My Childhood (29 page)

"Come yourself and ask them."

"You must have chattered about it yourself. Confess now--you told it yourself? Take care, for I shall find out for myself to-morrow who spread that story in school."

I gave her the name of the pupil. Her face wrinkled pitifully and her tears began to fall.

I went away to the kitchen and lay down on my bed, which consisted of a box behind the stove. I lay there and listened to my mother wailing:

"My God! My God!"

Not being able to bear the disgusting smell of greasy cloths being dried any longer, I rose and went out to the yard; but mother called after me:

"Where are you going to? Where are you going? Come here to me!"

Then we sat on the floor; and Sascha lay on mother's knees, and taking hold of the buttons of her dress bobbed his head and said "boovooga," which was his way of saying "poogorka" (button).

I sat pressed to mother's side, and she said, kissing me:

"We ... are poor, and every kopeck . . . every kopeck ..."

But she never finished what she began to say, pressing me with her hot arm.

"What trash--trash!" she exclaimed suddenly, using a word I had heard her use before.

Sascha repeated:

"T'ash!"

He was a queer little boy; clumsily formed, with a large head, he looked around on everything with his beautiful dark blue eyes, smiling quietly, exactly as if he were expecting some one. He began to talk unusually early, and lived in a perpetual state of quiet happiness. He was a weakly child, and could hardly crawl about; and he was always very pleased to see me, and used to ask to be taken up in my arms, and loved to crush my ears in his soft little fingers, which always,

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somehow, smelled of violets. He died unexpectedly, without having been ill at all; in the morning he was quietly happy as usual, and in the evening, when the bells were ringing for vespers, he was laid out upon the table. This happened soon after the birth of the second child, Nikolai. Mother had done as she had promised, and matters were put right for me at school, but I was soon involved in another scrape.

One day, at the time of evening tea, I was coming into the kitchen from the yard when I heard a distressful cry from mother:

"Eugen, I beg you, I beg--!"

"Non--sense!" said my stepfather.

"But you are going to her--I know it!"

"We--ll?"

For some seconds they were both silent; then mother said, coughing:

"What vile trash you are!"

I heard him strike her, and rushing into the room I saw that mother, who had fallen on to her knees, was resting her back and elbows against a chair, with her chest forward and her head thrown back, with a rattling in her throat, and terribly glittering eyes; while he, dressed in his best, with a new overcoat, was striking her in the chest with his long foot. I seized a knife from the table--a knife with a bone handle set in silver, which they used to cut bread with, the only thing belonging to my father which remained to mother --I seized it and struck with all my force at my stepfather's side.

By good-luck mother was in time to push Maximov away, and the knife going sideways tore a wide hole in his overcoat, and only grazed his skin. My stepfather, gasping, rushed from the room holding his side, and mother seized me and lifted me up; then with a groan threw me on the floor. My stepfather took me away from her when he returned from the yard.

Late that evening, when, in spite of everything, he had gone out, mother came to me behind the stove, gently took me in her arms, kissed me, and said, weeping:

"Forgive me; it was my fault! Oh, my dear! How could you? . . . And with a knife . . .?"

I remember with perfect clearness how I said to her that I would kill my stepfather and myself too. And I think I should have done it; at any rate I should have made the attempt. Even now I can see that contemptible long leg, in braided trousers, flung out into the air, and kicking a woman's breast. Many years later that unfortunate Maximov died before my eyes in a hospital. I had then become strangely attached to him, and I wept to see the light in his beautiful, roving eyes grow dim, and finally go out altogether; but even in that sad moment, although my heart was full of a great grief, I could not forget that he had kicked my mother.

As I remember these oppressive horrors of our wild V Russian life, I ask myself often whether it is worth while to speak of them. And then, with restored confidence, I answer myself--"It is worth while because it is actual, vile fact, which has not died out, even in these days--a fact which must be traced to its origin, and pulled up by the root from the memories, the souls of the people, and from our narrow, sordid lives."

And there is another and more important reason impelling me to describe these horrors. Although they are so disgusting, although they oppress us and crush many beautiful souls to death, yet the Russian is still so healthy and young in heart that he can and does rise above them. For in this amazing life of ours not only does the animal side of our nature flourish and grow fat, but with this animalism there has grown up, triumphant in spite of it, bright, healthful and creative --a type of humanity which inspires us to look forward to our regeneration, to the time when we shall all live peacefully and humanely.

CHAPTER XIII

ONCE more I found myself at grandfather's. "Well, robber, what do you want?" were his words of greeting; and he accompanied them by rapping his fingers on the table. "I am not going to feed you any longer; let your grandmother do it."

"And so I will," said grandmother. "Ekh! what ill-luck. Just think of it."

"All right, feed him if you want to," cried grandfather; then growing calmer, he explained to me:

"She and I live quite separately now; we have nothing to do with each other."

Grandmother, sitting under the window, was making lace with swift movements; the shuttle snapped gaily, and the pillow, thickly sewn with copper pins, shone like a golden hedgehog in the spring sunlight. And grandmother herself--one would think she had been cast in copper--was unchanged. But grandfather was more wizened, more wrinkled; his sandy hair had grown gray, and his calm, self-important manner had given way to a fuming fussiness; his green eyes had grown dim, and had a suspicious expression. Laughingly, grandmother told me of the division of property

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which had taken place between herself and grandfather; he had given her all the pots and pans and crockery ware, saying:

"Here is your little lot, and don't you ask me for anything else."

Thereupon he took all her old clothes and things, including a cloak of fox fur, and sold them for seven hundred roubles, and put the money out at interest to his Jew godson, the fruit merchant. Finally the malady of avarice fastened upon him, and he became lost to shame; he began to go about amongst his old acquaintances, his former colleagues, rich merchants, and complaining that he had been ruined by his children, would ask for money to help him in his poverty. He profited by their regard for him, for they gave to him generously--large sums in notes which he flourished boastfully in grandmother's face, taunting her, like a child:

"Look, fool, they won't give you a hundredth part of that."

The money which he obtained in this way he put out at interest with a new friend of his--a tall, bald furrier called, in the village, Khlist (a horsewhip), and his sister, a shopkeeper--a fat, red-cheeked woman with brown eyes, dark and sweet like virgin-honey.

All expenses in the house were carefully divided: one day the dinner was prepared by grandmother from provisions bought with her own money; and the next day it was grandfather who provided the food--and his dinners were never as good as hers, for grandmother bought good meat while he bought such stuff as liver and lights and scraps of meat. They each had their own store of tea and sugar, but the tea was brewed in the same teapot, and grandfather would say anxiously:

"Wait! Wait a moment! . . . How much have you put in?"

Shaking the tea-leaves out on to his palm, he would carefully measure them out, saying:

"Your tea is finer than mine, so I ought to put in less, as mine is a large leaf."

He was very particular that grandmother should pour out his tea and her own both equally strong, and that she should fill her cup only as often as he filled his.

"What about the last one?" she asked, just before she had poured out all the tea.

Grandfather looked into the teapot and said:

"There 's plenty there--for the last one."

Even the oil for the image-lamp he bought separately--and this after fifty years of united labor!

These tricks of grandfather amused and disgusted me at the same time, but to grandmother they were simply funny.

"You be quiet!" she would say pacifyingly to me.

"What of it? He is an old, old man, and he is getting silly; that's all. He must be eighty, or not far off it. Let him play the fool; what harm does it do any one? And I will do a little work for myself and you--never mind!"

I also began to earn a little money; in the holidays, early in the morning, I took a bag and went about the yards and streets collecting bones, rags, paper and nails. Rag-merchants would give two greevin (twenty kopecks) for a pood (forty pounds) of rags and paper, or iron, and ten or eight kopecks for a pood of bones. I did this work on week days after school too, and on Saturdays I sold articles at thirty kopecks or half a rouble each, and sometimes more if I was lucky. Grandmother took the money away from me and put it quickly into the pocket of her skirt, and praised me, looking down:

"There! Thank you, my darling. This will do for our food. . . . You have done very well."

One day I saw her holding five kopecks of mine in her hands, looking at them, and quietly crying; and one muddy tear hung from the tip of her spongy, pumicestone-like nose.

A more profitable game than rag-picking was the theft of logs and planks from the timber-yards on the banks of the Oka, or on the Island of Pesk, where, in fair time, iron was bought and sold in hastily built booths. After the fairs the booths used to be taken down, but the poles and planks were stowed away in the boathouses, and remained there till close on the time of the spring floods. A small houseowner would give ten kopecks for a good plank, and it was possible to steal two a day. But for the success of the undertaking, bad weather was essential, when a snowstorm or heavy rains would drive the watchmen to hide themselves under cover.

I managed to pick up some friendly accomplices-- one ten-year-old son of a Morduan beggar, Sanka Vyakhir, a kind, gentle boy always tranquilly happy; kinless Kostrom, lanky and lean, with tremendous black eyes, who in his thirteenth year was sent to a colony of young criminals for stealing a pair of doves; the little Tartar Khabi, a twelve-year-old "strong man," simple-minded and kind; blunt-nosed Yaz, the son of a graveyard watchman and grave-digger, a boy of eight, taciturn as a fish, and suffering from epilepsy; and the eldest of all was the son of a widowed dressmaker, Grishka Tchurka, a sensible, straightforward boy, who was terribly handy with his fists. We all lived in the same street.

Theft was not counted as a crime in our village; it had become a custom, and was practically the only means the half-starved natives had of getting a livelihood. Fairs lasting a month and a half would not keep them for a whole year, and many respectable householders "did a little work on the river"--catching logs and planks which were borne along by the tide, and carrying them off separately or in small loads at a time; but the chief form this occupation took was that of thefts from barges, or in a general prowling up and down the Volga or Oka on the lookout for anything which was not properly secured. The grown-up people used to boast on Sundays of their successes, and the youngsters listened and learned.

In the springtime, during the spell of heat before the fair, when the village streets were full of drunken workmen, cabmen, and all classes of working folk, the village children used to rummage in their pockets. This was looked upon as legitimate business, and they carried it on under the very eyes of their elders. They stole his tools from the carpenter, the keys from the heedless cabman, the harness from the dray-horse, and the iron from the axles of the cart. But our little band did not engage in that sort of thing. Tchurka announced one day in a tone of decision:

"I am. not going to steal. Mamka does not allow it."

"And I am afraid to," said Khabi.

Kostrom was possessed by an intense dislike for the little thieves; he pronounced the word "thieves" with peculiar force, and when he saw strange children picking the pockets of tipsy men he drove them away, and if he happened to catch one of them he gave him a good beating. This large-eyed, unhappy-looking boy imagined himself to be grown-up; he walked with a peculiar gait, sideways, just like a porter, and tried to speak in a thick, gruff voice, and was very reserved and self-possessed, like an old man.

Vyakhir believed that to steal was to sin.

But to take planks and poles from Pesk, that was not accounted a sin; none of us were afraid of that, and we so ordered matters as to make it very easy to succeed. Some evening, when it was beginning to grow dark, or by day, if it was bad weather, Vyakhir and Yaz set out for Pesk, crossing the creek by the wet ice. They went openly, for the purpose of drawing on themselves the attention of the watchmen, while we four crossed over separately without being seen. While the watchmen, suspicious of Yaz and Vyakhir, were occupied in watching them, we betook ourselves to the boathouse, which we had fixed upon beforehand, chose something to carry off, and while our fleet-footed companions were teasing the watchmen, and luring them to pursuit, we made off home. Each one of us had a piece of string with a large nail, bent like a hook, at the end of it, which we fastened in the plank or pole, and thus were able to drag it across the snow and ice. The watchmen hardly ever saw us, and if they did see us they were never able to overtake us.

When we had sold our plunder we divided the gains into six shares, which sometimes came to as much as five or seven kopecks each. On that money it was possible to live very comfortably for a day, but Vyakhir's mother beat him if he did not bring her something for a glass of brandy or a little drop of vodka. Kostrom was saving his money, dreaming of the establishment of a pigeon-hunt. The mother of Tchurka was ill, so he tried to work as much as possible. Khabi also saved his money, with the object of returning to his native town, whence he had been brought by his uncle who had been drowned at Nijni soon after his arrival. Khabi had forgotten what the town was called; all he remembered was that it stood on the Kama, close by the Volga. For some reason we always made fun of this town, and we used to tease the cross-eyed Tartar by singing: