My Childhood - Maxim Gorky [104]
Our peacemaker was Vyakhir, who always had some simple words ready, exactly suited to the occasion, which astonished us and put us to shame. He uttered them himself in a tone of astonishment. Yaz's spiteful sallies neither offended nor upset him; in his opinion everything bad was unnecessary, and he would reject it calmly and convincingly.
"Well, what is the use of it?" he would ask, and we saw clearly that it was no use.
He called his mother "my Morduan," and we did not laugh at him.
"My Morduan rolled home tipsy again last evening," he would tell us gaily, flashing his round, gold-colored eyes. "She kept the door open, and sat on the step and sang--like a hen."
"What did she sing?" asked Tchurka, who liked to be precise.
Vyakhir, slapping his hands on his knees, reproduced his mother's song in a thin voice:
"Shepherd, tap thy window small,
Whilst we run about the mall;
Tap, tap again, quick bird of night,
With piping music, out of sight,
On the village cast thy spell."
He knew many passionate songs like this, and sang them very well.
"Yes," he continued, "so she went to sleep on the doorstep, and the room got so cold I was shivering from head to foot, and got nearly frozen to death; but she was too heavy for me to drag her in. I said to her this morning, 'What do you mean by getting so dreadfully drunk?' 'Oh,' she said, 'it is all right. Bear with me a little longer. I shall soon be dead.'
"She will soon be dead," repeated Tchurka, in a serious tone. "She is already dropsical."
"Would you be sorry?" I asked.
"Of course I should," exclaimed Vyakhir, astonished. "She is all right with me, you know."
And all of us, although we knew that the Morduan beat Vyakhir continually, believed that she was "all right," and sometimes even, when we had had a bad day, Tchurka would suggest:
"Let us put our kopecks together to buy Vyakhir's mother some brandy, or she will beat him."
The only ones in our company who could read and write were Tchurka and I. Vyakhir greatly envied us, and would murmur, as he took himself by his pointed, mouse-like ears:
"As soon as my Morduan is buried I shall go to school too. I shall go on my knees to the teacher and beg him to take me, and when I have finished learning I will go as gardener to the Archbishop, or perhaps to the Emperor himself."
In the spring the Morduan, in company with an old man, who was a collector for a church building-fund, and a bottle of vodka, was crushed by the fall of a wood-stack; they took the woman to the hospital, and practical Tchurka said to Vyakhir:
"Come and live with me, and my mother will teach you to read and write."
And in a very short time Vyakhir, holding his head high, could read the inscription: "Grocery Store," only he read "Balakeinia," and Tchurka corrected him:
"Bakaleinia, my good soul."
"I know--but the letters jump about so. They jump because they are pleased that they are being read."
He surprised us all, and made us laugh very much by his love of trees and grass. The soil of the village was sandy and vegetation was scanty--in some of the yards stood a miserable willow tree, or some straggling elder bushes, or a few gray, dry blades of grass hid themselves timidly under a fence--but if one of us sat on them, Vyakhir would cry angrily:
"Why must you sit on the grass? Why don't you sit on the gravel? It is all the same to you, is n't it?"
In his opinion there was no sense in breaking off branches from the willow, or plucking elder flowers, or cutting weeping willow twigs on the banks of the Oka; he always expressed great surprise when we did this, shrugged his shoulders, and spread out his hands:
"Why on earth do you want