Great Russian Short Stories

by Unknown

  VI

  In the morning he set out to find Lesha. The boy met him at the gate and showed him where he lived. Lesha’s mother was drinking coffee and quarreling with her red-nosed lodger. This is what Saksaulov was able to learn about Lesha.

  His mother had died when he was three years old. His father had married this dark woman and had also died within the year. The dark woman, Irena Ivanovna, had a year-old child of her own. She was about to marry again. The wedding was to take place in a few days, and immediately afterwards they were to go into the “provinces.” Lesha was a stranger to her and in her way.

  “Give him to me,” Saksaulov suggested.

  “With pleasure,” Irena Ivanovna said with malicious joy. Then after a pause added, “Only you must pay me for his clothes.”

  And thus Lesha was installed in Saksaulov’s home. The Gorodishchev girl helped him to find a nurse and with the other details in connection with Lesha’s installment at the flat. For this purpose she had to visit Saksaulov’s home. Occupied thus she seemed quite a different being to Saksaulov. The door of her heart seemed to have opened to him. Her eyes became tender and radiant. Altogether she was permeated with the same gentleness that had emanated from Tamara.

  VII

  Lesha’s stories of his white mother touched Fedot and his wife. On Passion Saturday, when putting him to bed, they hung a white sugar egg at the end of his bed.

  “This is from your white mother,” Christine said. “But you mustn’t touch it, dear, until the Lord has risen and the bells are ringing.”

  Lesha lay down obediently. For a long time he stared at the lovely egg, then he fell asleep.

  And Saksaulov on this evening sat at home alone. About midnight an uncontrollable feeling of drowsiness closed his eyes and he was glad, because soon he would see Tamara. And she came, clothed in white, radiant, bringing with her the joyful distant sound of church bells. With a gentle smile she bent over him, and—unutterable joy!—Saksaulov felt a gentle touch on his lips. A gentle voice pronounced softly, “Christ has risen!”

  Without opening his eyes Saksaulov stretched out his arms and embraced a tender slim body. This was Lesha, who had climbed on to his knee to give him the Easter greeting.

  The church bells had wakened the boy. He had seized the white egg and run in to Saksaulov.

  Saksaulov awoke. Lesha laughed and held up his white egg.

  “White Mother has sent it,” he lisped; “I will give it you and you must give it to Auntie Valeria.”

  “Very well, dear, I will do as you say,” Saksaulov replied.

  He put Lesha to bed and then went to Valeria Michailovna with Lesha’s white egg, a present from the white mother. But it seemed to Saksaulov at the moment to be a present from Tamara.

  TWENTY-SIX MEN AND A GIRL

  Maxim Gorky

  WE WERE twenty-six men, twenty-six living machines cooped up in a dark hole of a basement where from morn till night we kneaded dough, making pretzels and cracknels. The windows of our basement faced a sunken area lined with bricks that were green with slime; the windows outside were encased in a close-set iron grating, and no ray of sunshine could reach us through the panes which were covered with meal. Our boss had fenced the windows off to prevent any of his bread going to beggars or to those of our comrades who were out of work and starving—our boss called us a bunch of rogues and gave us tainted tripe for dinner instead of meat....

  Stuffy and crowded was life in that stony dungeon beneath a low-hanging ceiling covered by soot and cobwebs. Life was hard and sickening within those thick walls smeared with dirt stains and mildew.... We got up at five in the morning, heavy with lack of sleep, and at six, dull and listless, we sat down to the table to make pretzels and cracknels out of the dough our comrades had prepared while we were sleeping. And all day long, from morning till ten o’clock at night some of us sat at the table kneading the stiff dough and swaying the body to fight numbness, while others were mixing flour and water. And all day long the simmering water in the cauldron where the pretzels were cooking gurgled pensively and sadly, and the baker’s shovel clattered angrily and swiftly on the hearthstone, throwing slippery cooked pieces of dough onto the hot bricks. From morning till night the wood burned at one end of the oven, and the ruddy glow of the flames flickered on the bakery walls, as though grinning at us. The huge oven resembled the ugly head of some fantastic monster thrust up from under the floor, its wide-open jaws ablaze with glowing fire breathing incandescent flames and heat at us, and watching our ceaseless toil through two sunken air-holes over its forehead. These two hollows were like eyes—the pitiless impassive eyes of a monster; they looked at us with an invariable dark scowl, as though weary with looking at slaves of whom nothing human could be expected, and whom they despised with the cold contempt of wisdom.

  Day in, day out, amid the meal dust and the grime that we brought in on our feet from the yard, in the smelly stuffiness of the hot basement, we kneaded the dough and made pretzels which were sprinkled with our sweat, and we hated our work with a fierce hatred, and never ate what our hands had made, preferring black rye bread to pretzels. Sitting at a long table facing one another—nine men on each side—our hands and fingers worked mechanically through the long hours, and we had grown so accustomed to our work that we no longer watched our movements. And we had grown so accustomed to one another that each of us knew every furrow on his comrades’ faces. We had nothing to talk about, we were used to that, and were silent all the time—unless we swore, for there is always something one can swear at a man for, especially one’s comrade. But we rarely swore at each other—is a man to blame if he is half-dead, if he is like a stone image, if all his senses are blunted by the crushing burden of toil? Silence is awful and painful only for those who have said all there is to say; but to people whose words are still unspoken, silence is simple and easy.... Sometimes we sang, and this is how our song would begin: during the work somebody would suddenly heave a deep sigh, like a weary horse, and begin softly to sing one of those long-drawn songs whose mournfully tender melody always lightens the heavy burden of the singer’s heart. One of the men would sing while we listened in silence to the lonely song, and it would fade and die away beneath the oppressive basement ceiling like the languishing flames of a campfire in the steppe on a wet autumn night, when the grey sky hangs over the earth like a roof of lead. Then another singer would join the first, and two voices would float drearily and softly in the stuffy heat of our crowded pen. And then suddenly several voices at once would take up the song—it would be lashed up like a wave, grow stronger and louder, and seem to break open the damp, heavy walls of our stony prison....

  All the twenty-six are singing; loud voices, brought to harmony by long practice, fill the workshop; the song is cramped for room; it breaks against the stone walls, moaning and weeping, and stirs the heart with a gentle prickly pain, reopening old wounds and wakening anguish in the soul.... The singers draw deep and heavy sighs; one will suddenly break off and sit listening for a long time to his comrades singing, then his voice will mingle again in the general chorus. Another will cry out dismally: “Ach!” singing with closed eyes, and maybe he sees the broad torrent of sound as a road leading far away, a wide road lit up by the brilliant sun, and he himself walking along it....

  The flames in the oven still flicker, the baker’s shovel still scrapes on the brick, the water in the cauldron still bubbles and gurgles, the firelight on the wall still flutters in silent laughter.... And we chant out, through words not our own, the dull ache within us, the gnawing grief of living men deprived of the sun, the grief of slaves. And so we lived, twenty-six men, in the basement of a big stone house, and so hard was our life, that it seemed as though the three stories of the house were built on our shoulders....

  Besides our songs there was something else that we loved and cherished, something that perhaps filled the place of the sun for us. On the second floor of our house there was a gold embroidery workshop, and there, among many girl
hands, lived sixteen-year-old Tanya, a housemaid. Every morning a little pink face with blue merry eyes would be pressed to the pane of the little window cut into the door of our workshop leading into the passage, and a sweet ringing voice would call out to us:

  “Jail-birdies! Give me some pretzels!”

  We would all turn our heads to the sound of that clear voice and look kindly and joyfully at the pure girlish face that smiled at us so sweetly. We liked to see the nose squashed against the glass, the little white teeth glistening from under rosy lips parted in a smile. We would rush to open the door for her, jostling each other, and there she would be, so winsome and sunny, holding out her apron, standing before us with her little head slightly tilted, and her face all wreathed in smiles. A thick long braid of chestnut hair hung over her shoulder on her breast. We grimy, ignorant, ugly men look up at her—the threshold rises four steps above the floor—look up at her with raised heads and wish her good morning, and our words of greeting are special words, found only for her. When we speak to her our voices are softer, our joking lighter. Everything we have for her is special. The baker draws out of the oven a shovelful of the crustiest browned pretzels and shoots them adroitly into Tanya’s apron.

  “Mind the boss doesn’t catch you!” we warn her. She laughs roguishly and cries merrily:

  “Good-bye jail-birdies!” and vanishes in a twinkling like a little mouse.

  And that is all.... But long after she was gone we talk about her—we say the same things we said the day before and earlier, because she, and we, and everything around us are the same they were the day before and earlier.... It is very painful and hard when a man lives, and nothing around him changes, and if it doesn’t kill the soul in him, the longer he lives the more painful does the immobility of things surrounding him become.... We always talked of women in a way that sometimes made us feel disgusted with ourselves and our coarse shameless talk. That is not surprising, since the women we knew did not probably deserve to be talked of in any other way. But of Tanya we never said a bad word; no one of us ever dared to touch her with his hand and she never heard a loose joke from any of us. Perhaps it was because she never stayed long—she would flash before our gaze like a star falling from the heavens and vanish. Or perhaps it was because she was small and so very beautiful, and everything that is beautiful inspires respect, even with rough men. Moreover, though hard labor was turning us into dumb oxen, we were only human beings, and like all human beings, could not live without an object of worship. Finer than she there was nobody about us, and nobody else paid attention to us men living in the basement—though there were dozens of tenants in the house. And finally—probably chiefly—we regarded her as something that belonged to us, something that existed thanks only to our pretzels; we made it our duty to give her hot pretzels, and this became our daily sacrifice to the idol, almost a holy rite, that endeared her to us ever more from day to day. Besides pretzels we gave Tanya a good deal of advice—to dress warmly, not to run quickly upstairs, not to carry heavy bundles of firewood. She listened to our counsels with a smile, retorted with a laugh and never obeyed them, but we did not take offense—we were satisfied to show our solicitude for her.

  Often she asked us to do things for her. She would, for instance, ask us to open a refractory door in the cellar or chop some wood, and we would gladly and with a peculiar pride do these things for her and anything else she asked.

  But when one of us asked her to mend his only shirt, she sniffed scornfully and said:

  “Catch me! Not likely!”

  We enjoyed a good laugh at the silly fellow’s expense, and never again asked her to do anything. We loved her—and there all is said. A man always wants to foist his love on somebody or other, though it frequently oppresses, sometimes sullies, and his love may poison the life of a fellow creature, for in loving he does not respect the object of his love. We had to love Tanya, for there was no one else we could love.

  At times one of us would suddenly begin to argue something like this:

  “What’s the idea of making such a fuss over the kid? What’s there so remarkable about her anyway?”

  We’d soon brusquely silence the fellow who spoke like that—we had to have something we could love: we found it, and loved it, and what we twenty-six loved stood for each of us, it was our holy of holies, and anybody who went against us in this matter was our enemy. We love, perhaps, what is not really good, but then there are twenty-six of us, and we therefore want the object of our adoration to be held sacred by others.

  Our love is no less onerous than hate . . . and, perhaps, that is why some stiff-necked people claim that our hate is more flattering than love.... But why do they not shun us if that is so?

  In addition to the pretzel bakehouse our boss had a bun bakery. It was situated in the same house, and only a wall divided it from our hole. The bun bakers, however, of whom there were four, held themselves aloof from us, considered their work cleaner than ours, and themselves, therefore, better men; they never visited our workshop, and treated us with mocking scorn whenever they met us in the yard. Neither did we visit them—the boss banned such visits for fear we would steal buns. We did not like the bun bakers, because we envied them—their work was easier than ours, they got better wages, they were fed better, they had a roomy, airy workshop, and they were all so clean and healthy, and hence so odious. We, on the other hand, were all a yellow grey-faced lot; three of us were ill with syphilis, some were scabby, and one was crippled by rheumatism. On holidays and off-days they used to dress up in suits and creaking high boots, two of them possessed accordions, and all used to go out for a stroll in the park, whilst we were dressed in filthy tatters, with rags or bast shoes on our feet, and the police wouldn’t let us into the park—now, could we love the bun bakers?

  And one day we learned that their chief baker had taken to drink, that the boss had dismissed him and taken on another in his place, and that the new man was an ex-soldier who went about in a satin waistcoat and had a watch on a gold chain. We were curious to have a look at that dandy, and every now and then one of us would run out into the yard in the hope of seeing him.

  But he came to our workshop himself. Kicking open the door he stood in the doorway, smiling, and said to us:

  “Hullo! How do you do, boys!”

  The frosty air rushing through the door in a smoky cloud eddied round his feet, while he stood in the doorway looking down at us, his large yellow teeth flashing from under his fair swaggering moustache. His waistcoat was indeed unique—a blue affair, embroidered with flowers, and all glittering, with buttons made of some kind of red stone. The chain was there too....

  He was a handsome fellow, was that soldier—tall, strong, with ruddy cheeks and big light eyes that had a nice look in them—a kind, clean look. On his head he wore a white stiffly starched cap, and from under an immaculately clean apron peeped the pointed toes of a highly polished pair of fashionable boots.

  Our chief baker politely asked him to close the door. He complied unhurriedly and began questioning us about the boss. We fell over each other telling him that the boss was a skinflint, a crook, a scoundrel and a tormentor—we told him everything there was to tell about the boss that couldn’t be put in writing here. The soldier listened, twitching his moustache and regarding us with that gentle, clear look of his.

  “You’ve a lot of girls around here . . .” he said suddenly.

  Some of us laughed politely, others pulled sugary faces, and some one informed the soldier that there were nine bits in the place.

  “Use ’em?” asked the soldier with a knowing wink.

  Again we laughed, a rather subdued, embarrassed laugh.... Many of us would have liked to make the soldier believe they were as gay lads as he was, but they couldn’t do it, none of us could do it. Somebody confessed as much, saying quietly:

  “How comes we. . . .”

  “M’yes, you’re a long way off!” said the soldier convincedly, subjecting us to a close scrutiny. “You’
re not . . . er, up to the mark.... Ain’t got the character . . . the proper shape . . . you know, looks! Looks is what a woman likes about a man! Give her a regular body . . . everything just so! Then of course she likes a bit of muscle.... Likes an arm to be an arm, here’s the stuff!”

  The soldier pulled his right hand out of his pocket, with the sleeve rolled back to the elbow, and held it up for us to see.... He had a strong, white arm covered with shining golden hair.

  “The leg, the chest—everything must be firm.... And then a man’s got to be properly dressed . . . in shipshape form.... Now, the women just fall for me. Mind you, I don’t call ’em or tempt ’em—they hang about my neck five at a time. . . .”

  He sat down on a sack of flour and spent a long time in telling us how the women loved him and how dashingly he treated them. Then he took his leave, and when the door closed behind him with a squeak, we sat on in a long silence, meditating over him and his stories. Then suddenly everybody spoke up at once, and it transpired that we had all taken a liking to him. Such a simple, nice fellow, the way he came in, sat down, and chatted. Nobody ever came to see us, nobody talked to us like that, in a friendly way.... And we kept on talking about him and his future success with the seamstresses, who, on meeting us in the yard, either steered clear of us with lips offensively pursed, or bore straight down on us as though we did not stand in their path at all. And we only admired them, in the yard or when they passed our windows, dressed in cute little caps and fur coats in the winter, and in flowery hats with bright colored parasols in the summer. But among ourselves we spoke of these girls in a way that, had they heard us, would have made them mad with shame and insult.

  “I hope he doesn’t . . . spoil little Tanya!” said the chief baker suddenly in a tone of anxiety.