My Childhood (10 page)

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

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 / 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 hedgehog 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 snowstorms 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 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 Lad}' 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 robberchieftainess 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. 

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.