My Childhood (15 page)

"Kind cooks, give me a little piece of pie--just a little piece of pie. U--gh,
you!"

Besides Igosha and Gregory Ivanovitch, I was greatly concerned about the Voronka--a woman of bad reputation, who was chased away from the streets. She used to appear on holidays--an enormous, dishevelled, tipsy creature, walking with a peculiar gait, as if without moving her feet or touching the earth--drifting along like a cloud, and bawling her ribald songs. People in the street hid themselves as soon as they saw her, running into gateways, or corners, or shops; she simply swept the street clean. Her face was almost blue, and blown out like a bladder; her large gray eyes were hideously and strangely wide open, and sometimes she groaned and cried:

"My little children, where are you?"

I asked grandmother who she was.

"There is no need for you to know," she answered; nevertheless she told me briefly:

"This woman had a husband--a civil-servant named Voronov, who wished to rise to a better position; so he sold his wife to his Chief, who took her away somewhere, and she did not come home for two years. When she returned, both her children--a boy and a girl--were dead, and her husband was in prison for gambling with Government money. She took to drink, in her grief, and now goes about creating disturbances. No holiday passes without her being taken up by the police."

Yes, home was certainly better than the street. The best time was after dinner, when grandfather went to Uncle Jaakov's workshop, and grandmother sat by the window and told me interesting fairy-tales, and other stories, and spoke to me about my father.

The starling, which she had rescued from the cat, had had his broken wings clipped, and grandmother had skilfully made a wooden leg to replace the one which had been devoured. Then she taught him to talk. Sometimes she would stand for a whole hour in front of the cage, which hung from the window-frame, and, looking like a huge, good-natured animal, would repeat in her hoarse voice to the bird, whose plumage was as black as coal:

"Now, my pretty starling, ask for something to eat."

The starling would fix his small, lively, humorous eye upon her, and tap his wooden leg on the thin bottom of the cage; then he would stretch out his neck and whistle like a goldfinch, or imitate the mocking note of the cuckoo. He would try to mew like a cat, and howl like a dog; but the gift of human speech was denied to him.

"No nonsense now!" grandmother would say quite seriously. "Say 'Give the starling something to eat.'"

The little black-feathered monkey having uttered a sound which might have been "babushka" (grandmother), the old woman would smile joyfully and feed him from her hand, as she said:

"I know you, you rogue! You are a make-believe. There is nothing you can't do--you are clever enough for anything."

And she certainly did succeed in teaching the starling; and before long he could ask for what he wanted clearly enough, and, prompted by grandmother, could drawl:

"Go--00--ood mo--0--orning, my good woman!" At first his cage used to hang in grandfather's room, but he was soon turned out and put up in the attic, because he learned to mock grandfather. He used to put his yellow, waxen bill through the bars of the cage while grandfather was saying his prayers loudly and clearly, and pipe:

"Thou! Thou! Thee! The--ee! Thou!" Grandfather chose to take offense at this, and once he broke off his prayers and stamped his feet, crying furiously:

"Take that devil away, or I will kill him!" Much that was interesting and amusing went on in this house; but at times I was oppressed by an inexpressible sadness. My whole being seemed to be consumed by it; and for a long time I lived as in a dark pit, deprived of sight, hearing, feeling--blind and halfdead.

CHAPTER VIII

GRANDFATHER unexpectedly sold the house over the tavern and bought another in Kanatoroi Street--a ramshackle house overgrown with grass, but clean and quiet; and it seemed to rise up out of the fields, being the last of a row of little houses painted in various colors.

The new house was trim and charming; its fagade was painted in a warm but not gaudy shade of dark raspberry, against which the sky-blue shutters of the three lower windows and the solitary square of the shutter belonging to the attic window appeared very bright. The left side of the roof was picturesquely hidden by thick green elms and lime trees. Both in the yard and in the garden there were many winding paths, so convenient that they seemed to have been placed there on purpose for hide-and-seek.

The garden was particularly good; though not large, it was wooded and pleasantly intricate. In one corner stood a small washhouse, just like a toy building; and in the other was a fair-sized pit, grown over with high grass, from which protruded the thick chimney-stack which was all that remained of the heating apparatus of an earlier washhouse. On the left the garden was bounded by the wall of Colonel Ovsyanikov's stables, and on the right by Betlenga House; the end abutted on the farm belonging to the dairy-woman Petrovna-- a stout, red, noisy female, who reminded me of a bell. Her little house, built in a hollow, was dark and dilapidated, and well covered with moss; its two windows looked out with a benevolent expression upon the field, the deep ravine, and the forest, which apppeared like a heavy blue cloud in the distance. Soldiers moved or ran about the fields all day long, and their bayonets flashed like white lightning in the slanting rays of the autumn sun.

The house was filled with people who seemed to me very wonderful. On the first floor lived a soldier from Tartary with his little, buxom wife, who shouted from morn till night, and laughed, and played on a richly ornamented guitar, and sang in a high flute-like voice. This was the song she sang most often:

"There 's one you love, but her love you will miss, 
   Seek on! another you must find. 
 And you will find her--for reward a kiss-- 

  Seven times as beautiful and kind. 
Oh, what a glo--or--i--ous reward!" 

The soldier, round as a ball, sat at the window and puffed out his blue face, and roguishly turned his reddish eyes from side to side, as he smoked his everlasting pipe, and occasionally coughed, and giggled with a strange, doglike sound:

"Vookh! Voo--kh!"

In the comfortable room which had been built over the cellar and the stables, lodged two draymen--little, gray-haired Uncle Peter and his dumb nephew Stepa-- a smooth, easy-going fellow, whose face reminded me of a copper tray--and a long-limbed, gloomy Tartar, Valei, who was an officer's servant. All these people were to me a complete novelty--magnificent "unknowns." But the one who attracted my attention and held it in a special degree, was the boarder, nicknamed "Good-business." He rented a room at the back of the house, next to the kitchen--a long room with two windows, one looking on the garden, the other on the yard. He was a lean, stooping man with a white face and a black beard, cleft in two, with kind eyes over which he wore spectacles. He was silent and unobtrusive, and when he was called to dinner or tea, his invariable reply was "Good-business!" so grandmother began to call him that both to his face and behind his back. It was: "Lenka! Call 'Good-business' to tea," or " 'Good-business,' you are eating nothing!"

His room was blocked up and encumbered with all sorts of cases and thick books, which looked strange to me, in Russian characters. Here were also bottles containing liquids of different colors, lumps of copper and iron, and bars of lead; and from morning till night, dressed in a reddish leather jacket, with gray check trousers all smeared with different kinds of paint, and smelling abominable, and looking both untidy and uncomfortable, he melted lead, soldered some kind of brass articles, weighed things in small scales, roared out when he burned his fingers, and then patiently blew on them. Or he would stumblingly approach a plan on the wall, and polishing his glasses, sniff at it, almost touching the paper with his straight, curiously pallid nose; or he would suddenly stand still for a long time in the middle of the room, or at the window, with his eyes closed, and his head raised--as if he were in a state of immobile stupefaction.

I used to climb on the roof of the shed, whence I could look across the yard; and in at the open window I could see the blue light of the spirit-lamp on the table, and his dark figure as he wrote something in a tattered notebook, with his spectacles gleaming with a bluish light, like ice. The wizard-like employment of this man often kept me on the roof for hours together, with my curiosity excited to a tormenting pitch. Sometimes he stood at the window, as if he were framed in it, with his hands behind him, looking straight at the roof; but apparently he did not see me, a fact which gave me great offense. Suddenly he would start back to the table, and bending double, would begin to rummage about.

I think that if he had been rich and better dressed I should have been afraid of him; but he was poor--a dirty shirt collar could be seen above the collar of his coat, his trousers were soiled and patched, and the slippers on his bare feet were down-trodden--and the poor are neither formidable nor dangerous. I had unconsciously learned this from grandmother's pitiful respect, and grandfather's contempt for them.

Nobody in the house liked "Good-business." They all made fun of him. The soldier's lively wife nicknamed him "Chalk-nose," Uncle Peter used to call him "The Apothecary" or "The Wizard," and grandfather described him as "The Black Magician" or "That Freemason."

"What does he do?" I asked grandmother.

"That is no business of yours. Hold your tongue!"

But one day I plucked up courage to go to his window, and concealing my nervousness with difficulty, I asked him, "What are you doing?"

He started, and looked at me for a long time over the top of his glasses; then stretching out his hand, which was covered with scars caused by burns, he said:

"Climb up!"

His proposal that I should enter by the window instead of the door raised him still higher in my estimation. He sat on a case, and stood me in front of him; then he moved away and came back again quite close to me, and asked in a low voice:

"And where do you come from?"

This was curious, considering that I sat close to him at table in the kitchen four times a day.

"I am the landlord's grandson," I replied.

"Ah--yes," he said, looking at his fingers.

He said no more, so I thought it necessary to explain to him:

"I am not a Kashmirin--my name is Pyeshkov."

"Pyeshkov?" he repeated incredulously. "Goodbusiness!"

Moving me on one side, he rose, and went to the table, saying:

"Sit still now."

I sat for a long, long time watching him as he scraped a filed piece of copper, put it through a press, from under which the filings fell, like golden groats, on to a piece of cardboard. These he gathered up in the palm of his hand and shook them into a bulging vessel, to which he added white dust, like salt, which he took from a small bowl, and some fluid out of a dark bottle. The mixture in the vessel immediately began to hiss and to smoke, and a biting smell rose to my nostrils which caused me to cough violently.

"Ah!" said the wizard in a boastful tone. "That smells nasty, does n't it?"

"Yes!"

"That's right! That shows that it has turned out well, my boy."

"What is there to boast about?" I said to myself; and aloud I remarked severely:

"If it is nasty it can't have turned out well."

"Really!" he exclaimed, with a wink. "That does not always follow, my boy. However-- Do you play knuckle-bones?"

"You mean dibs?"

"That's it."

"Yes."

"Would you like me to make you a thrower?"

"Very well, let me have the dibs then."

He came over to me again, holding the steaming vessel in his hand; and peeping into it with one eye, he said:

"I 'll make you a thrower, and you promise not to come near me again--is that agreed?"

I was terribly hurt at this.

"I will never come near you again, never!" And I indignantly left him and went out to the garden, where grandfather was bustling about, spreading manure round the roots of the apple trees, for it was autumn and the leaves had fallen long ago.

"Here! you go and clip the raspberry bushes," said grandfather, giving me the scissors.

"What work is it that 'Good-business' does?" I asked.

"Work--why, he is damaging his room, that's all. The floor is burned, and the hangings soiled and torn. I shall tell him he 'd better shift."

"That's the best thing he can do," I said, beginning to clip the dried twigs from the raspberry bushes.

But I was too hasty.

On wet evenings, whenever grandfather went out, grandmother used to contrive to give an interesting little party in the kitchen, and invited all the occupants of the house to tea. The draymen, the officer's servant, the robust Petrovna often came, sometimes even the merry little lodger, but always "Good-business" was to be found in his corner by the stove, motionless and mute. Dumb Stepa used to play cards with the Tartar. Valei would bang the cards on the deaf man's broad nose and yell:

"Your deal!"

Uncle Peter brought an enormous chunk of white bread, and some jam in large, tall pots; he cut the bread in slices, which he generously spread with jam, and distributed the delicious raspberry-strewn slices to all, presenting them on the palm of his hand and bowing low.

"Do me the favor of eating this," he would beg courteously; and after any one had accepted a slice, he would look carefully at his dark hand, and if he noticed any drops of jam on it, he would lick them off.

Petrovna brought some cherry liqueur in a bottle, the merry lady provided nuts and sweets, and so the feast would begin, greatly to the content of the dear, fat grandmother.

Very soon after "Good-business" had tried to bribe me not to go and see him any more, grandmother gave one of her evenings.

A light autumn rain was falling; the wind howled, the trees rustled and scraped the walls with their branches; but in the kitchen it was warm and cozy as we all sat close together, conscious of a tranquil feeling of kindness towards one another, while grandmother, unusually generous, told us story after story, each one better than the other. She sat on the ledge of the stove, resting her feet on the lower ledge, bending towards her audience with the light of a little tin lamp thrown upon her. Always when she was in a mood for story-telling she took up this position.