My Childhood - Maxim Gorky [31]
"Who is it?" he asked gruffly, making no attempt to let me in. "Oh, it's you! Well, what is it?"
"He has gone into the wineshop!"
"All right! Run along!"
"But I am frightened up there."
"I can't help that."
Again I stationed myself at the window. It was getting dark. The dust lay more thickly on the road, and looked almost black; yellow patches of light oozed out from the adjacent windows, and from the house opposite came strains of music played on several stringed instruments--melancholy but pleasing. 'There was singing in the tavern, too; when the door opened the sound of a feeble, broken voice floated out into the street. I recognized it as belonging to the beggar cripple, Nikitoushka--a bearded ancient, with one glass eye and the other always tightly closed. When the door banged it sounded as if his song had been cut off with an ax.
Grandmother used to quite envy this beggar-man. After listening to his songs she used to say, with a sigh:
"There 's talent for you! What a lot of poetry he knows by heart. It's a gift--that's what it is!"
Sometimes she invited him into the yard, where he sat on the steps and sang, or told stories, while grandmother sat beside him and listened, with such exclamations as:
"Go on. Do you mean to tell me that Our Lad}' was ever at Ryazin?"
To which he would reply in a low voice which carried conviction with it:
"She went everywhere--through every province."
An elusive, dreamy lassitude seemed to float up to me from the street, and place its oppressive weight upon my heart and my eyes. I wished that grandmother would come to me--or even grandfather. I wondered what kind of a man my father had been that grandfather and my uncles disliked him so, while grandmother and Gregory and Nyanya Eugenia spoke so well of him. And where was my mother? I thought of her more and more every day, making her the center of all the fairy-tales and old legends related to me by grandmother. The fact that she did not choose to live with her own family increased my respect for her. I imagined her living at an inn on a highroad, with robbers who waylaid rich travelers, and shared the spoils with beggars. Or it might be that she was living in a forest--in a cave, of course--with good robbers, keeping house for them, and taking care of their stolen gold. Or, again, she might be wandering about the earth reckoning up its treasures, as the robberchieftainess Engalitchev went with Our Lady, who would say to her, as she said to the robber-chieftainess:
"Do not steal, O grasping slave,
The gold and silver from every cave;
Nor rob the earth of all its treasure
For thy greedy body's pleasure."
To which my mother would answer in the words of the robber-chieftainess:
"Pardon, Lady, Virgin Blest!
To my sinful soul give rest;
Not for myself the gold I take,
I do it for my young son's sake."
And Our Lady, good-natured, like grandmother, would pardon her, and say:
"Maroushka, Maroushka, of Tartar blood,
For you, luckless one, 'neath the Cross I stood;
Continue your journey and bear your load,
And scatter your tears o'er the toilsome road.
But with Russian people please do not meddle;
Waylay the Mongol in the woods
Or rob the Kalmuck of his goods."
Thinking of this story, I lived in it, as if it had been a dream. I was awakened by a trampling, a tumult, and howls from below--in the sheds and in the yard. I looked out of the window and saw grandfather, Uncle Jaakov, and a man employed by the tavern-keeper-- the funny-looking bartender, Melyan--pushing Uncle Michael through the wicker-gate into the street. He hit out, but they struck him on the arms, the back, and the neck with their hands, and then kicked him. In the end he went flying headlong through the gate, and landed in the dusty road. The gate banged, the latch and the bolt rattled; all that remained of the fray was a much ill-used cap lying in the gateway, and all was quiet.
After lying still for a time, my uncle dragged himself to his feet, all torn and dishevelled,