by Maxim Gorky
It was him, wet, and panting wearily.
“Aha! The good old samovar?” he exclaimed. “That’s the best thing in life, Mamasha! You’re here already, Sashenka?”
Filling the little kitchen with the noise of his wheezing, he slowly dragged his coat off and, without stopping, said:
“Here’s an unpleasant girl for the authorities, Mamasha! After mistreatment by the prison governor, she announced to him that she’d be starving herself to death if he didn’t apologize to her, and she didn’t eat for eight days, for which reason she all but turned up her toes. Not bad, eh? And how about my belly?”
Chattering away and holding up his outrageously sagging stomach with his short arms, he went through into the other room and closed the door behind him, but there too he carried on saying something.
“Did you really not eat for eight days?” asked the mother in surprise.
“He had to apologize to me!” the girl replied, moving her shoulders about from the cold. Her serenity and stern insistence found a response in the mother’s soul that was somewhat akin to reproach.
“Upon my word!…” she thought, and then asked again: “And if you’d died?”
“What can you do?” the girl responded quietly. “He did apologize after all. People shouldn’t forgive mistreatment.”
“Ye-es,” the mother responded slowly. “But the likes of us have been mistreated all our lives…”
“I’ve unloaded!” announced Yegor, opening the door. “Is the good old samovar ready? Permit me to lug it in…”
He picked the samovar up and set off with it, saying:
“My daddy personally drank no fewer than twenty glasses of tea a day, and thus lived on this earth painlessly and peaceably for seventy-three years. He weighed eight poods* and was sexton in the village of Voskresenskoye…”
“You’re Father Ivan’s son?” exclaimed the mother.
“Precisely! And how is this fact known to you?”
“Why, I’m from Voskresenskoye!…”
“A fellow countrywoman? Which family would you be from?”
“Your neighbours’! I’m a Seryogin.”
“The daughter of lame Nil? A figure familiar to me, for more than once did he box my ears…”
They stood opposite one another, showering each other with questions and laughing. Sashenka looked at them with a smile and started brewing the tea. The clatter of the crockery brought the mother back to the present.
“Oh, excuse me, I got carried away talking! It’s ever so nice to see a fellow countryman…”
“I’m the one who should be excused for taking charge here! But it’s already gone ten, and I have a long way to go…”
“To go where? To town?” the mother asked in surprise.
“Yes.”
“What do you mean? It’s dark, wet – you’re tired! Spend the night here! Yegor Ivanovich can go to bed in the kitchen, and you and me here…”
“No, I ought to go!” the girl declared simply.
“Yes, fellow countrywoman, the young lady’s required to disappear. She’s known round here. And if she appears on the street tomorrow, that won’t be good!” Yegor declared.
“But how? Will she go alone?…”
“She will!” said Yegor with a grin.
The girl poured herself some tea, took a piece of rye bread, salted it and began to eat, gazing pensively at the mother.
“How is it you go walking about? You and Natasha? I wouldn’t go – it’s frightening!” said Vlasova.
“And she’s frightened too!” remarked Yegor. “Are you frightened, Sasha?”
“Of course!” the girl replied.
The mother glanced at her and at Yegor and then quietly exclaimed:
“How… stern you are!”
After drinking her tea, Sashenka silently shook Yegor’s hand and went into the kitchen, and the mother went out after her to see her off. In the kitchen Sashenka said:
“When you see Pavel Mikhailovich, give him my greetings! Please!”
And after taking hold of the door catch, she suddenly turned and asked in a low voice:
“May I give you a kiss?”
The mother silently embraced her and gave her an ardent kiss.
“Thank you!” the girl said quietly, and with a nod of the head she left.
Going back into the other room, the mother glanced anxiously out of the window. Wet flakes of snow were falling heavily in the darkness.
“And do you remember the Prozorovs?” Yegor asked.
He was sitting with his feet set wide apart and blowing loudly on his glass of tea. His face was red, sweaty and contented.
“I do, I do!” said the mother pensively, sidling up to the table. She sat down and, gazing at Yegor with sad eyes, drawled out slowly: “Dear, oh dear! Sashenka, how’s she going to get there?”
“She’ll be tired!” Yegor agreed. “Prison’s shaken her badly; the girl used to be stronger… What’s more, she had a gentle upbringing… She seems to have ruined her lungs already…”
“Who is she?” the mother enquired quietly.
“The daughter of a landowner. Her father’s a great scoundrel, so she says. Are you aware, Mamasha, that they want to get married?”
“Who?”
“She and Pavel… But they can never manage it – he’s at large while she’s in prison, and vice versa!”
“I didn’t know that!” the mother replied after a pause. “Pasha never says anything about himself…”
Now she felt even sorrier for the girl and, glancing at her guest with involuntary aversion, she said:
“You should be seeing her back!…”
“I can’t!” Yegor replied calmly. “I’ve got a heap of things to do here, and I’m going to have to be on my feet all the time from early morning. An unappealing business, with my breathlessness…”
“She’s a good girl,” the mother said vaguely, thinking about what Yegor had told her. She was hurt to have heard it not from her son, but from an outsider, and she pursed her lips tight, dropping her brows low.
“She is!” Yegor nodded. “I can see you feel sorry for her. Which is wrong! You won’t have enough heart left if you start feeling sorry for all of us plotters. None of us has a very easy life, to tell the truth. A comrade of mine came back from exile just recently. As he was travelling through Nizhni, his wife and child were waiting for him in Smolensk, but when he arrived in Smolensk, they were already in a Moscow prison. Now it’s the wife’s turn to go to Siberia. I, too, used to have a wife, an excellent person, but five years of that sort of life drove her to an early grave…”
He drank down his glass of tea in one gulp and continued his story. He enumerated the years and months of imprisonment and exile, told of various misfortunes, of beatings in prison, of hunger in Siberia. The mother looked at him, listened and wondered at how simply and calmly he spoke about this life, full of suffering, persecution and people being mocked…
“But let’s talk about the matter in hand!”
His voice altered, and his face became more serious. He began asking her how she was thinking of carrying the booklets into the factory, and the mother wondered at his excellent knowledge of all sorts of minor details.
Once they had finished with that, they again started reminiscing about their native village; he made jokes, while she wandered pensively in her past, which seemed to her strangely like the marsh, monotonously dotted with tussocks and overgrown with slender, fearfully trembling aspens, small fir trees and silver birches, gone astray amongst the tussocks. The birches grew slowly, and after standing on the unsteady, rotten ground for half a dozen years, they fell and rotted. She looked at this picture, and felt unbearably regretful about something. Before her stood the figure of a girl with a sharp, stubborn face. Now she was walking amidst wet snowflakes, lonely and
tired. And her son was in prison. Perhaps he was still awake, thinking… But thinking not of her, his mother – he had someone who was dearer than her. Difficult thoughts crept up on her in a motley, jumbled storm cloud and gripped her heart in a firm embrace…
“You’re tired, Mamasha! Let’s go to bed!” said Yegor with a smile.
She said goodnight to him and sidled cautiously into the kitchen, carrying a caustic, bitter feeling away in her heart.
In the morning, over tea, Yegor asked her:
“And if you’re caught and asked where you got all these heretical booklets from, what will you say?”
“‘None of your business,’ I’ll say!” she replied.
“They won’t agree with that, not for anything!” Yegor objected. “They’re deeply convinced that their business is precisely what it is! And they’ll keep asking, zealously and for a long time!”
“And I won’t tell!”
“And you’ll go to prison!”
“What of it? Thank God – at least that’s something I’m good for!” she said with a sigh. “Who needs me? No one. And they won’t use torture, so they say…”
“Hm!” said Yegor, looking at her carefully. “Use torture they won’t. But a good person should look after themselves…”
“That won’t be a lesson from you!” the mother replied with a grin.
After a pause, Yegor paced around the room, then went up to her and said:
“It’s hard, fellow countrywoman! I can sense it’s really hard for you!”
“It’s hard for everyone!” she replied, waving a hand. “Maybe only for those who can understand – for them it’s a bit easier… But I can understand a little bit, too, about what good people want…”
“And if you can understand that, Mamasha, then they all need you – all of them!” Yegor said seriously.
She glanced at him and smiled in silence.
At noon, in a calm and businesslike way, she covered her chest with booklets, and did it so cleverly and comfortably that Yegor clicked his tongue in appreciation, declaring: “Sehr gut!”* as a good German says when he drinks a bucket of beer. “The literature hasn’t changed you, Mamasha: you’ve remained a kind, older woman, tall and plump. May innumerable gods bless your undertaking!…”
Half an hour later, bent by the weight of her burden, calm and confident, she stood by the factory gates. Two guards, irritated by the gibes of the workers, were rudely frisking and squabbling with all who were entering the yard. To one side stood a policeman and a thin-legged man with a red face and quick eyes. Shifting her yoke from shoulder to shoulder, the mother watched him from under her brows, sensing that this was a spy.
A tall, curly lad with his hat tilted onto the back of his head shouted at the guards who were searching him:
“Search inside our heads, you devils, not in our pockets!”
One of the guards replied:
“There’s nothing in your head but lice…”
“It’s lice you should be trying to catch, not mice!” the worker responded. The spy gave him a quick look and spat.
“You might let me through!” the mother pleaded. “You can see I’m someone with a burden, and my back’s breaking!”
“Go on, go on!” the guard cried angrily. “Having an argument as well…”
The mother reached her spot, set the pots down on the ground and, wiping the sweat from her face, looked around.
The Gusev brothers, metalworkers, came up to her straight away, and the elder, Vasily, asked loudly, knitting his brows:
“Got any pies?”
“I’ll bring some tomorrow!” she replied.
This was the agreed password. The brothers’ faces brightened. Ivan, unable to restrain himself, exclaimed:
“Amazing, Holy Mother…”
Vasily squatted down, peering into a pot, and at that same moment there was suddenly a sheaf of leaflets in his bosom.
“Ivan,” he said loudly, “we’re not going home, let’s get our dinner from her!” Meanwhile he was quickly stuffing booklets into the tops of his boots. “The new trader needs our support…”
“She does!” Ivan agreed, chuckling.
Looking around cautiously, the mother cried:
“Cabbage soup, hot noodle soup!”
And discreetly taking out the booklets, sheaf by sheaf, she thrust them into the brothers’ hands. Each time some books disappeared from her hands, the face of the gendarme officer would flare up before her in a yellow blot, like the light of a match in a dark room, and she would say to him in her mind with a sense of gloating:
“Take that, then, sir…”
Handing over the next sheaf, she would add contentedly:
“And that…”
Workers would come up with cups in their hands; when they were close, Ivan Gusev would start chuckling loudly, and Vlasova would calmly stop the handover, pouring out the cabbage or the noodle soup, while the Gusevs laughed at her:
“Nilovna’s working smoothly!”
“You’ll even go catching mice if needs be!” some stoker remarked morosely. “And they’ve snatched her breadwinner away. The swine! Come on, then, three copecks’ worth of noodle soup. Never mind, Mother! You’ll get by!”
“Thank you for the kind word!” She smiled at him.
Moving away, he growled in an aside:
“A kind word doesn’t cost me much…”
Vlasova cried:
“Hot food – cabbage soup, noodle soup, broth…”
And while she thought about how she would tell her son of her first experience, the yellow face of the officer, perplexed and angry, was forever there before her. Its black moustache stirred in dismay, and from beneath the upper lip, which was curled in irritation, shone the white ivory of firmly clenched teeth. Joy sang in her breast like a bird, her brows quivered slyly and, smoothly doing her job, she kept on repeating to herself:
“And take that too!…”
XVI
In the evening, when she was having some tea, from outside the window came the squelching of horses’ hooves in the mud, and a familiar voice rang out. She leapt up and rushed into the kitchen towards the door; someone was walking quickly through the lobby, everything started to spin before her eyes and, leaning against the doorpost, she gave the door a kick.
“Good evening, nenko,” came the familiar voice, and long, thin arms came to rest on her shoulders.
The anguish of disappointment flared up in her heart, as did joy at seeing Andrei. They flared up and blended into one big burning sensation; it enveloped her in a hot wave, enveloped and lifted her, and she buried her face in Andrei’s chest. He squeezed her tight with trembling arms, and in silence the mother quietly cried, while he stroked her hair and said, as if singing:
“Don’t cry, nenko, don’t weary your heart! I tell you honestly: they’ll release him soon! They have nothing against him, and the lads are all as silent as boiled fish…”
Putting an arm around the mother’s shoulders, he led her into the other room, and pressing up against him, she wiped the tears from her face with the quick gesture of a squirrel and swallowed his words down greedily with the whole of her breast.
“Pavel sends you his greetings, he’s as well and cheerful as he could possibly be. It’s cramped there! They got hold of more than a hundred people, ours and from town, and they’re three or four to a cell. The prison authorities are all right. They’re good people, and they’re tired – the damned gendarmes have given them so much work to do! So they aren’t very strict in their commands, the authorities, they just carry on saying: ‘Keep things quiet, gentlemen, don’t put us in a spot!’ Well, and everything’s going all right. People talk, pass books on to one another, share food. It’s a good prison! It’s old and dirty, but it’s kind of soft and easy. The criminals are a fine bunch too – they help us a
lot. They’ve released me, Bukin and four others. They’ll soon release Pavel too – that’s for sure! Vesovshchikov will be inside longest of all: they’re really angry with him. He curses everyone tirelessly! The gendarmes can’t stand the sight of him. It’s quite possible he’ll be put on trial, or else one day he’ll be given a drubbing. Pavel tries to persuade him: ‘Stop it, Nikolai! They won’t be any better, will they, for your cursing them!’ But he growls: ‘I’m going to scratch them from the face of the earth like scabs!’ Pavel’s holding up well, steady and firm. He’ll be released soon, I tell you…”
“Soon!” said the mother, reassured and smiling gently. “Soon, I know!”
“That’s good, then, if you know! Well, pour me some tea; tell me how you’ve been.”
He looked at her, all smiles, so dear and fine, and in his round eyes shone a spark that was loving and a little sad.
“I love you very much, Andryusha!” said the mother with a deep sigh, scrutinizing his thin face, overgrown with funny little tufts of dark hair.
“A little’s enough for me. I know you love me – you can love everyone, you have a big heart!” said the Ukrainian, rocking on his chair.
“No, I love you especially!” she insisted. “If you had a mother, people would envy her for having such a son!…”
The Ukrainian shook his head and rubbed it hard with both hands.
“I have a mother somewhere too…” he said quietly.
“Do you know what I did today?” she exclaimed, and hurriedly, choking in her satisfaction and with a little embellishment, she recounted how she had carried the literature through into the factory.
He widened his eyes in surprise at first, then began chuckling and, shifting his feet around, drummed his fingers on his head and cried out joyously:
“Oho! Well, that’s no joke! That’s something worthwhile! Won’t Pavel be pleased, eh? That’s great, nenko! Both for Pavel and for everyone!”
He was clicking his fingers in delight, whistling, and his whole body was rocking and shining with joy, eliciting a strong, full echo in her.
“My dear Andryusha!” she began, as if her heart had opened and a stream of words full of quiet joy had come splashing and spurting out of it. “I’ve been thinking about my life, Lord Jesus Christ! I mean, what have I lived for? Beatings… work… I’ve seen nothing but my husband, known nothing but fear! And I never saw Pasha growing up, and whether I loved him when my husband was alive, I don’t know! All my worries, all my thoughts were about one thing – giving my beast nice, tasty food, pleasing him in good time so that he wouldn’t get sullen or frighten me with blows, so that he’d take pity on me just for once. I don’t remember him ever taking pity. He beat me as if it wasn’t his wife he was beating, but everyone he had a grudge against. I lived like that for twenty years, and what went on before my marriage I don’t remember! I try to, but, like a blind woman, I can’t see a thing! Yegor Ivanovich was here – we come from the same village – and he says this and that, and I remember the houses, I remember the people – but how the people lived, what they said, what happened to who – I’ve forgotten! I remember the fires, two fires. Everything’s evidently been beaten out of me, my soul’s been boarded up tight, it’s gone blind and can’t hear…”