Childhood, Boyhood, Youth (Penguin ed.)

by Leo Tolstoy

  I was overwhelmed and started to cry.

  FOUR

  Lessons

  Karl Ivanych was extremely put out. It was apparent from his scowl and the way he threw his tailcoat into a drawer of his chest and angrily tied the belt of his dressing gown and made a deep mark in the dialogue book with his fingernail to show how far we were to memorize. Volodya studied well enough, but I was so upset that I could do absolutely nothing. I stared blankly at the book of dialogues, but couldn’t read it because of the tears welling in my eyes at the thought of our imminent departure. When it was time to recite the dialogues to Karl Ivanych, who listened to them with narrowed eyes (a bad sign), I couldn’t hold back my tears any longer, and at the point where one of the people asks, ‘Wo kommen sie her?’ and the other replies, ‘Ich komme vom Kaffeehaus,’ I started sobbing and couldn’t say the words, ‘Haben Sie die Zeitung nicht gelesen?’13 When it was time for penmanship, I made so many smudges from the tears falling on the paper that it was as if I had been writing with water on wrapping paper.

  Karl Ivanych lost his temper, ordered me to kneel, kept repeating that it was obstinacy and a puppet show (a favourite expression of his), threatened me with his ruler, and insisted that I apologize, although from sobbing I couldn’t utter a word. No doubt realizing in the end how unfair he was being, he went into Nikolay’s room and slammed the door behind him.

  Their conversation could be heard from the classroom.

  ‘Did you know that the children were going to Moscow, Nikolay?’ Karl Ivanych asked as he entered the room.

  ‘Well, of course I did, sir.’

  Nikolay must have meant to get up, because Karl Ivanych said, ‘Sit, Nikolay,’ and shut the door all the way. I went over to it from my corner to listen.

  ‘However much good you do for people and however devoted you are, it seems that gratitude isn’t to be expected, Nikolay,’ Karl Ivanych said with feeling.

  Sitting next to the window, repairing a boot, Nikolay nodded affirmatively.14

  ‘I’ve lived in this house for twelve years, Nikolay, and I can say before God,’ Karl Ivanych went on, raising his eyes and snuffbox to the ceiling, ‘that I’ve loved them and looked after them better than if they had been my own children. You remember, Nikolay, when Volodenka had a fever and I sat by his bedside for nine days without shutting my eyes. Then it was “dear, kind Karl Ivanych”, then I was needed, but now,’ he added with a derisive grin, ‘now the “children are grown and it’s time for serious study”. As if they haven’t been studying here, Nikolay?’

  ‘Well, certainly they have, I think,’ Nikolay replied, inserting the awl and pulling the waxed twine through with both hands.

  ‘Yes, but now I’m no longer needed, now it’s time to send me away, and where are the promises? Where’s the gratitude? I respect and love Natalya Nikolayevna,’ he said, placing his hand over his heart, ‘but what can she do? Nobody in this house cares what she wants,’ he added, hurling a piece of leather onto the floor for emphasis. ‘I know who’s behind it and why I’m no longer needed; it’s because I don’t flatter and make allowances for everything, the way some people do. It’s always been my way to speak the truth to everyone,’ he said proudly. ‘So be it, then! They won’t get rich from my going, and with God’s help I’ll find a crust of bread somewhere. Isn’t that right, Nikolay?’

  Nikolay looked up and gazed at Karl Ivanych, as if wishing to reassure himself that the teacher would indeed be able to find a crust of bread, but said nothing.

  Karl Ivanych went on for quite a while in the same spirit: he talked about how there had been more appreciation for his services at a certain general’s where he had lived before (it hurt me very much to hear that), and he talked about Saxony and his parents and his friend the tailor Schönheit, and so on and so forth.

  I sympathized with his bitterness, and it distressed me, too, that Father and Karl Ivanych, whom I loved almost equally, didn’t understand each other. I returned to the corner, sat back down on my heels and thought about how to restore the accord between them.

  Returning to the classroom, Karl Ivanych ordered me to stand up and prepare my exercise book for dictation. When we were ready, he fell majestically back into his armchair and in a voice that seemed to come deep from within began to dictate the following: ‘Von al-len Lei-den-schaf-ten die grau-samste ist … Haben Sie geschrieben?’ He stopped there, slowly took some snuff and then resumed with greater emphasis, ‘Die grausamste ist die Un-dank-bar-keit … Ein grosses U.’15 After writing the last word, I looked up, expecting him to go on.

  ‘Punctum,’16 he said with a barely visible little smile, and then gestured for us to turn in our exercise books.

  Several times with various intonations and a look of immense gratification, he repeated that expression which had put his heartfelt thought into words. Then he assigned a history lesson and sat down by the window. His face was no longer grim; rather, it expressed the satisfaction of someone who had properly avenged a wrong.

  It was a quarter to one, but Karl Ivanych apparently still had no idea of letting us go and kept assigning new lessons. The tedium and hunger increased in equal measure. With great impatience I followed all the signs of dinner’s approach. A maidservant with a handful of bast went out to wash some plates. The noise of banging dishes could be heard in the pantry, as could the sound of the table being extended and the chairs being placed around it. Mimi and Lyubochka and Katenka (Katenka was Mimi’s twelve-year-old daughter) had returned from the garden, but Foka was still nowhere to be seen – the butler Foka, who always came to announce that dinner was ready. Only then could we abandon our books and, paying no attention to Karl Ivanych, run downstairs.

  Then footsteps were heard on the stairs, only it wasn’t Foka! I had learned his tread and could always recognize the squeak of his boots. And then the door opened, revealing a figure completely unfamiliar to me.

  FIVE

  The Holy Fool

  Into the room came a man of about fifty with a long, pale, pockmarked face, stringy grey hair and a wispy red beard. He was so tall that to enter the doorway he had not only to lower his head but bend his whole body. He was dressed in a ragged garment that resembled both a peasant caftan and a cassock. In his hand he held an enormous staff. Once inside the room, he banged the staff on the floor with all his might and then, scowling and opening his mouth extraordinarily wide, he guffawed in a most terrifying and unnatural way. He was blind in one eye, and its white pupil constantly leapt about, imparting to his already ugly face an even more repellent expression.

  ‘Aha! Caught!’ he yelled and, running with little steps over to Volodya, he seized his head and carefully examined its crown, and then with a completely serious expression he moved away from him to the table and started blowing under the oilcloth and making the sign of the cross over it. ‘Oh-oh, what a pity! Oh-oh, how sad! The dears will fly away,’ he began in a sobbing voice, while gazing at Volodya with feeling and then wiping with his sleeve the tears that really were falling from his eyes.

  His voice was gruff and hoarse, his movements hurried and jerky, and his speech nonsensical and disjointed (he almost never used pronouns), but his intonation was so moving, and his ugly yellow face sometimes had such a sincerely mournful expression, that listening to him it was impossible not to feel a mixture of pity, fear and sadness.

  It was the holy fool17 and wanderer, Grisha.

  Where was he from? Who were his parents? What had prompted him to choose the itinerant life he led? No one could say. I know only that he had from the age of fifteen become well known as a holy fool who went barefoot winter and summer, visited monasteries, gave little icons to those he liked and spoke cryptic words that some people regarded as prophetic; that no one had ever seen him in any other guise; that from time to time he had visited Grandmother’s; and that some claimed he was the unhappy son of rich parents and a pure soul, while others said he was just a peasant layabout
.

  The long-desired but punctual Foka at last appeared and we went downstairs. Sobbing and continuing to talk nonsense of one kind or another, Grisha followed behind, banging his staff on each step of the stairs. Papa and maman were walking around the drawing room, arm in arm, and quietly talking about something. Marya Ivanovna was primly sitting in one of the armchairs placed symmetrically at right angles to the sofa and in a severe but restrained tone admonishing the girls, who were on the sofa next to her. As soon as Karl Ivanych came into the room, she glanced at him, then instantly looked away and assumed an expression that conveyed something like ‘You’re beneath notice, Karl Ivanych.’ It was clear from the way the girls were looking at us that they wanted to share some very important news as soon as possible, but jumping up from their places and coming over to us would have been against Mimi’s rules. We first had to go over to her and say, ‘Bonjour, Mimi!’ with a click of our heels, after which conversation might begin. What an intolerable person that Mimi was! Around her you couldn’t talk about anything; she found it all improper. Moreover, she would constantly pester you with ‘Parlez donc français,’18 and, as if from spite, always just when you felt like chattering away in Russian. Or at dinner when you were just starting to enjoy something and didn’t want to be distracted, she would invariably say, ‘Mangez donc avec du pain,’ or ‘Comment est-ce que vous tenez votre fourchette?’19 ‘What business of hers are we?’ you would think. ‘Let her teach the girls! We have Karl Ivanych for that.’ I fully shared his loathing for some people.

  ‘Ask your mama for them to take us hunting, too,’ Katenka whispered, stopping me by holding onto my jacket after the grown-ups had gone ahead into the dining room.

  ‘All right, we’ll try.’

  Grisha ate in the dining room, but at a special little table. He kept his eyes on his plate, sighing from time to time and making dreadful faces and saying, as if to himself, ‘What a pity! Flown away … The dove will fly away to heaven … Oh, there’s a stone on the grave …,’ and so forth.

  Maman had been upset since morning, and Grisha’s presence, words and actions noticeably aggravated that state.

  ‘Oh yes, there’s something I meant to ask you,’ she said, handing Father a bowl of soup.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Tell them, please, to lock up their awful dogs. They almost bit poor Grisha as he was crossing the yard. They could go after the children, too.’

  Hearing that the talk was about him, Grisha turned towards the table and started showing the torn skirts of his garment, and repeating as he chewed, ‘Wanted them to bite … God wouldn’t let. A sin to set dogs! A great sin! Don’t beat, boss,20 why beat? God forgives … Times are different.’

  ‘What’s he talking about?’ Papa asked, giving him a hard, searching look. ‘I don’t understand a word of it.’

  ‘Well, I do,’ maman answered. ‘He told me a hunter had set the dogs on him on purpose, so he’s saying, “He wanted them to bite me, but God wouldn’t allow it,” and he’s asking you not to punish the man for it.’

  ‘Hah! So that’s it!’ Papa said. ‘Why does he think I want to punish the man? You know I’m not very fond of these fellows,’ he continued in French, ‘but I especially don’t like this one, and he must be –’

  ‘Oh, don’t say that, my dear,’ maman stopped him, as if frightened of something. ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I think I’ve had occasion to study the species – enough of them come by here to see you – and they’re all of the same cut. It’s always the same story …’

  It was clear that Mama had an entirely different view of the matter, but didn’t want to argue.

  ‘Please pass me a pasty,’ she said. ‘They’re good today, aren’t they?’

  ‘No, it makes me angry,’ Papa went on, picking up a pasty, but holding it too far away for maman to reach. ‘It makes me angry to see clever, educated people allowing themselves to be duped.’

  And he rapped the table with his fork.

  ‘I asked you to pass me a pasty,’ she repeated, holding out her hand.

  ‘And it’s quite right,’ Papa continued, moving his hand away, ‘to turn them over to the police. All they’re good for is upsetting the already weak nerves of certain persons,’ he added, finally handing Mama the pasty with a smile, when he realized that she didn’t care for the conversation at all.

  ‘I’ll say just one thing to you about that: it’s hard to believe that someone who despite being sixty years old goes around barefoot winter and summer, and without ever removing them wears seventy pounds of chains under his clothes, and has more than once refused offers of a quiet life with everything taken care of – it’s hard to believe that such a person is doing all that merely from laziness. As for his prophecies,’ she added with a sigh, after a brief pause, ‘je suis payée pour y croire.21 I think I’ve mentioned how Kiryusha foretold my own late papa’s death to the very day and hour.’

  ‘Oh no, what have you done?!’ Papa said with a grin, and brought his hand to his face on the side where Mimi was sitting. (Whenever he did that, I always listened with particular attention, expecting something funny.) ‘Why did you remind me of his feet? I just looked at them and now I can’t eat any more!’

  Dinner was nearly over. Lyubochka and Katenka kept winking at us and fidgeting in their chairs and generally showed extreme restlessness. The winking meant, ‘Why haven’t you asked them to take us hunting?’ I nudged Volodya with my elbow. Volodya nudged back and at last made up his mind. First in a hesitant and then in a fairly strong and loud voice he explained that since we had to leave today, we would like the girls to go hunting with us in the wagonette. After a brief consultation among the grown-ups, the question was decided in our favour and, what was even nicer, maman said that she would come too.

  SIX

  Preparations for the Hunt

  Yakov was called in during pastries and given orders regarding the wagonette, the dogs and our mounts – all in the greatest detail with every horse called by name. Volodya’s own horse was lame and Papa ordered a courser saddled for him. For some reason, the word ‘courser’ struck maman oddly: she decided that it must be some sort of savage beast that would surely bolt and kill Volodya. Despite Papa’s and Volodya’s reassurances, Volodya remarking with splendid pluck that it was nothing and that he actually liked it when horses bolted, poor maman continued to say that it would be a torment to her the whole outing.

  Dinner was over, the grown-ups retired to the study for coffee, and we ran out to the garden to scrape our feet along the paths covered with fallen yellow leaves and talk. We talked about Volodya’s riding a courser, about what a shame it was that Lyubochka couldn’t run as fast as Katenka, about how interesting it would be to see Grisha’s chains, and so on, but not a word about parting. Our conversation was interrupted by the clatter of the approaching wagonette with servant boys sitting alongside each spring. Behind the wagonette came the hunters with the dogs, and behind the hunters, on the horse meant for Volodya, rode Ignat the coachman, leading my ancient Klepper by its reins.22 First we ran over to the fence, where all those interesting things could be seen, and then, with squeals and pounding feet, we raced upstairs to dress, and dress to look as much like hunters as possible. One of the main ways of doing that was to tuck your trousers into your boots. We set about doing this as quickly as possible, hurrying to finish and run out onto the front steps to enjoy the sight of the dogs and the horses and conversation with the hunters.

  The day was hot. Whimsically shaped white storm clouds had been on the horizon all morning. Then a light breeze started to drive them closer and closer, so that they covered the sun from time to time. Yet however much the clouds shifted and darkened it was obvious that they wouldn’t, in the end, gather into a storm and spoil our pleasure. Later in the afternoon they started to disperse: some turned pale, grew elongated and sped off towards the horizon, while others right overhead turned into tr
anslucent white scales, with only one large black storm cloud coming to rest in the east. Karl Ivanych always knew which way storm clouds would go. He announced that this one would proceed in the direction of Maslovka, that there would be no rain and that the weather would be superb.

  Despite his advanced years, Foka ran down the steps with great nimbleness and speed and cried, ‘Drive up!’ and then with his feet wide in the stance of someone who didn’t need to be told his duties, he took a position by the entrance, midway between the steps and the place where the coachman was to bring the wagonette. The ladies came down and after a brief fuss about who would sit on which side and who would hold on to whom (although it didn’t seem necessary to me to hold on at all), they took their seats, opened their parasols and set off. As the wagonette began to move maman pointed at the courser and asked the coachman in a tremulous voice, ‘Is that the one for Vladimir Petrovich?’

  When the coachman confirmed that it was, she waved her hand and looked away. I was eager to start. Climbing onto my own little horse, I took aim between its ears and made several turns about the yard.

  ‘Kindly don’t trample the dogs, sir,’ one of the hunters said.

  ‘Have no fear, this isn’t my first time out,’ I proudly replied.

  Despite his determined character, Volodya mounted his courser with some trepidation and, stroking it, asked several times, ‘Is it gentle?’

  But he looked very fine on horseback, just like a grown-up. His tightly clad thighs lay upon the saddle so well that it made me envious, especially since I was, judging by my own shadow, far from having such an excellent appearance.

  Then Papa’s feet were heard on the steps. A whipper-in rounded up the hounds that had wandered off, and the hunters with the Borzois called their dogs over and began to mount up. A groom led a horse up to the front steps. The dogs in Papa’s pack, which had been lying nearby in various picturesque poses, rushed over to him. Behind him happily loped Milka in a beaded collar with a short, jingling chain. She always greeted the kennel dogs when she came out, playing with some, sniffing and growling at others and looking for fleas on a few.