The Maxim Gorky

by Maxim Gorky

  “Don’t be angry, Mamochka; it doesn’t matter,” Ludmilla would say. “Just look how the mat-maker’s widow is dressed up!”

  “I should be able to dress better if it were not for you three. You have eaten me up, devoured me,” said the mother, pitilessly through her tears, fixing her eyes on the large, broad figure of the mat-maker’s widow.

  She was like a small house. Her chest stuck out like the roof, and her red face, half hidden by the green handkerchief which was tied round it, was like a dormer-window when the sun is reflected on it. Evsyenko, drawing his harmonica to his chest, began to play. The harmonica played many tunes; the sounds traveled a long way, and the children came from all the street around, and fell in the sand at the feet of the performer, trembling with ecstasy.

  “You wait; I’ll give you something!” the woman promised her husband.

  He looked at her askance, without speaking. And the mat-maker’s widow sat not far off on the Xlistov’s bench, listening intently.

  In the field behind the cemetery the sunset was red. In the street, as on a river, floated brightly clothed, great pieces of flesh. The children rushed along like a whirlwind; the warm air was caressing and intoxicating. A pungent odor rose from the sand, which had been made hot by the sun during the day, and peculiarly noticeable was a fat, sweet smell from the slaughter-house—the smell of blood. From the yard where the fur-dresser lived came the salt and bitter odor of tanning. The women’s chatter, the drunken roar of the men, the bell-like voices of the children, the bass melody of the harmonica—all mingled together in one deep rumble. The earth, which is ever, creating, gave a mighty sigh. All was coarse and naked, but it instilled a great, deep faith in that gloomy life, so shamelessly animal. At times above the noise certain painful, never-to-be-forgotten words went straight to one’s heart:

  “It is not right for you all together to set upon one. You must take turns.” “Who pities us when we do not pity ourselves?” “Did God bring women into the world in order to deride them?”

  The night drew near, the air became fresher, the sounds became more subdued. The wooden houses seemed to swell and grow taller, clothing themselves with shadows. The children were dragged away from the yard to bed. Some of them were already asleep by the fence or at the feet or on the knees of their mothers. Most of the children grew quieter and more docile with the night. Evsyenko disappeared unnoticed; he seemed to have melted away. The mat-maker’s widow was also missing. The bass notes of the harmonica could be heard somewhere in the distance, beyond the cemetery. Ludmilla’s mother sat on a bench doubled up, with her back stuck out like a cat. My grandmother had gone out to take tea with a neighbor, a midwife, a great fat woman with a nose like a duck’s, and a gold medal “for saving lives” on her flat, masculine-looking chest. The whole street feared her, regarding her as a witch, and it was related of her that she had carried out of the flames, when a fire broke out, the three children and sick wife of a certain colonel. There was a friendship between grandmother and her. When they met in the street they used to smile at each other from a long way off, as if they had seen something specially pleasant.

  Kostrom, Ludmilla, and I sat on the bench at the gate. Tchurka had called upon Ludmilla’s brother to wrestle with him. Locked in each other’s arms they trampled down the sand and became angry.

  “Leave off!” cried Ludmilla, timorously.

  Looking at her sidewise out of his black eyes, Kostrom told a story about the hunter Kalinin, a grayhaired old man with cunning eyes, a man of evil fame, known to all the village. He had not long been dead, but they had not buried him in the earth in the graveyard, but had placed his coffin above ground, away from the other graves. The coffin was black, on tall trestles; on the lid were drawn in white paint a cross, a spear, a reed, and two bones. Every night, as soon as it grew dark, the old man rose from his coffin and walked about the cemetery, looking for something, till the first cock crowed.

  “Don’t talk about such dreadful things!” begged Ludmilla.

  “Nonsense!” cried Tchurka, breaking away from her brother. “What are you telling lies for? I saw them bury the coffin myself, and the one above ground is simply a monument. As to a dead man walking about, the drunken blacksmith set the idea afloat.” Kostrom, without looking at him, suggested:

  “Go and sleep in the cemetery; then you will see.” They began to quarrel, and Ludmilla, shaking her head sadly, asked:

  “Mamochka, do dead people walk about at night?” “They do,” answered her mother, as if the question had called her back from a distance.

  The son of the shopkeeper Valek, a tall, stout, red-faced youth of twenty, came to us, and, hearing what we were disputing about, said:

  “I will give three greven and ten cigarettes to whichever of you three will sleep till daylight on the coffin, and I will pull the ears of the one who is afraid—as long as he likes. Well?”

  We were all silent, confused, and Ludmilla’s mother said:

  “What nonsense! What do you mean by putting the children up to such nonsense?”

  “You hand over a ruble, and I will go,” announced Tchurka, gruffly.

  Kostrom at once asked spitefully:

  “But for two greven—you would be afraid?” Then he said to Valek: “Give him the ruble. But he won’t go; he is only making believe.”

  “Well, take the ruble.”

  Tchurka rose, and, without saying a word and without hurrying, went away, keeping close to the fence. Kostrom, putting his fingers in his mouth, whistled piercingly after him.; but Ludmilla said uneasily:

  “O Lord, what a braggart he is! I never!”

  “Where are you going, coward?” jeered Valek. “And you call yourself the first fighter in the street!” It was offensive to listen to his jeers. We did not like this overfed youth; he was always putting up little boys to do wrong, told them obscene stories of girls and women, and taught them to tease them. The children did what he told them, and suffered dearly for it. For some reason or other he hated my dog, and used to throw stones at it, and one day gave it some bread with a needle in it. But it was still more offensive to see Tchurka going away, shrinking and ashamed.

  I said to Valek:

  “Give me the ruble, and I will go.”

  Mocking me and trying to frighten me, he held out the ruble to Ludmilla’s mother, who would not take it, and said sternly:

  “I don’t want it, and I won’t have it!” Then she went out angrily.

  Ludmilla also could not make up her mind to take the money, and this made Valek jeer the more. I was going away without obtaining the money when grandmother came along” and, being told all about it, took the ruble, saying to me softly:

  “Put on your overcoat and take a blanket with you, for it grows cold toward morning.”

  Her words raised my hopes that nothing terrible would happen to me.

  Valek laid it down on a condition that I should either lie or sit on the coffin until it was light, not leaving it, whatever happened, even if the coffin shook when the old man Kalinin began to climb out of the tomb. If I jumped to the ground I had lost.

  “And remember,” said Valek, “that I shall be watching you all night.”

  When I set out for the cemetery grandmother made the sign of the cross over me and kissed me.

  “If you should see a glimpse of anything, don’t move, but just say, ‘Hail, Mary.’”

  I went along quickly, my one desire being to begin and finish the whole thing. Valek, Kostrom, and another youth escorted me thither. As I was getting over the brick wall I got mixed up in the blanket, and fell down, but was up in the same moment, as if the earth had ejected me. There was a chuckle from the other side of the wall. My heart contracted; a cold chill ran down my back.

  I went stumblingly on to the black coffin, against one side of which the sand had drifted, while on the other side could be seen the short, thick
legs. It looked as if some one had tried to lift it up, and had succeeded only in making it totter. I sat on the edge of the coffin and looked around. The hilly cemetery was simply packed with gray crosses; quivering shadows fell upon the graves.

  Here and there, scattered among the graves, slender willows stood up, uniting adjoining graves with their branches. Through the lace-work of their shadows blades of grass stuck up.

  The church rose up in the sky like a snow-drift, and in the motionless clouds shone the small setting moon.

  The father of Yaz, “the good-for-nothing peasant,” was lazily ringing his bell in his lodge. Each time, as he pulled the string, it caught in the iron plate of the roof and squeaked pitifully, after which could be heard the metallic clang of the little bell. It sounded sharp and sorrowful.

  “God give us rest!” I remembered the saying of the watchman. It was very painful and somehow it was suffocating. I was perspiring freely although the night was cool. Should I have time to run into the watchman’s lodge if old Kalinin really did try to creep out of his grave?

  I was well acquainted with the cemetery. I had played among the graves many times with Yaz and other comrades. Over there by the church my mother was buried.

  Every one was not asleep yet, for snatches of laughter and fragments of songs were borne to me from the village. Either on the railway embankment, to which they were carrying sand, or in the village of Katizovka a harmonica gave forth a strangled sound. Along the wall, as usual, went the drunken blacksmith Myachov, singing. I recognized him by his song:

  “To our mother’s door

  One small sin we lay.

  The only one she loves

  Is our Papasha.”

  It was pleasant to listen to the last sighs of life, but at each stroke of the bell it became quieter, and the quietness overflowed like a river over a meadow, drowning and hiding everything. One’s soul seemed to float in boundless and unfathomable space, to be extinguished like the light of a catch in the darkness, becoming dissolved without leaving a trace in that ocean of space in which live only the unattainable stars, shining brightly, while everything on earth disappears as being useless and dead. Wrapping myself in the blanket, I sat on the coffin, with my feet tucked under me and my face to the church. Whenever I moved, the coffin squeaked, and the sand under it crunched.

  Something twice struck the ground close to me, and then a piece of brick fell near by. I was frightened, but then I guessed that Valek and his friends were throwing things at me from the other side of the wall, trying to scare me. But I felt all the better for the proximity of human creatures.

  I began unwillingly to think of my mother. Once she had found me trying to smoke a cigarette. She began to beat me, but I said:

  “Don’t touch me; I feel bad enough without that. I feel very sick.”

  Afterward, when I was put behind the stove as a punishment, she said to grandmother:

  “That boy has no feeling; he doesn’t love any one.” It hurt me to hear that. When my mother punished me I was sorry for her. I felt uncomfortable for her sake, because she seldom punished me deservedly or justly. On the whole, I had received a great deal of ill treatment in my life. Those people on the other side of the fence, for example, must know that I was frightened of being alone in the cemetery, yet they wanted to frighten me more. Why?

  I should like to have shouted to them, “Go to the devil!” but that might have been disastrous. Who knew what the devil would think of it, for no doubt he was somewhere near? There was a lot of mica in the sand, and it gleamed faintly in the moonlight, which reminded me how, lying one day on a raft on the Oka, gazing into the water, a bream suddenly swam almost in my face, turned on its side, looking like a human cheek, and, looking at me with its round, bird-like eyes, dived to the bottom, fluttering like a leaf falling from a maple-tree.

  My memory worked with increasing effort, recalling different episodes of my life, as if it were striving to protect itself against the imaginations evoked by terror.

  A hedgehog came rolling along, tapping on the sand with its strong paws. It reminded me of a hobgoblin; it was just as little and as disheveled-looking.

  I remembered how grandmother, squatting down beside the stove, said, “Kind master of the house, take away the beetles.”

  Far away over the town, which I could not see, it grew lighter. The cold morning air blew against my cheeks and into my eyes. I wrapped myself in my blanket. Let come what would!

  Grandmother awoke me. Standing beside me and pulling off the blanket, she said:

  “Get up! Aren’t you chilled? Well, were you frightened?”

  “I was frightened, but don’t tell any one; don’t tell the other boys.”

  “But why not?” she asked in amazement. “If you were not afraid, you have nothing to be proud about.”

  As he went home she said to me gently:

  “You have to experience things for yourself in this world, dear heart. If you can’t teach yourself, no one else can teach you.”

  By the evening I was the “hero” of the street, and every one asked me, “Is it possible that you were not afraid?” And when I answered, “I was afraid,” they shook their heads and exclaimed, “Aha! you see!”

  The shopkeeper went about saying loudly:

  “It may be that they talked nonsense when they said that Kalinin walked. But if he did, do you think he would have frightened that boy? No, he would have driven him out of the cemetery, and no one would know where he went.”

  Ludmilla looked at me with tender astonishment. Even grandfather was obviously pleased with me. They all made much of me. Only Tchurka said gruffly:

  “It was easy enough for him; his grandmother is a witch!”

  CHAPTER III

  Imperceptibly, like a little star at dawn, my brother Kolia faded away. Grandmother, he, and I slept in a small shed on planks covered with various rags. On the other side of the chinky wall of the outhouse was the family poultry-house. We could hear the sleepy, overfed fowls fluttering and clucking in the evening, and the golden, shrill-voiced cock awoke us in the morning.

  “Oh, I should like to tear you to pieces!” grandmother would grumble when they woke her.

  I was already awake, watching the sunbeams falling through the chinks upon my bed, and the silver specks of dust which danced in them. These little specks seemed to me just like the words in a fairy-tale. Mice had gnawed the planks, and red beetles with black spots ran about there.

  Sometimes, to escape from the stifling fumes which arose from the soil in the fowl-house, I crept out of the wooden hut, climbed to the roof, and watched the people of the house waking up, eyeless, large, and swollen with sleep. Here appeared the hairy noddle of the boatman Phermanov, a surly drunkard, who gazed at the sun with blear, running eyes and grunted like a bear. Then grandfather came hurrying out into the yard and hastened to the wash-house to wash himself in cold water. The garrulous cook of the landlord, a sharp-nosed woman, thickly covered with freckles, was like a cuckoo. The landlord himself was like an old fat dove. In fact, they were all like some bird, animal, or wild beast.

  Although the morning was so pleasant and bright, it made me feel sad, and I wanted to get away into the fields where no one came, for I had already learned that human creatures always spoil a bright day.

  One day when I was lying on the roof grandmother called me, and said in a low voice, shaking her head as she lay on her bed:

  “Kolia is dead.”

  The little boy had slipped from the pillow, and lay livid, lanky on the felt cover. His night-shirt had worked itself up round his neck, leaving bare his swollen stomach and crooked legs. His hands were curiously folded behind his back, as if he had been trying to lift himself up. His head was bent on one side.

  “Thank God he has gone!” said grandmother as she did her hair. “What would have become of the poor little wretch had he l
ived?”

  Treading almost as if he were dancing, grandfather made his appearance, and cautiously touched the closed eyes of the child with his fingers.

  Grandmother asked him angrily:

  “What do you mean by touching him with unwashen hands?”

  He muttered:

  “There you are! He gets born, lives, and eats, and all for nothing.”

  “You are half asleep,” grandmother cut him short.

  He looked at her vacantly, and went out in the yard, saying:

  “I am not going to give him a funeral; you can do what you like about it.”

  “Phoo! you miserable creature!”

  I went out, and did not return until it was close upon evening. They buried Kolia on the morning of the following day, and during the mass I sat by the reopened grave with my dog and Yaz’s father. He had dug the grave cheaply, and kept praising himself for it before my face.

  “I have only done this out of friendship; for any one else I should have charged so many rubles.”

  Looking into the yellow pit, from which arose a heavy odor, I saw some moist black planks at one side. At my slightest movement the heaps of sand around the grave fell to the bottom in a thin stream, leaving wrinkles in the sides. I moved on purpose, so that the sand would hide those boards.

  “No larks now!” said Yaz’s father, as he smoked.

  Grandmother carried out the little coffin. The “trashy peasant” sprang into the hole, took the coffin from her, placed it beside the black boards, and, jumping out of the grave, began to hurl the earth into it with his feet and his spade. Grandfather and grandmother also helped him in silence. There were neither priests nor beggars there; only we four amid a dense crowd of crosses. As she gave the sexton his money, grandmother said reproachfully:

  “But you have disturbed Varina’s coffin.”

  “What else could I do? If I had not done that, I should have had to take some one else’s piece of ground. But there’s nothing to worry about.”