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By Root 606 0

who argued he had poisoned himself from grief. I was one of the witnesses. When they questioned me, I told them the whole truth. ‘She’s guilty,’ I said. ‘It’s no use hiding it—she didn’t love her husband, and she was strong-willed.…’ The trial began in the morning, and the same evening she was sentenced to thirteen years’ penal servitude in Siberia. After the sentence Mashenka spent three months in the local jail. I used to go and see her, bringing her in simple humanity small gifts of tea and sugar. I remember how her whole body would start trembling as soon as she set eyes on me, and she would wring her hands and mutter: ‘Go away! Go away!’ She would clasp Kuzka to her, as though she were afraid I would take the boy away from her. ‘See,’ I would say, ‘what you have brought upon yourself! Ah, my poor dear ruined Mashenka, you wouldn’t listen to me when I was giving you advice, and so you must weep! Yes, you are guilty,’ I said, ‘and you have only yourself to blame!’ I was offering her sound advice, but she only kept on saying: ‘Go away! Go away!’ as she huddled against the wall with Kuzka in her arms, trembling all over. When they were taking her off to the provincial capital, I accompanied her to the railroad station and slipped a ruble into her bundle for my soul’s sake. She never reached Siberia. In the provincial capital she fell ill with a fever, and she died in the jail.”

“Live like a dog, die like a dog!” Dyudya said.

“Well, Kuzka was sent back home.… I thought it over and then decided I would bring him up. What else could I do? He was born of a jailbird, but he had a living, Christian soul. I was sorry for him. I’ll make a clerk out of him, and if I never have children of my own I’ll make a merchant of him. Wherever I go now I take him with me—let him learn to work!”

All the time that Matvey Savvich was talking, Kuzka was sitting on a stone by the gate, his face cupped in his hands, gazing up at the sky; and seen from a distance in the dark, he resembled a tree stump.

“Kuzka, go to bed!” Matvey Savvich yelled at him.

“Yes, it’s high time!” Dyudya said, getting up. He yawned noisily and then went on: “They think they’re clever, not listening to advice, and so they come to grief!”

The moon was now floating high over the courtyard, moving in one direction while the clouds moved in another, but soon the clouds drifted away and then the moon shone clear over the courtyard. Matvey Savvich said a prayer with his face turned toward the church, bade the others good night, and lay down on the ground near the cart. Kuzka also said a prayer, lay down in the cart, and covered himself with a short coat; and for comfort he dug a hole in the straw and curled up so that his elbows touched his knees. From the yard Dyudya could be seen lighting a candle in a downstairs room, and then he put on his spectacles and stood in a corner with a book. For a long time he continued to read and bow before the icon.

The travelers fell asleep. Afanasyevna and Sophia went up to the cart and gazed down at Kuzka.

“The poor orphan sleeps,” the old woman said. “He’s so thin and weak, nothing but bones! He has no mother and no one to look after him on the road.”

“My Grisha must be about two years older,” Sophia said. “Up there in the factory, without his mother, he lives like a slave. I dare say his master beats him. When I looked at this poor orphan just now, I thought of my own Grisha, and my heart’s blood turned to ice.”

There was silence between them for a few moments.

“I wonder whether he remembers his mother,” the old woman asked.

“How could he?”

From Sophia’s eyes large tears flowed.

“He’s all curled up like a kitten,” she said, sobbing and laughing with tenderness and sorrow. “Poor little orphan!”

Kuzka started and opened his eyes. He saw above him an ugly, wrinkled, tear-stained face, and beside it another face, old and toothless, with a sharp chin and a humped nose, and high above them the unfathomable sky and the rushing clouds and the moon; and he screamed in terror. Sophia also screamed, echoes answered their screams, the