My Childhood - Maxim Gorky [25]
Closing my eyes, I could visualize the threshold of the little chamber with its gray cobble-stones, and the unclean stream of shaggy creatures of diverse colors which gradually filled the washhouse. I could see them blowing out the candle and thrusting out their impudent pink tongues. It was a picture both comical and terrifying.
Grandmother was silent a minute, shaking her head, before she burst out again:
"And I saw some fiends too, one wintry night, when it was snowing. I was coming across the Dinkov Causeway--the place where, if you remember, your Uncle Michael and your Uncle Jaakov tried to drown your father in an ice-hole--and I was just going to take the lower path, when there came the sounds of hissing and hooting, and I looked up and saw a team of three raven-black horses tearing towards me. On the coachman's place stood a great fat devil, in a red nightcap, with protruding teeth. He was holding the reins, made of forged iron chains, with outstretched arms, and as there was no way round, the horses flew right over the pond, and were hidden by a cloud of snow. All those sitting in the sledge behind were devils too; there they sat, hissing and screaming and waving their nightcaps. In all, seven troikas like this tore by, as if they had been fire-engines, all with black horses, and all carrying a load of thoroughbred devils. They pay visits to each other, you know, and drive about in the night to their different festivities. I expect that was a devil's wedding that I saw."
One had to believe grandmother, because she spoke so simply and convincingly.
But the best of all her stories was the one which told how Our Lady went about the suffering earth, and how she commanded the woman-brigand, or the "Amazon-chief" Engalichev, not to kill or rob Russian people. And after that came the stories about Blessed Alexei; about Ivan the Warrior, and Vassili the Wise; of the Priest Kozlya, and the beloved child of God; and the terrible stories of Martha Posadnitz, of Baba Ustye the robber chief, of Mary the sinner of Egypt, and of sorrowing mothers of robber sons. The fairytales, and stories of old times, and the poems which she knew were without number.
She feared no one--neither grandfather, nor devils, nor any of the powers of evil; but she was terribly afraid of black cockroaches, and could feel their presence when they were a long way from her. Sometimes she would wake me in the night whispering:
"Oleysha, dear, there is a cockroach crawling about. Do get rid of it, for goodness' sake."
Half-asleep, I would light the candle and creep about on the floor seeking the enemy--a quest in which I did not always succeed at once.
"No, there's not a sign of one," I would say; but lying quite still with her head muffled up in the bedclothes, she would entreat me in a faint voice:
"Oh, yes, there is one there! Do look again, please. I am sure there is one about somewhere."
And she was never mistaken. Sooner or later I found the cockroach, at some distance from the bed; and throwing the blanket off her she would breathe a sigh of relief and smile as she said:
"Have you killed it? Thank God! Thank you."
If I did not succeed in discovering the insect, she could not go to sleep again, and I could feel how she trembled in the silence of the night; and I heard her whisper breathlessly:
"It is by the door. Now it has crawled under the trunk."
"Why are you so frightened of cockroaches?"
"I don't know myself," she would answer, reasonably enough. "It is the way the horrid black things crawl about. God has given a meaning to all other vermin: woodlice show that the house is damp; bugs mean that the walls are dirty; lice foretell an illness, as every one knows; but these creatures!--who knows what powers they possess, or what