by Maxim Gorky
“You believe in God?”
“Yes.”
But I became confused at my answer. It was not true. Did I really believe?
Mikhail asked again:
“And you respect people?”
“No,” I answered.
“Don’t you see,” he said, “that they are created in the image of God?”
The uncle, the devil take him, smiled like a copper basin in the sun.
“With such people,” I thought to myself, “one must argue sincerely and if I should fall asunder in little pieces, they will gather me up again.”
“When I look upon people,” I said, “I doubt the power of God.”
Again it was not right. I doubted God before I ever saw the people.
Mikhail looked at me thoughtfully, with wise eyes, and the uncle walked heavily up and down the room, stroking his beard, and grunting low to himself.
It made me uneasy that I had to lower myself to lie before them. I saw my soul with remarkable clearness and my thoughts raced through me stupidly and alarmed like a frightened bee-hive. I began to drive them out of me, irritated. I wished to empty myself.
I spoke for a long time without connecting my words. I spoke at random on purpose. If they were such wise people, let them gather the sense themselves. I became tired and asked passionately: “How can you heal my sick soul?”
Mikhail answered low, without looking at me:
“I do not consider you sick.”
The uncle laughed again, and it pealed out as if a demon had come in through the roof.
“To be sick,” Mikhail continued, “is when a man is not conscious of himself, but knows only his pain and lives in it. But you, it is plain, have not lost yourself. You are seeking happiness in life, and only a healthy man does that.”
“But why is there such pain in my soul then?” “Because you like it,” he answered.
I gnashed my teeth. His calm was unbearable to me.
“Do you know for sure,” I asked, “that I like it?”
He looked me straight in the eyes and drove his nails slowly into my breast.
“As an honest man, you ought to recognize,” he said, “that your pain is necessary to your soul. It places you above others and you esteem it as something which separates you from others. Is it not so?”
His Lenten face was dry and drawn, his eyes darkened, he stroked his cheek with his hand, while he cleaned me hard, as one cleans copper with sand.
“You are evidently afraid to mingle with people for you unconsciously think to yourself, ‘Though they are ulcers, they are my own, and no one has ulcers but I.’”
I wanted to contradict him, but found no words. He was younger than I, and weaker, and I did not believe that of the two I was the more stupid.
The uncle laughed like a priest in a steam-bath.
“But this does not separate you from people. You are mistaken,” Mikhail went on. “Every one thinks the same. That is why life is weak and monstrous. Each one tries to go away from life and dig his own hole in the ground and look out upon the earth from it alone. From a hole, life seems low and futile, and it suits the isolated man to see life so. I say it about those people who for some reason or other cannot sit on the backs of their neighbors to drive them where they could eat tastier food.”
His speech angered and offended me.
“This vile life,” he said, “unworthy of human reason, began on that day when the first individual tore himself away from the miraculous strength of the people, from the masses, from his mother, and frightened by his isolation and his weakness, pitied himself and grew to be a futile and evil master of petty desires, a mass which called himself ‘I.’ It is this same 415 which is the worst enemy of man. In its business of defending itself and asserting itself on this earth, it has uselessly killed the strength of the soul, and its capacity of creating spiritual welfare.”
It seemed to me that his speech was familiar to me and that the words were those which I had waited for.
“Poor in soul, the eye is powerless to create. It is deaf, blind and dumb in life, and its goal is only self-defense, peace and comfort. It creates the new and purely human only under compulsion, after innumerable urgings from without and with great difficulty. It not only does not value its brother ‘I,’ but hates him and persecutes him. It is hostile because, remembering that it was born from the whole from which it was broken off, the ‘I’ tries to unite the broken pieces and to create anew a great unit.”
I listened, surprised. All this was clear to me; not only clear, but even near and true. It seemed to me that I had long ago thought the same, only without words. And now I had found words, and the thoughts arranged themselves before me like steps on a ladder, which led ever upward.
I remembered Juna’s speeches and they lived before my eyes, clear and beautiful. But at the same time I was restless and uncomfortable, as if I were standing on a block of ice in a river in the spring.
The uncle had quietly left us alone. There was no fire in the room, the night was moonlit, and in my soul, too, there was a moonlight mist.
At midnight Mikhail stopped speaking and we went to sleep in a shed in the courtyard, where we lay in the hay. He soon fell asleep, but I went out to the gate, and sat down on some logs and gazed about me.
The moon and two large stars strode carefully across the heavens. Over the mountains against the blue sky the jagged wall of the wood could be plainly seen. On the mountains was the hewn forest, and on the earth black pits. Below, the factory greedily showed its red teeth. It hummed and smoked and tongues of fire rose over the roofs and shot upward, but could not tear themselves away and were drowned in the smoke. The air smelled burnt. It was difficult to breathe.
I thought of the bitter loneliness of man. Mikhail had spoken well. He believed his own words and I saw truth in them. But why did they leave me cold? My soul did not harmonize with the soul of this man. It stood apart, as in a wilderness.
Soon I noticed that I was thinking the thoughts of Juna and Mikhail and that their thoughts lived powerfully within me, though still on the surface, for at bottom I was still hostile and suspicious of them.
“Where am I?” I asked. “And what am I?”
I spun around in my perplexity like a top, and always faster, so that the cloud storm roared in my ears.
The whistle blew in the factory. At first it was thin and plaintive, then it became louder and masterful.
The morning looked out sleepily from the mountain and the night hurried below, taking the thin veil off the trees quietly, folding it up and hiding it in the hollows and the pits. The robbed earth stood out clear to the eye. Everything was eaten out and plundered, as if some bold giant had played in this hollow, tearing out strips of wood and giving severe wounds to the earth.
The factory was sunk in this basin, dirty, oily, covered with smoke and puffing. Dark people dragged themselves to it from all sides and it swallowed them up, one by one. “Creators of God,” I thought to myself. “What have they created?”
The uncle came out into the court disheveled, stretching himself, yawning, cracking his joints, and smiling at me.
“Ah,” he cried, “you are up!” Then he asked me kindly, “Or perhaps you did not go to bed at all? Well, it does not matter. You will sleep during the day. Come, let us drink tea.”
At tea he said to me: “There were nights when I, too, did not sleep, brother. There was a time when I could have beaten every one I met. Even before I was a soldier my soul was troubled, but in the service they made me deaf. An officer gave me a blow on the ear. My right ear is deaf. There was one feldscher who helped me, thanks to—”
It was evident he wanted to say God, but he stopped, stroked his beard and smiled. He seemed to me childish and there was something childish in his eyes. They were so simple and credulous.
“He was a very good
man. He looked at me. ‘What is the matter?’ he asked. ‘Is this human life?’ I answered. ‘True,’ he said, ‘everything ought to be changed. Peter Vasilief, let me teach you political economy.’ And he began. At first I did not understand anything. But suddenly I understood the daily and eternal baseness in which we lived. Then I nearly went out of my head with joy. ‘Oh, you villains!’ I cried. That is the way science always suddenly unfolds itself. At first you only hear new words and then there comes a moment when everything unites and comes out into the light and that moment is the true birth of man. Marvelous!”
His face became happy and his eyes smiled softly. He nodded his shorn head and said:
“That is going to happen to you, too.”
It was pleasant to look at him. The child was strong in him and I envied him.
“Thirty-two years of my life I spent like a horse. It was disgraceful. Well, I will make up for it as best I can. Only my mind is not very quick. The mind is like the hands. It needs exercise. My hands are cleverer than my head.”
I looked at him and thought, how is it that these people are not afraid to speak about everything?
“But for that matter,” he continued, “Mishka has brains enough for two. He has read very much. You wait till he forgets himself. The factory priest called him ‘an arch heretic.’ Too bad his head is not clear about God. That comes from his mother. My sister was a very distinguished woman in religious matters. From Orthodox she went over to the Old Believers, but the Old Believers did not admit her.”
As he spoke he got ready to go to work. He walked from one corner of the room to the other. Everything about him shook. The chairs fell and the floor bent under him as he walked. He was funny, yet pleasant to look upon.
“What kind of people are they?” I thought. Then I said aloud: “Can I remain with you three days?”
“Go ahead,” he said; “three months if you wish. You are a strange fellow. You are not in our way, thank God.”
Then he scratched his head and smiled apologetically.
“The word God always comes to my mouth. It is from habit.”
Again the factory whistle blew, and the uncle went away. I went to sleep in the shed. Mikhail lay there. He was frowning sternly, and his hands were on his breast, his face was flushed. He was beardless and without mustache, his cheekbones were high; in fact, he was all bones.
“What kind of people are they?”
And with this thought I fell asleep.
CHAPTER XXII
I awoke. There was noise, whistling, hubbub, as if at a meeting of all the devils. I looked out into the court. It was full of youngsters and Mikhail was among them, in a white shirt, looking like a sailboat among small canoes. He stood laughing with his head on one side, his mouth wide open and his eyes twinkling. He in no way resembled the serious Lenten young man of the night before.
The children were dressed in blue, red and pink. They shone in the sun as they jumped and shouted. Something drew me toward them and I crawled out from the shed. One youngster noticed me and cried out:
“Look, fellows, here is a mo-onk!” Like fire that had been set to a heap of dry shavings, so the children jumped, wheeled about, looked at me and began to dance up and down.
“Wha-at a red one!”
“And such a hairy one, too!”
“He’ll bite you!”
“Oh, don’t tease him; he’s strong.”
“He’s not a monk. He’s a bell-tower.”
“Mikhail Ivanich, who is he?”
The teacher became somewhat embarrassed, and they, the little devils, laughed. I did not know why I struck them as funny, but I caught the spirit from them, smiled and cried to them:
“Stop it, you mice!”
The sun was shining, a gay noise filled the air and everything about us fluttered and floated with it, blinding me with its light and wrapping me in its warmth.
Mikhail greeted me and shook my hand.
“We are going to the wood,” he said. “Do you want to come along?”
It was a pleasant sight. There was one fat youngster who snatched my cap, put it on his head and flew about the courtyard like a butterfly.
I went to the wood with this band of madcaps, and the day remains engraven on my memory.
The children poured out into the street and fled to the mountain lightly, like feathers in the wind. I walked alongside of their shepherd, and it seemed to me that I had never seen such charming children before.
Mikhail and I walked behind them. He gave them orders, crying out to them; but the children refused to listen to him. They jostled, fought and bombarded one another with pine cones, and quarreled. When they were tired they surrounded us, crawled about our feet like beetles, pulled at their teacher’s hands, asked him now about the grass, now about the flowers, and he answered each one in a friendly way, as if to an equal. He rose above them like a white sail.
The children were all alert, but some of them were more serious and thoughtful than their age warranted. Silent, they kept near their teacher.
Later the children again spread themselves out and Mikhail said to me, low:
“Are they created only for toil and drunkenness? Each one is a receptacle of a living soul. Each one could hasten the development of the thought which would free us from the bondage of confusion, yet they must travel along the same dark and narrow channel through which the days of their fathers flowed turbidly. They are ordered to work and forbidden to think. Many of them, perhaps all, pledge allegiance to dead strength and serve it. Here lies the source of earth’s misery. There is no freedom for the growth of the human soul.”
He talked while several young boys walked alongside of him and listened to his words. Their attentiveness was amusing. What could these young sprouts of life understand by his words? I remembered my own teacher. He beat the children on the head with a ruler and would come to school drunk.
“Life is filled with fear,” Mikhail said, “and mutual hatred eats out the soul of man. A hideous life. But only give the children time to develop freely; do not transform them into beasts of burden, and free and alert, they will light up life both from within and without with the exquisite young fire of their proud souls and the great beauty of their eternal activity.”
Their blond heads, their blue eyes, their red cheeks were around us like live flowers among the dark green pines. The laughter and clear voices of these gay birds rang out—these harbingers of new life. And all this vital beauty would be trampled down by greed! What sense was there in that? A delicate child is born rejoicing. He grows into a beautiful child, and then, as a grown-up man, he swears vulgarly and groans bitterly, beats his wife and drowns his sorrow in vodka. And as an answer to my thought, Mikhail said:
“They go on destroying the people—the one and true temple of the living God. And the destroyers themselves sinking in the chaos of the ruins, see their wicked work and cry out, ‘Horrible!’ They rush hither and thither and whine, ‘Where is God?’ while they themselves have killed Him.”
I remembered Juna’s words about the breaking up of the Russian people, and my thoughts followed Mikhail’s words lightly and pleasantly. But I could not understand why he spoke low and without anger, as if this whole oppressive life was a thing of the past for him.
The earth breathed warm and friendly, with the intoxicating perfumes of the sap and the flowers. The birds pierced the air with their twitter, the children played about and conquered the stillness of the wood, and it became more and more clear to me that before this day I had not understood their strength, nor had I ever seen their beauty. It was good to see Mikhail among them, with his calm smile on his face. I said, smiling:
“I am going to leave you for a little. I have to think.”
He looked at me. His eyes beamed, his eyelashes fluttered, and my heart answered him, trembling. I had seen little of friendship, but I kn
ew how to value it.
“You are a good man,” I said to him.
He became embarrassed, lowered his eyes, and I also was confused. We stood opposite each other, silent; then separated. He called out after me:
“Don’t go too far. You will lose your way.”
“Thank you.”
I turned into the wood, chose a place and sat down. From the distance came the voices of the children. The thick, green wood resounded with their laughter and it sighed. The squirrels squeaked over my head, the finches sang.
I wanted to explain all to my soul; all which I knew and which I had heard these days, but everything melted within me into a rainbow, and it enfolded me and carried me on as it floated quietly along, filling my soul. It grew infinitely large, and I lost myself in it, forgetting myself in a light cloud of speechless thought.
At night I reached home and said to Mikhail that I would like to live with them some time, until I learned their faith. For this reason I wished Uncle Peter to find some work for me in the factory.
“Don’t hurry so,” he said. “You ought to rest and read some books.”
“Give me your books,” I said, for I trusted them.
“Take them.”
“I have never read worldly books,” I said. “Give me what you think I need; for instance, a Russian history.”
“It is necessary to know everything,” he answered, and looked at the books affectionately, as at the children.
Then I buried myself in study, reading all day long. It was difficult for me, and painful. The books did not argue with me. They simply did not wish to know me. One book especially tortured me. It spoke about the development of the world and of human life. It was written against the Bible. Everything was stated simply, clearly and positively. I could find no loophole in this simplicity, and it seemed to me that a whole row of strange powers were around me and that I w as among them like a mouse in a trap. I read it twice, read it in silence, wishing to find some flaw in it through which I could escape to liberty. But I found none. I asked my teacher:
“How is it? Where is the man?”
