by Maxim Gorky
“Go home, Nilovna! Go on, Mother! You’re worn out!” said Sizov loudly.
He was pale, his beard was dishevelled and shaking. Suddenly, knitting his brows, he cast a stern gaze over everyone, straightened his entire body and said distinctly:
“My son Matvei was crushed at the factory, you know that. But if he’d been alive, I’d have sent him to join their ranks myself, I’d have said: ‘You go too, Matvei! Go on, it’s right, it’s the honest thing to do!’”
He broke off, fell silent, and all were gloomily silent, powerfully gripped by something huge, new, but no longer frightening for them. Sizov raised a hand, shook it and continued:
“This is an old man talking – you know me! I’ve worked here for thirty-nine years, and I’ve lived on this earth for fifty-three. My nephew, an innocent boy, a good lad, has been taken away again today. He was marching at the front too, next to Vlasov, right by the banner…”
He flapped an arm, sank into himself and, taking the mother’s hand, said:
“This woman spoke the truth. Our children want to live according to honour and reason, and we went and abandoned them, we left, yes! Go, Nilovna…”
“My dear ones!” she said, casting her tear-stained eyes over all of them. “Life is for the children, the earth is for them!…”
“Go, Nilovna. Here, take the pole,” said Sizov, handing her the fragment of the staff.
The mother was watched with sadness, with respect, and a hum of sympathy followed her. Sizov silently moved people aside from her path, they made way and, obedient to some obscure force that drew them after the mother, unhurriedly went after her, exchanging brief words in low voices.
By the gates of her house, leaning on the fragment of the banner, she turned to them, bowed and, gratefully, quietly, said:
“Thank you…”
And once again remembering her idea, the new idea to which, as it seemed to her, her heart had given birth, she said:
“Our Lord Jesus Christ wouldn’t exist if people hadn’t died for His glory…”
The crowd looked at her in silence.
She bowed to the people again and went into her house, and Sizov, bowing his head, went in with her.
The people stood by the gates talking about something.
And they dispersed without haste.
Part Two
I
The rest of the day passed in a mottled mist of memories and a deep weariness that enveloped body and soul. There was the bobbing grey shape of the little officer, Pavel’s gleaming bronze face and Andrei’s smiling eyes.
She walked around the room, sat down by the window, looked into the street, then walked around again with a raised eyebrow, shuddering, gazing about and, devoid of thought, searching for something. She drank water without slaking her thirst and could not extinguish the hot smouldering of anguish and hurt in her breast. The day had been chopped in two – in its beginning there had been substance, but now everything had leaked out of it, and extending before her was a doleful wasteland, and there flickered the perplexing question:
“What now?…”
Korsunova came. She waved her arms around, shouted, cried and went into raptures, stamped her feet, made suggestions and promises, threatened someone. None of it touched the mother.
She heard Maria’s strident voice: “Aha! How they’ve offended the people, though! The factory’s risen up – the whole of it’s risen up!”
“Yes, yes!” the mother said quietly, nodding her head, but her eyes were motionless, scrutinizing what had already become the past and, along with Andrei and Pavel, had left her. She could not cry: her heart had contracted, gone dry, her lips had gone dry too and there was a shortage of moisture in her mouth. Her hands were shaking, and the skin on her back was aquiver with little tremors.
In the evening the gendarmes came. She received them without surprise, without fear. They came in noisily, and there was something cheerful and contented about them. Baring his teeth, the yellow-faced officer said:
“Well then, how are you? We meet for a third time, yes?”
She was silent, passing her dry tongue over her lips. The officer talked a lot, sermonizing, and she sensed he was enjoying talking. But his words did not get through to her, did not disturb her. Only when he said: “You yourself are to blame, Mother, if you didn’t know how to instil respect for God and the Tsar in your son…” – only then did she reply in a muffled voice, standing by the door and not looking at him:
“Yes, our children are our judges. They will rightly condemn us for abandoning them on such a road.”
“What?” cried the officer. “Louder!”
“I’m saying the children are the judges!” she repeated with a sigh.
Then he started talking about something rapidly and angrily, but his words circled around without touching her.
Maria Korsunova was one of the witnesses. She stood next to the mother, but did not look at her, and whenever the officer turned to her with some question or other, with a low bow she hurriedly replied in a monotonous way:
“I don’t know, Your Honour! I’m an uneducated woman, engaged in trade, and in my stupidity I don’t know anything…”
“Be quiet, then!” the officer ordered, with his moustache twitching. She bowed and, thumbing her nose at him unnoticed, whispered to the mother:
“He can get stuffed!”
She was ordered to search Vlasova. She began blinking her eyes and goggled at the officer, saying in fright:
“Your Honour, I don’t know how to do that!”
He stamped his foot and shouted. Maria lowered her eyes and said to the mother quietly:
“All right – undo your buttons, Pelageya Nilovna…”
Rummaging and groping around inside her dress, with a bloodshot face she whispered:
“Ooh, the dogs, eh?”
“Are you saying something there?” cried the officer sternly, glancing into the corner where she was conducting the search.
“About women’s stuff, Your Honour!” Maria mumbled in fright.
When he ordered the mother to sign the record of proceedings, with her unskilled hand she inscribed on the paper in boldly shining, printed letters:
“Working man’s widow Pelageya Vlasova.”
“What have you written? What’s that for?” the officer exclaimed, pulling a fastidious face, and then with a smirk said: “Savages…”
They went away. The mother stood by the window with her arms crossed over her chest and, unblinking, yet seeing nothing, spent a long time gazing into space with raised eyebrows, compressing her lips and clenching her jaws so tight that she soon felt a pain in her teeth. The paraffin had burnt away in the lamp, and the flame, with a crackle, was going out. She blew on it and was left in darkness. A dark cloud of dreary thoughtlessness filled her breast, hampering the beating of her heart. She stood for a long time, and her legs and eyes grew tired. She heard Maria stop by the window and shout in a drunken voice:
“Pelageya! You asleep? My unhappy martyr, you sleep!”
The mother went to bed without undressing and, as though having fallen into deep water, sank into restless sleep.
She dreamt of the yellow, sandy barrow beyond the marsh on the way to town. At its edge, above the precipice that descended to the pits they took sand from, stood Pavel, quietly and sonorously singing in Andrei’s voice:
“Stand up now, arise, working people…”
She was walking down the road past the barrow and, with the palm of her hand resting on her forehead, was looking at her son. Against the background of the blue sky his figure was outlined distinctly and sharply. She felt too ashamed to approach him, because she was pregnant. And she also had a child in her arms. She carried on walking. Some children were playing ball in a field – there were a lot of them – and the ball was red. The child reached towards them fr
om her arms and noisily burst out crying. She offered her breast to him and turned back, but now there were soldiers standing on the barrow, pointing their bayonets at her. She ran quickly towards the church that stood in the middle of the field, towards the white, light church, built, as it seemed, of clouds and immeasurably tall. Someone’s funeral was taking place there, and the coffin was large and black, and its lid tightly shut. But the priest and the deacon were walking around the church in white chasubles singing:
“Christ is risen from the dead…”
The deacon was censing, bowing to her and smiling; his hair was bright red and his face cheerful, like Samoilov’s. From above, from the cupola, fell rays of sunlight as wide as towels. In both choir places boys were quietly singing:
“Christ is risen from the dead…”
“Take them!” the priest suddenly cried, stopping in the middle of the church. His chasuble vanished, and on his face there appeared stern grey whiskers. Everyone started to flee, and the deacon ran off, tossing his censer aside and holding his head in his hands, like the Ukrainian. The mother dropped the child onto the floor under people’s feet, and they ran around him, glancing back fearfully at the little naked body, while she fell to her knees and cried to them:
“Don’t abandon the child! Take him…”
“Christ is risen from the dead…”
sang the Ukrainian, with his hands behind his back and smiling.
She bent down, picked the child up and sat him on a cart loaded with planks, walking slowly beside which was Nikolai, who was chuckling and saying:
“They’ve given me a difficult job…”
The street was dirty, and people were poking their heads out of the windows of the houses, whistling, shouting and waving their arms. The day was clear, and the sun was burning brightly, but there were no shadows anywhere.
“Sing, nenko!” said the Ukrainian. “That’s the way life is!”
And he sang, drowning every sound with his voice. The mother was walking behind him; suddenly she stumbled, flying quickly into bottomless depths, and those depths howled fearfully to greet her…
She woke up in the grip of trembling. It was as if someone’s heavy, horny hand had seized her heart and were gently squeezing it in malicious play. The call to work was droning insistently, and she determined that this was already the second one. Books and clothing were lying about the room in disorder, everything had been displaced and turned upside down, and the floor was covered in footprints.
She got up and, without washing and without praying to God, started tidying the room. Her eye was caught in the kitchen by a stick with a piece of red calico; she took it in her hands with hostility and meant to shove it under the stove, but with a sigh she removed the scrap of banner from it, carefully folded the shred of red cloth and put it into her pocket, while the stick she snapped in two over her knee and threw onto the hearth. Then she washed the windows and floor with cold water, put the samovar on and got dressed. She sat down in the kitchen by the window, and once again the question stood before her:
“What’s to be done now?”
Remembering she had yet to say her prayers, she went and stood in front of the icons, and then, after standing for a few seconds, sat down again – her heart was empty.
It was strangely quiet, as if the people who yesterday had been shouting so much in the street had today hidden in their houses, thinking in silence about that unusual day.
Suddenly she recalled a picture she had once seen in the days of her youth: in the old park belonging to some landowners, the Zausailovs, there was a big pond, densely covered in water lilies. On a grey day in autumn she had been walking past the pond and had caught sight of a boat in the middle of it. The pond had been dark and calm, and the boat might have been glued to the black water, sadly adorned with yellow leaves. There had been an air of deep sorrow and mysterious grief about that boat without rower or oars, solitary and motionless on the matt water amidst the dead leaves. The mother had stood for a long time on the bank of the pond then, thinking – who was it that had pushed the boat away from the bank and why? That evening it had been learnt that the wife of the Zausailovs’ bailiff – a small woman with always tousled black hair and a rapid step – had drowned herself in the pond.
The mother drew her hand across her face, and her thoughts began drifting timidly over her impressions of the previous day. She sat in their grip for a long time, with her eyes fixed on a cold cup of tea and the desire flaring up in her soul to see someone wise and straightforward, and to ask them about many things.
And as if in response to her desire, after dinner Nikolai Ivanovich appeared. But when she saw him, alarm suddenly took hold of her and, without answering his greeting, she began saying quietly:
“Oh, my dear man, you’ve made a mistake coming here! It’s incautious! You’ll be seized, you know, if they see you…”
Shaking her hand firmly, he adjusted his glasses and, bending his face down close to her, explained in urgent speech:
“I arranged with Pavel and Andrei, you see, that if they were arrested I was to move you to town the very next day!” he said gently and anxiously. “Has there been a search here?”
“There has. They rummaged and groped around. Those people have no shame and no conscience!” she exclaimed.
“What do they need shame for?” said Nikolai with a shrug of the shoulders, and he began telling her why she had to live in town.
She listened amicably to the solicitous voice, looked at him with a pale smile and, without understanding his arguments, was surprised by her feeling of affectionate trust for this man.
“If Pasha wanted it,” she said, “and I won’t be in your way—”
He interrupted her:
“Don’t worry about that. I live alone, my sister comes just occasionally.”
“I’ll have to earn my keep,” she reflected out loud.
“A job’ll be found, if you want!” said Nikolai.
Already indissolubly merged for her with the concept of a job was her notion of the work of her son and Andrei and their comrades. She moved towards Nikolai and, looking him in the eye, asked:
“It will?”
“My home’s a small one, a bachelor’s…”
“I’m not talking about that, not about a job in the house!” she said quietly.
And she sighed sadly, stung by the fact that he had not understood her. With his short-sighted eyes smiling, he said pensively:
“Now, if during a visit to Pavel you were to try and find out from him the address of the peasants who were asking about a newspaper—”
“I know them!” she exclaimed joyfully. “I’ll find them and do everything you say. Who’s going to think I’m carrying forbidden things? I used to take them into the factory – glory to Thee, Lord!”
She suddenly had an urge to be going down roads somewhere, past forests and villages, with a knapsack over her shoulder and a stick in her hand.
“You get me onto that job, dear, please do!” she said. “I’ll go everywhere for you. Through every province, I’ll find every path! I’ll go winter and summer, to the very grave, a wandering pilgrim – is that such a bad lot for me?”
She grew sad when she saw herself as a homeless wanderer, begging for alms in the name of Christ at the windows of village huts.
Nikolai took her hand cautiously and stroked it with his warm one. Then, glancing at the clock, he said:
“We’ll talk about it later on!”
“My dear!” she exclaimed. “The children, the bits of our heart most dear to us, are giving up their freedom and their lives, perishing without pity for themselves – and what am I doing, a mother?”
Nikolai’s face turned pale, and quietly, looking at her with gentle attention, he said:
“You know, that’s the first time I’ve heard such words…”
“What can I say?” she asked with a sorrowful shake of the head, spreading her hands in a gesture of impotence. “If I had the words to talk about my maternal heart…”
She stood up, raised by the strength that was growing in her breast and intoxicating her head with an ardent onslaught of indignant words:
“Many would burst into tears… Even the wicked and brazen…”
Nikolai stood up too, and glanced at the clock once again.
“So it’s decided – you’ll move to my place in town?”
She nodded her head in silence.
“When? Make it soon!” he urged, and added gently: “I shall be anxious for you, truly!”
She glanced at him in surprise – what was she to him? With his head bowed and smiling in embarrassment, he stood before her, round-shouldered, short-sighted, dressed in a simple black jacket, and it was as if nothing he wore were his own…
“Do you have any money?” he asked, lowering his eyes.
“No!”
He quickly pulled a purse from his pocket, opened it and reached out to her.
“Here, please, take this…”
The mother involuntarily smiled and, shaking her head, remarked:
“Everything in a new way! And money has no value! Some people lose their souls for it, but for you it’s nothing special! As if you keep it on you as a favour to people…”
Nikolai laughed quietly.
“It’s a terribly inconvenient and unpleasant thing, money! It’s always awkward both to take and to give it…”
He took her hand, squeezed it firmly and urged her once again:
“So, make it soon!”
And, quiet as ever, he left.
After seeing him out, she thought:
“So kind – but didn’t say a thing to comfort me…”
And she could not make out whether she found this unpleasant or merely surprising.
II
She was ready to go to him on the fourth day after his visit. When the cart with her two chests drove out of the settlement into open country, she suddenly felt, as she looked back, that she was abandoning for good the place where a dark and difficult spell of her life had passed and where another one had begun, full of new grief and also of joy that quickly swallowed up the days.