The Adolescent (43 page)

III

TO FINISH WITH the characterization of Makar Ivanovich, I shall tell one of his stories from his own private life. His stories had a strange character, or rather, they had no general character at all; it was impossible to squeeze any moral or any general trend out of them, unless it was that they were all more or less moving. But there were also some that were not moving, that were even quite merry, that even made fun of wayward monks, so that he directly harmed his idea by telling them—which I pointed out to him; but he didn’t understand what I meant to say. Sometimes it was hard to make out what prompted him to this storytelling, so that I even wondered at such loquacity and ascribed it in part to old age and to his ailing condition.

“He’s not what he used to be,” Versilov once whispered to me, “he used to be not at all like this. He’ll die soon, much sooner than we think, and we must be prepared.”

I forgot to mention that something like “evenings” had been established among us. Besides mama, who wouldn’t leave Makar Ivanovich’s side, Versilov always came to his little room in the evenings; I, too, always came, and couldn’t be anywhere else; during the last few days, Liza almost always came, though later than everyone else, and almost always sat silently. Tatyana Pavlovna also came sometimes, though rarely, and sometimes the doctor. It suddenly happened somehow that I became friends with the doctor; not very much, but at least there were none of my former outbursts. I liked his simplicity, as it were, which I finally discerned in him, and the certain attachment he had to our family, so that I finally ventured to forgive him his medical arrogance and, on top of that, taught him to wash his hands and clean his fingernails, if he was incapable of wearing clean linen. I explained to him directly that it was not at all for the sake of foppishness or any sort of fine arts, but that cleanliness was a natural part of a doctor’s profession, and I proved it to him. Finally, Lukerya often came to the door from her kitchen and, standing behind it, listened to Makar Ivanovich’s stories. Versilov once called her out from behind the door and invited her to sit with us. I liked that; but from then on she stopped coming to the door. Their ways!

I include one of his stories, without choosing, solely because I remember it more fully. It’s a story about a merchant, and I think that in our towns, big and small, such stories occur by the thousand, if only we know how to look. Those who wish to can skip the story, the more so as I tell it in his style.

IV

AND IN THE town of Afimyevsk, I’ll tell you now, here’s what a wonder we had. There lived a merchant named Skotoboinikov,
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Maxim Ivanovich, and there was nobody richer than he in the whole region. He built a calico factory and employed several hundred workers; and he became conceited beyond measure. And it must be said that everything walked at a sign from him, and the authorities themselves didn’t hinder him in anything, and the abbot of the monastery thanked him for his zeal: he donated a lot to the monastery, and when the fancy took him, he sighed greatly for his soul and had no little concern for the age to come. He was a widower and childless; about his wife, rumor had it that he sweetened her away in the first year and that since his youth he had always liked making free with his hands; only that was a very long time back; he never wanted to enter the bonds of matrimony again. He also had a weakness for drink, and when the time came on him, he would run drunkenly around town, naked and yelling; the town was nothing grand, but still it was a shame. When the time was over, he’d get irate, and then everything he decided was good, and everything he ordered was wonderful. And he settled accounts with people arbitrarily; he’d take an abacus, put his spectacles on: “How much for you, Foma?” “Haven’t had anything since Christmas, Maxim Ivanovich, there’s thirty-nine roubles owing to me.” “Oof, that’s a lot of money! It’s too much for you; the whole of you isn’t worth such money; it doesn’t suit you at all; let’s knock off ten roubles, and you’ll get twenty-nine.” The man says nothing; and nobody else dares to make a peep, they all say nothing.

“I know how much he should be given,” he says. “It’s impossible to deal with the people here any other way. The people here are depraved; without me they’d all have died of hunger, however many there are. I say again, the people here are thieves, whatever they see, they filch, there’s no manliness in them. And again take this, that he’s a drunkard; give him money, he’ll bring it to the pot-house and sit there naked, not a stitch left, he goes home stripped. Again, too, he’s a scoundrel: he’ll sit on a stone facing the pot-house and start wailing: ‘Mother, dear, why did you give birth to me, bitter drunkard that I am? It would be better if you’d smothered me, bitter drunkard that I am, at birth!’ Is this a man? This is a beast, not a man; he should be eddicated first of all and then be given money. I know when to give it to him.”

So Maxim Ivanovich spoke about the people of Afimyevsk; though it was bad what he said, all the same it was the truth: they were slack, unsteady folk.

There lived in that same town another merchant, and he died; he was a young and light-minded man, he went broke and lost all his capital. During the last year he struggled like a fish on dry land, but his life had come full term. He had been on bad terms with Maxim Ivanovich all the time, and remained roundly in debt to him. In his last hour he still cursed Maxim Ivanovich. And he left behind a widow, still young, and five children with her. And to be left a solitary widow after your husband is like being a swallow without a nest—no small ordeal, the more so with five little ones and nothing to feed them: their last property, a wooden house, Maxim Ivanovich was taking for debt. And so she lined them all up in a row by the church porch; the eldest was a boy of eight, the rest were all girls with a year’s difference between them, each one smaller than the next; the eldest was four and the youngest was still nursing in her mother’s arms. The liturgy was over, Maxim Ivanovich came out, and all the children knelt before him in a row—she had taught them beforehand—and they pressed their little palms together in front of them all as one, and she herself behind them, with the fifth child in her arms, bowed down to the ground before him in front of all the people: “Dear father, Maxim Ivanovich, have mercy on the orphans, don’t take our last crust of bread, don’t drive us out of our own nest!” And everybody there waxed tearful—she had taught them so well. She thought, “He’ll take pride in front of the people, and forgive us, and give the house back to the orphans,” only it didn’t turn out that way. Maxim Ivanovich stopped: “You’re a young widow,” he said, “you want a husband, it’s not the orphans you’re weeping about. And the deceased man cursed me on his deathbed.” And he walked on and didn’t give them back the house. “Why be indigent” (that is, indulgent) “of their foolishness? I’ll do them a good turn, and they’ll berate me still more; nothing will be accomplished, except that a great rumor will spread.” And there was, in fact, a rumor that he had sent to this widow when she was still a young girl, ten years before, and offered her a large sum (she was very beautiful), forgetting that this sin was the same as desecrating God’s church; but he hadn’t succeeded then. And he did not a few such abominations, in town and even all over the province, and on this occasion even lost all measure.

The mother and her fledglings howled when he drove them orphaned from the house, and not only out of wickedness, but like a man who sometimes doesn’t know himself what makes him stand his ground. Well, people helped her at first, and then she went to look for work. Only what kind of work was there, except for the factory? She’d wash the floors here, weed the vegetable patch there, stoke the stove in a bathhouse, all with the baby in her arms, and start wailing, while the other four ran around outside in nothing but their shirts. When she made them kneel by the church porch, they still had some sort of shoes and some sort of coats, because anyhow they were a merchant’s children; now they ran around barefoot: clothes burn up on children, that’s a known fact. Well, what is that to children? As long as the sun shines, they rejoice, they don’t sense their ruin, they’re like little birds, their voices are like little bells. The widow thinks, “Winter will come, and what am I going to do with you? If only God would take care of you by then!” Only she didn’t have to wait till winter. There’s a children’s disease in our parts, the whooping cough, that goes from one to another. First of all the nursing girl died, after her the rest fell ill, and that same autumn all four girls, one after the other, were carried off. True, one was run over by horses in the street. And what do you think? She buried them and started wailing; she had cursed them before, but once God took them, she was sorry. A mother’s heart!

The only one left alive to her was the oldest boy, and she doted on him, trembled over him. He was weak and delicate, and had a pretty face like a girl’s. And she took him to the factory, to his godfather, who was a manager, and got herself hired in the official’s family as a nanny. One day the boy was running in the yard, and here suddenly Maxim Ivanovich came driving up with a pair, and just then he was tipsy; and the boy ran down the stairs straight at him, slipped accidentally, and bumped straight into him as he was getting out of his droshky, punching him in the belly with both hands. He seized the boy by the hair: “Whose boy is he? The birch! Whip him right now, in front of me!” he yelled. The boy went numb, they started thrashing him, he screamed. “So you scream, too? Whip him till he stops screaming!” Maybe they whipped him a lot, maybe not, but he didn’t stop screaming till he looked quite dead. Then they left off whipping him, they got frightened, the boy wasn’t breathing, he lay there unconscious. Later they said they hadn’t whipped him much, but he was very fearful. Maxim Ivanovich also got frightened. “Whose boy is he?” he asked; they told him. “Really now! Take him to his mother. Why was he loitering around the factory?” For two days afterwards he said nothing and then asked again, “How’s the boy?” And things were bad with the boy: he was sick, lying in his mother’s corner, she left her job at the official’s because of it, and he had an inflammation in his lungs. “Really now!” he said. “And why do you think that is? It’s not that they whipped him painfully: they just gave him a little treatment. I’ve ordered the same kind of beatings for others; it went over without any such nonsense.” He expected the mother to go and make a complaint, and, being proud, said nothing; only how could she, the mother didn’t dare to make a complaint. And then he sent her fifteen roubles and a doctor from himself; not because he was afraid or anything, but just so, from pondering. And soon after that his time came, and he went on a three-week binge.

Winter passed, and on the bright day of Christ’s resurrection itself, on the great day itself, Maxim Ivanovich asked again, “And how’s that same boy?” And for the whole winter he had said nothing, hadn’t asked. They say to him, “He’s recovered, he’s with his mother, and she still does day labor.” That very day Maxim Ivanovich drove to the widow’s, he didn’t go into the house, but called her out to the gate, sitting in the droshky himself: “Here’s what, honest widow,” he says, “I want to be a true benefactor to your son and do no end of good things for him: from now on I’m taking him to live with me, in my own house. And if he pleases me the least bit, I’ll make over a sufficient capital to him; and if he really pleases me, I may set him up as the heir to my whole fortune at my death, as if he were my own son, on condition, however, that your honor doesn’t visit my house except on great feast days.
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If that’s agreeable to you, bring the boy tomorrow morning, he can’t go on playing knucklebones.” And having said that, he drove off, leaving the mother as if out of her mind. People heard about it and said to her, “The lad will grow up and reproach you that you deprived him of such a destiny.” She spent the night weeping over him and in the morning she brought the child. And the boy was more dead than alive.

Maxim Ivanovich dressed him like a young gentleman and hired a tutor, and from that hour on had him sitting over books; and it reached the point that he wouldn’t let him out of his sight, but always kept him with him. As soon as the boy starts gaping, he shouts, “To your books! Study! I want to make a man of you.” And the boy was sickly, he had been coughing ever since that time, after the beating. “As if it’s not a fine life with me!” Maxim Ivanovich marveled. “With his mother he just ran around barefoot, chewed on crusts, why is he more sickly than ever?” And the tutor says to him, “Every boy needs to romp and play,” he says, “he shouldn’t study all the time, movement is necessary for him,” and he deduced it all for him reasonably. Maxim Ivanovich thought, “It’s true what you say.” And this tutor, Pyotr Stepanovich, God rest his soul, was like a holy fool;
¹⁰
he drank ver-ry much, so that it was even too much, and for that reason had long been removed from any position, and he lived about town like a beggar, but he had great intelligence and a solid education. “I shouldn’t have been here,” he used to say of himself, “I should have been a professor at the university, and here I sink into the mud and ‘even my garments hate my flesh.’”
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Maxim Ivanovich sits and shouts at the boy, “Romp!”—and the boy can barely breathe before him. It reached the point that the child couldn’t bear his voice—he just started trembling all over. And Maxim Ivanovich was still more surprised: “He’s neither this nor that; I took him up from the dirt, dressed him in
drap de dames
; he’s got nice cloth bootikins, an embroidered shirt, I keep him like a general’s son, why isn’t he well disposed towards me? Why is he silent as a wolf cub?” And though people had long ceased marveling at Maxim Ivanovich, here again they began to wonder: the man’s out of his mind; latched onto the little child and won’t let him be. “Upon my life, I’ll eradicate his character. His father cursed me on his deathbed, after taking holy communion; he has his father’s character.” He didn’t use the birch rod even once (was afraid ever since that time). He intimidated him, that’s what. Intimidated him without the birch rod.

And then the thing happened. Once he went out, and the boy left his book and climbed on a chair. Earlier he had thrown a ball up onto the chiffonier, and he wanted to get his ball, but he caught his sleeve on a china lamp that stood on the chiffonier; the lamp crashed to the floor and broke into smithereens, the clatter was heard all over the house, and it was a costly object—Saxony china. And here suddenly Maxim Ivanovich heard it three rooms away and yelled. The child rushed out and ran in fear wherever his legs would take him, ran out to the terrace, and across the garden, and through the back gate, straight to the riverbank. And there was a boulevard along the bank, old willows, a cheerful spot. He ran down to the water, people saw, clasped his hands, at the very place where the ferry docks, maybe terrified of the water—and stood as if rooted to the spot. And it was a wide place, the river swift, barges going past, on the other side there are shops, a square, the church of God shines with its golden domes. And just then the wife of Colonel Ferzing—an infantry regiment was stationed in town—was hurrying to catch the ferry. Her daughter, also a little child of about eight, walks along in a white dress, looks at the boy and laughs, and she’s carrying a little country basket, and in the basket there’s a hedgehog. “Look, mummy,” she says, “how the boy is looking at my hedgehog.” “No,” says the colonel’s wife, “he’s frightened of something. What are you so afraid of, pretty boy?” (So they told it afterwards.) “And what a pretty boy he is, and how well he’s dressed; whose boy are you?” she says. And he had never seen a hedgehog before, he came closer and looked, and he had already forgotten—childhood! “What’s that you’ve got?” he says. “This,” says the young miss, “is our hedgehog, we just bought it from a village peasant, he found it in the forest.” “What’s a hedgehog like?” he says, and he’s laughing now, and he begins poking his finger at it, and the hedgehog bristles up, and the girl is glad of the boy. “We’re taking it home,” she says, “we want to tame it.” “Ah,” he says, “give me your hedgehog!” And he asked her so touchingly, and no sooner had he said it than Maxim Ivanovich descended on him: “Ah! Here’s where you are! Take him!” (He was so enraged that he had run out of the house without his hat to chase him.) The boy, the moment he remembered everything, cried out, rushed to the water, pressed his little fists to his breast, looked up at the sky (they saw it, they saw it!) and—splash into the water! Well, people shouted, rushed from the ferry, tried to pull him out, but the current was swift, it carried him away, and when they pulled him out he was already dead—drowned. He had a weak chest, he couldn’t endure the water, and how much does it take for such a boy? And in people’s memories in those parts there had never yet been such a small child to take his own life! Such a sin! And what can so small a soul say to the Lord God in the other world!