In conjunction with him I remembered my father, as grandmother had seen him in her dream, with a walnut stick in his hand, and behind him a spotted dog running, with its tongue hanging out.
CHAPTER XIII
THE icon-painting workshop occupied two rooms in a large house partly built of stone. One room had three windows overlooking the yard and one overlooking the garden; the other room had one window overlooking the garden and another facing the street. These windows were small and square, and their panes, irisated by age, unwillingly admitted the pale, diffused light of the winter days.
Both rooms were closely packed with tables, and at every table sat the bent figures of icon-painters.
From the ceilings were suspended glass balls full of water, which reflected the light from the lamps and threw it upon the square surfaces of the icons in white cold rays.
It was hot and stifling in the workshop. Here worked about twenty men, icon-painters, from Palekh, Kholia, and Mstir. They all sat down in cotton overalls with unfastened collars. They had drawers made of ticking, and were barefooted, or wore sandals.
Over their heads stretched, like a blue veil, the smoke of cheap tobacco, and there was a thick smell of size, varnish, and rotten eggs.
The melancholy Vlandimirski song flowed slowly, like resin:
How depraved the people have now become;
The boy ruined the girl, and cared not who knew.
They sang other melancholy songs, but this was the one they sang most often.
Its long-drawn-out movement did not hinder one from thinking, did not impede the movement of the fine brush, made of weasel hair, over the surface of the icons, as it painted in the lines of the figure, and laid upon the emaciated faces of the saints the fine lines of suffering.
By the windows the chaser, Golovev, plied his small hammer. He was a drunken old man with an enormous blue nose. The lazy stream of song was punctuated by the ceaseless dry tap of the hammer; it was like a worm gnawing at a tree.
Some evil genius had divided the work into a long series of actions, bereft of beauty and incapable of arousing any love for the business, or interest in it.
The squinting joiner, Panphil, ill-natured and malicious, brought the pieces of cypress and lilac — wood of different sizes, which he had planed and glued; the consumptive lad, Davidov, laid the colors on; his comrade, Sorokin, painted in the inscription; Milyashin outlined the design from the original with a pencil; old Golovev gilded it, and embossed the pattern in gold; the finishers drew the land — scape, and the clothes of the figures; and then they were stood with faces or hands against the wall, waiting for the work of the face-painter.
It was very weird to see a large icon intended for an iconastasis, or the doors of the altar, standing against the wall without face, hands, or feet, — just the sacerdotal vestments, or the armor, and the short garments of archangels.
These variously painted tablets suggested death. That which should have put life into them was absent, but it seemed as if it had been there, and had miraculously disappeared, leaving only its heavy vestments behind.
When the features had been painted in by the face-painter, the icon was handed to the workman, who filled in the design of the chaser. A different workman had to do the lettering, and the varnish was put on by the head workman himself Ivan Larionovich, a quiet man.
He had a gray face; his beard, too, was gray, the hair fine and silky; his gray eyes were peculiarly deep and sad.
He had a pleasant smile, but one could not smile at him. He made one feel awkward, somehow.
He looked like the image of Simon Stolpnik, just as lean and emaciated, and his motionless eyes looked far away in the same abstracted man — ner, through people and walls.
Some days after I entered the workshop, the banner-worker, a Cossack of the Don, named Kapendiukhin, a handsome, mighty fellow, arrived in a state of intoxication. With clenched teeth and his gentle, wom — anish eyes blinking, he began to smash up everything with his iron fist, without uttering a word.
Of medium height and well built, he cast himself on the workroom like a cat chasing rats in a cellar. The others lost their presence of mind, and hid themselves away in the corners, calling out to one another:
“Knock him down!”
The face-painter, Evgen Sitanov, was successful in stunning the maddened creature by hitting him on the head with a small stool.
The Cossack subsided on the floor, and was immediately held down and tied up with towels, which he began to bite and tear with the teeth of a wild beast.
This infuriated Evgen. He jumped on the table, and with his hands pressed close to his sides, prepared to jump on the Cossack. Tall and stout as he was, he would have inevitably crushed the breast-bone of Kapendiukhin by his leap, but at that moment Larionovich appeared on the scene in cap and overcoat, shook his finger at Sitanov, and said to the workmen in a quiet and business-like tone:
“Carry him into the vestibule, and leave him there till he is sober.”
They dragged the Cossack out of the workshop, set the chairs and tables straight, and once again set to work, letting fall short remarks on the strength of their comrade, prophesying that he would one day be killed by some one in a quarrel.
“It would be a difficult matter to kill him,” said Sitanov very calmly, as if he were speaking of a business which he understood very well.
I looked at Larionovich, wondering perplexedly why these strong, pugilistic people were so easily ruled by him.
He showed every one how he ought to work; even the best workmen listened willingly to his advice; he taught Kapendiukhin more, and with more words, than the others.
“ You, Kapendiukhin, are what is called a painter — that is, you ought to paint from life in the Italian manner.
Painting in oils requires warm colors, and you have introduced too much white, and made Our Lady’s eyes as cold as winter.
The cheeks are painted red, like apples, and the eyes do not seem to belong to them.
And they are not put in right, either; one is looking over the bridge of the nose, and the other has moved to the temple; and the face has not come out pure and holy, but crafty, wintry.
You don’t think about your work, Kapendiukhin.”
The Cossack listened and made a wry face. Then smiling impudently with his womanish eyes, he said in his pleasant voice, which was rather hoarse with so much drinking:
“Ekh! I— va — a — n Larionovich, my father, that is not my trade.
I was born to be a musician, and they put me among monks.”
“With zeal, any business may be mastered.”
“No; what do you take me for?
I ought to have been a coachman with a team of gray horses, eh?”
And protruding his Adam’s apple, he drawled despairingly:
“Eh, i-akh, if I had a leash of grayhounds
And dark brown horses,
Och, when I am in torment on frosty nights
I would fly straight, straight to my love!”
Ivan Larionovich, smiling mildly, set his glasses straight on his gray, sad, melancholy nose, and went away. But a dozen voices took up the song in a friendly spirit, and there flowed forth a mighty stream of song which seemed to raise the whole workshop into the air and shake it with measured blows:
“By custom the horses know Where the little lady lives.”