Mother Read online

  “Why was Nikolai rude to him?”

  “He must have got scared,” said Pavel quietly.

  “Came and seized and took away,” muttered the mother, spreading her arms.

  Her son had been left at home, and her heart began beating more calmly, but her thought was fixed upon a fact that it could not embrace:

  “That yellow one jeers and threatens…”

  “All right, Mother dear!” said Pavel, suddenly decisive: “Let’s clear all this up…”

  He had said “Mother” and “dear” as he did only when he felt close to her. She moved towards him, looked into his face and quietly asked:

  “Are you upset?”

  “Yes!” he replied. “It’s hard! I’d rather have been with them…”

  He seemed to her to have tears in his eyes and, wanting to comfort him, dimly feeling his pain, she said with a sigh:

  “Just wait – they’ll take you too!…”

  “They will!” he responded.

  After a pause, the mother remarked sadly:

  “How stern you are, Pasha! You might try comforting me some time! As it is, I say something terrible, and then you say something even worse.”

  He glanced at her, went over and quietly said:

  “I don’t know how, Mama! You have to get used to that.”

  She sighed and, after a pause, suppressing a tremor of fear, began:

  “Do they maybe torture people? Tear their bodies, break their bones? When I think of that, Pasha dear, I’m frightened!…”

  “They break your spirit… That hurts more, when dirty hands are laid on your spirit…”

  XI

  It became known next day that Bukin, Samoilov, Somov and five others had been arrested. Fedya Mazin dropped in that evening: there had been a search of his house, too, and, pleased with that, he felt himself a hero.

  “Were you afraid, Fedya?” asked the mother.

  He turned pale, his face became sharp and his nostrils quivered.

  “I was afraid the officer was going to hit me! He’s black-bearded, fat, his fingers are all covered in fur and he’s got dark glasses on his nose, as though he’s eyeless. He was shouting and stamping his feet! I’m going to rot in prison, he says! And I’ve never been beaten, not by my father or mother – I’m an only son, and they loved me.”

  He closed his eyes for an instant, pursed his lips, fluffed up the hair on his head with a quick gesture of both hands and, gazing at Pavel with reddened eyes, said:

  “If anyone ever hits me, I’ll launch myself into him, the whole of me, like a knife, get my teeth into him – so he’d better finish me off at once!”

  “You’re slim, thin!” exclaimed the mother. “How are you going to fight?”

  “I will!” Fedya replied quietly.

  When he had gone, the mother said to Pavel:

  “He’ll be the first one of all to break!…”

  Pavel remained silent.

  A few minutes later, the door into the kitchen opened slowly and in came Rybin.

  “Hello!” he said with a grin. “Here I am again. Yesterday I was brought here, but today I’ve come myself!” He shook Pavel’s hand hard, took the mother by the shoulder and asked:

  “Will you give me some tea?”

  In silence Pavel scrutinized his swarthy, broad face, covered by its thick black beard, and his dark eyes. In his calm gaze there was the light of something significant.

  The mother went off into the kitchen to put the samovar on. Rybin sat down, stroked his beard and, putting his elbows on the table, cast his dark gaze over Pavel.

  “So, then!” he said, as though continuing an interrupted conversation. “I need to talk to you openly. I’ve been looking you over for a long time. We live almost next door to one another; I see a lot of people visiting you, but there’s no drunkenness or bad behaviour. That’s the first thing. If people aren’t behaving badly, they’re immediately noticeable – what’s going on? Right. I’ve been an irritation to people myself by keeping out of things.”

  His words flowed heavily, but fluently, he stroked his beard with a black hand and looked Pavel intently in the face.

  “People started talking about you. The people I lodge with call you a heretic; you don’t go to church. I don’t either. Then these leaflets appeared. Was it you that thought them up?”

  “It was!” replied Pavel.

  “Oh, it was you, was it?” exclaimed his mother in alarm, glancing in from the kitchen. “Not just you!”

  Pavel grinned. Rybin too.

  “Right!” he said.

  The mother inhaled noisily through her nose and went away, a little offended that they had paid no attention to her words.

  “The leaflets – that was a good idea. They stir people up. Were there nineteen?”

  “Yes!” replied Pavel.

  “I read them all, then! Right. There are things in them that are hard to understand, things that are unnecessary – well, when someone’s got a lot to say, he’s bound to use the odd word he needn’t…”

  Rybin smiled; his teeth were white and strong.

  “Then the search. That more than anything won me over. You, and the Ukrainian, and Nikolai, you were all revealed to be…”

  Not finding the word he wanted, he fell silent, looked out of the window and drummed his fingers on the table.

  “Your decision was revealed. As if to say: ‘You get on with your business, Your Honour, and we’ll get on with ours.’ The Ukrainian’s a good lad too. Sometimes I listen to the way he talks at the factory, and I think: ‘You won’t crush this one, it’s only death that’ll overcome him.’ A man of sinew! Do you trust me, Pavel?”

  “I do!” said Pavel, nodding his head.

  “Right. Look – I’m forty, I’m twice your age and I’ve seen twenty times as much. I marched as a soldier for three years and more, I’ve been married twice, one wife died, I left the other. I’ve been in the Caucasus, I know the Dukhobors.* They’re not going to overcome life, brother, no!”

  The mother listened avidly to his powerful speech; it was nice to see an older man coming to see her son and talking to him as though he was making his confession. But it seemed to her that Pavel was being too dry with his guest and, to soften his attitude, she asked Rybin:

  “Perhaps you’d like something to eat, Mikhailo Ivanovich?”

  “Thank you, Mother! I’ve had dinner. So, Pavel, you think life’s going the wrong way, then?”

  Pavel stood up and began walking around the room with his hands behind his back.

  “It’s going the right way!” he said. “Now it’s brought you to me with an open soul. Little by little it’s uniting those of us who spend all our lives working; the time will come when it’ll unite everyone! The way it’s organized is unfair and hard on us, but it is itself opening our eyes to its bitter meaning and showing man how to quicken its pace.”

  “That’s right!” Rybin interrupted him. “Man must be renewed! If someone gets mangy, take him to the bathhouse, wash him down, put clean clothes on, and he’ll recover! Right! But how can a man be cleansed from within? There!”

  Pavel started speaking sharply and heatedly about the authorities, about the factory, about how workers abroad stood up for their rights. At times Rybin would tap a finger on the table, as though inserting a full stop. More than once he exclaimed:

  “Right!”

  And on one occasion he said quietly with a laugh:

  “Oh dear, you’re too young! You know too little of people!”

  And then Pavel stopped opposite him and remarked seriously:

  “Let’s not talk of old age and youth! Rather let’s look at whose ideas are better.”

  “So, in your view, they’ve deceived us with God too? Right. I think our religion is false as well.”

  Here the
mother intervened. Whenever her son spoke about God and everything she connected with her faith in Him, everything that was dear and sacred to her, she always sought to meet his eyes; she tried to ask her son silently not to scratch her heart with sharp, harsh words of unbelief. But behind his unbelief she could sense faith, and this reassured her.

  “How am I to understand his ideas?” she thought.

  It seemed to her that Rybin, an older man, found it unpleasant and hurtful to listen to Pavel’s speeches too. But when Rybin calmly asked Pavel his question, she could not contain herself and said briefly, but insistently:

  “Regarding the Lord, you should be more careful! For you it’s as you like!” Catching her breath, she continued with even greater force: “But for me, an old woman, there’ll be nothing to lean on in my anguish, if you take the Lord God away from me!”

  Her eyes filled with tears. She was doing the washing-up, and her fingers were trembling.

  “You didn’t understand us, Mamasha!” said Pavel, quietly and gently.

  “Forgive me, Mother!” Rybin added slowly in his rich voice and looked at Pavel with a grin. “I was forgetting you’re too old to have your warts cut off…”

  “I was speaking,” continued Pavel, “not of the good and merciful God you believe in, but of the one the priests threaten us with like a stick, the God in whose name they want to force everyone to submit to the wicked will of the few…”

  “That’s right, yes!” exclaimed Rybin, tapping his fingers on the table. “They’ve taken our God away too, they direct everything that’s in their hands against us! Remember, mother, God created man in His own image and likeness, so He is like man, if man is like Him! But we’re not like God: we’re like wild beasts. In church they show us a scarecrow… God needs to be changed, Mother, cleansed! They’ve clothed Him in lies and slander, they’ve distorted His face to kill our spirits!…”

  He spoke quietly, but each word of his speech fell upon the mother’s head as a heavy, stunning blow. And his face, large and mournful in the black frame of his beard, scared her. The dark lustre of his eyes was unbearable and awoke a nagging fear in her heart.

  “No, I’d better go away!” she said with a negative shake of her head. “I haven’t got the strength to listen to this!”

  And she went off quickly into the kitchen, accompanied by Rybin’s words:

  “There, Pavel! The root of things isn’t in the head, but in the heart! There’s this place in the human soul on which nothing else will grow…”

  “It’s only reason that will free man!” said Pavel firmly.

  “Reason doesn’t give you strength!” retorted Rybin loudly and insistently. “It’s the heart gives you strength, not the head – there!”

  The mother undressed and got into bed without praying. She felt cold and unpleasant. And Rybin, who had at first seemed to her so solid and wise, aroused a feeling of hostility in her now.

  “A heretic! A troublemaker!” she thought, listening to his voice. “And he just had to come here, didn’t he!”

  And he was saying confidently and calmly:

  “A pedestal shouldn’t stand empty. Where God lives is a sore spot. If he falls out of your soul, there’ll be a wound left in it – there! A new faith needs to be thought up, Pavel… a god needs to be created who’s a friend to man!”

  “There was Christ!” exclaimed Pavel.

  “Christ wasn’t firm in spirit. ‘Take away this cup from me,’* He said. He recognized Caesar.* God can’t recognize human power over men, He is all power! He doesn’t divide His soul: this is divine, this is human… But He recognized trade, recognized marriage. And He was wrong to curse the fig tree* – was it of its own free will that it didn’t bring forth? It’s not of its own free will that the soul lacks the fruit of goodness either – did I myself sow malice in it? There!”

  In the room was the constant sound of two voices, embracing and grappling with one another in excited play. Pavel paced, and the floor creaked beneath his feet. When he spoke, all other sounds were drowned in his speech, while when Rybin’s heavy voice was calmly and slowly flowing one could hear the ticking of the pendulum and the quiet crackling of the frost, probing the walls of the house with its sharp claws.

  “I’ll tell you in my way, a stoker’s way: God is like fire. Right! He lives in the heart. It’s said: ‘God is the Word,* and the Word is spirit’…”

  “Reason!” said Pavel insistently.

  “Right! So God is in the heart and in reason, but not in the church! The church is God’s grave.”

  The mother fell asleep and did not hear when Rybin left.

  But he started coming frequently, and if one of Pavel’s comrades was with him, Rybin would sit down in a corner and be silent, just occasionally saying:

  “There. Right!”

  One day, though, looking at everyone from the corner with his dark gaze, he said morosely:

  “We need to talk about what is; what will be, that we don’t know – there! When the people are freed, they’ll see for themselves what’ll be best. Quite a lot has been knocked into their heads that they didn’t want at all – enough of that! Let them weigh things up for themselves. Perhaps they’ll want to reject everything, the whole of life and all the sciences; perhaps they’ll see that everything is directed against them, like, for example, the Church’s God. Just pass all the books into their hands and they’ll reply for themselves – there!”

  If Pavel was alone, however, they would immediately enter into an endless but always calm argument, and the mother would listen to their speeches and follow them, trying to understand what they were saying. At times it seemed to her that the broad-shouldered, black-bearded peasant and her well-proportioned, strong son had both gone blind. They rushed around, first in one direction, then in another, in search of a way out; they clutched at everything with powerful but blind hands, shook things, moved them from place to place and dropped them onto the floor, and their feet trampled on what had fallen. They brushed against everything, had a feel of each thing and then threw it away, without losing faith or hope…

  They accustomed her to hearing words that were terrible in their directness and boldness, but those words no longer struck her with the force they had the first time – she had learnt to push them aside. And at times, behind the words rejecting God she sensed a strong belief in that very same God. Then she would smile a quiet, all-forgiving smile. And although she did not like Rybin, he no longer aroused hostility.

  Once a week she would take linen and books to the prison for the Ukrainian; on one occasion she was allowed to see him and, on coming home, she talked about it emotionally:

  “Even there he’s made himself at home. He’s nice to everyone, and everyone jokes with him. It’s hard for him, difficult, but he doesn’t want to show it…”

  “That’s the right way!” remarked Rybin. “Misery hems us all in like our skin, we breathe woe, we’re clothed in woe. It’s nothing to boast about. Not everyone has the wool pulled over their eyes, some shut their eyes of their own accord – there! And if you’re stupid – put up with it!…”

  XII

  The Vlasovs’ small grey house attracted the attention of the settlement more and more. There was much suspicious caution and latent hostility in that attention, but there were the seeds of trustful curiosity too. Sometimes someone would come and, looking around cautiously, say to Pavel:

  “Right, brother, you here read books, you know the laws. So then, can you explain…”

  And he would tell Pavel about some injustice on the part of the police or the factory administration. In complicated cases Pavel would give the man a note to take to a barrister he knew in town or, when he could, he would explain the matter himself.

  Respect was gradually growing among people for the serious young man who talked about everything simply and boldly, looking at and listening to everything with an
attention that dug stubbornly into the tangle of each individual case and always, everywhere, found some common, endless thread linking people together by thousands of strong stitches.

  Pavel particularly grew in people’s eyes after the episode of “the marsh copeck”.

  Beyond the factory, almost surrounding it in the shape of a rotten ring, there stretched an extensive marsh, overgrown with fir groves and birch. In summer it breathed out dense yellow fumes, and clouds of mosquitoes flew out of it at the settlement, spreading fever. The marsh belonged to the factory, and the new director, wanting to extract some benefit from it, came up with the idea of draining it and at the same time extracting the peat. Indicating to the workers that this measure would make the locality healthier and improve living conditions for all, the director ordered one copeck in the rouble to be deducted from their earnings towards the draining of the marsh.

  The workers became agitated. They were particularly upset that the office staff were not included in those paying the new tax.

  Pavel was ill on the Saturday when the director’s notice about the collection of the copeck was put up; he was not at work and knew nothing about it. The next day, after the Liturgy, a fine-looking old man, the smelter Sizov, and a tall, angry metalworker, Makhotin, came and told him about the director’s decision.

  “We got together, the older ones,” said Sizov steadily, “had a talk about it, and so our comrades have sent us to you to ask, as you’re a learned man, if there’s a law that lets the director battle the mosquitoes with our copeck?”

  “Think about it!” said Makhotin, his narrow eyes flashing. “Four years ago they were collecting for a bathhouse, the rogues. Three thousand eight hundred was collected. Where’s it gone? There’s no bathhouse!”

  Pavel explained the injustice of the tax and the venture’s clear financial benefit for the factory; they both left wearing frowns. After seeing them off, the mother said with a grin:

  “There, Pasha, even old men have started coming to you for your wisdom.”

  Preoccupied, Pavel sat down at the table without replying and began writing something. A few minutes later he said to her: