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Vesovshchikov left without replying.

  The Ukrainian paced slowly and wearily around the room, shuffling quietly on his thin, spidery legs. He had taken off his boots, always doing this so as not to make a clatter and disturb Vlasova. But she was not asleep and, when Nikolai had gone, she said anxiously:

  “I’m afraid of him!”

  “Ye-es!” the Ukrainian drawled slowly. “He’s an angry boy. Don’t talk to him about Isai, nenko – that Isai really is a spy.”

  “That’s no wonder. He has a gendarme for a gossip!” the mother remarked.

  “Nikolai may well give him a drubbing!” the Ukrainian continued apprehensively. ‘You see what feelings the gentlemen who command our lives have cultivated among the lower ranks? When people such as Nikolai come to feel their grievances and lose their patience, what’ll happen then? They’ll spatter the sky with blood, and the earth’ll be lathered in it, like soap…”

  “It’s terrifying, Andryusha!” the mother exclaimed quietly.

  “If they hadn’t swallowed any flies, they wouldn’t be sick!” said Andrei after a pause. “And after all, nenko, each drop of their blood is washed clean in advance by lakes of the people’s tears…”

  He suddenly laughed quietly and added:

  “It’s fair, but that’s no comfort!”

  XXII

  One day, a holiday, the mother came back from the shop, opened the door and stood on the threshold, suddenly completely drenched in joy, as though in warm summer rain – ringing out in the room was the strong voice of Pavel.

  “Here she is!” cried the Ukrainian.

  The mother saw how quickly Pavel turned, and saw that his face had flushed with feeling, which promised something big for her.

  “So you’ve come back… and you’re home!” she began murmuring, bewildered by the surprise and sitting down.

  Pale, he bent towards her – little tears sparkled brightly in the corners of his eyes, and his lips were quivering. For a second he was silent, and his mother looked at him in silence too.

  Whistling quietly, the Ukrainian walked past them with his head lowered and went out into the yard.

  “Thank you, Mama!” Pavel began in a deep, low voice, squeezing her hand with quivering fingers. “Thank you, dear!”

  Joyfully shaken by her son’s expression and the sound of his voice, she stroked his head and, keeping the beating of her heart in check, said quietly:

  “Christ be with you! What for?”

  “For helping our great cause, thank you!” he said. “When a man can call his mother a kindred spirit too – that’s rare good fortune!”

  Silently, greedily swallowing his words with her open heart, she feasted her eyes on her son – he stood before her so bright and dear.

  “I could see it, Mama – there were a lot of things that wounded your soul, and it’s difficult for you. I thought you’d never be reconciled with us or accept our ideas as your own, that you’d only put up with us in silence as you have all your life. That was hard!…”

  “Andryusha helped me understand a huge amount!” she interjected.

  “He’s told me about you!” said Pavel, laughing.

  “Yegor too. We’re from the same parts. Andryusha even wanted to teach me to read and write…”

  “And you got embarrassed and started studying on the quiet by yourself?”

  “So he’s been peeping!” she exclaimed in confusion. And disturbed by the abundance of joy filling her breast, she suggested to Pavel: “We should call him! He went away on purpose so as not to be a hindrance. He has no mother…”

  “Andrei!” Pavel cried, opening the door into the lobby. “Where are you?”

  “Here. I want to chop some firewood.”

  “Come here!”

  He did not come at once and, on entering the kitchen, began saying providently:

  “We must tell Nikolai to bring us some firewood – we haven’t got much. You see, nenko, how he is, Pavel? Instead of punishing mutineers, the authorities just fatten them up…”

  The mother laughed. Her heart was as yet standing sweetly still, she was intoxicated with joy, but something niggardly and cautious was already prompting in her a desire to see her son calm, the way he always was. Her soul was too happy, and she wanted the first great joy of her life to take immediate and lasting shape in her heart, as vivid and powerful as when it had come. And apprehensive that her happiness might be diminished, she hastened to conceal it quickly, as a bird-catcher does a rare bird, after by chance having caught one.

  “Let’s have dinner!” she suggested fussily. “You haven’t eaten yet, have you, Pasha?”

  “No. I learnt from the warder yesterday that they’d decided to release me, and today I’ve had nothing to eat or drink…”

  “The first person I met here was old Sizov,” Pavel recounted. “He saw me, crossed the road, says hello. I say to him: ‘You be more careful with me now: I’m a dangerous man, I’m under police supervision.’ ‘That’s all right,’ he says. And do you know how he asked about his nephew? ‘So,’ he says, ‘has Fyodor conducted himself well?’ ‘What does conducting yourself well mean in prison?’ ‘Well,’ he says, ‘he hasn’t gone blabbing anything out of place against his comrades?’ And when I said Fedya was an honest, bright fellow, he stroked his beard and declared in such a proud way: ‘Us Sizovs don’t have any bad lots in our family!’”

  “That old man’s got a brain!” said the Ukrainian, nodding his head. “He and I often talk – he’s a good man. They’ll release Fedya soon.”

  “They’ll release everyone, I think! They’ve got nothing apart from Isai’s evidence, and what could he have said?”

  The mother walked back and forth and looked at her son. Andrei was listening to his stories standing by the window with his hands behind his back. Pavel was pacing the room. He had grown a beard, and little rings of fine, dark hair curled densely on his cheeks, softening his swarthy complexion.

  “Sit down!” the mother suggested, bringing a hot dish to the table.

  Over dinner Andrei told the story of Rybin. And when he had finished, Pavel exclaimed with regret:

  “If I’d been at home, I wouldn’t have let him go! What did he take away with him? A great sense of indignation and a muddle in his head.”

  “Well,” said the Ukrainian, grinning, “when a man’s forty, and he’s long been struggling with the demons in his soul, it’s hard to refashion him…”

  There started up one of those arguments in which people would begin talking in words incomprehensible to the mother. They finished their dinner, and still they showered one another bitterly with a crackling hail of obscure words. At times, though, they did speak simply.

  “We have to go our own way, without taking a single sideways step!” Pavel declared firmly.

  “And stumble on the way into several tens of millions of people who’ll greet us as enemies…”

  The mother lent an ear to the argument and understood that Pavel disliked the peasants, while the Ukrainian stood up for them, arguing that the peasants needed to be taught goodness too. She understood Andrei better, and he seemed to her to be right, but every time he said something to Pavel, she would wait for her son’s reply, on her guard and with bated breath, to see at once whether the Ukrainian had offended him. But they shouted at one another without taking offence.

  Sometimes the mother would ask her son:

  “Is it so, Pasha?”

  Smiling, he would reply:

  “It is!”

  “You, sir,” the Ukrainian once said with gentle sarcasm, “have eaten your fill, but not chewed your food properly, and there’s a bit stuck in your throat. Have a gargle!”

  “Don’t be silly!” Pavel advised him.

  “But I’m as solemn a man at a requiem!…”

  Laughing quietly, the mother shook her head…
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  XXIII

  Spring was approaching, and the snow was melting, laying bare the dirt and soot hidden in its depths. With every day the dirt was more persistent in calling attention to itself, and the entire settlement seemed dressed in rags, unwashed. In the daytime the roofs would be dripping and the grey walls of the buildings wearily and sweatily smoking, but by night-time there were icicles showing dimly white everywhere. More and more often the sun would appear in the sky. And streams were resolutely starting to babble, running down into the marsh.

  Preparations were being made to celebrate May Day.

  Leaflets explaining the significance of this holiday flew around at the factory and through the settlement, and, on reading them, even youngsters unaffected by propaganda said:

  “We ought to do this!”

  Grinning morosely, Vesovshchikov exclaimed:

  “It’s time! That’s enough of playing hide-and-seek!”

  Fedya Mazin was joyful. Grown very thin, with the nervous tremor of his movements and speech he had started to resemble a skylark in a cage. He was always accompanied by Yakov Somov, who was taciturn and too serious for his age, and now worked in town. Samoilov – who had become even more ginger in prison – Vasily Gusev, Bukin, Dragunov and some others tried to argue the need to go armed, but Pavel, the Ukrainian, Somov and others disagreed with them.

  Yegor would appear, always tired, sweaty, out of breath and joking:

  “Work towards the alteration of the existing order is great work, comrades, but to make it go more successfully, I need to buy myself new boots!” he said, indicating his torn, wet shoes. “My galoshes are ripped incurably, too, and every day I get my feet soaking wet. I don’t want to move into the bowels of the earth before we’ve publicly and overtly renounced the old world and, for that reason, while declining Comrade Samoilov’s proposal for an armed demonstration, I propose arming me with some strong boots, for I am profoundly convinced that that is more beneficial for the triumph of socialism than a punch-up, even a really big one!…”

  In similarly mannered language he told the workers stories about how, in various different countries, the people had tried to make their life easier. The mother enjoyed listening to his speeches and drew a strange impression from them: the most cunning enemies of the people, who deceived them most cruelly and most often, were pot-bellied, red-faced little men, unscrupulous and greedy, cunning and cruel. When having a hard time under the power of their tsars, they would set the common people on the royal power, and when the people rose and tore that power from the hands of the king, the little men would use deceit to gather it into their own hands, driving the people into their kennels, and if the people argued with them, they would beat them up in their hundreds and thousands.

  One day, plucking up her courage, she told him about this picture of life that was conjured up by his speeches and, laughing in embarrassment, asked:

  “Is it so, Yegor Ivanych?”

  He chuckled, rolling his little eyes, gasping for breath and rubbing his chest with his hands.

  “It is indeed, Mamasha! You’ve taken the bull of history by the horns. On that yellow background there are certain ornamental designs – that’s to say, bits of embroidery – but they don’t change things! It is precisely the fat little men that are the chief sinners and the most poisonous insects biting the people. The French felicitously call them bourgeois. Remember that, Mamasha – bour-jaws. They enjoy using their jaws on us and sucking us dry…”

  “They’re rich, then?” the mother asked.

  “Precisely! That’s their misfortune. You see, if, a little at a time, you add copper to the food of a child, it stunts the growth of his bones and he ends up a dwarf, but if you poison a man with gold, his soul becomes small, dead and grey, just like a rubber ball that costs five copecks…”

  One day, talking about Yegor, Pavel said:

  “Do you know, Andrei, the people who do the most joking are the very ones whose hearts are aching…”

  The Ukrainian paused and then, narrowing his eyes, answered:

  “If what you say were true, the whole of Russia would be dying of laughter…”

  Natasha appeared, and she too had been in prison in another town somewhere, but it had not changed her. The mother noticed that the Ukrainian became merrier in front of her, that he was full of jokes and getting at everyone with his gentle sarcasm, exciting her merry laughter. But when she had gone, he would start sadly whistling his endless songs and spend a long time pacing the room, shuffling his feet dejectedly.

  Sasha would often drop in quickly, always frowning, always in a hurry, and for some reason ever more awkward and sharp.

  Once, when Pavel went out into the lobby to see her off without closing the door behind him, the mother heard a quick conversation:

  “Are you going to carry the banner?” the girl asked quietly.

  “I am.”

  “Is that decided?”

  “Yes. It’s my right.”

  “Prison again?!”

  Pavel was silent.

  “You couldn’t…” she began, and then stopped.

  “What?” asked Pavel.

  “Let somebody else…”

  “No!” he said loudly.

  “Just think: you’re so influential, you’re well liked!… You and Nakhodka are the leaders here, just think how much you can do if you’re at large! And you’ll be sent into exile for this, you know, far away and for a long time!”

  It seemed to the mother there were familiar feelings to be heard in the girl’s voice – anxiety and fear. And Sasha’s words began to fall upon her heart like big drops of icy water.

  “No, I’ve decided!” said Pavel. ‘I won’t give this up, not for anything.”

  “Not even if I ask you to?…”

  Pavel suddenly began speaking quickly and somehow with particular severity:

  “You shouldn’t talk like that – really! You shouldn’t!”

  “I’m a human being!” she said quietly.

  “And a good one!” said Pavel, quietly too, but in a special sort of way, as if he were out of breath. “One who’s dear to me. And that’s why… that’s why you mustn’t talk like that…”

  “Farewell!” said the girl.

  The mother realized from the clatter of her heels that she had set off quickly, almost at a run. Pavel went off into the yard after her.

  Onerous, crushing fright enveloped the mother’s breast. She did not understand what had been talked about, but sensed that woe awaited her up ahead.

  “What does he mean to do?”

  Pavel returned along with Andrei; shaking his head, the Ukrainian was saying:

  “Oh, Isaika, Isaika – what’s to be done with him?”

  “He needs to be advised to give up his games!” said Pavel gloomily.

  “Pasha, what do you mean to do?” the mother asked, her head dropping.

  “When? Now?”

  “On the first… on May Day?”

  “Aha!” Pavel exclaimed, lowering his voice. “I’m going to carry our banner. I’m going to march with it ahead of everyone else. I’ll probably be put in prison again for it.”

  The mother’s eyes grew hot, and an unpleasant dryness came into her mouth. He took her hand and stroked it.

  “It’s got to be done – you must understand!”

  “I’m not saying a word!” she said, slowly raising her head. And when her eyes met with the stubborn brightness of his, she bent her neck once more.

  He let her hand go, sighed and said reproachfully:

  “You shouldn’t be grieving, but rejoicing. When will there be mothers who’ll even send their children to their death with joy?…”

  “Hup, hup!” growled the Ukrainian. “Hitching up his kaftan, off the master ran…”

  “Am I saying a word?” the mother repea
ted. “I’m not stopping you. And if I feel sorry for you, well, that’s a maternal thing!…”

  He stepped away from her, and she heard harsh, sharp words:

  “There’s love that prevents a man living…”

  Wincing, afraid he might say something else that would alienate her heart, she quickly began:

  “Don’t, Pasha! I understand: you can’t do otherwise; it’s for your comrades…”

  “No!” he said. “I’m doing it for myself.”

  Andrei appeared in the doorway; he was taller than the door, and now, standing in it as if in a frame, he had his knees strangely bent, one shoulder leaning against the jamb, and the other one thrust forward, along with his neck and head.

  “You might stop nattering, sir!” he said, morosely fixing his bulging eyes on Pavel’s face. He looked like a lizard in a crack in a rock.

  The mother felt like crying. Not wanting her son to see her tears, she suddenly murmured: “Oh Heavens, I’d forgotten…”

  And she went out into the lobby. There, jamming her head into a corner, she gave free rein to the tears of her hurt and cried in silence, soundlessly, growing weak from the tears as though the blood were flowing out of her heart with them.

  And through the door that she had not closed tightly there came creeping out to her the muffled sounds of an argument.

  “What are you doing, admiring yourself as you torment her?” asked the Ukrainian.

  “You have no right to talk like that!” cried Pavel.

  “A fine comrade I’d be to you if I were silent while seeing you acting the goat so stupidly! Why did you say that? Do you get it?”

  “You should always say both yes and no firmly!”

  “To her, you mean?”

  “To everyone! I don’t want either the love or the friendship that clings to your legs and holds you back…”

  “What a hero! Wipe your nose! Wipe it and go and tell all that to Sashenka. She’s the one you should have said it to…”

  “I did!…”

  “Really? You’re lying! You spoke to her gently, you spoke to her tenderly; I didn’t hear, but I know it! And in front of your mother you’ve laid out your heroism… Understand this, you goat – your heroism isn’t worth a damned thing!”