My Childhood - Maxim Gorky [14]
I did love Ivan, and admired him inexpressibly. On Saturday when, after punishing the children for the transgressions of the week, grandfather went to vespers, we had an indescribably happy time in the kitchen.
Tsiganok would get some cockroaches from the stove, make a harness of thread for them with great rapidity, cut out a paper sledge, and soon two pairs of black horses were prancing on the clean, smooth, yellow table. Ivan drove them at a canter, with a thin splinter of wood as a whip, and urged them on, shouting:
"Now they have started for the Bishop's house."
Then he gummed a small piece of paper to the back of one of the cockroaches and sent him to run behind the sledge.
"We forgot the bag," he explained. "The monk drags it with him as he runs. Now then, geeup!"
He tied the feet of another cockroach together with cotton, and as the insect hopped along, with its head thrust forward, he cried, clapping his hands:
"This is the deacon coming out of the wineshop to say vespers."
After this he showed us a mouse which stood up at the word of command, and walked on his hind legs, dragging his long tail behind him and blinking comically with his lively eyes, which were like black glass beads.
He made friends of mice, and used to carry them about in his bosom, and feed them with sugar and kiss them.
"Mice are clever creatures," he used to say in a tone of conviction. "The house-goblin is very fond of them, and whoever feeds them will have all his wishes granted by the old hob-goblin."
He could do conjuring tricks with cards and coins too, and he used to shout louder than any of the children; in fact, there was hardly any difference between them and him. One day when they were playing cards with him they made him "booby" several times in succession, and he was very much offended. He stuck his lips out sulkily and refused to play any more, and he complained to me afterward, his nose twitching as he spoke:
"It was a put-up job! They were signaling to one another and passing the cards about under the table. Do you call that playing the game? If it comes to trickery I 'm not so bad at it myself."
Yet he was nineteen years old and bigger than all four of us put together.
I have special memories of him on holiday evenings, when grandfather and Uncle Michael went out to see their friends, and curly headed, untidy Uncle Jaakov appeared with his guitar while grandmother prepared tea with plenty of delicacies, and vodka in a square bottle with red flowers cleverly molded in glass on its lower part. Tsiganok shone bravely on these occasions in his holiday attire. Creeping softly and sideways came Gregory, with his colored spectacles gleaming; came Nyanya Eugenia--pimply, red-faced and fat like a Toby-jug, with cunning eyes and a piping voice; came the hirsute deacon from Uspenski, and other dark slimy people bearing a resemblance to pikes and eels. They all ate and drank a lot, breathing hard the while; and the children had wineglasses of sweet syrup given them as a treat, and gradually there was kindled a warm but strange gaiety.
Uncle Jaakov tuned his guitar amorously, and as he did so he always uttered the same words:
"Well, now let us begin!"
Shaking his curly head, he bent over the guitar, stretching out his neck like a goose; the expression on his round, careless face became dreamy, his passionate, elusive eyes were obscured in an unctuous mist, and lightly touching the chords, he played something disjointed, involuntarily rising to his feet as he played. His music demanded an intense silence. It rushed like a rapid torrent from somewhere far away, stirring one's heart and penetrating it with an incomprehensible