My Childhood - Maxim Gorky [96]
"I will go and have a look at the old man, and see how he is getting on."
"Take me with you."
"You would be frozen. Look how it is snowing!" And she would walk seven versts, by the roads, or across the snowy fields.
Mother, yellow, pregnant, and shivering with cold, went about wrapped in a gray, torn shawl with a fringe.
I hated that shawl, which disfigured the large, wellbuilt body; I hated the tails of the fringe, and tore them off; I hated the house, the factory, and the village. Mother went about in downtrodden felt boots, coughing all the time, and her unbecomingly fat stomach heaved, her gray-blue eyes had a bright, hard gleam in them, and she often stood about against the bare walls just as if she were glued to them. Sometimes she would stand for a whole hour looking out of the window on to the street, which was like a jaw in which half the teeth were blackened and crooked from age, and the other half had quite decayed and had been replaced by false ones.
"Why do we live here?" I asked.
"Ach! . . . You hold your tongue, can't you?" she answered.
She spoke very seldom to me, and when she did speak it was only to order me about:
"Go there! . . . Come here! . . . Fetch this!"
I was not often allowed out in the street, and on each occasion I returned home bearing signs of having been knocked about by other boys; for fighting was my favorite, indeed, my only enjoyment, and I threw myself into it with ardor. Mother whipped me with a strap, but the punishment only irritated me further, and the next time I fought with childish fury--and mother gave me a worse punishment. This went on till one day I warned her that if she did not leave off beating me I should bite her hand, and run away to the fields and get frozen to death. She pushed me away from her in amazement, and walked about the room, panting from exhaustion as she said:
"You are getting like a wild animal!"
That feeling which is called love began to blossom in my heart now, full of life, and tremulous as a rainbow; and my resentment against every one burst out oftener, like a dark blue, smoky flame, and an oppressive feeling of irritation smoldered in my heart--a consciousness of being entirely alone in that gray, meaningless existence.
My stepfather was severe with me, and hardly ever speaking to mother, went about whistling or coughing, and after dinner would stand in front of a mirror and assiduously pick his uneven teeth with a splinter of wood. His quarrels with mother became more frequent--angrily addressing her as "you" (instead of "thou"), a habit which exasperated me beyond measure. When there was a quarrel on he used to shut the kitchen door closely, evidently not wishing me to hear what he said, but all the same the sound of his deep bass voice could be heard quite plainly. One day he cried, with a stamp of his foot:
"Just because you are fool enough to become pregnant, I can't ask any one to come and see me--you
I was so astonished, so furiously angry, that I jumped up in the air so high that I knocked my head against the ceiling and bit my tongue till it bled.
On Saturdays workmen came in batches of ten to see my stepfather and sell him their food-tickets, which they ought to have taken to the shop belonging to the works to spend in place of money; but my stepfather used to buy them at half-price. He received the workmen in the kitchen, sitting at the table, looking very important, and as he took the cards he would frown and say:
"A rouble and a half!"
"Now, Eugen Vassilev, for the love of God--"
"A rouble and a half!"
This muddled, gloomy existence only lasted till mother's confinement, when I was sent back to grandfather. He was then living at Kunavin, where he rented a poky room with a Russian stove, and two win
dows looking on to the yard, in a two-storied house on a sandy road, which extended to the fence of the Napolno churchyard.
"What's this?" he cried, squeaking with laughter, as he met me. "They say there 's no better friend than your own mother; but now, it seems, it is not the mother but the old devil of a grandfather