My Childhood - Maxim Gorky [108]
When the animals bellowed as the butt-end of the ax struck them between the horns, Kolai would blink and blow out his lips, as if he wanted to imitate the sound; but all he could do was to breathe:
"Phoo . . ."
At midday grandfather, putting his head out of the window, would call:
"Dinner!"
He used to feed the child himself, holding him on his knees, pressing potatoes and bread into Kolai's mouth, and smearing them all over his thin lips and pointed chin. When he had given him a little food grandfather would lift up the little boy's shirt, poke his swollen stomach with his fingers, and debate with himself aloud:
"Will that do? Or must I give him some more?"
Then my mother's voice would be heard, proceeding from her dark corner:
"Look at him! He is reaching for the bread."
"Stupid child! How can he possibly know how much he ought to eat?" And again he gave Kolai something to chew.
I used to feel ashamed when I looked on at this feeding business; a lump seemed to rise in my throat and make me feel sick.
"That will do," grandfather would say, at length. "Take him to his mother."
I took Kolai; he wailed and stretched his hands out to the table. Mother, raising herself with difficulty, came to meet me, holding out her hideously dry, fleshless arms, so long and thin--just like branches broken off a Christmas-tree.
She had become almost dumb, hardly ever uttering a word in that passionate voice of hers, but lying in silence all day long in her corner--slowly dying. That she was dying I felt, I knew--yes. And grandfather spoke too often, in his tedious way, of death, especially in the evening, when it grew dark in the yard, and a smell of rottenness, warm and woolly, like a sheep's fleece, crept in at the window.
Grandfather's bed stood in the front corner, almost under the image, and he used to lie there with his head towards it and the window, and mutter for a long time in the darkness:
"Well--the time has come for us to die. How shall we stand before our God? What shall we say to Him? All our life we have been struggling. What have we done? And with what object have we done it?"
I slept on the floor between the stove and the window; I had not enough room, so I had to put my feet in the oven, and the cockroaches used to tickle them. This corner afforded me not a little malicious enjoyment, for grandfather was continually breaking the window with the end of the oven-rake, or the poker, during his cooking operations; and it was very comical to see, and very strange, I thought, that any one so clever as grandfather should not think of cutting down the rake.
One day when there was something boiling in a pot on the fire he was in a hurry, and he used the rake so carelessly that he broke the window-frame, two panes of glass, and upset the saucepan on the hearth and broke it. The old man was in such a rage that he sat on the floor and cried.
"OLord! OLord!"
That day, when he had gone out, I took a bread knife and cut the oven-rake down to a quarter or a third of its size; but when grandfather saw what I had done, he scolded me:
"Cursed devil! It ought to have been sawn through with a saw. We might have made rollingpins out of the end, and sold them, you devil's spawn!"
Throwing his arms about wildly, he ran out of the door, and mother said:
"You ought not to have meddled . . ."
She died one Sunday in August about midday. My stepfather had only just returned from his travels, and had obtained a post somewhere. Grandmother had taken Kolai to him--to a newly done-up flat near the station, and mother was to be carried there in a few days.
In the morning of the day of her death she said to me in a low but a lighter and clearer voice than I had heard from her lately:
"Go to Eugen Vassilev, and ask him to come to me."
Lifting herself up in bed by pressing her hands against the wall, she added:
"Run--quickly!"
I thought she was smiling, and that there was a new light in her eyes.
My stepfather was