My Childhood (30 page)

"On the Kama a town there is, 
 But nobody knows where it is! 
 Our hands to it will never reach, 
 Our feet to find it we cannot teach." 

At first Khabi used to get angry with us, but one day Vyakhir said to him in his cooing voice, which justified his nickname:

"What is the matter with you? Surely you are not angry with your comrades."

The Tartar was ashamed of himself, and after that he used to join us in singing about the town on the Kama.

But all the same we preferred picking up rags and bones to stealing planks. The former was particularly interesting in the springtime, when the snow had melted, and after the rain had washed the street pavements clean. There, by the place where the fair was held, we could always pick up plenty of nails and pieces of iron in the gutter, and occasionally we found copper and silver coins; but to propitiate the watchman, so that he would not chase us away or seize our sacks, we had to give him a few kopecks or make profound obeisances to him. But we found it no easy task to get money. Nevertheless, we got on very well together, and though we sometimes disputed a little amongst ourselves, I do not remember that we ever had one serious quarrel.

Our peacemaker was Vyakhir, who always had some simple words ready, exactly suited to the occasion, which astonished us and put us to shame. He uttered them himself in a tone of astonishment. Yaz's spiteful sallies neither offended nor upset him; in his opinion everything bad was unnecessary, and he would reject it calmly and convincingly.

"Well, what is the use of it?" he would ask, and we saw clearly that it was no use.

He called his mother "my Morduan," and we did not laugh at him.

"My Morduan rolled home tipsy again last evening," he would tell us gaily, flashing his round, gold-colored eyes. "She kept the door open, and sat on the step and sang--like a hen."

"What did she sing?" asked Tchurka, who liked to be precise.

Vyakhir, slapping his hands on his knees, reproduced his mother's song in a thin voice:

"Shepherd, tap thy window small, 
 Whilst we run about the mall; 
 Tap, tap again, quick bird of night, 
 With piping music, out of sight, 
 On the village cast thy spell." 

He knew many passionate songs like this, and sang them very well.

"Yes," he continued, "so she went to sleep on the doorstep, and the room got so cold I was shivering from head to foot, and got nearly frozen to death; but she was too heavy for me to drag her in. I said to her this morning, 'What do you mean by getting so dreadfully drunk?' 'Oh,' she said, 'it is all right. Bear with me a little longer. I shall soon be dead.'

"She will soon be dead," repeated Tchurka, in a serious tone. "She is already dropsical."

"Would you be sorry?" I asked.

"Of course I should," exclaimed Vyakhir, astonished. "She is all right with me, you know."

And all of us, although we knew that the Morduan beat Vyakhir continually, believed that she was "all right," and sometimes even, when we had had a bad day, Tchurka would suggest:

"Let us put our kopecks together to buy Vyakhir's mother some brandy, or she will beat him."

The only ones in our company who could read and write were Tchurka and I. Vyakhir greatly envied us, and would murmur, as he took himself by his pointed, mouse-like ears:

"As soon as my Morduan is buried I shall go to school too. I shall go on my knees to the teacher and beg him to take me, and when I have finished learning I will go as gardener to the Archbishop, or perhaps to the Emperor himself."

In the spring the Morduan, in company with an old man, who was a collector for a church building-fund, and a bottle of vodka, was crushed by the fall of a wood-stack; they took the woman to the hospital, and practical Tchurka said to Vyakhir:

"Come and live with me, and my mother will teach you to read and write."

And in a very short time Vyakhir, holding his head high, could read the inscription: "Grocery Store," only he read "Balakeinia," and Tchurka corrected him:

"Bakaleinia, my good soul."

"I know--but the letters jump about so. They jump because they are pleased that they are being read."

He surprised us all, and made us laugh very much by his love of trees and grass. The soil of the village was sandy and vegetation was scanty--in some of the yards stood a miserable willow tree, or some straggling elder bushes, or a few gray, dry blades of grass hid themselves timidly under a fence--but if one of us sat on them, Vyakhir would cry angrily:

"Why must you sit on the grass? Why don't you sit on the gravel? It is all the same to you, is n't it
^?
"

In his opinion there was no sense in breaking off branches from the willow, or plucking elder flowers, or cutting weeping willow twigs on the banks of the Oka; he always expressed great surprise when we did this, shrugged his shoulders, and spread out his hands:

"Why on earth do you want to break everything? Look what you have done, you devils!" And before his astonishment we were ashamed.

We had contrived a very merry game for Saturdays, and we were preparing for it all the week by collecting all the troddendown bast shoes we could find and storing them in convenient corners. Then on Saturday evening when the Tartar porters came home from the Siberian ports, we took up a position at the cross-roads and pelted the Tartars with shoes.

At first this used to irritate them, and they ran after us, and abused us; but the game soon began to interest them, and knowing what they might expect they appeared on the field of battle also armed with a quantity of bast shoes, and what is more, they found out where we kept our war materials and stole them. We made a complaint about this--"It is not playing the game!" Then they divided the shoes, giving us half, and the fight began. Generally they drew themselves up in an open place, in the middle of the cross-roads, and with yells we ran round them, hurling the shoes. They also yelled, and laughed loud enough to deafen any one when one of us buried his head in the sand, having been thrown down by a shoe adroitly hurled under his feet.

This game would be carried on with zest for a long time, sometimes till it was nearly dark; and the inhabitants used to gather round, or watch us from corners, and grumble, because they thought it was the right thing to do. The dusty shoes flew about like crows in the damp air; sometimes one of us was hit hard, but the pleasure of the game was greater than pain or injury.

The Tartars were not less keen on it than we were; often when we had finished playing we went with them to an eating-house where they fed us with a special sweet kind of preserve made with fruit, and after supper we drank thick, brick-colored tea, with sweetmeats. We liked these people, whose strength matched their great size; there was something about them so childlike and transparent. The points which most struck me about them were their meekness, their unwavering good-nature, and their grave, impressive respect for each other.

They all laughed so heartily that the tears ran Sown their faces; and one of them, a native of Kassimov, with a broken nose, was a man renowned for his strength. One day he carried, from a barge which was at some distance from the shore, a bell weighing twenty-seven poods, and he roared out laughing as he cried: "Voo! Voo!"

One day he made Vyakhir sit on the palm of his hand, and lifting him on high, he said:

"Look where you are living now, right up in the sky."

In bad weather we used to assemble at Yaz's home, in the burial-ground, where his father's lodge was. This father was an individual with hoisted bones, long arms, and a small head; mud-colored hair grew on his face. His head looked like a burdock set on his long, thin neck, as on a stalk. He had a delightful way of half closing his yellow eyes and muttering rapidly:

"God give us rest. Ouch!"

We bought three zolotniks of tea, eight portions of sugar, some bread, and, of course, a portion of vodka for Yaz's father, who was sternly ordered about by Tchurka:

"Good for nothing peasant, get the samovar ready."

The peasant laughed and prepared the tin samovar; and while we discussed business as we waited for tea to be ready, he gave us good advice:

"Look here! The day after to-morrow is the month's mind of Trusov, and there will be some feasting going on there. . . . There 's a place to pick up bones."

"The cook collects all the bones at Trusov's," observed Tchurka, who knew everything.

Vyakhir said dreamily, as he looked out of the window on the graveyard:

"We shall soon be able to go out to the woods."

Yaz was always silent, looking at us all expressively with his sad eyes. In silence he showed us his toys--wooden soldiers which he had found in a rubbish pit, horses without legs, pieces of copper, and buttons.

His father set the table with cups and saucers of various patterns, and brought in the samovar. Kostrom sat down to pour out tea, and he, when he had drunk his vodka, climbed on the stove, and stretching out his long neck, surveyed us with vinous eyes, and muttered:

"Ouch! So you must take your ease, as if you were not little boys at all, eh? Ach! thieves . . . God give us rest!"

Vyakhir said to him:

"We are not thieves at all."

"Well--little thieves then."

If Yaz's father became too tiresome, Tchurka cried angrily:

"Be quiet, you trashy peasant!"

Vyakhir, Tchurka and I could not bear to hear the man counting up the number of houses which contained people in ill-health, or trying to guess how many of the villagers would die soon; he spoke so calculatingly and pitilessly, and seeing that what he said was objectionable to us, he purposely teased and tormented us:

"Oh, so you are afraid, young masters? Well, well! And before long a certain stout person will die--ekh! And long may he rot in his grave!"

We tried to stop him, but he would not leave off.

"And, you know, you've got to die too; you can't live long in this cesspool!"

"Well," said Vyakhir, "that's all right; and when we die they will make angels of us."

"Yo--u?" exclaimed Yaz's father, catching his breath in amazement. "You? Angels?"

He chuckled, and then began to tease us again by telling us disgusting stories about dead people.

But sometimes this man began to talk in a murmur, lowering his voice strangely:

"Listen, children . . . wait a bit! The day before yesterday they buried a female . . . and I knew her history, children. . . . What do you think the woman was?"

He often spoke about women, and always obscenely; yet there was something appealing and plaintive about his stories--he invited us to share his thoughts, as it were--and we listened to him attentively. He spoke in an ignorant and unintelligent manner, frequently interrupting his speech by questions; but his stories always left some disturbing splinters or fragments in one's memory.

"They ask her: 'Who set the place on fire?' 'I did!' 'How can that be, foolish woman, when you were not at home that night, but lying ill in the hospital?' 'I set the place on fire.' That's the way she kept on. . . . Why? Ouch! God give us rest."

He knew the life story of nearly every female inhabitant of the place who had been buried by him in that bare, melancholy graveyard, and it seemed as if he were opening the doors of houses, which we entered, and saw how the occupiers lived; and it made us feel serious and important. He would have gone on talking all night till the morning apparently, but as soon as the lodge window grew cloudy, and the twilight closed in upon it, Tchurka rose from the table and said:

"I am going home, or Mamka will be frightened. Who is coming with me?"

We all went away then. Yaz conducted us to the fence, closed the gate after us, and pressing his dark, bony face against the grating, said in a thick voice:

"Good-by."

We called out "Good-by" to him too. It was always hard to leave him in the graveyard. Kostrom said one day, looking back:

"We shall come and ask for him one day--and he will be dead."

"Yaz has a worse life than any of us," Tchurka said frequently; but Vyakhir always rejoined:

"We don't have a bad time--any of us!"

And when I look back I see that we did not have

a bad time. That independent life so full of contrasts

X
was very attractive to me, and so were my comrades,

who inspired me with a desire to be always doing them

a good turn.

My life at school had again become hard; the pupils nicknamed me "The Ragman" and "The Tramp," and one day, after a quarrel, they told the teacher that I smelt like a drain, and that they could not sit beside me. I remember how deeply this accusation cut me, and how hard it was for me to go to school after it. The complaint had been made up out of malice. I washed very thoroughly every morning, and I never went to school in the clothes I wore when I was collecting rags.

However, in the end I passed the examination for the third class, and received as prizes bound copies of the Gospels and the "Fables of Krilov," and another book unbound which bore the unintelligible title of "Fata-Morgana"; they also gave me some sort of laudatory certificates. When I took my presents home, grandfather was delighted, and announced his intention of taking the books away from me and locking them up in his box. But grandmother had been lying ill for several days, penniless, and grandfather continually sighed and squeaked out: "You will eat me out of house and home. Ugh!
You!"
so I took the books to a little shop, where I sold them for fifty-five kopecks, and gave the money to grandmother; as to the certificates I spoiled them by scribbling over them, and then handed them to grandfather, who took them without turning them over, and so put them away, without noticing the mischief I had done, but I paid for it later on.

As school had broken up I began to live in the streets once more, and I found it better than ever.

It was in the middle of spring, and money was earned easily; on Sundays the whole company of us went out into the fields, or into the woods, where the foliage was fresh and young, early in the morning, and did not return till late in the evening, pleasantly tired, and drawn together closer than ever.