? And that is an old woman, mind you ! crushed and breaking-up and yet you see ! U ugh, youT
After a long silence, during which he sat huddled up, he rose and snuffed the candle, as he asked me :
“Were you frightened?”
“No.”
“Quite right! There was nothing to be frightened about.”
Irritably dragging his shirt from his shoulder, he went to the washstand in the corner, and I could hear him in the darkness stamping his feet as he exclaimed :
“A fire is a silly business. The person who causes a fire ought to be beaten in the market-place. He must be either a fool or a thief. If that was done there would be no more fires. Go away now, and go to bed! What are you sitting there for?”
I did as he told me, but sleep was denied to me that night. I had no sooner laid myself down when an unearthly howl greeted me, which seemed to come from the bed. I rushed back to the kitchen, in the middle of which stood grandfather, shirtless, holding a candle which flickered violently as he stamped his feet on the floor, crying:
“Mother ! Jaakov ! What is that?”
I jumped on the stove and hid myself in a corner, and the household was once more in a state of wild commotion; a heartrending howl beat against the ceiling and walls, increasing in sound every moment.
It was all just the same as it had been during the fire. Grandfather and uncle ran about aimlessly; grandmother shouted as she drove them away from one place to another; Gregory made a great noise as he thrust logs into the stove and filled the iron kettle with water. He went about the kitchen bobbing his head just like an Astrakhan camel.
“Heat the stove first,” said grandmother in a tone of authority.
He rushed to do her bidding, and fell over my legs.
“Who is there?” he cried, greatly flustered. “Phew! How you frightened me! You are always where you ought not to be.”
“What has happened?”
“Aunt Natalia has had a little baby born to her,” he replied calmly, jumping down to the floor.
I remembered that my mother had not screamed like that when her little baby was born.
Having placed the kettle over the fire, Gregory climbed up to me on the stove, and drawing a long pipe from his pocket, showed it to me.
“I am taking to a pipe for the good of my eyes,” he explained. “Grandmother advised me to take snuff, but I think smoking will do me more good.”
He sat on the edge of the stove with his legs crossed, looking down at the feeble light of the candle; his ears and cheeks were smothered in soot, one side of his shirt was torn, and I could see his ribs as broad as the ribs of a cask. One of his eyeglasses was broken; almost half of the glass had come out of the frame, and from the empty space peered a red, moist eye, which had the appearance of a wound.
Filling his pipe with coarse-cut tobacco, he listened to the groans of the travailing woman, and murmured disjointedly, like a drunken man :
“That grandmother of yours has burned herself so badly that I am sure I don’t know how she can attend to the poor creature. Just hear how your aunt is groaning. You know, they forgot all about her. She was taken bad when the fire first broke out. It was fright that did it. You see what pain it costs to bring children into the world, and yet women are thought nothing of! But, mark my words women ought to be thought a lot of, for they are the mothers ”
Here I dozed, and was awakened by a tumult: a banging of doors, and the drunken cries of Uncle Michael ; these strange words floated to my ears :
“The royal doors must be opened !”
“Give her holy oil with rum, half a glass of oil, half a glass of rum, and a tablespoonful of soot ”
Then Uncle Michael kept asking like a tiresome child: ioo
“Let me have a look at her !”
He sat on the floor with his legs sprawling, and kept spitting straight in front of him, and banging his hands on the floor.
I began to find the stove unbearably hot, so I slid down, but when I got on a level with uncle he seized and held me by the legs, and I fell on the back of my head.
“Fool !” I exclaimed.
He jumped to his feet, grabbed me again, and roared :
“I’ll smash you against the stove ”
I escaped to a corner of the best parlor, under the image, and ran against grandfather’s knees; he put me aside, and gazing upwards, went on in a low voice :
“There is no excuse for any of us ”
The image-lamp burned brightly over his head, a candle stood on the table in the middle of the room, and the light of a foggy winter’s morning was already peeping in at the window.
Presently he bent towards me, and asked :
“What’s the matter with you?”
Everything was the matter with me my head was clammy, my body sorely weary; but I did not like to say so because everything about me was so strange. Almost all the chairs in the room were occupied by strangers; there were a priest in a lilac-colored robe, a gray-headed old man with glasses, in a military uniform, and many other people who all sat quite still like wooden figures, or figures frozen, as it were, in expectation of something, and listened to the sound of water splashing somewhere near. By the door stood Uncle Jaakov, very upright, with his hands behind his back. “Here!” said grandfather to him, “take this child to bed.”
My uncle beckoned me to follow him, and led the way on tiptoe to the door of grandmother’s room, and when I had got into bed he whispered :
“Your Aunt Natalia is dead.”
I was not surprised to hear it. She had not been visible for a long time, either in the kitchen or at meals.
“Where is grandmother?” I asked.
“Down there,” he replied, waving his hand, and went out of the room, still going softly on his bare feet.
I lay in bed and looked about me. I seemed to see hairy, gray, sightless faces pressed against the window-pane, and though I knew quite well that those were grandmother’s clothes hanging over the box in the corner, I imagined that some living creature was hiding there and waiting. I put my head under the pillow, leaving one eye uncovered so that I could look at the door, and wished that I dared jump out of bed and run out of the room. It was very hot, and there was a heavy, stifling odor which reminded me of the night when Tsiganok died, and that rivulet of blood ran along the floor.
Something in my head or my heart seemed to be swelling; everything that I had seen in that house seemed to stretch before my mind’s eye, like a train of winter sledges in the street, and to rise up and crush me.
The door opened very slowly, and grandmother crept into the room, and closing the door with her shoulder, came slowly forward ; and holding out her hand to the blue light of the image-lamp, wailed softly, pitifully as a child:
“Oh, my poor little hand! My poor hand hurts me so !”

10-28-2011, 05:39 PM

المشاركة 7

ريم بدر الدين

عضو مجلس الإدارة سابقا



Chapter V

BEFORE long another nightmare began. One evening when we had finished tea and grandfather and I sat over the Psalter, while grandmother was washing up the cups and saucers, Uncle Jaakov burst into the room, as dishevelled as ever, and bearing a strange resemblance to one of the household brooms. Without greeting us, he tossed his cap into a corner and began speaking rapidly, with excited gestures.
“Mischka is kicking up an utterly uncalled-for row. He had dinner with me, drank too much, and began to show unmistakable signs of being out of his mind; he broke up the crockery, tore up an order which had just been completed it was a woolen dress broke the windows, insulted me and Gregory, and now he is coming here, threatening you. He keeps shouting, ‘I’ll pull father’s beard for him ! I’ll kill him !’ so you had better look out.”
Grandfather rose slowly to his feet, resting his hands on the table. He was frowning heavily, and his face seemed to dry up, growing narrow and cruel, like a hatchet.
“Do you hear that, Mother?” he yelled. “What do you think of it, eh? Our own son coming to kill his father! But it is quite time; it is quite time, my children.”
He went up the room, straightening his shoulders, to the door, sharply snapped the heavy iron hook, which fastened it, into its ring, and turned again to Uncle Jaakov saying:
“This is all because you want to get hold of Varvara’s dowry. That ‘s what it is !”
And he laughed derisively in the face of my uncle, who asked in an offended tone :
“What should I want with it?”
“You? I know you!”
Grandmother was silent as she hastily put the cups and saucers away in the cupboard.
“Well?” cried grandfather, laughing bitterly. “Very good ! Thank you, my son. Mother, give this fox a poker, or an iron if you like. Now, Jaakov Vassilev, when your brother breaks in, kill him before my eyes !”
My uncle thrust his hands into his pockets and retired into a corner.
“Of course, if you won’t believe me ”
“Believe you?” cried grandfather, stamping his feet. “No ! I’ll believe an animal a dog, a hedge-hog even but I have no faith in you. I know you too well. You made him drunk, and then gave him his instructions. Very well! What are you waiting for? Kill me now him or me, you can take your choice !”
Grandmother whispered to me softly: “Run upstairs and look out of the window, and when you see Uncle Michael coming along the street, hurry back and tell us. Run along now ! Make haste !”
A little frightened by the threatened invasion of my turbulent uncles, but proud of the confidence placed in me, I leaned out of the window which looked out upon the broad road, now thickly coated with dust through which the lumpy, rough cobblestones were just visible. The street stretched a long way to the left, and crossing the causeway continued to Ostrojni Square, where, firmly planted on the clay soil, stood a gray building with a tower at each of its four corners the old prison, about which there was a suggestion of melancholy beauty. On the right, about three houses away, there was an opening in Syenia Square, which was built round the yellow domicile of the prison officials, and on the leaden-colored fire-tower, on the look-out gallery of the tower, revolved the figures of the watchmen, looking like dogs on chains. The whole square was cut off from the causeway at one end stood a green thicket, and, more to the right, lay the stagnant Dinka Pond, into which, so grandmother used to tell the story, my uncles had thrown my father one winter, with the intention of drowning him. Almost opposite our windows was a lane of small houses of various colors which led to the dumpy, squat church of the “Three Apostles.” If you looked straight at it the roof appeared exactly like a boat turned upside down on the green waves of the garden. Defaced by the snow-storms of a long winter, washed by the continuous rains of autumn, the discolored houses in our street were powdered with dust. They seemed to look at each other with half-closed eyes, like beggars in the church porch, and, like me, they seemed to be waiting for some one, and their open windows had an air of suspicion.
There were a few people moving about the street in a leisurely manner, like thoughtful cockroaches on a warm hearth ; a suffocating heat rose up to me, and the detestable odor of pie and carrots and onions cooking forced itself upon me a smell which always made me feel melancholy.
I was very miserable ridiculously, intolerably miserable ! My breast felt as if it were full of warm lead which pressed from within and exuded through my ribs. I seemed to feel myself inflating like a bladder, and yet there I was, compressed into that tiny room, under a coffin-shaped ceiling.
There was Uncle Michael peeping from the lane round the corner of the gray houses. He tried to pull his cap down over his ears, but they stuck out all the same. He was wearing a brown pea-jacket and high boots which were very dusty; one hand was in the pocket of his check trousers, and with the other he tugged at his beard. I could not see his face, but he stood almost as if he were prepared to dart across the road and seize grandfather’s house in his rough, black hands. I ought to have run downstairs to say that he had come, but I could not tear myself away from the window, and I waited till I saw my uncle kick the dust about over his gray boots just as if he were afraid, and then cross the road. I heard the door of the wineshop creak, and its glass panels rattle as he opened it, before I ran downstairs and knocked at grandfather’s door.
“Who is it?” he asked gruffly, making no attempt to let me in. “Oh, it ‘s you ! Well, what is it?”
“He has gone into the wineshop !”
“All right! Run along!”
“But I am frightened up there.”
“I can’t help that.”
Again I stationed myself at the window. It was getting dark. The dust lay more thickly on the road, and looked almost black; yellow patches of light oozed out from the adjacent windows, and from the house opposite came strains of music played on several stringed instruments melancholy but pleasing. There was singing in the tavern, too; when the door opened the sound of a feeble, broken voice floated out into the street. I recognized it as belonging to the io8 beggar cripple, Nikitoushka a bearded ancient, with one glass eye and the other always tightly closed. When the door banged it sounded as if his song had been cut off with an ax.
Grandmother used to quite envy this beggar-man. After listening to his songs she used to say, with a sigh :
“There ‘s talent for you ! What a lot of poetry he knows by heart. It ‘s a gift that ‘s what it is !”
Sometimes she invited him into the yard, where he sat on the steps and sang, or told stories, while grandmother sat beside him and listened, with such exclamations as:
“Go on. Do you mean to tell me that Our Lady was ever at Ryazin?”
To which he would reply in a low voice which carried conviction with it:
“She went everywhere through every province.”
An elusive, dreamy lassitude seemed to float up to me from the street, and place its oppressive weight upon my heart and my eyes. I wished that grandmother would come to me or even grandfather. I wondered what kind of a man my father had been that grandfather and my uncles disliked him so, while grandmother and Gregory and Nyanya Eugenia spoke so well of him. And where was my mother? I thought of her more and more every day, making her the center of all the fairy-tales and old legends related to me by grandmother. The fact that she did not choose to live with her own family increased my respect for her. I imagined her living at an inn on a highroad, with robbers who waylaid rich travelers, and shared the spoils with beggars. Or it might be that she was living in a forest in a cave, of course with good robbers, keeping house for them, and taking care of their stolen gold. Or, again, she might be wandering about the earth reckoning up its treasures, as the robber-chieftainess Engalitchev went with Our Lady, who would say to her, as she said to the robber-chieftainess :
“Do not steal, O grasping slave, The gold and silver from every cave ; Nor rob the earth of all its treasure For thy greedy body’s pleasure.”
To which my mother would answer in the words of the robber-chieftainess :
“Pardon, Lady, Virgin Blest! To my sinful soul give rest; Not for myself the gold I take, I do it for my young son’s sake.”
And Our Lady, good-natured, like grandmother, would pardon her, and say:
“Maroushka, Maroushka, of Tartar blood, For you, luckless one, ‘neath the Cross I stood; Continue your journey and bear your load, And scatter your tears o’er the toilsome road. no
But with Russian people please do not meddle ; Waylay the Mongol in the woods Or rob the Kalmuck of his goods.”
Thinking of this story, I lived in it, as if it had been a dream. I was awakened by a trampling, a tumult, and howls from below in the sheds and in the yard. I looked out of the window and saw grandfather, Uncle Jaakov, and a man employed by the tavern-keeper the funny-looking bartender, Melyan pushing Uncle Michael through the wicker-gate into the street. He hit out, but they struck him on the arms, the back, and the neck with their hands, and then kicked him. In the end he went flying headlong through the gate, and landed in the dusty road. The gate banged, the latch and the bolt rattled; all that remained of the fray was a much ill-used cap lying in the gateway, and all was quiet.
After lying still for a time, my uncle dragged himself to his feet, all torn and dishevelled, and picking up one of the cobblestones, hurled it at the gate with such a resounding clangor as might have been caused by a blow on the bottom of a cask. Shadowy people crept out of the tavern, shouting, cursing, gesticulating violently ; heads were thrust out of the windows of the houses round; the street was alive with people, laughing and talking loudly. It was all like a story which aroused one’s curiosity, but was at the same time unpleasant and full of horrors. Suddenly the whole thing was obliterated; the voices died away, and every one disappeared from my sight.
On a box by the door sat grandmother, doubled up, motionless, hardly breathing. I went and stood close to her and stroked her warm, soft, wet cheeks, but she did not seem to feel my touch, as she murmured over and over again hoarsely:
“O God ! have You no compassion left for me and my children”? Lord! have mercy !”
It seems that grandfather had only lived in that house in Polevoi Street for a year from one spring to another yet during that time it had acquired an unpleasant notoriety. Almost every Sunday boys ran about our door, chanting gleefully:
“There ‘s another row going on at the Kashmirins !” Uncle Michael generally put in an appearance in the evening and held the house in a state of siege all night, putting its occupants into a frenzy of fear: sometimes he was accompanied by two or three assistants repulsive-looking loafers of the lowest class. They used to make their way unseen from the causeway to the garden, and, once there, they indulged their drunken whims to the top of their bent, stripping the raspberry and currant bushes, and sometimes making a raid on the washhouse and breaking everything in it which could be broken washing-stools, benches, kettles smashing the stove, tearing up the flooring, and pulling down the framework of the door.
Grandfather, grim and mute, stood at the window listening to the noise made by these destroyers of his property; while grandmother, whose form could not be descried in the darkness, ran about the yard, crying in a voice of entreaty :
“Mischka! what are you thinking of? Mischka!”
For answer, a torrent of abuse in Russian, hideous as the ravings of a madman, was hurled at her from the garden by the brute, who was obviously ignorant of the meaning, and insensible to the effect of the words which he vomited forth.
I knew that I must not run after grandmother at such a time, and I was afraid to be alone, so I went down to grandfather’s room; but directly he saw me, he cried :
“Get out ! Curse you !”
I ran up to the garret and looked out on the yard and garden from the dormer-window, trying to keep grandmother in sight. I was afraid that they would kill her, and I screamed, and called out to her, but she did not come to me ; only my drunken uncle, hearing my voice, abused my mother in furious and obscene language.
On one of these evenings grandfather was unwell, and as he uneasily moved his head, which was swathed in a towel, upon his pillow, he lamented shrilly:
“For this I have lived, and sinned, and heaped up riches! If it were not for the shame and disgrace of it, I would call in the police, and let them be taken before the Governor tomorrow. But look at the dis grace! What sort of parents are they who bring the law to bear on their children? Well, there ‘s nothing for you to do but to lie still under it, old man !”
He suddenly jumped out of bed, and went, staggeringly, to the window.
Grandmother caught his arm : “Where are you going?” she asked.
“Light up !” he said, breathing hard.
When grandmother had lit the candle, he took the candlestick from her, and holding it close to him, as a soldier would hold a gun, he shouted from the window in loud, mocking tones :
“Hi, Mischka! You burglar! You mangy, mad cur!”
Instantly the top pane of glass was shattered to atoms, and half a brick fell on the table beside grandmother.
“Why don’t you aim straight?” shrieked grandfather hysterically.
Grandmother just took him in her arms, as she would have taken me, and carried him back to bed, saying over and over again in a tone of terror :
“What are you thinking of? What are you thinking of? May God forgive you ! I can see that Siberia will be the end of this for him. But in his madness he can’t realize what Siberia would mean.”
Grandfather moved his legs angrily, and sobbing dryly, said in a choked voice :
“Let him kill me !”
From outside came howls, and the sound of trampling feet, and a scraping at walls. I snatched the brick from the table and ran to the window with it, but grandmother seized me in time, and hurling it into a corner, hissed :
“You little devil !”
Another time my uncle came armed with a thick stake, and broke into the vestibule of the house from the yard by breaking in the door as he stood on the top of the dark flight of steps. However, grandfather was waiting for him on the other side, stick in hand, with two of his tenants armed with clubs, and the tall wife of the innkeeper holding a rolling-pin in readiness. Grandmother came softly behind them, murmuring in tones of earnest entreaty:
“Let me go to him! Let me have one word with him!”
Grandfather was standing with one foot thrust forward like the man with the spear in the picture called “The Bear Hunt.” When grandmother ran to him, he said nothing, but pushed her away by a movement of his elbow and his foot. All four were standing in formidable readiness. Hanging on the wall above them was a lantern which cast an unflattering, spasmodic light on their countenances. I saw all this from the top staircase, and I was wishing all the time that I could fetch grandmother to be with me up there.
My uncle had carried out the operation of breaking in the door with vigor and success. It had slipped out of its place and was ready to spring out of the upper hinge the lower one was already broken away and jangled discordantly.
Grandfather spoke to his companions-in-arms in a voice which repeated the same jarring sound:
“Go for his arms and legs, but let his silly head alone, please.”
In the wall, at the side of the door, there was a little window, through which you could just put your head. Uncle had smashed the panes, and it looked, with the splinters sticking out all round it, like some one’s black eye. To this window grandmother rushed, and putting her hand through into the yard, waved it warningly as she cried :
“Mischka! For Christ’s sake go away; they will tear you limb from limb. Do go away !” u6
He struck at her with the stake he was holding. A broad object could be seen distinctly to pass the window and fall upon her hand, and following on this grandmother herself fell; but even as she lay on her back she managed to call out:
“Mischka! Mi i schka! Run!”
“Mother, where are you?” bawled grandfather in a terrific voice.
The door gave way, and framed in the black lintel stood my uncle ; but a moment later he had been hurled, like a lump of mud off a spade, down the steps.
The wife of the innkeeper carried grandmother to grandfather’s room, to which he soon followed her, asking morosely :
“Any bones broken?”
“Och! I should think every one of them was broken,” replied grandmother, keeping her eyes closed. “What have you done with him’? What have you done with him?”
“Have some sense!” exclaimed grandfather sternly. “Do you think I am a wild beast”? He is lying in the cellar bound hand and foot, and I ‘ve given him a good drenching with water. I admit it was a bad thing to do; but who caused the whole trouble?”
Grandmother groaned.
“I have sent for the bone-setter. Try and bear it till he comes,” said grandfather, sitting beside her on the bed. “They are ruining us, Mother and in the shortest time possible.”
“Give them what they ask for then.”
“What about Varvara?”
They discussed the matter for a long time grandmother quietly and pitifully, and grandfather in loud and angry tones.
Then a little, humpbacked old woman came, with an enormous mouth, extending from ear to ear; her lower jaw trembled, her mouth hung open like the mouth of a fish, and a pointed nose peeped over her upper lip. Her eyes were not visible. She hardly moved her feet as her crutches scraped along the floor, and she carried in her hand a bundle which rattled.
It seemed to me that she had brought death to grandmother, and darting at her I yelled with all my force :
“Go away!”
Grandfather seized me, not too gently, and, looking very cross, carried me to the attic.

10-28-2011, 05:41 PM

المشاركة 8

ريم بدر الدين

عضو مجلس الإدارة سابقا



Chapter VI

WHEN the spring came my uncles separated Jaakov remained in the town and Michael established himself by the river, while grandfather bought a large, interesting house in Polevoi Street, with a tavern on the ground-floor, comfortable little rooms under the roof, and a garden running down to the causeway which simply bristled with leafless willow branches.
“Canes for you !” grandfather said, merrily winking at me, as after looking at the garden, I accompanied him on the soft, slushy road. “I shall begin teaching you to read and write soon, so they will come in handy.”
The house was packed full of lodgers, with the exception of the top floor, where grandfather had a room for himself and for the reception of visitors, and the attic, in which grandmother and I had established ourselves. Its window gave on to the street, and one could see, by leaning over the sill, in the evenings and on holidays, drunken men crawling out of the tavern and staggering up the road, shouting and tumbling about. Sometimes they were thrown out into the road, just as if they had been sacks, and then they would try to make their way into the tavern again ; the door would bang, and creak, and the hinges would squeak, and then a fight would begin. It was very interesting to look down on all this.
Every morning grandfather went to the workshops of his sons to help them to get settled, and every evening he would return tired, depressed, and cross.
Grandmother cooked, and sewed, and pottered about in the kitchen and flower gardens, revolving about something or other all day long, like a gigantic top set spinning by an invisible whip ; taking snuff continually, and sneezing, and wiping her perspiring face as she said:
“Good luck to you, good old world! Well now, Oleysha, my darling, isn’t this a nice quiet life now? This is thy doing, Queen of Heaven that everything has turned out so well !”
But her idea of a quiet life was not mine. From morning till night the other occupants of the house ran in and out and up and down tumultuously, thus demonstrating their neighborliness always in a hurry, yet always late; always complaining, and always ready to call out: “Akulina Ivanovna!”
And Akulina Ivanovna, invariably amiable, and impartially attentive to them all, would help herself to snuff and carefully wipe her nose and fingers on a red check handkerchief before replying:
“To get rid of lice, my friend, you must wash yourself oftener and take baths of mint-vapor; but if the lice are under the skin, you should take a tablespoonful of the purest goose-grease, a teaspoonful of sulphur, three drops of quicksilver stir all these ingredients together seven times with a potsherd in an earthenware vessel, and use the mixture as an ointment. But remember that if you stir it with a wooden or a bone spoon the mercury will be wasted, and that if you put a brass or silver spoon into it, it will do you harm to use it.”
Sometimes, after consideration, she would say :
“You had better go to Asaph, the chemist at Petchyor, my good woman, for I am sure I don’t know how to advise you.”
She acted as midwife, and as peacemaker in family quarrels and disputes; she would cure infantile maladies, and recite the “Dream of Our Lady,” so that the women might learn it by heart “for luck,” and was always ready to give advice in matters of housekeeping.
“The cucumber itself will tell you when pickling time comes ; when it falls to the ground and gives forth a curious odor, then is the time to pluck it. Kvass must be roughly dealt with, and it does not like much sweetness, so prepare it with raisins, to which you may add one zolotnik to every two and a half gallons. . . . You can make curds in different ways. There ‘s the Donski flavor, and the Gimpanski, and the Caucasian.”
All day long I hung about her in the garden and in the yard, and accompanied her to neighbors’ houses, where she would sit for hours drinking tea and telling all sorts of stories. I had grown to be a part of her, as it were, and at this period of my life I do not remember anything so distinctly as that energetic old woman, who was never weary of doing good.
Sometimes my mother appeared on the scene from somewhere or other, for a short time. Lofty and severe, she looked upon us all with her cold gray eyes, which were like the winter sun, and soon vanished again, leaving us nothing to remember her by.
Once I asked grandmother: “Are you a witch?”
“Well! What idea will you get into your head next?” she laughed. But she added in a thoughtful tone: “How could I be a witch? Witchcraft is a difficult science. Why, I can’t read and write even; I don’t even know my alphabet. Grandfather he ‘s a regular cormorant for learning, but Our Lady never made me a scholar.”
Then she presented still another phase of her life to me as she went on:
“I was a little orphan like you, you know. My mother was just a poor peasant woman and a cripple.
She was little more than a child when a gentleman took advantage of her. In fear of what was to come, she threw herself out of the window one night, and broke her ribs and hurt her shoulder so much that her right hand, which she needed most, was withered . . . and a noted lace-worker, too! Well, of course her employers did not want her after that, and they dismissed her to get her living as well as she could. How can one earn bread without hands? So she had to beg, to live on the charity of others ; but in those times people were richer and kinder . . . the carpenters of Balakhana, as well as the lace-workers, were famous, and all the people were for show.
“Sometimes my mother and I stayed in the town for the autumn and winter, but as soon as the Archangel Gabriel waved his sword and drove away the winter, and clothed the earth with spring, we started on our travels again, going whither our eyes led us. To Mourome we went, and to Urievitz, and by the upper Volga, and by the quiet Oka. It was good to wander about the world in the spring and summer, when all the earth was smiling and the grass was like velvet; and the Holy Mother of God scattered flowers over the fields, and everything seemed to bring joy to one, and speak straight to one’s heart. And sometimes, when we were on the hills, my mother, closing her blue eyes, would begin to sing in a voice which, though not powerful, was as clear as a bell; and listening to her, everything about us seemed to fall into a breathless sleep. Ah! God knows it was good to be alive in those days!
“But by the time that I was nine years old, my mother began to feel that she would be blamed if she took me about begging with her any longer; in fact, she began to be ashamed of the life we were leading, and so she settled at Balakhana, and went about the streets begging from house to house taking up a position in the church porch on Sundays and holidays, while I stayed at home and learned to make lace. I was an apt pupil, because I was so anxious to help my mother; but sometimes I did not seem to get on at all, and then I used to cry. But in two years I had learned the business, mind you, small as I was, and the fame of of it went through the town. When people wanted really good lace, they came to us at once :
“‘Now, Akulina, make your bobbins fly !’ ’
“And I was very happy . . . those were great days for me. But of course it was mother’s work, not mine ; for though she had only one hand and that one useless, it was she who taught me how to work. And a good teacher is worth more than ten workers.
“Well, I began to be proud. ‘Now, my little mother,’ I said, ‘you must give up begging, for I can earn enough to keep us both.’
“‘Nothing of the sort !’ she replied. ‘What you earn shall be set aside for your dowry.’
“And not long after this, grandfather came on the scene. A wonderful lad he was only twenty-two, and already a freewater-man. His mother had had her eye on me for some time. She saw that I was a clever worker, and being only a beggar’s daughter, I suppose she thought I should be easy to manage ; but ! Well, she was a crafty, malignant woman, but we won’t rake up all that. . . . Besides, why should we remember bad people? God sees them; He sees all they do; and the devils love them.”
And she laughed heartily, wrinkling her nose comically, while her eyes, shining pensively, seemed to caress me, more eloquent even than her words.
I remember one quiet evening having tea with grandmother in grandfather’s room. He was not well, and was sitting on his bed undressed, with a large towel wrapped round his shoulders, sweating profusely and breathing quickly and heavily. His green eyes were dim, his face puffed and livid; his small, pointed ears also were quite purple, and his hand shook pitifully as he stretched it out to take his cup of tea. His manner was gentle too; he was quite unlike himself.
“Why haven’t you given me any sugar?” he asked pettishly, like a spoiled child.
“I have put honey in it ; it is better for you,” replied grandmother kindly but firmly.
Drawing in his breath and making a sound in his throat like the quacking of a duck, he swallowed the hot tea at a gulp.
“I shall die this time,” he said; “see if I don’t!”
“Don’t you worry ! I will take care of you.”
“That ‘s all very well ; but if I die now I might as well have never lived. Everything will fall to pieces.”
“Now, don’t you talk. Lie quiet.”
He lay silent for a minute with closed eyes, twisting his thin beard round his fingers, and smacking his discolored lips together; but suddenly he shook himself as if some one had run a pin into him, and began to utter his thoughts aloud :
“Jaaschka and Mischka ought to get married again as soon as possible. New ties would very likely give them a fresh hold on life. What do you think?” Then he began to search his memory for the names of eligible brides in the town.
But grandmother kept silence as she drank cup after cup of tea, and I sat at the window looking at the evening sky over the town as it grew redder and redder and cast a crimson reflection upon the windows of the opposite houses. As a punishment for some misdemeanor, grandfather had forbidden me to go out in the garden or the yard. Round the birch trees in the garden circled beetles, making a tinkling sound with their wings; a cooper was working in a neighboring yard, and not far away some one was sharpening knives. The voices of children who were hidden by the thick bushes rose up from the garden and the causeway. It all seemed to draw me and hold me, while the melancholy of eventide flowed into my heart.
Suddenly grandfather produced a brand-new book from somewhere, banged it loudly on the palm of his hand, and called me in brisk tones.
“Now, yon young rascal, come here! Sit down! Now do you see these letters’? This is ‘Az.’ Say after me ‘Az,’ ‘Buki,’ ‘Viedi.’ What is this one?”
“Buki.”
“Right ! And what is this?”
“Viedi.”
“Wrong! It is ‘Az.’
“Look at these ‘Glagol,’ ‘Dobro,’ ‘Yest.’ WTiat is this one?”
“Dobro.”
“Right! And this one?”
“Glagol.”
“Good! And this one?”
“Az.”
“You ought to be lying still, you know, Father,” put in grandmother.
“Oh, don’t bother! This is just die dung for me; it takes my thoughts off myself. Go on, Lexei!”
He put his hot, moist aim round my neck, and ticked off the letters on my shoulder with his finger He smelled strongly of vinegar, to which an odor of baked onion was added, and I felt nearly suffocated; but he flew into a rage and growled and roared in my ear:
“Zemlya, Loodi!”
The words were familiar to me, but the Slav characters did not correspond with them. “Zemlya” (Z) looked like a worm; 4i Glagol M (G) like round-shouldered Gregory; “Ya” resembled grandmother and me standing together; and grandfather seemed to have something in common with all the letters of the alphabet.
He took me through it over and over again, sometimes asking me the names of the letters in order, sometimes “dodging” ; and his hot temper must have been catching, for I also began to perspire, and to shout at the top of my voice at which he was greatly amused. He clutched his chest as he coughed violently and tossed the book aside, wheezing:
“Do you hear how he bawls, Mother? What are you making that noise for, you little Astrakhan maniac?
It was you that made the noise.
It was a pleasure to me then to look at him and at grandmother, who, with her elbows on the table, and cheek resting on her hand, was watching us and laughing gently as she said :
“You will burst yourselves with laughing if you are not careful.”
“I am irritable because I am unwell,” grandfather explained in a friendly tone. “But what ‘s the matter with you, eh?”
“Our poor Natalia was mistaken,” he said to grandmother, shaking his damp head, “when she said he had no memory. He has a memory, thank God! It is like a horse’s memory. Get on with it, snub-nose !”
At last he playfully pushed me off the bed.
“That will do. You can take the book, and tomorrow you will say the whole alphabet to me without a mistake, and I will give you five kopecks.”
When I held out my hand for the book, he drew me to him and said gruffly :
“That mother of yours does not care what becomes of you, my lad.”
Grandmother started.
“Oh, Father, why do you say such things’?”
“I ought not to have said it my feelings got the better of me. Oh, what a girl that is for going astray !”
He pushed me from him roughly.
“Run along now! You can go out, but not into the street; don’t you dare to do that. Go to the yard or the garden.”
The garden had special attractions for me. As soon as I showed myself on the hillock there, the boys in the causeway started to throw stones at me, and I returned the charge with a will.
“Here comes the ninny,” they would yell as soon as they saw me, arming themselves hastily. “Let ‘s skin him !”
As I did not know what they meant by “ninny,” the nickname did not offend me; but I liked to feel that I was one alone fighting against the lot of them, especially when a well-aimed stone sent the enemy flying to shelter amongst the bushes. We engaged in these battles without malice, and they generally ended without any one being hurt.
I learned to read and write easily. Grandmother bestowed more and more attention on me, and whippings became rarer and rarer although in my opinion I deserved them more than ever before, for the older and more vigorous I grew the more often I broke grandfather’s rules, and disobeyed his commands; yet he did no more than scold me, or shake his fist at me. I began to think, if you please, that he must have beaten me without cause in the past, and I told him so.
He lightly tilted my chin and raised my face towards him, blinking as he drawled:
“Wha a a t?”
And half-laughing, he added :
“You heretic! How can you possibly know how many whippings you need? Who should know if not I? There! get along with you.”
But he had no sooner said this than he caught me by the shoulder and asked:
“Which are you now, I wonder crafty or simple?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know! Well, I will tell you this much be crafty; it pays! Simple-mindedness is nothing but foolishness. Sheep are simple-minded, remember that! That will do. Run away!”
Before long I was able to spell out the Psalms. Our usual time for this was after the evening tea, when I had to read one Psalm.
“B-1-e-s-s, Bless; e-d, ed; Blessed,” I read, guiding the pointer across the page. “Blessed is the man Does that mean Uncle Jaakov?” I asked, to relieve the tedium.
“I’ll box your ears; that will teach you who it is that is blessed,” replied grandfather, snorting angrily; but I felt that his anger was only assumed, because he thought it was the right thing to be angry.
And I was not mistaken; in less than a minute it was plain that he had forgotten all about me as he muttered :
“Yes, yes ! King David showed himself to be very spiteful in sport, and in his songs, and in the Absalom affair. Ah! Maker of Songs, Master of Language, and Jester. That is what you were !”
I left off reading to look at his frowning, wondering face. His eyes, blinking slightly, seemed to look through me, and a warm, melancholy brightness shone from them ; but I knew that before long his usual harsh expression would return to them. He drummed on the table spasmodically with his thin fingers ; his stained nails shone, and his golden eyebrows moved up and down.
“Grandfather!”
“Eh? 5
“Tell me a story.”
“Get on with your reading, you lazy clown!” he said querulously, rubbing his eyes just as if he had been awakened from sleep. “You like stories, but you don’t care for the Psalms !”
I rather suspected that he, too, liked stories better than the Psalter, which he knew almost by heart, for he had made a vow to read it through every night before going to bed, which he did in a sort of chant, just as the deacons recite the breviary in church.
At my earnest entreaty, the old man, who was growing softer every day, gave in to me.
“Very well, then! You will always have the Psalter with you, but God will be calling me to judgment before long.”
So, reclining against the upholstered back of the old armchair, throwing back his head and gazing at the ceiling, he quietly and thoughtfully began telling me about old times, and about his father. Once robbers had come to Balakhana, to rob Zaev, the merchant, and grandfather’s father rushed to the belfry to sound the alarm; but the robbers came up after him, felled him with their swords, and threw him down from the tower.
“But I was an infant at the time, so of course I do not remember anything about the affair. The first person I remember is a Frenchman; that was when I was twelve years old exactly twelve. Three batches of prisoners were driven into Balakhana all small, wizened people ; some of them dressed worse than beggars, and others so cold that they could hardly stand by themselves. The peasants would have beaten them to death, but the escort prevented that and drove them away; and there was no more trouble after that. We got used to the Frenchmen, who showed themselves to be skilful and sagacious; merry enough too . . . sometimes they sang songs. Gentlemen used to come out from Nijni in troikas to examine the prisoners; some of them abused the Frenchmen and shook their fists at them, and even went so far as to strike them, while others spoke kindly to them in their own tongue, gave them money, and showed them great cordiality. One old gentleman covered his face with his hands and wept, and said that that villain Bonaparte had ruined the French. There, you see ! He was a Russian, and a gentleman, and he had a good heart he pitied those foreigners.”
He was silent for a moment, keeping his eyes closed, and smoothing his hair with his hands; then he went on, recalling the past with great precision.
“Winter had cast its spell over the streets, the peasants’ huts were frostbound, and the Frenchmen used sometimes to run to our mother’s house and stand under the windows she used to make little loaves to sell and tap on the glass, shouting and jumping about as they asked for hot bread. Mother would not have them in our cottage, but she threw them the loaves from the window; and all hot as they were, they snatched them up and thrust them into their breasts, against their bare skin. How they bore the heat I cannot imagine! Many of them died of cold, for they came from a warm country, and were not accustomed to frost. Two of them lived in our wash-house, in the kitchen garden an officer, with his orderly, Miron.
“The officer was a tall, thin man, with his bones coming through his skin, and he used to go about wrapped in a woman’s cloak which reached to his knees. He was very amiable, but a drunkard, and my mother used to brew beer on the quiet and sell it to him. When he had been drinking he used to sing. When he had learned to speak our language he used to air his views ‘Your country is not white at all, it is black and bad!’ He spoke very imperfectly, but we could understand him, and what he said was quite true. The upper banks of the Volga are not pleasing, but farther south the earth is warmer, and on the Caspian Sea snow is never even seen. One can believe that, for there is no mention of either snow or winter in the Gospels, or in the Acts, or in the Psalms, as far as I remember . . . and the place where Christ lived . . . Well, as soon as we have finished the Psalms we will read the Gospels together.”
He fell into another silence, just as if he had dropped off to sleep. His thoughts were far away, and his eyes, as they glanced sideways out of the window, looked small and sharp.
“Tell me some more,” I said, as a gentle reminder of my presence.
He started, and then began again.
“Well we were talking about French people. They are human beings like ourselves, after all, not worse, or more sinful. Sometimes they used to call out to my mother, ‘Madame! Madame!’ that means ‘my lady,’ ‘my mistress’ and she would put flour five poods of it into their sacks. Her strength was extraordinary for a woman; she could lift me up by the hair quite easily until I was twenty, and even at that age I was no light weight. Well, this orderly, Miron, loved horses; he used to go into the yard and make signs for them to give him a horse to groom. At first there was trouble about it there were disputes and enmity but in the end the peasants used to call him ‘Hi, Miron!’ and he used to laugh and nod his head, and run to them. He was sandy, almost red-haired, with a large nose and thick lips. He knew all about horses, and treated their maladies with wonderful success; later on he became a veterinary surgeon at Nijni, but he went out of his mind and was killed in a fire. Towards the spring the officer began to show signs of breaking up, and passed quietly away, one day in early spring, while he was sitting at the window of the out-house just sitting and thinking, with drooping head.
“That is how his end came. I was very grieved about it. I cried a little, even, on the quiet. He was so gentle. He used to pull my ears, and talk to me so kindly in his own tongue. I could not understand him, but I liked to hear him human kindness is not to be bought in any market. He began to teach me his language, but my mother forbade it, and even went so far as to send me to the priest, who prescribed a beating for me, and went himself to make a complaint to the officer. In those days, my lad, we were treated very harshly. You have not experienced anything like it yet. . . . What you have had to put up with is nothing to it, and don’t you forget it! . . . Take my own case, for example. ... I had to go through so much ”
Darkness began to fall. Grandfather seemed to grow curiously large in the twilight, and his eyes gleamed like those of a cat. On most subjects he spoke quietly, carefully, and thoughtfully, but when he talked about himself his words came quickly and his tone was passionate and boastful, and I did not like to hear him; nor did I relish his frequent and peremptory command :
“Remember what I am telling you now ! Take care you don’t forget this !”
He told me of many things which I had no desire to remember, but which, without any command from him, I involuntarily retained in my memory, to cause me a morbid sickness of heart.

10-28-2011, 05:42 PM

المشاركة 9

ريم بدر الدين

عضو مجلس الإدارة سابقا



He never told fictitious stories, but always related events which had really happened; and I also noticed that he hated to be questioned, which prompted me to ask persistently :
“Who are the best the French or the Russians?”
“How can I tell? I never saw a Frenchman at home,” he growled angrily. “A Pole cat is all right in its own hole,” he added.
“But are the Russians good?”
“In many respects they are, but they were better when the landlords ruled. We are all at sixes and sevens now; people can’t even get a living. The gentlefolk, of course, are to blame, because they have more intelligence to back them up; but that can’t be said of all of them, but only of a few good ones who have already been proved. As for the others most of them are as foolish as mice; they will take anything you like to give them. We have plenty of nut shells amongst us, but the kernels are missing; only nut shells, the kernels have been devoured. There ‘s a lesson for you, man ! We ought to have learned it, our wits ought to have been sharpened by now; but we are not keen enough yet.”
“Are Russians stronger than other people?” “We have some very strong people amongst us ; but it is not strength which is so important, but dexterity. As far as sheer strength goes, the horse is our superior.”
“But why did the French make war on us?”
“Well, war is the Emperor’s affair. We can’t expect to understand about it.”
But to my question: “What sort of a man was Bonaparte?” grandfather replied in a tone of retrospection :
“He was a wicked man. He wanted to make war on the whole world, and after that he wanted to make us all equal without rulers, or masters; every one to be equal, without distinction of class, under the same rules, professing the same religion, so that the only difference between one person and another would be their names. It was all nonsense, of course. Lobsters are the only creatures which cannot be distinguished one from the other . . . but fish are divided into classes. The sturgeon will not associate with the sheat-fish, and the sterlet refuses to make a friend of the herring. There have been Bonapartes amongst us ; there was Razin (Stepan Timotheev), and Pygatch (Emilian Ivanov) but I will tell you about them another time.”
Sometimes he would remain silent for a long time, gazing at me with rolling eyes, as if he had never seen me before, which was not at all pleasant. But he never spoke to me of my father or my mother. Now and again grandmother would enter noiselessly during these conversations, and taking a seat in the corner, would remain there for a long time silent and invisible. Then she would ask suddenly in her caressing voice :
“Do you remember, Father, how lovely it was when we went on a pilgrimage to Mouron? What year would that be now?”
After pondering, grandfather would answer carefully:
“I can’t say exactly, but it was before the cholera. It was the year we caught those escaped convicts in the woods.”
“True, true! We were still frightened of them”
“That’s right!”
I asked what escaped convicts were, and why they were running about the woods; and grandfather rather reluctantly explained.
“They are simply men who have run away from prison from the work they have been set to do.”
“How did you catch them?”
“How did we catch them? Why, like little boys play hide-and-seek some run away and the others look for them and catch them. When they were caught they were thrashed, their nostrils were slit, and they were branded on the forehead as a sign that they were convicts.”
“But why?”
“Ah! that is the question and one I can’t answer.
As to which is in the wrong the one who runs away or the one who pursues him that also is a mystery !”
“And do you remember, Father,” said grandmother, “after the great fire, how we ?”
Grandfather, who put accuracy before everything else, asked grimly:
“What great fire?”
When they went over the past like this, they forgot all about me. Their voices and their words mingled so softly and so harmoniously, that it sounded sometimes as if they were singing melancholy songs about illnesses and fires, about massacred people and sudden deaths, about clever rogues, and religious maniacs, and harsh landlords.
“What a lot we have lived through! What a lot we have seen !” murmured grandfather softly.
“We haven’t had such a bad life, have we?” said grandmother. “Do you remember how well the spring began, after Varia was born?”
“That was in the year ‘48, during the Hungarian Campaign ; and the day after the christening they drove out her godfather, Tikhon ”
“And he disappeared,” sighed grandmother.
“Yes; and from that time God’s blessings have seemed to flow off our house like water off a duck’s back. Take Varvara, for instance ”
“Now, Father, that will do!”
“What do you mean That will do’?’ he asked, scowling at her angrily. “Our children have turned out badly, whichever way you look at them. What has become of the vigor of our youth? We thought we were storing it up for ourselves in our children, as one might pack something away carefully in a basket ; when, lo and behold, God changes it in our hands into a riddle without an answer!”
He ran about the room, uttering cries as if he had burned himself, and groaning as if he were ill; then turning on grandmother he began to abuse his children, shaking his small, withered fist at her threateningly as he cried:
“And it is all your fault for giving in to them, and for taking their part, you old hag !”
His grief and excitement culminated in a tearful howl as he threw himself on the floor before the icon, and beating his withered, hollow breast with all his force, cried:
“Lord, have I sinned more than others’? Why then?”
And he trembled from head to foot, and his eyes, wet with tears, glittered with resentment and animosity.
Grandmother, without speaking, crossed herself as she sat in her dark corner, and then, approaching him cautiously, said:
“Now, why are you fretting like this? God knows what He is doing. You say that other people’s children are better than ours, but I assure you, Father, that you will find the same thing everywhere quarrels, and bickerings, and disturbances. All parents wash away their sins with their tears; you are not the only one.”
Sometimes these words would pacify him, and he would begin to get ready for bed; then grandmother and I would steal away to our attic.
But once when she approached him with soothing speech, he turned on her swiftly, and with all his force dealt her a blow in the face with his fist.
Grandmother reeled, and almost lost her balance, but she managed to steady herself, and putting her hand to her lips, said quietly: “Fool!” And she spit blood at his feet ; but he only gave two prolonged howls and raised both hands to her.
“Go away, or I will kill you !”
“Fool!” she repeated as she was leaving the room.
Grandfather rushed at her, but, with haste, she stepped over the threshold and banged the door in his face.
“Old hag!” hissed grandfather, whose face had become livid, as he clung to the door-post, clawing it viciously.
I was sitting on the couch, more dead than alive, hardly able to believe my eyes. This was the first time he had struck grandmother in my presence, and I was overwhelmed with disgust at this new aspect of his character at this revelation of a trait which I found unforgivable, and I felt as if I were being suffocated. He stayed where he was, hanging on to the door-post, his face becoming gray and shriveled up as if it were covered with ashes.
Suddenly he moved to the middle of the room, knelt down, and bent forward, resting his hands on the floor; but he straightened himself almost directly, and beat his breast.
“And now, O Lord!”
I slipped off the warm tiles of the stove-couch, and crept out of the room, as carefully as if I were treading on ice. I found grandmother upstairs, walking up and down the room, and rinsing her mouth at intervals.
“Are you hurt?”
She went into the corner, spit out some water into the hand-basin, and replied coolly:
“Nothing to make a fuss about. My teeth are all right; it is only my lips that are bruised.”
“Why did he do it?’
Glancing out of the window she said :
“He gets into a temper. It is hard for him in his old age. Everything seems to turn out badly. Now you go to bed, say your prayers, and don’t think any more about this.”
I began to ask some more questions; but with a severity quite unusual in her, she cried:
“What did I say to you? Go to bed at once! I never heard of such disobedience !”
She sat at the window, sucking her lip and spitting frequently into her handkerchief, and I undressed, looking at her. I could see the stars shining above her black head through the blue, square window. In the street all was quiet, and the room was in darkness. When I was in bed she came over to me and softly stroking my head, she said :
“Sleep well! I shall go down to him. Don’t be anxious about me, sweetheart. It was my own fault, you know. Now go to sleep !”
She kissed me and went away; but an overwhelming sadness swept over me. I jumped out of the wide, soft, warm bed, and going to the window, gazed down upon the empty street, petrified by grief.

10-28-2011, 05:45 PM

المشاركة 10

ريم بدر الدين

عضو مجلس الإدارة سابقا



Chapter VII

I WAS not long in grasping the fact that there was one God for grandfather and another for grandmother. The frequency with which this difference was brought to my notice made it impossible to ignore it.
Sometimes grandmother woke up in the morning and sat a long while on the bed combing her wonderful hair. Holding her head firmly, she would draw the comb with its jagged teeth through every thread of that black, silky mane, whispering the while, not to wake me:
“Bother you! The devil take you for sticking together like this !”
When she had thus taken all the tangles out, she quickly wove it into a thick plait, washed in a hurry, with many angry tossings of her head, and without washing away the signs of irritation from her large face, which was creased by sleep, she placed herself before the icon and began her real morning ablutions, by which her whole being was instantly refreshed.
She straightened her crooked back, and raising her head, gazed upon the round face of Our Lady of Kazan, and after crossing herself reverently, said in a loud, fierce whisper:
“Most Glorious Virgin! Take me under thy protection this day, dear Mother.”
Having made a deep obeisance, she straightened her back with difficulty, and then went on whispering ardently, and with deep feeling:
“Source of our Joy! Stainless Beauty! Apple tree in bloom !”
Every morning she seemed to find fresh words of praise; and for that reason I used to listen to her prayers with strained attention.
“Dear Heart, so pure, so heavenly! My Defense and my Refuge! Golden Sun! Mother of God! Guard me from temptation; grant that I may do no one harm, and may not be offended by what others do to me thoughtlessly.”
With her dark eyes smiling, and a general air of rejuvenation about her, she crossed herself again, with that slow and ponderous movement of her hand.
“Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner, for Thy Mother’s sake!”
Her prayers were always non-liturgical, full of sincere praise, and very simple.
She did not pray long in the mornings because she had to get the samovar ready, for grandfather kept no servants, and if the tea was not made to the moment, he used to give her a long and furious scolding.
Sometimes he was up before her, and would come up to the attic. Finding her at prayer, he would stand for some minutes listening to her, contemptuously curling his thin, dark lips, and when he was drinking his tea, he would growl:
“How often have I taught you how to say your prayers, blockhead. But you are always mumbling some nonsense, you heretic! I can’t think why God puts up with you.”
“He understands,” grandmother would reply confidently, “what we don’t say to Him. He looks into everything.”
“You cursed dullard! U u ugh, you!” was all he said to this.
Her God was with her all day; she even spoke to the animals about Him. Evidently this God, with willing submission, made Himself subject to all creatures to men, dogs, bees, and even the grass of the field; and He was impartially kind and accessible to every one on earth.
Once the petted cat belonging to the innkeeper’s wife an artful, pretty, coaxing creature, smoke-colored with golden eyes caught a starling in the garden. Grandmother took away the nearly exhausted bird and punished the cat, crying:
“Have you no fear of God, you spiteful wretch?”
The wife of the innkeeper and the porter laughed at these words, but she said to them angrily:
“Do you think that animals don’t understand about God? All creatures understand about Him better than you do, you heartless things !”
When she harnessed Sharapa, who was growing fat and melancholy, she used to hold a conversation with him.
“Why do you look so miserable, toiler of God? Why? You are getting old, my dear, that’s what it is.” And the horse would sigh and toss his head.
And yet she did not utter the name of God as frequently as grandfather did. Her God was quite com prehensible to me, and I knew that I must not tell lies in His presence; I should be ashamed to do so. The thought of Him produced such an invincible feeling of shame, that I never lied to grandmother. It would be simply impossible to hide anything from this good God ; in fact, I had not even a wish to do so.
One day the innkeeper’s wife quarreled with grandfather and abused him, and also grandmother, who had taken no part in the quarrel; nevertheless she abused her bitterly, and even threw a carrot at her.
“You are a fool, my good woman,” said grandmother very quietly; but I felt the insult keenly, and resolved to be revenged on the spiteful creature.
For a long time I could not make up my mind as to the best way to punish this sandy-haired, fat woman, with two chins and no eyes to speak of. From my own experience of feuds between people living together, I knew that they avenged themselves on one another by cutting off the tails of their enemy’s cat, by chasing his dogs, by killing his cocks and hens, by creeping into his cellar in the night and pouring kerosene over the cabbages and cucumbers in the tubs, and letting the kvass run out of the barrels; but nothing of this kind appealed to me. I wanted something less crude, and more terrifying.
At last I had an idea. I lay in wait for the inn-keeper’s wife, and as soon as she went down to the cellar, I shut the trap door on her, fastened it, danced a jig on it, threw the key on to the roof, and rushed into the kitchen where grandmother was busy cooking. At first she could not understand why I was in such an ecstasy of joy, but when she had grasped the cause, she slapped me on that part of my anatomy provided for the purpose, dragged me out to the yard, and sent me up to the roof to find the key. I gave it to her with reluctance, astonished at her asking for it, and ran away to a corner of the yard, whence I could see how she set the captive free, and how they laughed together in a friendly way as they crossed the yard.
“I’ll pay you for this !” threatened the innkeeper’s wife, shaking her plump fist at me; but there was a good-natured smile on her eyeless face.
Grandmother dragged me back to the kitchen by the collar. “Why did you do that?” she asked.
“Because she threw a carrot at you.”
“That means that you did it for me? Very well! This is what I will do for you I will horsewhip you and put you amongst the mice under the oven. A nice sort of protector you are! ‘Look at a bubble and it will burst directly.’ If I were to tell grandfather he would skin you. Go up to the attic and learn your lesson.”
She would not speak to me for the rest of the day, but before she said her prayers that night she sat on the bed and uttered these memorable words in a very impressive tone:
“Now, Lenka, my darling, you must keep yourself from meddling with the doings of grown-up persons. Grown-up people are given responsibilities and they have to answer for them to God; but it is not so with you yet; you live by a child’s conscience. Wait till God takes possession of your heart, and shows you the work you are to do, and the way you are to take. Do you understand? It is no business of yours to decide who is to blame in any matter. God judges, and punishes; that is for Him, not for us.”
She was silent for a moment while she took a pinch of snuff; then, half-closing her right eye, she added:
“Why, God Himself does not always know where the fault lies.”
“Doesn’t God know everything?” I asked in astonishment.
“If He knew everything, a lot of things that are done would not be done. It is as if He, the Father, . looks and looks from Heaven at the earth, and sees how often we weep, how often we sob, and says: ‘My people, my dear people, how sorry I am for you !’ ”
She was crying herself as she spoke; and drying her wet cheeks, she went into the corner to pray.
From that time her God became still closer and still more comprehensible to me.
Grandfather, in teaching me, also said that God was a Being Omnipresent, Omniscient, All-seeing, the kind Helper of people in all their affairs ; but he did not pray like grandmother. In the morning, before going to stand before the icon, he took a long time washing himself; then, when he was fully dressed, he carefully combed his sandy hair, brushed his beard, and looking at himself in the mirror, saw that his shirt sat well, and tucked his black cravat into his waistcoat after which he advanced cautiously, almost stealthily, to the icon. He always stood on one particular board of the parquet floor, and with an expression in his eyes which made them look like the eyes of a horse, he stood in silence for a minute, with bowed head, and arms held straight down by his sides in soldier fashion; then, upright, and slender as a nail, he began impressively :
“In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.”
After these words it always seemed to me that the room became extraordinarily quiet; the very flies seemed to buzz cautiously.
There he stood, with his head thrown back, his eyebrows raised and bristling, his golden beard sticking out horizontally, and recited the prayers, in a firm tone, as if he were repeating a lesson, and with a voice which was very distinct and very imperious.
“It will be useless when the Judge comes, and every action is laid bare ”
Striking himself lightly on the breast, he prayed fervently:
“To Thee alone can sinners come. Oh, turn Thy face away from my misdeeds.”
He recited the “I believe,” using the prescribed words only; and all the while his right leg quivered, as if it were noiselessly keeping time with his prayers, and his whole form, straining towards the icon, seemed to become taller, leaner, and drier so clean he was, so neat, and so persistent in his demands.
“Heavenly Physician, heal my soul of its long-lived passions. To thee, Holy Virgin, I cry from my heart; to thee I offer myself with fervor.”
And with his green eyes full of tears he wailed loudly:
“Impute to me, my God, faith instead of works, and be not mindful of deeds which can by no means justify me!”
Here he crossed himself frequently at intervals, tossing his head as if he were about to butt at something, and his voice became squeaky and cracked. Later, when I happened to enter a synagogue, I realized that grandfather prayed like a Jew.
By this time the samovar would have been snorting on the table for some minutes, and a hot smell of rye-cakes would be floating through the room. Grandmother, frowning, strolled about, with her eyes on the floor; the sun looked cheerfully in at the window from the garden, the dew glistened like pearls on the trees, the morning air was deliciously perfumed by the smell of dill, and currant-bushes, and ripening apples, but grandfather went on with his prayers quavering and squeaking.
“Extinguish in me the flame of passion, for I am in misery and accursed.”
I knew all the morning prayers by heart, and even in my dreams I could say what was to come next, and
I followed with intense interest to hear if he made a mistake or missed out a word which very seldom happened; but when it did, it aroused a feeling of malicious glee in me.
When he had finished his prayers, grandfather used to say “Good morning!” to grandmother and me, and we returned his greeting and sat down to table. Then I used to say to him:
“You left out a word this morning.”
“Not really?” grandfather would say with an uneasy air of incredulity.
“Yes. You should have said, ‘This, my Faith, reigns supreme,’ but you did not say ‘reigns.’ ’
“There now!” he would exclaim, much perturbed, and blinking guiltily.
Afterwards he would take a cruel revenge on me for pointing out his mistake to him; but for the moment, seeing how disturbed he was, I was able to enjoy my triumph.
One day grandmother said to him jokingly:
“God must get tired of listening to your prayers, Father. You do nothing but insist on the same things over and over again.”
“What ‘s that?” he drawled in an ominous voice. “What are you nagging about now?”
“I say that you do not offer God so much as one little word from your own heart, so far as I can hear.”
He turned livid, and quivering with rage, jumped up on his chair and threw a dish at her head, yelping with a sound like that made by a saw on a piece of wood:
“Take that, you old hag!”
When he spoke of the omnipotence of God, he always emphasized its cruelty above every other attribute. “Man sinned, and the Flood was sent; sinned again, and his towns were destroyed by fire; then God punished people by famine and plague, and even now He is always holding a sword over the earth a scourge for sinners. All who have wilfully broken the commandments of God will be punished by sorrow and ruin.” And he emphasized this by rapping his fingers on the table.
It was hard for me to believe in the cruelty of God, and I suspected grandfather of having made it all up on purpose to inspire me with fear not of God but of himself; so I asked him frankly:
“Are you saying all this to make me obey you?”
And he replied with equal frankness:
“Well, perhaps I am. Do you mean to disobey me again?”
“And how about what grandmother says?”
“Don’t you believe the old fool!” he admonished me sternly. “From her youth she has always been stupid, illiterate, and unreasonable. I shall tell her she must not dare to talk to you again on such an important matter. Tell me, now how many companies of angels are there?”
I gave the required answer, and then I asked :
“Are they limited companies’?”
“Oh, you scatterbrain !” he laughed, covering his eyes and biting his lips. “What have companies to do with God . . . they belong to life on earth . . . they are founded to set the laws at naught.”
“What are laws?”
“Laws! Well, they are really derived from custom,” the old man explained, with pleased alacrity; and his intelligent, piercing eyes sparkled. “People living together agree amongst themselves ‘Such and such is our best course of action ; we will make a custom of it a rule’ ; finally it becomes a law. For example, before they begin a game, children will settle amongst themselves how it is to be played, and what rules are to be observed. Laws are made in the same way.”
“And what have companies to do with laws’?”
“Why, they are like an impudent fellow; they come along and make the laws of no account.”
“But why?”
“Ah! that you would not understand,” he replied, knitting his brows heavily ; but afterwards, as if in explanation, he said:
“All the actions of men help to work out God’s plans.
Men desire one thing, but He wills something quite different. Human institutions are never lasting. The Lord blows on them, and they fall into dust and ashes.”
I had reason for being interested in “companies,” so I went on inquisitively:
“But what does Uncle Jaakov mean when he sings:
“The Angels bright For God will fight, But Satan’s slaves Are companies”?
Grandfather raised his hand to his beard, thus hiding his mouth, and closed his eyes. His cheeks quivered, and I guessed that he was laughing inwardly.
“Jaakov ought to have his feet tied together and be thrown into the water,” he said. “There was no necessity for him to sing or for you to listen to that song. It is nothing but a silly joke which is current in Kalonga a piece of schismatical, heretical nonsense.” And looking, as it were, through and beyond me, he murmured thoughtfully: “U u ugh, you!”
But though he had set God over mankind, as a Being to be very greatly feared, none the less did he, like grandmother, invoke Him in all his doings.
The only saints grandmother knew were Nikolai, Yowry, Frola, and Lavra, who were full of kindness and sympathy with human-nature, and went about in the villages and towns sharing the life of the people, and regulating all their concerns; but grandfather’s saints were nearly all males, who cast down idols, or defied the Roman emperors, and were tortured, burned or flayed alive in consequence.
Sometimes grandfather would say musingly:
“If only God would help me to sell that little house, even at a small profit, I would make a public thanksgiving to St. Nicholas.”
But grandmother would say to me, laughingly:
“That’s just like the old fool! Does he think St. Nicholas will trouble himself about selling a house”? Hasn’t our little Father Nicholas something better to do?”
I kept by me for many years a church calendar which had belonged to grandfather, containing several inscriptions in his handwriting. Amongst others, opposite the day of Joachim and Anne, was written in red ink, and very upright characters :
“My benefactors, who averted a calamity.”
I remember that “calamity.”
In his anxiety about the maintenance of his very unprofitable children, grandfather set up as a money-lender, and used to receive articles in pledge secretly. Some one laid an information against him, and one night the police came to search the premises. There was a great fuss, but it ended well, and grandfather prayed till sunrise the next morning, and before breakfast, and in my presence, wrote those words in the calendar.
Before supper he used to read with me the Psalms, the breviary, or the heavy book of Ephraim Sirine ; but as soon as he had supped he began to pray again, and his melancholy words of contrition resounded in the stillness of evening :
“What can I offer to Thee, or how can I atone to Thee, O generous God, O King of Kings! . . . Preserve us from all evil imaginations. . . . O Lord, protect me from certain persons ! . . . My tears fall like rain, and the memory of my sins ...”
But very often grandmother said:
“Oie, I am dog-tired! I shall go to bed without saying my prayers.”
Grandfather used to take me to church to vespers on Saturday, and to High Mass on Sundays and festivals but even in church I made a distinction as to which God was being addressed ; whatever the priest or the deacon recited that was to grandfather’s God ; but the choir always sang to grandmother’s God. Of course I can only crudely express this childish distinction which I made between these two Gods, but I remember how it seemed to tear my heart with terrific violence, and how grandfather’s God aroused in my mind a feeling of terror and unpleasantness. A Being Who loved no one, He followed all of us about with i6o
His severe eyes, seeking and finding all that was ugly, evil, and sinful in us. Evidently He put no trust in man, He was always insisting on penance, and He loved to chastise.
In those days my thoughts and feelings about God were the chief nourishment of my soul and were the most beautiful ones of my existence. All other impressions which I received did nothing but disgust me by their cruelty and squalor, and awaken in me a sense of repugnance and ferocity. God was the best and brightest of all the beings who lived about me grandmother’s God, that Dear Friend of all creation; and naturally I could not help being disturbed by the question “How is it that grandfather cannot see the Good God?”
I was not allowed to run about the streets because it made me too excited. I became, as it were, intoxicated by the impressions which I received, and there was almost always a violent scene afterwards.
I had no comrades. The neighbors’ children treated me as an enemy. I objected to their calling me “the Kashmirin boy,” and seeing that they did it all the more, calling out to each other as soon as they saw me : “Look, here comes that brat, Kashmirin’s grandson. Go for him!” then the fight would begin. I was strong for my age and active with my fists, and my enemies, knowing this, always fell upon me in a crowd ; and as a rule the street vanquished me, and I returned home with a cut across my nose, gashed lips, and bruises all over my face all in rags and smothered in dust.
“What now?” grandmother exclaimed as she met me, with a mixture of alarm and pity; “so you ‘ve been fighting again, you young rascal ? What do you mean by it?’
She washed my face, and applied to my bruises copper coins or fomentations of lead, saying as she did so :
“Now, what do you mean by all this fighting”? You are as quiet as anything at home, but out of doors you are like I don’t know what. You ought to be ashamed of yourself. I shall tell grandfather not to let you go out.”