My Childhood - Maxim Gorky [40]
"Are Russians stronger than other people?" "We have some very strong people amongst us; but it is not strength which is so important, but dexterity. As far as sheer strength goes, the horse is our superior."
"But why did the French make war on us?"
"Well, war is the Emperor's affair. We can't expect to understand about it."
But to my question: "What sort of a man was Bonaparte?" grandfather replied in a tone of retrospection:
"He was a wicked man. He wanted to make war on the whole world, and after that he wanted to make us all equal--without rulers, or masters; every one to be equal, without distinction of class, under the same rules, professing the same religion, so that the only difference between one person and another would be their names. It was all nonsense, of course. Lobsters are the only creatures which cannot be distinguished one from the other . . . but fish are divided into classes. The sturgeon will not associate with the sheat-fish, and the sterlet refuses to make a friend of the herring. There have been Bonapartes amongst us; there was Razin (Stepan Timotheev), and Pygatch (Emilian Ivanov)--but I will tell you about them another time."
Sometimes he would remain silent for a long time, gazing at me with rolling eyes, as if he had never seen me before, which was not at all pleasant. But he never spoke to me of my father or my mother. Now and again grandmother would enter noiselessly during these conversations, and taking a seat in the corner, would remain there for a long time silent and invisible. Then she would ask suddenly in her caressing voice:
"Do you remember, Father, how lovely it was when we went on a pilgrimage to Mouron? What year would that be now?"
After pondering, grandfather would answer carefully:
"I can't say exactly, but it was before the cholera. It was the year we caught those escaped convicts in the woods."
"True, true! We were still frightened of them--"
"That's right!"
I asked what escaped convicts were, and why they were running about the woods; and grandfather rather reluctantly explained.
"They are simply men who have run away from prison--from the work they have been set to do."
"How did you catch them?"
"How did we catch them? Why, like little boys play hide-and-seek--some run away and the others look for them and catch them. When they were caught they were thrashed, their nostrils were slit, and they were branded on the forehead as a sign that they were convicts."
"But why?"
"Ah! that is the question--and one I can't answer. As to which is in the wrong--the one who runs away or the one who pursues him--that also is a mystery!"
"And do you remember, Father," said grandmother, "after the great fire, how we--?"
Grandfather, who put accuracy before everything else, asked grimly:
"What great fire?"
When they went over the past like this, they forgot all about me. Their voices and their words mingled so softly and so harmoniously, that it sounded sometimes as if they were singing melancholy songs about illnesses and fires, about massacred people and sudden deaths, about clever rogues, and religious maniacs, and harsh landlords.
"What a lot we have lived through! What a lot we have seen!" murmured grandfather softly.
"We have n't had such a bad life, have we?" said grandmother. "Do you remember how well the spring began, after Varia was born?"
"That was in the year '48, during the Hungarian Campaign; and the day after the christening they drove out her godfather, Tikhon--"
"And he disappeared," sighed grandmother.
"Yes; and from that time God's blessings have seemed to flow off our house like water off a duck's back. Take Varvara, for instance--"
"Now, Father, that will do!"
"What do you mean--'That will do'?" he asked, scowling at her angrily. "Our children have turned out badly, whichever way you look at them. What has become of the vigor of our youth? We thought we were storing it up for ourselves in our children, as one might pack something away carefully in a basket; when,