Childhood, Boyhood, Youth (Penguin ed.)

by Leo Tolstoy

  Since I had gone to her room many times before to nap after dinner, she guessed what had brought me this time, and getting up from the bed she said to me, ‘Come for a rest then, darling? Go ahead and lie down.’

  ‘What do you mean, Natalya Savishna?’ I said, taking her hand. ‘That isn’t the reason I came at all. I just came … And you’re tired yourself. Why don’t you lie down instead?’

  ‘No, little master, I’ve slept enough,’ she said, even though I knew that she hadn’t slept for three days. ‘Anyway, I don’t feel like it now,’ she added with a deep sigh.

  I wanted to talk to Natalya Savishna about our calamity. I knew how sincere and loving she was, and having a cry with her would be a comfort to me.

  ‘Natalya Savishna,’ I said after a brief silence as I sat down on the bed, ‘did you expect it?’

  The old woman looked at me in bewilderment, probably not understanding why I was asking her that.

  ‘Could anyone have expected it?’ I repeated.

  ‘Oh, little master,’ she said, looking at me with an expression of tender compassion, ‘not only didn’t I expect it, I don’t believe it even now. It’s high time for an old woman like me to lay her old bones to rest, but I’ve outlived them all: the old master, your grandfather Prince Nikolay Mikhailovich, eternal memory to him, and my two brothers and my sister Annushka, and all of them younger than I am, little master; and now, clearly for my sins, I’ve come to outlive her, too. His holy will be done! He took her because she was worthy and He needs good people there, too.’

  That simple thought impressed and comforted me, and I moved closer to Natalya Savishna. She folded her hands over her breast and looked up. Her moist, sunken eyes expressed a great but tranquil sadness. It was her firm hope that God had not separated her for long from the one on whom all the power of her love had been concentrated for so many years.

  ‘Yes, little master, it doesn’t seem so very long ago that I took care of her and swaddled her and she called me “Nasha”.60 She would run to me, take hold of me with her little hands, and start to kiss me and say, “My Nashik, my handsome one, my little turkey hen.” And I would say in fun, “That isn’t so, missy, you don’t love me. Why, when you grow up to be a big girl and get married, you’ll forget all about your Nasha.” Then she would start thinking. “No,” she would say, “it would be better not to get married if I can’t take Nasha with me. I’ll never leave Nasha.” But she didn’t wait, and now she’s left me. And she did love me, but now she’s gone! But whom didn’t she love, to tell the truth of it? No, little master, you must never forget your mama; she wasn’t a human being but an angel from above. When her soul goes to the kingdom of heaven, she’ll love you there, too, and rejoice in you.’

  ‘But Natalya Savishna, why do you say when her soul goes to the kingdom of heaven?’ I asked. ‘It’s already there now, I think.’

  ‘No, little master,’ Natalya Savishna said, lowering her voice and moving closer to me on the bed. ‘Her soul’s still here.’

  And she gestured upward. She spoke almost in a whisper, and with such feeling and conviction that I involuntarily looked up at the cornices, expecting to see something there.

  ‘Before the soul of a righteous person goes to heaven, it passes through forty ordeals, little master, for forty days, and may still be in its home.’

  She talked that way for a long time, and did so with such simplicity and conviction it was as if she were talking about quite ordinary things that she herself had seen and no one would even think of doubting. I held my breath as I listened, and although I didn’t understand most of what she said, I believed her completely.

  ‘Yes, little master, she’s here, watching us now and perhaps listening to what we’re saying,’ Natalya Savishna concluded.

  And looking down, she fell silent. She needed a handkerchief to dry her tears. She got up, looked directly at me and said in a voice shaking in agitation, ‘The Lord has moved me many steps closer to Him with this. What’s left for me here? For whom shall I live? Whom shall I love?’

  ‘But don’t you love us?’ I said reproachfully, barely holding back my tears.

  ‘God knows how much I love you, my darlings, but I’ve never loved and cannot love anyone the way I loved her.’

  She couldn’t say any more, and turned away from me and broke into loud sobs.

  I was no longer thinking about sleep. We silently sat across from each other and wept.

  Just then Foka came into the room. Noticing our state and probably not wishing to disturb us, he remained by the door and watched in silence.

  ‘What have you come for, Fokasha?’ Natalya Savishna asked, drying her tears with her handkerchief.

  ‘A pound and a half of raisins, four pounds of sugar and three pounds of rice for the kutya,61 ma’am.’

  ‘In a moment, in a moment, my dear,’ Natalya Savishna said, hurriedly taking some snuff and quickly stepping over to a trunk. The last traces of the sorrow produced by our conversation disappeared as she set about her duties, which she regarded as very important.

  ‘Why four pounds?’ she asked querulously, as she got out the sugar and weighed it on her scale. ‘Three and a half will be plenty.’

  And she removed several pieces from the scale.

  ‘And what do they mean by asking for more rice when I gave them eight pounds only yesterday? You may do as you like, Foka Demidych, but I won’t give them the rice. That Vanka’s glad there’s a to-do in the house now: he thinks no one will notice. No, I’m not going to be a party to pilfering the masters’ property. Whoever heard of such a thing? Eight pounds!’

  ‘But what can I do, ma’am? He says it’s all gone.’

  ‘Well, here, take it, then! Take it! Let him have it!’

  I was struck at the time by the shift from the tender feeling of her conversation with me to peevishness and petty calculation. Reflecting on it afterwards, I realized that, regardless of what was in her heart, she still had enough presence of mind to do her work, and force of habit pulled her back to her usual activities. Grief affected her so powerfully that she found it unnecessary to hide her ability to deal with other things. She wouldn’t even have understood where such an idea could have come from.

  Vanity is the feeling most incompatible with genuine grief, but it’s so tightly intertwined in human nature that it’s quite rare for even the strongest grief to drive it out. Vanity in grief is expressed in the desire to seem grief-stricken or miserable or strong, and those base desires, which we don’t admit but which almost never leave us, even in the greatest sorrow, deprive our sorrow of its force and dignity and sincerity. But Natalya Savishna was so profoundly affected by her unhappiness that not a single desire remained in her heart, and she lived by habit alone.

  After handing over the requested provisions to Foka, and reminding him of the pie that would have to be baked as a treat for the parish priests, she let him go, picked up the stocking she was knitting and sat back down beside me.

  We started to talk about the same thing again, and wept again, and dried our tears again.

  Those talks with Natalya Savishna were repeated every day. Her quiet tears and calm, devout words provided comfort and relief.

  But we were soon parted. Three days after the funeral, the entire household moved to Moscow and I was destined never to see her again.

  It was only with our arrival that Grandmother received the terrible news, and her grief was extraordinary. We weren’t allowed in to see her, since she was delirious the whole week and the doctors were concerned for her life, all the more since she not only refused to take any medication but wouldn’t talk to anyone, sleep or eat. Sometimes while sitting alone in her room in her armchair, she would suddenly start laughing and then sob convulsively without tears or scream terrible or meaningless words in a frenzied voice. It was the first powerful grief to affect her, and it brought her to despair. She needed to blame someone for he
r unhappiness, and would say appalling things and make threats with exceptional violence, jump up from her armchair, move around the room with long, rapid strides, and then collapse in a swoon.

  One time I went into her room. She was sitting in her armchair as usual and seemed calm enough, although I was struck by her gaze. Her eyes were open very wide, but with an unfocused, absent look. She was staring straight at me, but probably didn’t see me. Her lips slowly started to smile and she began to speak in a tender, touching voice: ‘Come here, my friend, come here, my angel.’ I thought she was speaking to me and moved closer, but she wasn’t looking at me at all. ‘Ah, if you only knew, dear heart, how much I’ve suffered and how happy I am that you’ve come.’ I realized she was imagining that she saw maman and I stopped. ‘And they told me you were gone,’ she continued with a frown. ‘What nonsense! Could you really die before me?’ And she started to laugh in terrifying, hysterical guffaws.

  Only those capable of strong love can experience strong grief, but the very need to love serves as a counterweight to their grief and heals them. For that reason, a person’s mental nature is even more resilient than his physical one. Grief never kills.

  A week later Grandmother was finally able to cry and she got better. Her first thought, when she was herself again, was of us, and her love for us increased. We didn’t leave her armchair. She wept quietly, and talked about maman and tenderly petted us.

  It would never have occurred to anyone observing Grandmother’s sorrow that she exaggerated it, and the expression of that sorrow was powerful and moving, but, I don’t know why, I had greater sympathy for Natalya Savishna, and I remain convinced to this day that no one loved maman more sincerely and purely, or felt greater sorrow at her passing, than that simple-hearted and loving creature.

  With my mother’s death, the happy period of childhood ended and a new one began, that of boyhood. But since my memories of Natalya Savishna belong to that first period, and she had such a strong and beneficial influence on my outlook and the development of my sensibility, even though I never saw her again, I’ll say a few more words about her and her passing.

  As those who had remained behind in the country told me later, she got very bored with the lack of anything to do after we had gone. Although the trunks remained in her care and she hadn’t stopped rummaging in them or moving things around or weighing and distributing them, she missed the noise and bustle of the country house occupied by masters she had known since childhood. Grief, the change in her way of life, and the lack of responsibilities aggravated the infirmities of age to which she was already prone. A year after Mama passed away, she developed dropsy and took to her bed.

  It was hard, I think, for Natalya Savishna to live alone, and harder still for her to die that way in the large, empty Petrovskoye house without either family or friends. Everyone in the house liked and respected her, but she wasn’t on intimate terms with any of them and took pride in that. She felt that in her position as housekeeper, as someone who enjoyed the confidence of her masters and was responsible for so many trunks of every kind of property, friendship with anyone would surely have led to partiality and tolerance of wrongdoing. For that reason, or perhaps merely because she had nothing in common with the other servants, she remained aloof from them all and said that she had neither kith nor kin in the house, and would allow no pilfering of the masters’ property.

  Confiding her feelings to God in heartfelt prayer, she sought and found solace, but sometimes in those moments of weakness to which all are subject, when the best comfort is the sympathy and tears of another living creature, she would lift up onto her bed her favourite pug (which would lick her hands and fix its yellow eyes on her) and talk to it and quietly weep as she petted it. Whenever the pug would start to whimper, she would soothe it and say, ‘That’s enough. I know even without you that I’ll die soon.’

  A month before she died she took out of her own trunk some white calico, white muslin and pink ribbons and, with the help of the young woman who looked after her, made a white dress and bonnet for herself and gave instructions down to the smallest detail about everything else required for her funeral. She also went through all the household trunks and with the utmost care, by inventory list, transferred their contents to the steward’s wife. Then she got out two silk dresses and an old shawl that had been given to her by my grandmother, along with my grandfather’s gold-braided army uniform, also given to her to use in whatever way she wanted. Thanks to her care, the braiding was like new, and the cloth was untouched by moths.

  Just before she died, she expressed the wish that one dress – the pink one – should be given to Volodya to make a dressing gown or quilted jacket, that the other – the puce one with checks – should go to me for the same purpose, while the shawl should be left to Lyubochka. The uniform she bequeathed to whichever of us should become an officer first. All the rest of her possessions and money, except for forty roubles she set aside for her burial and for prayers on her behalf, she left to her brother, who had long since been freed and was living in some distant province where he led a most dissolute life, as a result of which she had no dealings with him at all.

  When the brother turned up to claim his inheritance, and the entire property of the deceased turned out to be no more than twenty-five paper roubles, he couldn’t believe it, and said that an old woman who had spent sixty years in a rich house and been in charge of everything, and had lived her whole life frugally and worried about every little scrap, couldn’t possibly have left so little behind. But it really was so.

  Natalya Savishna suffered for two months from her illness and endured her suffering with true Christian forbearance: she didn’t grumble or complain but only prayed continually to God, as had always been her custom. An hour before she died she made her confession with quiet joy and received Communion and unction.

  She asked all the servants to forgive her if she had done them any offence, and she asked her confessor, Father Vasily, to convey to all of us that she didn’t know how to express her gratitude for our kindness, and begged us to forgive her if from foolishness she had offended any of us, ‘Although I was never a thief and can say that I never took a single thread at the masters’ expense.’ That was the one quality she valued in herself.

  After putting on the gown and bonnet she had prepared, and propping herself up on her pillows, she remembered that she had left nothing for the poor. She got out ten roubles and asked the priest to distribute them in the parish, and then continued to talk with him until the very end. And then she crossed herself, lay down, and breathed her last, saying the name of God with a joyful smile.

  She departed life without regret, not fearing death but accepting it as a blessing. That is often said, but how rarely it happens! Natalya Savishna could meet death without fear, because she was dying with a steadfast faith after fulfilling the law of the Gospels. Her whole life had been one of pure, unselfish love and sacrifice.

  What if her beliefs could have been loftier or her life directed towards a higher goal – was that pure soul any the less deserving of love and wonder because of that?

  She accomplished the best and greatest thing in this life: she died without regret or fear.

  At her request, she was buried near the chapel that stands over Mama’s grave. The mound under which she lies is overgrown with nettles and burdocks and surrounded by a black railing, and I never forget to go from the chapel to that railing to prostrate myself.

  Sometimes I linger in silence between the chapel and the railing. Painful memories are awakened in my soul. The thought comes to me: could Providence really have bound me to those two beings only to make me regret their loss forever?

  BOYHOOD

  ONE

  A Trip in Stages

  Two carriages are again waiting by the front steps of the Petrovskoye house, one a coach in which Mimi, Katenka and Lyubochka have taken their places, with the chambermaid Masha and the steward Yakov himself up on
the box, and the other a britzka in which Volodya and I are to ride with the footman Vasily, recently added to our household.

  Papa, who’s supposed to join us in Moscow in a few days, stands hatless on the steps, making the sign of the cross at the britzka and the coach’s window.

  ‘Well, Christ be with you! Get going!’ Yakov and the coachmen (we’re using our own horses) doff their caps and cross themselves. ‘Gee-up! Gee-up! God speed us!’ The coach and britzka start to bounce along the uneven road, and the birches of the wide avenue slip past, one after another. I’m not sad at all: my mental gaze is directed not at what I’m leaving behind, but at what lies ahead. The farther I am from the things linked to the painful memories that have filled my imagination, the less power those memories have, and the more rapidly they’re replaced by a joyful sense of life full of strength, vitality and hope.

  Rarely have I spent as many days, I won’t say merrily, since I was still somehow ashamed to yield to merriment, but pleasantly and well as during the four days of our trip. Gone from sight were the closed door of Mama’s room that I had been unable to walk by without a shudder; the piano that we not only didn’t go near, but couldn’t even look at without a kind of dread; our mourning clothes (we were dressed in simple travel attire); and all the other things that, by vividly bringing to mind our irreparable loss, made me wary of any expression of life, lest I somehow insult the memory of her. But now picturesque new places and things continually capture my attention and interest, and springtime nature fills my heart with joyful feelings of contentment with the present and bright hope for the future.

  Very early the next morning the pitiless and, as always happens with people in new employment, overly zealous Vasily yanks off my blanket and announces that everything’s ready and that it’s time to go. Scrunch down, pretend, or show anger as you may to prolong your sweet morning slumber, if only another quarter-hour, it’s obvious from Vasily’s determined face that he’s implacable and prepared to yank the blanket off another twenty times, so you jump out of bed and run out to the yard to wash.