In the evenings she would say to me and Sascha:
“Why do you sit there doing nothing, children? You had far better be fighting.”
This used to make Sascha angry.
“I am not a child, you fool; I am junior assistant.”
“That does not concern me.
In my eyes, while you remain unmarried, you are a child.”
“Fool! Blockhead!”
“The devil is clever, but God does not love him.”
Her talk was a special source of irritation to Sascha, and he used to tease her; but she would look at him contemptuously, askance, and say:
“Ugh, you beetle! One of God’s mistakes!”
Sometimes he would tell me to rub blacking or soot on her face when she was asleep, stick pins into her pillow, or play other practical jokes on her; but I was afraid of her. Besides, she slept very lightly and used to wake up frequently. Lighting the lamp, she would sit on the side of her bed, gazing fixedly at something in the corner.
Sometimes she came over to me, where I slept behind the stove, and woke me up, saying hoarsely:
“I can’t sleep, Leksyeka. I am not very well. Talk to me a little.”
Half asleep, I used to tell her some story, and she would sit without speaking, swaying from side to side.
I had an idea that her hot body smelt of wax and incense, and that she would soon die.
Every moment I expected to see her fall face downward on the floor and die.
In terror I would begin to speak loudly, but she would check me.
“ ‘S-sh!
You will wake the whole place up, and they will think that you are my lover.”
She always sat near me in the same attitude, doubled up, with her wrists between her knees, squeezing them against the sharp bones of her legs.
She had no chest, and even through the thick linen night-dress her ribs were visible, just like the ribs of a broken cask.
After sitting a long time in silence, she would suddenly whisper:
“What if I do die, it is a calamity which happens to all.”
Or she would ask some invisible person,
“Well, I have lived my life, haven’t If
“Sleep!” she would say, cutting me short in the middle of a word, and, straightening herself, would creep noiselessly across the dark kitchen.
“Witch!” Sascha used to call her behind her back.
I put the question to him:
“Why don’t you call her that to her face?”
“Do you think that I am afraid to?”
But a second later he said, with a frown:
“No, I can’t say it to her face.
She may really be a witch.”
Treating every one with the same scornful lack of consideration, she showed no indulgence to me, but would drag me out of bed at six o’clock every morning, crying:
“Are you going to sleep forever?
Bring the wood in!
Get the samovar ready!
Clean the door-plate!”
Sascha would wake up and complain:
“What are you bawling like that for?
I will tell the master. You don’t give any one a chance to sleep.”
Moving quickly about the kitchen with her lean, withered body, she would flash her blazing, sleepless eyes upon him.
“Oh, it’s you, God’s mistake?
If you were my son, I would give you something!”
Sascha would abuse her, calling her “accursed one,” and when we were going to the shop he said to me: “We shall have to do something to get her sent away.
We’ll put salt in everything when she’s not looking. If everything is cooked with too much salt, they will get rid of her.
Or paraffin would do.
What are you gaping about?”
“Why don’t you do it yourself?”
He snorted angrily: