My Childhood - Maxim Gorky [109]
When I returned to grandfather's, mother was sitting at the table dressed in a clean, lilac-colored frock, with her hair prettily dressed, and looking as splendid as she used to look.
"You are feeling better?" I asked, with a feeling of inexplicable fear.
Looking at me fixedly, she said:
"Come here! Where have you been? Eh?"
Before I had time to reply, she seized me by the hair, and grasping in her other hand a long, flexible knife, made out of a saw, she nourished it several times and struck me with the flat of it. It slipped from her hands to the floor.
"Pick it up and give it to me. . . ."
I picked up the knife and threw it on the table, and mother pushed me away from her. I sat on the ledge of the stove and watched her movements in a state of terror.
Rising from the chair she slowly made her way towards her own corner, lay down on the bed, and wiped her perspiring face with a handkerchief. Her hands moved uncertainly; twice she missed her face and touched the pillow instead.
"Give me some water. . . ."
I scooped some water out of a pail with a cup, and lifting her head with difficulty, she drank a little. Then she pushed my hand away with her cold hand, and drew a deep breath. Then after looking at the corner where the icon was, she turned her eyes on me, moved her lips as if she were smiling, and slowly let her long lashes droop over her eyes. Her elbows were pressed closely against her sides, and her hands, on which the fingers were weakly twitching, crept about her chest, moving towards her throat. A shadow fell upon her face, invading every part of it, staining the skin yellow, sharpening the nose. Her mouth was open as if she were amazed at something, but her breathing was not audible. I stood, for how long I do not know, by my mother's bedside, with the cup in my hand, watching her face grow frozen and gray.
When grandfather came in I said to him:
"Mother is dead."
He glanced at the bed.
"Why are you telling lies?"
He went to the stove and took out the pie, rattling the dampers deafeningly.
I looked at him, knowing that mother was dead, and waiting for him to find it out.
My stepfather came in dressed in a sailor's peajacket, with a white cap. He noiselessly picked up a chair and took it over to mother's bed, when suddenly he let it fall with a crash to the floor and cried in a loud voice, like a trumpet:
"Yes--she is dead! Look!"
Grandfather, with wide-open eyes, softly moved away from the stove with the damper in his hand, stumbling like a blind man.
A few days after my mother's funeral, grandfather said to me:
"Now, Lexei--you must not hang round my neck. There is no room for you here. You will have to go out into the world."
And so I went out into the world.
THE END
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