“Yes; always working, like a convict.”
Grandmother conversed with him affectionately and well, but in the tone of a senior.
Sometimes he called my mother to mind.
“Ye-es, Varvara Vassilievna.
What a woman! A heroine, eh?”
His wife turned to grandmother and put in:
“Do you remember my giving her that cloak — black silk trimmed with jet?”
“Of course I do.”
“It was quite a good one.”
“Ye-es,” muttered the master, “a cloak, a palm; and life is a trickster.” 1 1 A play on the words “ tal’ma, cloak; pal’ma, palm; shelma, trickster.
“What are you talking about?” asked his wife, suspiciously.
“I?
Oh, nothing in particular.
Happy days and good people soon pass away.”
“I don’t know what is the matter with you,” said my mistress, uneasily.
Then grandmother was taken to see the new baby, and while I was clearing away the dirty cups and saucers from the table the master said to me:
“She is a good old woman, that grandmother of yours.”
I was deeply grateful to him for those words, and when I was alone with grandmother, I said to her, with a pain in my heart:
“Why do you come here? Why?
Can’t you see how they — ”
“Ach, Olesha, I see everything,” she replied, looking at me with a kind smile on her wonderful face, and I felt conscience-stricken. Why, of course she saw everything and knew everything, even what was going on in my soul at that moment.
Looking round carefully to see that no one was coming, she embraced me, saying feelingly:
“I would not come here if it were not for you. What are they to me?
As a matter of fact, grandfather is ill, and I am tired with looking after him.
I have not been able to do any work, so I have no money, and my son Mikhail has turned Sascha out. I have him now to give food and drink, too.
They promised to give you six rubles a month, and I don’t suppose you have had a ruble from them, and you have been here nearly half a year.”
Then she whispered in my ear: “They say they have to lecture you, scold you, they say that you do not obey; but, dear heart, stay with them. Be patient for two short years while you grow strong.
You will be patient, yes?”
I promised.
It was very difficult.
That life oppressed me; it was a threadbare, depressing existence. The only excitement was about food, and I lived as in a dream.
Sometimes I thought that I would have to run away, but the accursed winter had set in. Snow-storms raged by night, the wind rushed over the top of the house, and the stanchions cracked with the pressure of the frost. Whither could I run away?
They would not let me go out, and in truth it was no weather for walking. The short winter day, full of the bustle of housework, passed with elusive swiftness.
But they made me go to church, on Saturday to vespers and on Sunday to high mass.
I liked being in church. Standing somewhere in a corner where there was more room and where it was darker, I loved to gaze from a distance at the iconastasis, which looked as if it were swimming in the candlelight flowing in rich, broad streams over the floor of the reading-desk. The dark figures of the icons moved gently, the gold embroidery on the vestments of the priests quivered joyfully, the candle flames burned in the dark-blue atmosphere like golden bees, and the heads of the women and children looked like flowers.
All the surroundings seemed to blend harmoniously with the singing the choir. Everything seemed to be imbued with the weird spirit of legends. The church seemed to oscillate like a cradle, rocking in pitch-black space.
Sometimes I imagined that the church was sunk deep in a lake in which it lived, concealed, a life peculiar to itself, quite different from any other form of life.
I have no doubt now that this idea had its source in grandmother’s stories of the town of Kitej, and I often found myself dreamily swaying, keeping time, as it were, with the movement around me. Lulled into somnolence by the singing of the choir, the murmur of prayers, the breath of the congregation, I concentrated myself upon the melodious, melancholy story:
“They are closing upon us, the accursed Tatars.
Yes, these unclean beasts are closing in upon Kitej The glorious; yea, at the holy hour of matins.
O Lord, our God!
Holy Mother of God!
Save Thy servants
To sing their morning praises,
To listen to the holy chants!
Oi, let not the Tatars
Jeer at holy church;
Let them not put to shame Our women and maidens;
Seize the little maids to be their toys,
And the old men to be put to a cruel death!