by Maxim Gorky
The factory stretched out on soot-blackened earth like a huge, dark-red spider, with its chimneys raised high into the sky. Huddling up to it were the little one-storey houses of the workers. Grey and squashed, they crowded together in a tight little heap on the edge of the marsh and looked at one another dolefully with their dim little windows. Above them rose the church, dark-red too, matching the factory, but its bell tower was shorter than the factory chimneys.
The mother sighed and adjusted the collar of her cardigan, which was tight at her throat.
“Get along!” muttered the carrier, flapping the reins at his horse. He was a bowlegged man of indefinite age with sparse, faded hair on his face and head and colourless eyes. He walked alongside the cart, rocking from side to side, and it was clearly all the same to him where he went, to the right or to the left.
“Get along!” he said in a colourless voice, kicking out in a funny way with his crooked legs, shod in heavy boots caked in dry mud. The mother looked around. The fields were empty, like her soul…
Nodding its head dolefully, the horse drove its legs hard into deep, softly hissing sand, heated by the sun. The badly oiled, battered cart creaked, and all the noises, along with the dust, stayed behind…
Nikolai Ivanovich lived on a desolate street on the edge of town, in a little green wing built onto a dark, two-storey house, swollen by old age. In front of the wing was a dense patch of garden, and peeping in affectionately at the windows of the apartment’s three rooms were the branches of lilacs and acacias and the silvery leaves of young poplars. The rooms were quiet and clean: patterned shadows trembled soundlessly on the floor; stretching along the walls there were shelves, tightly packed with books; and there were portraits hanging of some stern people or other.
“Will you be comfortable here?” asked Nikolai, leading the mother into a small room which had one window looking out onto the garden and another onto the yard, densely overgrown with grass. And in this room, too, all the walls were taken up by bookcases and bookshelves.
“I’d be better in the kitchen!” she said. “The kitchen’s nice and light and clean…”
He seemed to her to be alarmed about something. But when, in an awkward and embarrassed way, he started trying to dissuade her, and she agreed, he immediately cheered up.
All three rooms were filled with a special sort of air – breathing was easy and pleasant, but one’s voice involuntarily dropped, not wanting to speak too loudly and disturb the peaceful pensiveness of the people looking down raptly from the walls.
“The flowers need watering!” said the mother, feeling the soil in the flowerpots on the window sills.
“Yes, yes!” her host said guiltily. “I like them, you know, but there’s no time to look after them…”
Observing him, she saw that in his own cosy apartment, too, Nikolai walked carefully, detached and distant from everything surrounding him. He would bring his face right up close to whatever he was looking at and, adjusting his glasses with the slender fingers of his right hand, screw up his eyes, aiming a wordless question at the object that interested him. Sometimes he would pick something up in his hand, lift it up to his face and scan it thoroughly; it was as if he had come into the room along with the mother, so that for him, as for her, everything here was unfamiliar, unaccustomed. Seeing him like this, the mother immediately felt at home in these rooms. She followed Nikolai around, noting what stood where and asking about his routine, and he answered her in the guilty tone of a man aware he does everything wrong, but who knows no other way.
After watering the flowers and stacking the sheet music scattered on the piano into an orderly pile, she looked at the samovar and remarked:
“That needs cleaning…”
He drew his fingers over the dull metal, lifted a finger to his nose and looked at it seriously. The mother grinned affectionately.
When she went to bed and ran through her day, she lifted her head from the pillow in surprise and looked around. For the first time in all her life she was in a stranger’s house, and it did not make her feel inhibited. She thought about Nikolai solicitously and felt a desire to do everything as well as she could for him and to bring something affectionate and warming into his life. Her heart was touched by Nikolai’s awkwardness, his funny lack of know-how, his estrangement from the ordinary, and something wisely childlike in his light eyes. Then her thoughts fixed firmly on her son, and May Day unfolded before her again, all clothed in new sounds, inspired with new meaning. And the woe of that day was, like the day as a whole, peculiar – it did not bend her head to the ground, like the dull, stunning blow of a fist, but stung her heart with many a sharp prick and stirred up quiet rage in it, straightening her bent back.
“The children are marching through the world,” she thought, listening to the unfamiliar sounds of the nocturnal life of the town. They were creeping in through the open window, making the foliage in the garden rustle, flying in from afar, tired and pale, and dying quietly inside the room.
Early in the morning she cleaned the samovar, boiled it, noiselessly collected the crockery and, sitting in the kitchen, began waiting for Nikolai to wake up. His cough rang out, and he came through the door, holding his glasses in one hand and covering his throat with the other. After answering his greeting, she carried the samovar off into the other room, and he started washing, splashing the water onto the floor, dropping the soap and his toothbrush and snorting at himself.
Over tea Nikolai told her:
“I do a very sad job at the zemstvo board,* observing the way our peasants go broke…”
And with a guilty smile he repeated:
“People sapped by hunger go to their graves prematurely, their children are born weak, they perish like flies in the autumn – we know all that, we know the reasons for the misfortune, and while we’re scrutinizing them, we’re paid a salary. And thereafter, properly speaking – nothing…”
“And what are you – a student?” she asked him.
“No, I’m a teacher. My father’s a factory manager in Vyatka, but I became a teacher. I began giving the peasants in the village books though, and for that I was put in prison. After prison I worked as an assistant in a bookshop, acted incautiously and ended up in prison again, and then I was exiled to Archangel. I had some unpleasantness with the governor there, too, and was dispatched to the White Sea coast, to a little village where I spent five years.”
In the light, sun-washed room, his speech sounded calm and equable. The mother had heard many such stories by now, but could never understand why people told them so calmly, treating them as something inevitable.
“My sister will be coming today!” he announced.
“Is she married?”
“Widowed. Her husband was exiled to Siberia, but escaped and died abroad two years ago of consumption.”
“Is she younger than you?”
“Six years older. I owe her a great deal. You just listen to the way she plays! That’s her piano… all in all there are lots of her things here, but the books are mine…”
“And where does she live?”
“Everywhere!” he answered with a smile. “Wherever someone bold is needed, there she is.”
“Doing the same work too?” the mother asked.
“Of course!” he said.
He soon left for the office, and the mother fell into thought about “the same work” that people were doing persistently and calmly from one day to the next. And she felt the same in the face of those people as she would have in the face of a mountain in the night-time.
At about midday, a lady in a black dress appeared, tall and shapely. When the mother opened the door to her, she dropped a little yellow suitcase onto the floor and, quickly seizing Vlasova’s hand, asked:
“You’re Pavel Mikhailovich’s Mama, yes?”
“Yes,” the mother replied, made to feel ill at ease by her rich
clothing.
“You’re just as I imagined you! My brother wrote that you’d be staying with him!” said the lady, taking off her hat in front of the mirror. “Pavel Mikhailovich and I have long been friends. He’s told me about you.”
Her voice was rather muffled, and she spoke slowly, but her movements were quick and strong. The smile of her big grey eyes was young and clear, but slender, radiant little lines were already shining on her temples, and above the little shells of her ears was the silvery gleam of grey hairs.
“I’m hungry!” she declared. “A cup of coffee would be nice just now…”
“I’ll make some right away!” the mother responded and, getting the coffee service out of a cupboard, asked quietly: “And did Pasha really talk about me?”
“A lot…”
She took out a small leather cigarette case, lit a cigarette and, pacing up and down the room, asked:
“Are you very afraid for him?”
Watching the blue tongues of fire from the spirit lamp flickering under the coffee pot, the mother smiled. Her unease before the lady had disappeared in the depths of her joy.
“So he talks about me, my dear one!” she thought, at the same time as she was slowly saying: “Of course, it’s hard, but it would have been worse before – now I know he’s not alone…”
And looking into the woman’s face, she asked her:
“And what’s your name?”
“Sofia!” the other replied.
The mother looked at her closely with a penetrating gaze. There was something flamboyant about this woman, too brash and hasty.
Sipping the coffee quickly, she said with confidence:
“The main thing is for none of them to be in prison long, for them all to be convicted quickly! And as soon as they’re exiled, we’ll arrange Pavel Mikhailovich’s escape straight away – he’s needed here.”
The mother glanced at Sofia mistrustfully, and she, after looking for a place to leave her cigarette butt, pushed it into the soil of a flower pot.
“That ruins the flowers!” the mother remarked automatically.
“Sorry!” said Sofia. “Nikolai’s always telling me that too!” And taking the butt out of the pot, she threw it out of the window.
The mother looked into her face in embarrassment and said guiltily:
“No, I’m sorry! I said it without thinking. Who am I to be instructing you?”
“And why not instruct me, if I’m a slattern?” Sofia responded with a shrug of the shoulders. “Is the coffee ready?* Thank you! But why the one cup? Aren’t you having any?”
And suddenly, taking the mother by the shoulders, drawing her towards her and looking into her eyes, she asked in surprise:
“You’re not feeling shy, are you?”
Smiling, the mother replied:
“I just spoke to you about the cigarette butt, and you ask if I’m feeling shy!”
And without concealing her surprise, she began, as if questioning:
“I came to your house just yesterday, but I’ve made myself at home; I’m not afraid of anything, I’m saying what I want…”
“And so you should!” Sofia exclaimed.
“My head’s spinning, and it’s as if I’m a stranger to myself,” the mother continued. “It used to be the way that you’d have to be around someone a long, long time before saying anything from the heart, but now your heart’s always open, and you say things straight away that you wouldn’t have thought of before…”
Sofia lit up another cigarette, illuminating the mother’s face gently and silently with her grey eyes.
“You say ‘arrange an escape’? But then how will he live as a fugitive?” the mother asked, posing the question that was worrying her.
“That’s unimportant!” Sofia replied, pouring herself some more coffee. “He’ll live as dozens of escapees do… I’ve just met a man and seen him off, a very valuable one too, and he was exiled for five years, but only actually lived in exile for three and a half months…”
The mother looked at her intently, smiled and, shaking her head, said quietly:
“No, it looks to have made a mess of me, that May Day! I feel awkward somehow, and it’s as if I’m walking down two roads at once: first I think I understand everything, then suddenly it’s like I’m in a fog. Right now I look at you, and you’re a fine lady and you’re doing this work… You know Pasha and you appreciate him, for which you have my thanks…”
“Well, it’s you should have my thanks!” Sofia laughed.
“Why me? I didn’t teach him all this!” said the mother with a sigh.
Sofia placed her cigarette butt on her saucer, gave a toss of her head and, with thick golden locks of hair spilling down her back, went away, saying:
“Well, it’s time I took all this splendour off…”
III
Nikolai appeared towards evening. They had dinner, and over dinner Sofia recounted, laughing, how she had met and hidden the man who had escaped from exile, how she had been afraid of spies, seeing them in everyone, and how funnily the fugitive had behaved. There was something in her tone that reminded the mother of the bragging of a worker who had done some difficult job well and was happy.
She was now dressed in a light, loose dress, the colour of steel. She seemed taller in this dress, and it was as if her eyes had darkened and her movements become more serene.
“You’re going to have to take on another job, Sofia,” began Nikolai after dinner. “You know we’ve planned a newspaper for the countryside, but the link with the people out there has been lost thanks to the latest arrests. Pelageya Nilovna’s the only one who can show us how to find the man who’s going to take on the distribution of the newspaper. You go there with her. It needs to be done soon.”
“Very well,” said Sofia, puffing at her cigarette. “Shall we go, Pelageya Nilovna?”
“All right, let’s…”
“Is it far?”
“Eighty versts or so…”
“Marvellous! And now I shall play a little. Can you put up with some music, Pelageya Nilovna?”
“Don’t ask me – act as though I’m not here!” said the mother, settling down in a corner of the sofa. She could see that the brother and sister did not seem to be paying her any attention, yet at the same time it turned out that, like it or not, at their imperceptible instigation she was constantly intruding in their conversation.
“Now listen, Nikolai! This is Grieg.* I brought it today… Shut the windows.”
She opened up the music and struck the keys lightly with her left hand. The singing of the strings began, lush and full. With a deep sigh, another note, rich in sound, flowed to join them. Ringing brightly from beneath the fingers of the right hand, there flew from the strings an anxious flock of strangely transparent cries which began to sway and beat like frightened birds against the dark background of the low notes.
At first the mother was untouched by these sounds; she heard in their flow only ringing chaos. Her ear was unable to catch the melody in the complex quivering of the mass of notes. Half-asleep, she watched Nikolai sitting with his legs folded beneath him at the other end of the long sofa, she scrutinized Sofia’s severe profile and her head, covered in a heavy mass of golden hair. At first a ray of sun cast a warm light onto Sofia’s head and shoulder, and then it fell onto the keys of the piano and began to quiver under the woman’s fingers, embracing them. The music was filling the room up ever more tightly and, imperceptibly for the mother, rousing her heart.
And for some reason, from the dark pit of the past there arose before her an injury long forgotten, but now coming back to life with bitter clarity.
One day her now deceased husband had come home from work late at night, very drunk, had grabbed her by the arm, thrown her from the bed onto the floor, kicked her in the side and said:
“Get out of h
ere, scum, I’m sick of you!”
To protect herself from his blows, she had quickly picked up their two-year-old son and, on her knees, used his body to cover her, like a shield. He had cried, struggling in her hands, frightened, naked and warm.
“Get out!” Mikhail had roared.
She had leapt to her feet, rushed into the kitchen, thrown a cardigan over her shoulders, wrapped the child in a shawl and, in silence, without cries or complaints, barefooted, in just her nightshirt with the cardigan on top of it, had set off down the street. It had been May, the night fresh, and the dust of the street had stuck coldly to her feet, getting right in between the toes. The child had cried and struggled. She had bared her breast, pressed her son up against her body and, driven by fear, had walked and walked down the street, singing a lullaby:
“Oh-oh-oh… oh-oh-oh!…”
But it had already been getting light, and she had felt fearful and ashamed, expecting someone to come out into the street and see her, half-naked. She had gone down towards the marsh and sat on the ground beneath a closely packed group of young aspens. And she had sat like that for a long time, embraced by the night, gazing motionless into the darkness with wide-open eyes and fearfully singing a lullaby to the now sleeping child and to her own injured heart…
“Oh-oh-oh… oh-oh-oh… oh-oh-oh!…”
At some point during the moments she had spent there, some kind of quiet black bird had flashed over her head as it flew into the distance, and this had roused her and got her up. Shivering with cold, she had set off for home to meet the customary horror of blows and fresh insults…
An echoing chord, indifferent and cold, sighed a final time, sighed and died away.
Sofia turned, asking her brother in a low voice:
“Did you like it?”
“Very much!” he said, giving a start, like someone being woken. “Very much…”