My Childhood - Maxim Gorky [107]
As school had broken up I began to live in the streets once more, and I found it better than ever.
It was in the middle of spring, and money was earned easily; on Sundays the whole company of us went out into the fields, or into the woods, where the foliage was fresh and young, early in the morning, and did not return till late in the evening, pleasantly tired, and drawn together closer than ever.
But this form of existence did not last long. My stepfather, dismissed for getting into debt, had disappeared again, and mother came back to grandfather, with my little brother Nikolai, and I had to be nurse, for grandmother had gone to live at the house of a rich merchant in the town, where she worked at stitching shrouds.
Mother was so weak and anemic that she could hardly walk, and she had a terrible expression in her eyes as she looked about her. My brother was scrofulous, and covered with painful ulcers, and so weak that he could not even cry aloud and only whimpered when he was hungry. When he had been fed he slumbered, breathing with a strange sound like the soft mewing of a kitten.
Observing him attentively, grandfather said:
"He ought to have plenty of good food; but I have not got enough to feed you all."
Mother, sitting on the bed in the corner, sighed, and said in a hoarse voice:
"He does not want much."
"A little for one and a little for another soon mounts up."
He waved his hand as he turned to me:
"Nikolai must be kept out in the sun--in some sand."
I dragged out a sack of clean sand, turned it out in a heap in a place where the sun was full on it, and buried my brother in it up to his neck, as grandfather told me. The little boy loved sitting in the sand; he cooed sweetly, and flashed his bright eyes upon me --extraordinary eyes they were, without whites, just blue pupils surrounded by brilliant rings.
I became attached to my little brother at once. It seemed to me that he understood all my thoughts as I lay beside him on the sand under the window, whence the sound of grandfather's shrill voice proceeded:
"If he dies--and he won't have much difficulty about it--you will have a chance to live."
Mother answered by a long fit of coughing.
Getting his hands free, the little boy held them out to me, shaking his small white head; he had very little hair, and what there was was almost gray, and his tiny face had an old and wise expression. If a hen or a cat came near us Kolai would gaze at it for a long time, then he would look at me and smile almost significantly. That smile of his disturbed me. Was it possible that he felt that I found it dull being with him, and was longing to run out to the street and leave him there?
The yard was small, close, and dirty; from the gate were built a succession of sheds and cellars ending at the washhouse. All the roofs were made of pieces of old boats--logs, boards, and damp bits of wood which had been secured by the inhabitants of the neighborhood when the ice was breaking on the Oka, or at flood-time--and the whole yard was an unsightly conglomeration of heaps of wood of all sorts, which, being saturated with water, sweated in the sun and emitted an intensified odor of rottenness.
Next door there was a slaughter-house for the smaller kind of cattle, and almost every morning could be heard the bellowing of calves and the bleating of sheep, and the smell of blood