My Childhood - Maxim Gorky [106]
"Ouch! So you must take your ease, as if you were not little boys at all, eh? Ach! thieves . . . God give us rest!"
Vyakhir said to him:
"We are not thieves at all."
"Well--little thieves then."
If Yaz's father became too tiresome, Tchurka cried angrily:
"Be quiet, you trashy peasant!"
Vyakhir, Tchurka and I could not bear to hear the man counting up the number of houses which contained people in ill-health, or trying to guess how many of the villagers would die soon; he spoke so calculatingly and pitilessly, and seeing that what he said was objectionable to us, he purposely teased and tormented us:
"Oh, so you are afraid, young masters? Well, well! And before long a certain stout person will die--ekh! And long may he rot in his grave!"
We tried to stop him, but he would not leave off.
"And, you know, you've got to die too; you can't live long in this cesspool!"
"Well," said Vyakhir, "that's all right; and when we die they will make angels of us."
"Yo--u?" exclaimed Yaz's father, catching his breath in amazement. "You? Angels?"
He chuckled, and then began to tease us again by telling us disgusting stories about dead people.
But sometimes this man began to talk in a murmur, lowering his voice strangely:
"Listen, children . . . wait a bit! The day before yesterday they buried a female . . . and I knew her history, children. . . . What do you think the woman was?"
He often spoke about women, and always obscenely; yet there was something appealing and plaintive about his stories--he invited us to share his thoughts, as it were--and we listened to him attentively. He spoke in an ignorant and unintelligent manner, frequently interrupting his speech by questions; but his stories always left some disturbing splinters or fragments in one's memory.
"They ask her: 'Who set the place on fire?' 'I did!' 'How can that be, foolish woman, when you were not at home that night, but lying ill in the hospital?' 'I set the place on fire.' That's the way she kept on. . . . Why? Ouch! God give us rest."
He knew the life story of nearly every female inhabitant of the place who had been buried by him in that bare, melancholy graveyard, and it seemed as if he were opening the doors of houses, which we entered, and saw how the occupiers lived; and it made us feel serious and important. He would have gone on talking all night till the morning apparently, but as soon as the lodge window grew cloudy, and the twilight closed in upon it, Tchurka rose from the table and said:
"I am going home, or Mamka will be frightened. Who is coming with me?"
We all went away then. Yaz conducted us to the fence, closed the gate after us, and pressing his dark, bony face against the grating, said in a thick voice:
"Good-by."
We called out "Good-by" to him too. It was always hard to leave him in the graveyard. Kostrom said one day, looking back:
"We shall come and ask for him one day--and he will be dead."
"Yaz has a worse life than any of us," Tchurka said frequently; but Vyakhir always rejoined:
"We don't have a bad time--any of us!"
And when I look back I see that we did not have
a bad time. That independent life so full of contrasts
X was very attractive to me, and so were my comrades,
who inspired me with a desire to be always doing them
a good turn.
My life at school had again become hard; the pupils nicknamed me "The Ragman" and "The Tramp," and one day, after a quarrel, they told the teacher that I smelt like a drain, and that they could not sit beside me. I remember how deeply this accusation cut me, and how hard it was for me to go to school after it. The complaint had been made up out of malice. I washed very thoroughly every morning, and I never went to school in the clothes I wore when I was collecting rags.
However, in the end I passed the examination for the third class, and received as prizes bound copies of the Gospels and the "Fables of Krilov," and another book unbound which bore the unintelligible title of "Fata-Morgana"; they