The Maxim Gorky

by Maxim Gorky

“That is to say, about dogs and horses—whichever may happen to come their way.”

  The shopman laughed. I was enraged. The atmosphere was oppressive, unpleasant to me. But if I attempted to get away, the shopman stopped me.

  “Where are you going?”

  And the old man would examine me.

  “Now, you learned man, gnaw this problem. Suppose you had a thousand naked people standing before you, five hundred women and five hundred men, and among them Adam and Eve. How would you tell which were Adam and Eve?”

  He kept asking me this, and at length explained triumphantly:

  “Little fool, don’t you see that, as they were not born, but were created, they would have no navels!” The old man knew an innumerable quantity of these “problems.” He could wear me out with them.

  During my early days at the shop, I used to tell the shopman the contents of some of the books I had read. Now these stories came back to me in an evil form. The shopman retold them to Petr Vassilich, considerably cut up, obscenely mutilated. The old man skilfully helped him in his shameful questions. Their slimy tongues threw the refuse of their obscene words at Eugénie Grandet, Ludmilla, and Henry IV.

  I understood that they did not do this out of ill-nature, but simply because they wanted something to do. All the same, I did not find it easy to bear.

  Having created the filth, they wallowed in it, like hogs, and grunted with enjoyment when they soiled what was beautiful, strange, unintelligible, and therefore comical to them.

  The whole Gostinui Dvor, the whole of its population of merchants and shopmen, lived a strange life, full of stupid, puerile, and always malicious diversions. If a passing peasant asked which was the nearest way to any place in the town, they always gave him the wrong direction. This had become such a habit with them that the deceit no longer gave them pleasure. They would catch two rats, tie their tails together, and let them go in the road. They loved to see how they pulled in different directions, or bit each other, and sometimes they poured paraffin-oil over the rats, and set fire to them. They would tie an old iron pail on the tail of a dog, who, in wild terror, would tear about, yelping and growling, while they all looked on, and laughed.

  There were many similar forms of recreation, “and it seemed to me that all kinds of people, especially country people, existed simply for the amusement of the Gostinui Dvor. In their relations to other people, there was a constant desire to make fun of them, to give them pain, and to make them uncomfortable. It was strange that the books I had read were silent on the subject of this unceasing, deep-seated tendency of people to jeer at one another.

  One of the amusements of the Gostinui Dvor seemed to me peculiarly offensive and disgusting.

  Underneath our shop there was a dealer in woolen and felt footwear, whose salesman amazed the whole of Nijni by his gluttony. His master used to boast of this peculiarity of his employee, as one boasts of the fierceness of a dog, or the strength of a horse. He often used to get the neighboring shopkeepers to bet.

  “Who will go as high as ten rubles? I will bet that Mishka devours, ten pounds of ham in two hours!”

  But they all knew that Mishka was well able to do that, and they said:

  “We won’t take your bet, but buy the ham and let him eat it, and we will look on.”

  “Only let it be all meat and no bones!”

  They would dispute a little and lazily, and then out of the dark storehouse crept a lean, beardless fellow with high cheek-bones, in a long cloth coat girdled with a red belt all stuck round with tufts of wool. Respectfully removing his cap from his small head, he gazed in silence, with a dull expression in his deep-set eyes, at the round face of his master which was suffused with purple blood. The latter was saying in his thick harsh voice:

  “Can you eat a gammon of ham?”

  “How long shall I have for it?” asked Mishka practically, in his thin voice.

  “Two hours.”

  “That will be difficult.”

  “Where is the difficulty?”

  “Well, let me have a drop of beer with it.”

  “All right,” said his master, and he would boast:

  “You need not think that he has an empty stomach. No! In the morning he had two pounds of bread, and dinner at noon, as you know.”

  They brought the ham, and the spectators took their places. All the merchants were tightly enveloped in their thick fur-coats and looked like gigantic weights. They were people with big stomachs, but they all had small eyes and some had fatty tumors. An unconquerable feeling of boredom oppressed them all.

  With their hands tucked into their sleeves, they surrounded the great glutton in a narrow circle, armed with knives and large crusts of rye bread. He crossed himself piously, sat down on a sack of wool and placed the ham on a box at his side, measuring it with his vacant eyes.

  Cutting off a thin slice of bread and a thick one of meat, the glutton folded them together carefully, and held the sandwich to his mouth with both hands. His lips trembled; he licked them with his thin and long canine tongue, showing his small sharp teeth, and with a dog-like movement bent his snout again over the meat.

  “He has begun!”

  “Look at the time!”

  All eyes were turned in a business-like manner on the face of the glutton, on his lower jaw, on the round protuberances near his ears; they watched the sharp chin rise and fall regularly, and drowsily uttered their thoughts.

  “He eats cleanly—like a bear.”

  “Have you ever seen a bear eat?”

  “Do I live in the woods? There is a saying, ‘he gobbles like a bear.’”

  “Like a pig, it says.”

  “Pigs don’t eat pig.”

  They laughed unwillingly, and soon some one knowingly said:

  “Pigs eat everything—little pigs and their own sisters.”

  The face of the glutton gradually grew darker, his ears became livid, his running eyes crept out of their bony pit, he breathed with difficulty, but his chin moved as regularly as ever.

  “Take it easy, Mikhail, there is time!” they encouraged him.

  He uneasily measured the remains of the meat with his eyes, drank some beer, and once more began to munch. The spectators became more animated. Looking more often at the watch in the hand of Mishka’s master, they suggested to one another:

  “Don’t you think he may have put the watch back? Take it away from him! Watch Mishka in case he should put any meat up his sleeve! He won’t finish it in the time!”

  Mishka’s master cried passionately:

  “I’ll take you on for a quarter of a ruble! Mishka, don’t give way!”

  They began to dispute with the master, but no one would take the bet.

  And Mishka went on eating and eating; his face began to look like the ham, his sharp grisly nose whistled plaintively. It was terrible to look at him. It seemed to me that he was about to scream, to wail:

  “Have mercy on me!”

  At length he finished it all, opened his tipsy eyes wide, and said in a hoarse, tired voice:

  “Let me go to sleep.”

  But his master, looking at his watch, cried angrily:

  “You have taken four minutes too long, you wretch!”

  The others teased him:

  “What a pity we did not take you on; you would have lost.”

  “However, he is a regular wild animal, that fellow.”

  “Ye—e—es, he ought to be in a show.”

  “You see what monsters the Lord can make of men, eh?”

  “Let us go and have some tea, shall we?”

  And they swam like barges to the tavern.

  I wanted to know what stirred in the bosoms of these heavy, iron-hearted people that they should gather round the poor fellow because his unhealthy gluttony amused them.

  It was dark and dul
l in that narrow gallery closely packed with wool, sheepskins, hemp, ropes, felt, boots, and saddlery. It was cut off. from the pavement by pillars of brick, clumsily thick, weather-beaten, and spattered with mud from the road. All the bricks and all the chinks between them, all the holes made by the fallen-away mortar, had been mentally counted by me a thousand times, and their hideous designs were forever heavily imprinted on my memory.

  The foot-passenger dawdled along the pavement; hackney carriages and sledges loaded with goods passed up the road without haste. Beyond the street, in a red-brick, square, two-storied shop, was the marketplace, littered with cases, straw, crumpled paper, covered with dirt and trampled snow.

  All this, together with the people and the horses, in spite of the movement, seemed to be motionless, or lazily moving round and round in one place to which it was fastened by invisible chains. One felt suddenly that this life was almost devoid of sound, or so poor in sounds that it amounted to dumbness. The sides of the sledges squeaked, the doors of the shops slammed, sellers of pies and honey cried their wares, but their voices sounded unhappy, unwilling. They were all alike; one quickly became used to them, and ceased to pay attention to them.

  The church-bells tolled funerally. That melancholy sound was always in my ears. It seemed to float in the air over the market-place without ceasing from morning to night; it was mingled with all my thoughts and feelings; it lay like a copper veneer over all my impressions.

  Tedium, coldness, and want breathed all around: from the earth covered with dirty snow, from the gray snow-drift on the roof, from the flesh-colored bricks of the buildings; tedium rose from the chimneys in a thick gray smoke, and crept up to the gray, low, empty sky; with tedium horses sweated and people sighed. They had a peculiar smell of their own, these people—the oppressive dull smell of sweat, fat, hemp oil, hearth-cakes, and smoke. It was an odor which pressed upon one’s head like a warm close-fitting cap, and ran down into one’s breast, arousing a strange feeling of intoxication, a vague desire to shut one’s eyes, to cry out despairingly, to run away somewhere and knock one’s head against the first wall.

  I gazed into the faces of the merchants, over-nourished, full-blooded, frost-bitten, and as immobile as if they were asleep. These people often yawned, opening their mouths like fish which have been cast on dry land.

  In winter, trade was slack and there was not in the eyes of the dealer that cautious, rapacious gleam which somehow made them bright and animated in the summer. The heavy fur coats hampered their movements, bowed them to the earth. As a rule they spoke lazily, but when they fell into a passion, they grew vehement. I had an idea that they did this purposely, in order to show one another that they were alive.

  It was perfectly clear to me that tedium weighed upon them, was killing them, and the unsuccessful struggle against its overwhelming strength was the only explanation I could give of their cruelty and senseless amusements at the expense of others.

  Sometimes I discussed this with Petr Vissilich.

  Although as a rule he behaved to me scornfully and jeeringly, he liked me for my partiality for books, and at times he permitted himself to talk to me instructively, seriously.

  “I don’t like the way these merchants live,” I said.

  Twisting a strand of his beard in his long fingers, he said:

  “And how do you know how they live? Do you then often visit them at their houses? This is merely a street, my friend, and people do not live in a street; they simply buy and sell, and they get through that as quickly as they can, and then go home again! People walk about the streets with their clothes on, and you do not know what they are like under their clothes. What a man really is is seen in his own home, within his own four walls, and how he lives there—that you know nothing about!”

  “Yes, but they have the same ideas whether they are here or at home, don’t they?”

  “And how can any one know what ideas his neighbors have?” said the old man, making his eyes round. “Thoughts are like lice; you cannot count them. It may be that a man, on going to his home, falls on his knees and, weeping, prays to God: ‘Forgive me, Lord, I have defiled Thy holy day!’ It may be that his house is a sort of monastery to him, and he lives there alone with his God. You see how it is! Every spider knows its own corner, spins its own web, and understands its own position, so that it may hold its own.”

  When he spoke seriously, his voice went lower and lower to a deep base, as if he were communicating secrets.

  “Here you are judging others, and it is too soon for you; at your age one lives not by one’s reason but by one’s eyes. What you must do is to look, remember, and hold your tongue. The mind is for business, but faith is for the soul. It is good for you to read books, but there must be moderation in all things, and some have read themselves into madness and godlessness.”

  I looked upon him as immortal; it was hard for me to believe that he might grow older and change. He liked to tell stories about merchants and coiners who had become notorious. I had heard many such stories from grandfather, who told them better than the valuer, but the underlying theme was the same—that riches always lead to sin towards God and one’s fellow-creatures. Petr Vassilich had no pity for human creatures, but he spoke of God with warmth of feeling, sighing and covering his eyes.

  “And so they try to cheat God, and He, the Lord Jesus Christ, sees it all and weeps. ‘My people, my people, my unhappy people, hell is being prepared for you!’”

  Once I jokingly reminded him:

  “But you cheat the peasants yourself.”

  He was not offended by this.

  “Is that a great matter as far as I am concerned?” he said. “I may rob them of from three to five rubles, and that is all it amounts to!”

  When he found me reading, he would take the book out of my hands and ask me questions about what I had read, in a fault-finding manner. With amazed incredulity he would say to the shopman:

  “Just look at that now; he understands books, the young rascal!”

  And he would give me a memorable, intelligent lecture:

  “Listen to what I tell you now; it is worth your while. There were two Kyrills, both of them bishops; one Kyrill of Alexandria, and the other Kyrill of Jerusalem. The first warred against the cursed heretic, Nestorius, who taught obscenely that Our Lady was born in original sin and therefore could not have given birth to God; but that she gave birth to a human being with the name and attributes of the Messiah, the Saviour of the world, and therefore she should be called not the God-Bearer, but the Christ-Bearer. Do you understand? That is called heresy! And Kyrill of Jerusalem fought against the Arian heretics.”

  I was delighted with his knowledge of church history, and he, stroking his beard with his well-cared-for, priest-like hands, boasted:

  “I am a past master in that sort of thing. When I was in Moscow, I was engaged in a verbal debate against the poisonous doctrines of the Nikonites, with both priests and seculars. I, my little one, actually conducted discussions with professors, yes! To one of the priests I so drove home the verbal scourge that his nose bled infernally, that it did!”

  His cheeks were flushed; his eyes shone.

  The bleeding of the nose of his opponent was evidently the highest point of his success, in his opinion; the highest ruby in the golden crown of his glory, and he told the story voluptuously.

  “A ha—a—andsome, wholesome-looking priest he was! He stood on the platform and drip, drip, the blood came from his nose. He did not see his shame. Ferocious was the priest as a desert lion; his voice was like a bell. But very quietly I got my words in between his ribs, like saws. He was really as hot as a stove, made red-hot by heretical malice—ekh—that was a business!”

  Occasionally other valuers came. These were Pakhomi, a man with a fat belly, in greasy clothes, with one crooked eye who was wrinkled and snarling; Lukian, a little old man, smooth as a mouse, kind and brisk; a
nd with him came a big, gloomy man looking like a coachman, black bearded, with a deathlike face, unpleasant to look upon, but handsome, and with eyes which never seemed to move. Almost always they brought ancient books, icons and thuribles to sell, or some kind of bowl. Sometimes they brought the vendors—an old man or woman from the Volga. When their business was finished, they sat on the counter, looking just like crows on a furrow, drank tea with rolls and lenten sugar, and told each other about the persecutions of the Nikonites.

  Here a search had been made, and books of devotion had been confiscated; there the police had closed a place of worship, and had contrived to bring its owner to justice under Article 103. This Article 103 was frequently the theme of their discussions, but they spoke of it calmly, as of something unavoidable, like the frosts of winter. The words police, search, prison, justice, Siberia—these words, continually recurring in their conversations about the persecutions for religious beliefs, fell on my heart like hot coals, kindling sympathy and fellow feeling for these Old Believers. Reading had taught me to look up to people who were obstinate in pursuing their aims, to value spiritual steadfastness.

  I forgot all the bad which I saw in these teachers of life. I felt only their calm stubbornness, behind which, it seemed to me, was hidden an unwavering belief in the teachings of their faith, for which they were ready to suffer all kinds of torments.

  At length, when I had come across many specimens of these guardians of the old faith, both among the people and among the intellectuals, I understood that this obstinacy was the oriental passivity of people who never moved from the place whereon they stood, and had no desire to move from it, but were bound by strong ties to the ways of the old words, and worn-out ideas. They were steeped in these words and ideas. Their wills were stationary, incapable of looking forward, and when some blow from without cast them out of their accustomed place, they mechanically and without resistance let themselves roll down, like a stone off a hill. They kept their own fasts in the graveyards of lived-out truths, with a deadly strength of memory for the past, and an insane love of suffering and persecution; but if the possibility of suffering were taken away from them, they faded away, disappeared like a cloud on a fresh winter day.