Mother Page 12

  Rybin looked at her and answered calmly:

  “They’ll catch me, then they’ll release me. And I’ll do it again…”

  “The peasants themselves’ll tie you up. And you’ll do time in prison…”

  “I’ll do time, then I’ll come out. And I’ll go again. And as for the peasants, they’ll tie me up once, twice, and then they’ll understand they don’t need to tie me up, but to listen. I’ll tell them: ‘Don’t believe me – just listen.’ And if they do listen, they’ll believe!”

  He spoke slowly, as though groping for every word before saying it.

  “I’ve swallowed a lot here recently. Understood a thing or two…”

  “You’ll be done for, Mikhailo Ivanovich!” she said, shaking her head sadly.

  He looked at her with dark, deep eyes, questioning and waiting. His strong body had bent forward, his hands were resting on the seat of the chair and his swarthy face seemed pale in the black frame of his beard.

  “And have you heard what Christ said about the grain? If you don’t die, you won’t rise again in a new ear of corn.* I have a long way to go until death. I’m a sly one!”

  He began shifting about on the chair and, without haste, stood up.

  “I’ll go to the inn and sit there for a while in company. The Ukrainian’s not coming for some reason. Has he started to get busy?”

  “Yes!” said the mother with a smile.

  “So he should. You tell him about me…”

  Shoulder to shoulder, they set off slowly into the kitchen and exchanged brief words without looking at one another:

  “Well, goodbye!”

  “Goodbye. When are you giving notice?…”

  “I’ve given it.”

  “And when are you leaving?”

  “Tomorrow. Early in the morning. Goodbye!”

  Rybin stooped and, reluctantly, awkwardly, clambered out into the lobby. The mother stood in front of the door for a minute or so, listening to his heavy footsteps, and doubts awakened in her breast. Then she turned quietly, went through into the other room and, raising the blind a little, looked out of the window. Beyond the glass the black darkness was motionless.

  “I live in the night-time!” she thought.

  She felt sorry for the solid peasant – he was so broad and strong.

  Andrei came back animated and cheerful.

  When she told him about Rybin, he exclaimed:

  “Well, let him go around the villages, gossiping about truth and rousing the people. It’s hard for him with us. His own peasant’s ideas have grown up in his head, and there’s no room there for ours…”

  “What he was saying about gentlefolk – there’s something in that!” the mother remarked cautiously. “I hope they won’t deceive you!”

  “Does that worry you?” cried the Ukrainian, laughing. “Oh, nenko, money! If only we had some! We still continue to live at the expense of others. Nikolai Ivanovich, he gets seventy-five roubles a month and gives fifty to us. Others are the same. And hungry students sometimes send the little they’ve got together, copeck by copeck. And, of course, you find different sorts of gentlefolk. Some’ll deceive you, others’ll drop away, but the best’ll go on with us…”

  He clapped his hands and continued strongly:

  “The eagle won’t be joining our celebration, but we’re going to organize a little one anyway, on the first of May! It’ll be fun!”

  His animation was pushing the anxiety sown by Rybin aside. The Ukrainian walked around the room, rubbing his head with one hand, and, gazing at the floor, said:

  “Do you know, sometimes there’s something astonishing that lives in your heart! It seems as if everywhere, wherever you go, your comrades are all burning with the same fire, they’re all cheerful, good and fine. They understand one another without words… They all live in chorus, yet each heart sings its own song. All the songs, like streams, they run, they pour into a single river, and the river flows wide and free into the sea of bright joys of a new life.”

  The mother tried not to move, so as not to stop him, not to interrupt his speeches. She always listened to him with greater attention than she did to the others – he spoke simplest of all, and his words touched the heart more powerfully. Pavel never talked about what he saw up ahead. Whereas a part of this man’s heart, it seemed to her, was always there, and ringing out in his speeches was a magical tale of a future time of celebration for everyone on earth. For the mother, this tale shed light on the meaning of the life and work of her son and all his comrades.

  “And you come to,” said the Ukrainian, with a shake of his head, “you look around, and it’s cold and dirty! Everyone’s grown tired and angry…”

  With deep sadness he continued:

  “It’s painful, but you mustn’t trust a man, you have to fear him, even hate him! You get split in two! You might just want to love him, but how can you? How can you forgive a man if he’s coming at you like a wild beast, doesn’t recognize you as a living soul and puts the boot into your human face? You can’t forgive! It’s not for yourself you can’t – I can bear any injury for myself – but I don’t want to indulge the bullies; I don’t want them using my back to learn how to beat others.”

  Now his eyes flared up with a cold light, he bowed his head stubbornly and spoke more firmly:

  “I shouldn’t forgive anything harmful, even if it isn’t harmful to me. I’m not alone on earth! Today I allow myself to be hurt, and I may only laugh at the hurt – it doesn’t wound me – and then tomorrow, after trying out his strength on me, the one who hurt me will go and skin someone else. And you have to look at people in different ways, you have to keep your heart stern, sort people out: these are our kind; those are different. It’s fair – but that’s no comfort!”

  For some reason the mother remembered the officer and Sashenka. Sighing, she said: “What sort of bread do you get from unsieved flour, now!…”

  “That’s the trouble!” the Ukrainian exclaimed.

  “Ye-es!” said the mother. In her memory now stood the figure of her husband, sullen, heavy, like a big rock overgrown with moss. She imagined the Ukrainian as Natasha’s husband and her son married to Sashenka.

  “But why?” asked the Ukrainian, becoming heated. “It’s so easy to see, it’s even funny. Only because people are unequal. So let’s make everyone equal! We’ll divide up equally everything that’s done by reason, everything that’s made by hand! We won’t keep each other in the slavery of fear and envy, in the captivity of greed and stupidity!…”

  They began to talk like this often.

  Nakhodka was taken on again at the factory; he gave her all his earnings, and she took the money just as easily as she had taken it from Pavel’s hands.

  Sometimes, with a smile in his eyes, Andrei would suggest to the mother:

  “Shall we do some reading, nenko, eh?”

  With a joke, but stubbornly, she would refuse; she was troubled by that smile and, a little hurt, would think:

  “If you’re laughing, then what’s the point?”

  And ever more frequently she would ask him the meaning of some bookish word or other that was alien to her. She would look away when asking, and her voice would sound indifferent. He guessed she was studying little by little on her own, understood her bashfulness and stopped suggesting she read with him. Soon she declared to him:

  “My eyes are getting weak, Andryusha. I could do with glasses.”

  “All right!” he responded. “I’ll go into town with you on Sunday, show you to the doctor, and then you’ll have your glasses…”

  XIX

  She had already been three times to ask to visit Pavel, and on each occasion the gendarme general, a grey-haired little old man with crimson cheeks and a big nose, had gently refused her.

  “In a week’s time, Ma, no sooner! In a week’s time we’ll se
e, but for now it’s not possible…”

  He was rotund, well fed and reminded her of a ripe plum that had been lying around a bit too long and was already covered in fluffy mould. He was forever picking his small white teeth with a sharp little yellow stick, his small greenish eyes smiled gently, and his voice sounded cordial and friendly.

  “He is polite!” she told the Ukrainian thoughtfully. “He’s always smiling.”

  “Yes, yes!” said the Ukrainian. “They’re fine and gentle; they smile. They’ll be told: ‘Right, now he’s an intelligent and honest man, he’s a danger to us, hang him!’ They’ll smile and hang him, and then they’ll smile again.”

  “The one who came here with the search, he was more straightforward,” the mother made a comparison. “It’s clear at once that he’s a dog…”

  “None of them are human beings: they’re just hammers to stun people. Tools. The likes of us get rounded off by them, so we’re more amenable. They themselves have already been made amenable for the hand that controls us – they can work as much as they’re made to without thinking, without asking why it’s necessary.”

  Finally she was allowed a visit, and one Sunday she was sitting modestly in a corner of the prison office. In the cramped and dirty room with a low ceiling there were several other people waiting for visits besides her. They appeared to be there not for the first time and they knew one another; slowly and lazily, a quiet conversation, as sticky as a cobweb, was woven between them.

  “Have you heard?” said a plump woman with a flabby face and a travelling bag on her knees. “At the early Liturgy today, the cathedral choirmaster half tore off a choirboy’s ear…”

  An older man in the uniform jacket of a retired soldier cleared his throat loudly and remarked:

  “Choirboys are terrors!”

  Running fussily around the office was a little bald man on short legs with long arms and a jutting jaw. Without coming to a halt, he said in an anxious and cracking voice:

  “Life’s becoming more expensive, and people, as a result, are angrier. Second-quality beef is fourteen copecks a pound, bread’s two and a half again now…”

  Prisoners would come in at times, grey and all alike, wearing heavy leather shoes. Coming into the semi-darkness of the room, they blinked their eyes. There were fetters ringing on the legs of one of them.

  Everything was strangely calm and unpleasantly simple. It seemed as if everyone had long ago grown accustomed to their position, got used to it: some calmly serve their sentence, others lazily stand guard, yet others, scrupulous and weary, visit the prisoners. The mother’s heart trembled with a tremor of impatience, and she looked in bewilderment at everything around her, amazed by this oppressive simplicity.

  Next to Vlasova sat a little old woman who had a wrinkled face, but young eyes. Turning her slender neck, she listened attentively to the conversation and looked at everyone with a strange cheeriness.

  “Who do you have here?” Vlasova asked her quietly.

  “A son. A student,” the old woman answered quickly and loudly. “And you?”

  “A son as well. A worker.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Vlasov.”

  “Never heard of him. Has he been inside long?”

  “Over six weeks.”

  “Mine’s been in over nine months!” the old woman said, and Vlasova sensed something strange in her voice, something resembling pride.

  “Yes, yes!” the little old bald man said quickly. “Patience is disappearing… Everyone’s getting irritable, everyone’s shouting, everything’s increasing in price. And people, in conformity thereto, are becoming cheaper. There is no sound of conciliatory voices.”

  “Absolutely right!” said the military man. “It’s a disgrace! We need a firm voice to finally ring out: ‘Silence!’ That’s what we need. A firm voice…”

  The conversation became general and animated. Each was in a hurry to give their own opinion on life, but everyone spoke in a low voice, and the mother sensed something alien to her in all of them. At home people spoke differently, more comprehensibly, plainer and louder.

  A fat warder with a square ginger beard called out her name, looked her over from head to toe and set off with a slight limp, saying to her:

  “Follow me…”

  She strode along and felt like pushing the warder in the back to make him go faster. Standing in a small room, smiling and reaching out his hand was Pavel. The mother seized it and laughed, blinked her eyes frequently and, finding no words, said quietly:

  “Hello… hello…”

  “Calm down, Mama!” said Pavel, squeezing her hand.

  “It’s nothing.”

  “Mother!” said the warder with a sigh. “By the way, step apart – so that there’s some distance between you…”

  And he yawned loudly. Pavel asked her about her health, about the house… She was expecting some other questions, sought them in her son’s eyes and did not find them. He was, as always, calm, but his face had turned pale, and his eyes seemed to have grown bigger.

  “Sasha sends greetings!” she said.

  Pavel’s eyelids quivered, his face became softer and he smiled. Sharp bitterness stung his mother’s heart.

  “Are they going to let you out soon?” she began, with a sense of grievance and irritation. “What did they put you in for? I mean, those papers have appeared again…”

  Pavel’s eyes shone with joy.

  “Again?” he asked quickly.

  “It’s forbidden to talk about such things!” the warder announced lazily. “You can only talk about family matters…”

  “And isn’t this a family matter, then?” the mother objected.

  “Well, I don’t know. Only – it’s forbidden,” the warder insisted indifferently.

  “Talk about family matters, Mama,” said Pavel. “What are you doing?”

  Feeling a sort of youthful impudence inside her, she replied:

  “I’m taking all these things to the factory…”

  She stopped and then, smiling, continued:

  “Cabbage soup, porridge, various things Maria’s cooked and other sorts of nourishment too…”

  Pavel understood. His face began shaking with repressed laughter, he fluffed up his hair and affectionately, in a voice she had not heard from him before, said:

  “It’s good that you have work to do – you’re not bored!”

  “And when these leaflets appeared, they started searching me too!” she announced, not without boastfulness.

  “About that again!” said the warder, getting upset. “I’m telling you: you mustn’t! The man was deprived of his freedom so that he wouldn’t know anything, and you just do as you like! You need to understand what you mustn’t do.”

  “Well, leave it, Mama!” said Pavel. “Matvei Ivanovich is a good man – don’t make him angry. He and I get on well together. He’s here with us today by chance – it’s usually the Assistant Governor in attendance.”

  “The visit’s over!” the warder announced, looking at his watch.

  “Well, thank you, Mama!” said Pavel. “Thank you, my dear! Don’t you worry. They’ll let me go soon…”

  He gave her a tight hug and a kiss, and, happy and moved by this, she burst into tears.

  “Step apart!” said the warder, and as he saw the mother out, he murmured: “Don’t cry – he’ll be released! They’re releasing everyone… It’s got crowded…”

  At home she told the Ukrainian, smiling broadly and with animatedly twitching eyebrows:

  “I was cunning the way I told him – he understood!”

  And she heaved a sad sigh.

  “He understood. Or else he wouldn’t have given me a hug – he’s never done that before!”

  “You’re a one!” the Ukrainian laughed. “People look for different things
, but a mother always looks for affection…”

  “No, Andryusha, those people, I’m telling you!” she suddenly exclaimed in surprise. “I mean, how used to things they are! Their children have been torn away from them and put in prison, but they’re all right, they go and sit and wait and talk – eh? And if educated people get used to things that way, what can you expect from the common people?…”

  “It makes sense,” said the Ukrainian with that grin of his, “after all, the law’s kinder to them than to us, and they have greater need of it than we do. So when it hits them on the head, they may frown, but not a lot. Being hit with your own stick doesn’t hurt as much…”

  XX

  One evening, when the mother was sitting by the table knitting socks and the Ukrainian was reading out loud from a book about an uprising of Roman slaves, someone knocked hard at the door, and when the Ukrainian opened it, in came Vesovshchikov with a bundle under his arm, wearing a hat pushed onto the back of his head and bespattered up to his knees with mud.

  “I’m walking along and I see you’ve got a light on here. I’ve dropped in to say hello. Straight from prison!” he announced in a strange voice and, seizing Vlasova’s hand, he shook it hard, saying:

  “Pavel sends his greetings…”

  Then, after sinking indecisively onto a chair, he cast his gloomy, suspicious gaze around the room.

  The mother did not like him: there was something in his angular, cropped head and his little eyes that always frightened her, but now she rejoiced and, affectionate and smiling, she said with animation:

  “You look pinched! Andryusha, let’s give him some tea…”

  “I’m already putting the samovar on!” the Ukrainian responded from the kitchen.

  “Well, how’s Pavel, then? Have they released anyone else, or only you?”

  Nikolai lowered his head and answered:

  “Pavel’s doing his time patiently! They released just me!” He raised his eyes to the mother’s face and said slowly, through his teeth, “I said to them: ‘That’ll do, let me go free!… Otherwise I’ll kill someone and myself too.’ And they released me.”