Oblomov - Ivan Goncharov [87]
His mother cried, but his father did not mind at all – he actually laughed.
‘He’ll be a good Bursch – a good Bursch,’ he said sometimes.
‘But really, dear,’ his mother complained, ‘not a day passes without his coming home with a bruise, and the other day he came back with his nose bleeding.’
‘What kind of a child would he be if he never made his nose bleed – or someone else’s?’ his father said with a laugh.
His mother would burst into tears, but after a little while she would sit down at the piano and forget her troubles over Herz, her tears dropping on the keys. But soon Andrey came back or was brought home, and he began recounting his adventures so vividly and with such animation that he would make her laugh; and he was so quick too! Soon he was able to read Télémaque as well as she, and to play duets with her. Once he disappeared for a whole week. His mother cried her eyes out; his father did not seem to mind at all – he just walked in the garden smoking his pipe.
‘Now if Oblomov’s son had disappeared,’ he said in reply to his wife’s suggestion to go and look for him, ‘I’d have roused the whole village and the rural police, but Andrey will come back. He’s a good Bursch.’
Next morning Andrey was discovered sleeping peacefully in his bed. Under the bed lay a gun and a pound of powder and shot.
‘Where have you been?’ His mother began firing questions at him. ‘Where did you get the gun? Why don’t you speak?’
‘Oh, nowhere!’ was all he would say.
His father asked whether he had prepared the translation of Cornelius Nepos into German. ‘No,’ he replied.
His father took him by the collar, led him out of the gate, put his cap on his head and gave him such a kick from behind that he fell down.
‘Go back to where you’ve come from,’ he added, ‘and come back with a translation of two chapters instead of one, and learn the part from the French comedy for your mother – don’t show yourself until you have done it.’ Andrey returned in a week, bringing the translation and having learnt the part.
When he grew older, his father took him in the trap with him, gave him the reins, and told him to drive to the factory, then to the fields, and to the town, to the shops and to the Government offices, or to have a look at some special clay which he took in his fingers, sniffed, sometimes licked, and gave to his son to sniff, explaining what kind of clay it was and what it was good for. Or they would go to see how potash or tar was made or how lard was refined.
At fourteen or fifteen the boy went by himself in a trap or on horseback with a bag strapped to the saddle to carry out some commission for his father in the town, and he never forgot, or misinterpreted, or overlooked or missed anything.
‘Recht gut, mein lieber Junge!’ his father said, after hearing his report, patting him on the shoulder with his large hand, and gave him two or three roubles, according to the importance of the commission.
His mother spent a long time afterwards washing the soot, dirt, clay, and oil off her darling. She was not altogether pleased with this business-like, practical education. She was afraid that her son would become the same kind of middle-class business man as his father’s people. She regarded the whole German nation as a crowd of patented middle-class tradesmen, and she disliked the coarseness, independence, and self-conceit with which the German masses everywhere asserted the civic rights they had acquired in the course of centuries, just like a cow that always carries her horns about with her and