The Mother Page 5

  Sashenka was the first to say loudly and sharply:

  “We are socialists…”

  When the mother heard this word, she stared into the young lady’s face in silent fright. She had heard that socialists had killed the Tsar.* That was in the days of her youth; it had been said then that some landowners, wanting to take revenge on the Tsar for his having liberated the peasants, had made a pledge not to cut their hair until they had killed him, and it was for that they had been called socialists. And now she could not understand why her son and his comrades were socialists.

  When everyone had dispersed, she asked Pavel:

  “Pavlusha, are you really a socialist?”

  “Yes!” he said, standing before her, as always, upright and firm. “What of it?”

  His mother heaved a heavy sigh and, lowering her eyes, asked:

  “Is it so, Pavlusha? They’re against the Tsar, aren’t they? I mean, they’ve killed one before.”

  Pavel paced up and down the room, stroked his cheek with his hand and said with a grin:

  “We don’t need that!”

  He spent a long time telling her something in a quiet, serious voice. She looked into his face and thought:

  “He won’t do anything bad – he isn’t capable!”

  But then the terrible word began to be repeated ever more often, its sharpness was worn away, and it became just as customary to her ear as dozens of other incomprehensible words. But she did not like Sashenka, and whenever she appeared, the mother felt anxious and awkward…

  One day, discontentedly pursing her lips, she said to the Ukrainian:

  “Sashenka really is very strict somehow! Always giving orders – you have to do this, you have to do that…”

  The Ukrainian burst into loud laughter.

  “Well spotted! You’ve hit the nail on the head, nenko! Eh, Pavel?”

  And, winking at the mother, with a grin in his eyes he said:

  “The gentry!”

  Pavel remarked drily:

  “She’s a good person.”

  “That’s true!” the Ukrainian confirmed. “Only she doesn’t understand that she ‘has to’, whereas we ‘want to’ and ‘can’!”

  And they began to argue about something incomprehensible.

  The mother also noticed that Sashenka was strictest of all with Pavel and sometimes even shouted at him. Grinning, Pavel would look silently into the girl’s face with that same soft gaze with which he had previously looked into Natasha’s. The mother did not like this either.

  Sometimes the mother was amazed by the mood of wild joy that would suddenly and simultaneously take hold of everyone. This was usually on those evenings when they read in the newspapers about working people abroad. Then everyone’s eyes would shine with joy, everyone would become strangely, somehow childishly happy, would laugh merry, clear laughter and slap one another affectionately on the shoulder.

  “Well done, our German comrades!” someone cried, as though intoxicated by their merriment.

  “Long live the workers of Italy!” they cried on another occasion.

  And, sending these cries off somewhere into the distance, to friends who did not know them and could not understand their language, they seemed to be certain that these people who were unknown to them could hear and understand their delight.

  The Ukrainian spoke with shining eyes, filled with a feeling of love that embraced everyone:

  “It’d be good to write to them there, eh? So they know they have friends living in Russia who believe and confess the same religion as them, people living with the same aims and rejoicing in their victories!”

  And dreamily, with smiles on their faces, everyone talked for a long time about the French, the English and the Swedes as their friends, as people close to their hearts whom they respected, living their joys, feeling their woe.

  Being born in this cramped room was a sense of the spiritual kinship of the workers of the entire earth. This sense fused everyone into a single soul, exciting the mother too: although it was incomprehensible to her, still it straightened her up with its strength, joyous and youthful, intoxicating and full of hope.

  “Just look at you!” she said to the Ukrainian once. “Everyone’s your comrades – the Armenians, the Jews, the Austrians – sadness and joy for all!”

  “For all, my nenko, for all!” the Ukrainian exclaimed. “For us there are no nations, no tribes; there are only comrades, only enemies. All workers are our comrades, all rich people, all governments are our enemies. When you run your kind eyes over the earth, when you see how many of us workers there are, how much strength we bring, such joy embraces your heart, there’s such a great celebration inside your breast! And the Frenchman and the German feel the same, nenko, when they look at life, and the Italian rejoices in just the same way. We’re all children of one mother – the invincible idea of the brotherhood of the working people of all the countries of the earth. It warms us, it’s the sun in the sky of justice, and that sky is in the heart of the worker, and whoever he might be, whatever he might call himself, a socialist is our brother in spirit always, now, in days to come and to the end of time!”

  This childlike but strong faith sprang up among them ever more frequently, kept rising and growing in its mighty strength. And when the mother saw it, she involuntarily sensed that something truly had come into the world that was great and radiant, like the sun in the sky she could see.

  They often sang songs. They sang simple songs known to all, loudly and cheerfully, but sometimes they struck up new ones, particularly harmonious somehow, but sombre and with unusual tunes. These were sung in low tones, seriously, as if they were something from church. The faces of the singers paled and flushed, and great power could be sensed in the resonant words.

  One of the new songs in particular troubled and agitated the woman.* Nowhere to be heard in this song were the sad meditations of an injured soul, roaming lonely down the dark paths of sorrowful bewilderment, or the groans of a soul cowed by need, intimidated by fear, characterless and colourless. And there was no sound in it of the melancholy sighs of a force thirsting indefinitely for space, nor of the provocative cries of a bold recklessness that is indifferent in its readiness to shatter both good and evil. There was no blind sense in it of vengeance and hurt, capable of destroying everything and powerless to create anything: there was nothing to be heard in this song of the old world of the slave.

  The mother disliked the sharp words and the severe tune, but behind the words and the tune there was something bigger, which drowned the sound and the word with its power and wakened in the heart a presentiment of something thought could not encompass. This something she could see in the faces and the eyes of the youngsters, she could feel it in their breasts and, yielding to the power of the song, which could not fit into the words and the sounds, she always listened to it with particular attention and with more profound disquiet than she did all the other songs.

  This song was sung more quietly than the others, but it sounded more powerful than all of them and enveloped people like the air of a March day, the first day of the coming spring.

  “It’s time we started singing this in the street!” said Vesovshchikov morosely.

  When his father again stole something and went to prison, Nikolai declared to his comrades calmly:

  “Now we can meet at my house…”

  Almost every evening after work, one or other of his comrades would sit with Pavel, and they would read and copy things out from books, preoccupied, without finding time to have a wash. They ate dinner and drank tea with books in their hands, and their talk was ever more incomprehensible to the mother.

  “We need a newspaper!” Pavel would often say.

  Life was becoming hurried and feverish, people rushed ever more quickly from one book to another, like bees from flower to flower.

  “People are
talking about us!” said Vesovshchikov one day. “We’re likely to come to grief soon…”

  “That’s what a quail is for, to get caught in someone’s net,” responded the Ukrainian.

  The mother liked him more and more. When he called her nenko, it was as if the word were stroking her cheeks with the soft hand of a child. On Sundays he would chop firewood, if Pavel had no time, and one day he arrived with a plank on his shoulder and, picking up the axe, quickly and skilfully replaced the rotten step on the porch; and another time, just as inconspicuously, he mended a collapsed fence. He whistled as he worked, and his whistling was beautifully sad.

  One day the mother said to her son:

  “Let’s take the Ukrainian in as our lodger. It’ll be better for both of you, not running to see one another.”

  “Why make things awkward for yourself?” asked Pavel, shrugging his shoulders.

  “What a question! I’ve felt awkward all my life without knowing why; for a good person I don’t mind!”

  “Do as you like!” her son responded. “If he comes, I’ll be glad…”

  And the Ukrainian moved in with them.

  VIII

  The small house on the outskirts of the settlement was catching people’s attention; its walls had already been probed by dozens of suspicious looks. Fluttering restlessly above it were the mottled wings of rumour – people were trying to excite fear, to reveal something concealed behind the walls of the house above the gully. They would look in at the windows at night, and sometimes someone would knock on a window pane and quickly, fearfully run away.

  One day, Vlasova was stopped on the street by the innkeeper Beguntsov, a little old man of good appearance, who always wore a black silk kerchief on his flabby red neck and a lilac-coloured thick plush waistcoat on his chest. On his nose, sharp and shiny, sat a pair of tortoiseshell glasses, and for that reason he was known as Bone Eyes.

  Having stopped Vlasova, in a single breath and without waiting for any replies, he showered her with dry, highfalutin words:

  “Pelageya Nilovna, how are you faring? How’s the son? You don’t mean to marry him off, eh? A youth in his absolute prime for marriage. Marrying a son off early renders parents’ lives more restful. Within a family, a man is better kept in both spirit and flesh, within a family he’s like a mushroom in vinegar! In your place I should marry him off. Our times demand the strict surveillance of a man’s being, or else people start living out of their own heads. Disorder gets underway in their thoughts, and their deeds are worthy of censure. Youngsters pass God’s church by, shun public places and, gathering in secret, in corners, they whisper. Why do they whisper, permit me to enquire? Why do they avoid other people? All that a man dare not say in front of others – in an inn, for example – what is that? A mystery! And the place for a mystery is our holy church of apostolic zeal. And all other secret things, done in corners, result from mental delusion! I wish you good health!”

  With a fancifully crooked arm he doffed his cap, waved it in the air and went away, leaving the mother bewildered.

  The Vlasovs’ neighbour, too, Maria Korsunova, a smith’s widow who sold food at the factory gates, upon meeting the mother at the market, said:

  “Keep an eye on your son, Pelageya!”

  “What is it?” asked the mother.

  “There’s a rumour going round!” Maria informed her mysteriously. “A bad one, mother dear! About him organizing a sort of artel, like the flagellants.* Sects is what they call it. They’ll be whipping each other, like the flagellants…”

  “Stop spreading silly gossip, Maria!”

  “It’s not the gossip that’s the liar, but the denier!” responded the street trader.

  The mother relayed all these conversations to her son, and he shrugged his shoulders in silence, while the Ukrainian laughed his rich, soft laugh.

  “The unmarried girls are very upset with you too!” she said. “You’re desirable young men for any girl, all good workers and sober, yet you pay no attention to the unmarried girls! They say young ladies of shameless conduct come from town to call on you…”

  “Well, of course!” exclaimed Pavel, pulling a fastidious face.

  “Everything smells rotten in a marsh!” said the Ukrainian with a sigh. “Nenko, you should explain to them, the little fools, what it means to be a wife, so they’re in no hurry to break their bones…”

  “Oh, my dear man,” said the mother. “They see the woe, they understand, but there’s nothing they can do – is there? – other than that!”

  “They don’t understand very well, or else they’d find a way!” remarked Pavel.

  The mother glanced at his stern face.

  “Well, you teach them! You could invite the cleverer ones here…”

  “It’s not convenient!” her son responded drily.

  “But if we try?” asked the Ukrainian.

  Pavel paused and then replied:

  “Couples will start going for walks, then some will get married, and that’ll be that!”

  His mother fell into thought. Pavel’s monastic strictness troubled her. She could see that his advice was heeded even by those comrades who, like the Ukrainian, were his senior in years, but it seemed to her that everyone was afraid of him, and nobody loved him because of this dryness.

  Once, when she had gone to bed and her son and the Ukrainian were still reading, she eavesdropped through the thin partition on their quiet conversation.

  “I like Natasha – do you know that?” the Ukrainian exclaimed quietly all of a sudden.

  “I do!” Pavel answered, though not at once.

  The Ukrainian could be heard slowly getting up and starting to walk around. His bare feet shuffled across the floor. And a quiet, doleful whistling rang out. Then the drone of his voice began again:

  “But does she notice it?”

  Pavel was silent.

  “What do you think?” the Ukrainian asked, lowering his voice.

  “She does!” Pavel replied. “And that’s why she’s refused to study here with us…”

  The Ukrainian drew his feet heavily over the floor, and again his quiet whistling quavered in the room. Then he asked:

  “And what if I tell her…”

  “What?”

  “That I, well…” the Ukrainian began quietly.

  “Why?” Pavel interrupted him.

  The mother could hear that the Ukrainian had come to a halt and sensed that he was grinning.

  “Well, I reckon, you see, that if you love a girl, then you do need to tell her about it, otherwise there’ll be no sense whatsoever!”

  Pavel shut his book with a bang. His question was heard:

  “And what sense do you expect?”

  Both were silent for a long time.

  “Well?” asked the Ukrainian.

  “Andrei, you need to have a clear idea of what you want,” Pavel began slowly. “Let’s suppose she loves you too – I don’t think she does, but let’s suppose so, right? – and you get married. An interesting marriage, a girl from the intelligentsia and a worker! There’ll be children, you’ll have to work on your own… and work a lot. Your life will become a life for a crust of bread, for the children, for housing – for the cause you’re no more. Neither of you!”

  It became quiet. Then Pavel began, seemingly more softly:

  “Better if you drop all this, Andrei. And don’t trouble her…”

  All is quiet. The pendulum of the clock taps distinctly, rhythmically severing the seconds.

  The Ukrainian said:

  “Half the heart loves and half of it hates – is that really a heart, eh?”

  The pages of a book began rustling – Pavel must have started reading again. His mother lay with her eyes closed, afraid to stir. She felt sorry to the point of tears for the Ukrainian, but even more so for her son. She thought a
bout him:

  “My dear one…”

  Suddenly the Ukrainian asked:

  “So I should say nothing?”

  “It’s more honest,” said Pavel quietly.

  “Then that’s the path we’ll take!” said the Ukrainian. And a few seconds later he went on, sadly and quietly: “It’ll be hard for you, Pasha, when you’re like this yourself…”

  “It’s hard already…”

  The wind was beating against the walls of the house. The pendulum of the clock counted the time precisely as it passed away.

  “It’s no laughing matter, this!” the Ukrainian said slowly.

  The mother buried her face in her pillow and began silently crying.

  In the morning, Andrei seemed to the mother reduced in height and nicer than ever. And her son was, as always, thin, upright and taciturn. The mother had called the Ukrainian Andrei Onisimovich before, but today, without noticing it, she said to him:

  “You need to get your boots repaired, Andryusha – you’ll get cold feet like that!”

  “I’m going to buy new ones on payday!” he replied, laughing, then, suddenly, putting his long arm on her shoulder, he asked: “Maybe you’re my real mother? Only you don’t want to admit it to anyone, as I’m very ugly, eh?”

  She slapped him on the hand in silence. She wanted to say a lot of affectionate words to him, but her heart was gripped tight by pity, and the words would not leave her tongue.

  IX

  There was talk in the settlement of socialists who were disseminating leaflets written in blue ink. There was angry writing in these leaflets about practices in the factory, about workers’ strikes in St Petersburg and the south of Russia, and the workers were called upon to unite and struggle for their interests.

  Older men who had good earnings at the factory grumbled: “Troublemakers! They should get a smack in the mouth for that sort of thing!”

  And they took the leaflets to the office. The youngsters read the proclamations with enthusiasm:

  “It’s true!”