As it gradually thinned out the garden became a real meadow sloping down to a river overgrown with green rushes and osiers. Near the mill-dam was a deep pond full of fish. A small mill with a thatched roof angrily hummed away and frogs croaked furiously. Occasionally the mirror-like surface of the water was broken by ripples, water-lilies trembled as lively fish brushed past them. On the far side of the stream was the hamlet of Dubechnya. The calm blue millpond drew one to it, promising cool and rest. And now all this – the millpond, the mill and the pleasant river banks – belonged to the engineer!
And so I started my new job. I received and despatched telegrams, wrote out expense sheets, made fair copies of order forms, claims and reports that were sent to our office by illiterate foremen and workmen. Most of the day I did nothing but pace the room waiting for telegrams. Or I would make a boy sit there and go out into the garden for a walk until he came running to tell me that the telegraph machine was clicking. I had dinner at Mrs Cheprakov’s. They hardly ever served meat and we usually had nothing but milk dishes; on fast days such as Wednesday and Friday, they brought out the ‘Lenten’ pink plates. Mrs Cheprakov was in the habit of always winking and I felt ill at ease whenever I was with her.
As there wasn’t enough work in the outbuilding, even for one person, Cheprakov slept or went down with his rifle to the millpond to shoot ducks. In the evenings he would get drunk in the village or at the station, and before going to bed would look at himself in the mirror and shout, ‘Hullo, Ivan Cheprakov!’
When drunk he looked very pale, and he kept rubbing his hands and producing a neighing laugh. He would strip and run around the field stark naked for the fun of it. He used to eat flies and said that they had a rather sour taste.
IV
One day, after dinner, he came running breathlessly into the outbuilding and said, ‘You’d better get moving, your sister’s arrived.’
I went out. A cab from the town was standing at the entrance to the main house. My sister had come with Anyuta Blagovo and a gentleman in a military tunic. As I went closer I recognized him as Anyuta’s brother, an army doctor.
‘We’ve come for a picnic!’ he said. ‘I hope it’s all right.’
My sister and Anyuta wanted to ask how I was getting on, but neither spoke and simply stared at me. They could see I didn’t like it there and my sister’s eyes filled with tears, while Anyuta Blagovo blushed. We went into the garden with the doctor leading the way and exclaiming rapturously, ‘What air! My goodness, what air!’
He still looked like a student, he spoke and walked like one, and his grey eyes had the lively, natural, open look of a good student. Next to his tall, beautiful sister he seemed frail and thin. His beard was thin too, as was his pleasant tenor voice. He had been serving somewhere with his regiment and was now home on leave. He said that he was going to St Petersburg in the autumn to sit for his M.D. A family man with a wife and three children, he had married young, when he was a second-year student, and people in the town said he had an unhappy life at home and that he wasn’t living with his wife.
‘What’s the time?’ my sister asked anxiously. ‘We’ll have to be back early. Papa said I could come and see my brother, but only if I’m back by six, without fail.’
‘Oh, blow your Papa!’ the doctor sighed.
I put the samovar on and we drank our tea on a rug in front of the terrace of the big house. The doctor knelt as he drank out of a saucer, saying that it was sheer bliss. Then Cheprakov fetched a key, opened the french window, and we all went into the house. It was gloomy, mysterious and smelt of fungus. Our footsteps had a hollow ring as if there was a cellar under the floor. The doctor stood at the piano and touched the keys, which replied with a weak, tremulous, rather blurred but melodious chord. He tested his voice and sang a song, frowning and impatiently stamping his foot when he touched a dead key. My sister had forgotten about going home, and excitedly paced the room saying, ‘I feel so gay, so very, very gay!’
There was a note of surprise in her voice and it was as if she did not think that she too could be happy. It was the first time I had seen her looking so cheerful. She even looked prettier. In profile she wasn’t very pretty, with protruding nose and mouth, so that she always seemed to be blowing. But she had beautiful, dark eyes, a pale, very delicate complexion and a kind, sad look that was most touching. When she spoke she seemed attractive, beautiful even. Both of us took after our mother – we were broad-shouldered, strong, and with great staying-power – but her pallor was that of a sick person. She was always coughing and sometimes I detected in her eyes the look of a person who was seriously ill but who was somehow trying to hide it. There was something child-like, naïve in her gaiety now, as if the child’s sense of joy that had been crushed and stifled by our strict upbringing had suddenly awakened in her and was struggling to express itself.
But when evening came and the horses were brought round my sister became quiet and seemed to shrink. She sat down in the carriage like a prisoner in the dock.
When they had driven off and everything became quiet, it struck me that Anyuta Blagovo had not spoken one word to me the whole time.
‘An amazing girl!’ I thought. ‘Wonderful!’
St Peter’s Fast arrived and every day we had only Lenten food. Idleness and the uncertainty of my position had brought on a physical depression. Feeling dissatisfied with myself, sluggish and hungry, I lounged around the estate, just waiting until I was in the right mood to leave.
One day, late in the afternoon, when Radish was with us in the outbuilding, Dolzhikov unexpectedly came in, very sunburnt and grey with dust. He had spent three days on his section of the line, had just travelled to Dubechnya on a railway engine and had walked over from the station to see us. While he was waiting for a cab to come from town and collect him, he made a tour of the estate with his manager, giving orders in a loud voice. Then he sat in our building for a whole hour writing letters. While he was there some telegrams came through and he tapped out the answers himself. The three of us stood to attention, not saying a word.
‘What a mess!’ he said, looking disgustedly at the records. ‘In a fortnight’s time I’m transferring the office to the station and I just don’t know what I’m going to do with you.’
‘I’m trying very hard, sir,’ Cheprakov said.
‘I can see how you’re trying. All you can do is draw your wages,’ he continued. ‘Just because you have people to pull strings for you, you think it’s easy to get a quick leg-up. Well, no one gets that from me. No one ever bothered about me. Before I was in charge of the railway I was an engine-driver. I worked in Belgium as an ordinary greaser. Hey, you, Panteley,’ he said, turning to Radish, ‘what are you doing here? Getting drunk with this lot, eh?’
For some reason he called all simple labourers Panteley, while he despised people like myself and Cheprakov, calling us scum and drunken pigs behind our backs. On the whole he was hard on his junior clerks, fined them and coolly gave them the sack without any explanation.
At last his carriage arrived. By way of farewell he promised to sack the lot of us in a fortnight and called his manager a blockhead. Then he sprawled back in his carriage and bowled off to town.
‘Andrey,’ I asked Radish, ‘can I work for you?’
‘Oh, all right.’
And we went off to town together. When the station and manor house were far behind I asked ‘Andrey, why did you come to Dubechnya just now?’
‘Firstly, my lads are working on the line, and secondly I went to pay the general’s widow the interest I owe her. Last year I borrowed fifty roubles and now I’m paying her a rouble a month.’
The painter stopped and caught hold of one of my coat buttons. ‘My dear Misail,’ he went on, ‘the way I see it is this. An ordinary working man or gent who lends money – even at the very lowest rates – is a villain. The truth cannot dwell in him.’
Thin, pale and terrifying, Radish closed his eyes, shook his head and spoke out, in the solemn voice o
f a sage, ‘Aphids eat grass, rust eats iron – and lies the soul. God save us sinners!’
V
Radish was an impractical person, with no head for business. He took on more work than he could handle, tended to lose his nerve when settling up, and as a result was almost always losing money. He did painting, glazing, wallpapering and even roofing jobs, and I can remember him running around for three days looking for roofers – just because of some miserable little job. He was an excellent workman and sometimes earned as much as ten roubles a day. But for his wish to be boss at all costs, to call himself a contractor, he would have been quite prosperous.
He was paid by the job, while he paid me and the other lads by the day – between seventy copecks and a rouble. When the weather was hot and dry we did different outside jobs, mainly roof painting. I was not used to this kind of work and my feet burnt – I felt I was walking over red-hot flagstones – and when I put my felt boots on my feet were even hotter. But this was only at the beginning; later on I got used to it and everything went as smooth as clockwork.
Now I was living among people who had to do physical work, for whom it was unavoidable and who slaved like carthorses, often without being aware of the moral meaning of work and never using the word ‘work’ in conversation even. Next to them I felt rather like a carthorse myself. I became ever more aware that what I was doing just had to be done, there was no avoiding it, and this made life easier and freed me from all doubts.
At first I found everything new and absorbing, as if I had been reborn. I could sleep on the ground or go barefoot, which was extremely pleasant. I could stand in a crowd of ordinary people without attracting any bad feeling, and when a cabman’s horse fell down in the street I would rush to help pull it up without worrying if my clothes got dirty. Most important, I was earning my own living and wasn’t a burden to anyone.
Painting roofs, particularly when we used our own paint, was considered highly profitable, and so even such good workmen as Radish didn’t turn their noses up at this rough, tedious work. With skinny, purple legs, he looked like a stork in his short trousers as he walked over the roofs, and I would hear him sigh deeply as he wielded his brush ‘Woe, woe unto us sinners!’
He walked over roofs as easily as over the ground. Despite being as pale and sickly as a corpse, he was extraordinarily agile, painting the cupolas and domes of churches just like a young man, without using any scaffolding – only ladders and ropes. It was rather frightening seeing him there, poised aloft, far above the ground, stretching himself to his full height and pronouncing solemnly, on behalf of some person unknown, ‘Aphids eat grass, rust eats iron – and lies the soul!’
At times he would ponder something and answer his own thoughts: ‘Anything’s possible! Anything!’
When I went home from work, everyone sitting on benches near their gates – shop-assistants, errand-boys and their masters – followed me with sneers and abuse. At first this worried me and seemed quite monstrous.
‘Better-than-Nothing!’ I heard from all sides. ‘Got yer paint, botcher!’
No one was so unkind to me as those very people who only recently had themselves been ordinary labourers and earned their living by unskilled labour. When I passed the row of shops, water was ‘accidentally’ thrown over me near the ironmonger’s and once someone even threw a stick at me. A grey-haired old fish merchant once barred my path, eyed me malevolently and said, ‘I’m not sorry for you, you fool! It’s your father I’m sorry for!’
For some reason my friends were embarrassed if they met me. Some looked on me as a crank or a clown, others were sorry for me, while others did not know how to approach me and I found it difficult to make them out. One day I met Anyuta Blagovo in a side-street near Great Dvoryansky Street. I was on my way to work, carrying two long brushes and a bucket of paint. She flushed when she recognized me.
‘Please don’t bow to me in the street,’ she said, in a nervous, stern, trembling voice, without offering to shake hands, and suddenly tears glistened in her eyes. ‘If you really must do this kind of thing, then go ahead, but please try and avoid meeting me in public.’
I had left Great Dvoryansky Street and was living in the suburb of Makarikha with my old nanny Karpovna, a kindly but morose old woman who lived in perpetual fear that something dreadful was about to happen. She was frightened by any kind of dream and even saw evil omens in the bees and wasps that flew into her room. In her opinion my becoming a workman was an evil portent.
‘It’s all up with you!’ she said mournfully, shaking her head. ‘You’re finished!’
Prokofy the butcher, her adopted son, lived with her in that little house. He was a hulking, clumsy fellow of about thirty, with reddish hair and wiry moustache. Whenever we met in the hall he would not speak and would politely give way to me – if he happened to be drunk he would accord me a full military salute. When he dined in the evenings I could hear him grunting and sighing through the wooden plank partition as he polished off one glass of vodka after the other.
‘Ma!’ he would call in a low voice.
‘What is it?’ Karpovna would reply. (She loved her adopted son dearly.) ‘What is it, sonny?’
‘I’m going to do you a favour, Ma. I’ll keep you in your old age, in this vale of tears, and when you die I’ll pay all the funeral expenses. I mean it.’
I would be up before dawn every morning and I went early to bed. We house-painters had good appetites and slept soundly, but for some reason my heart would beat violently at night. I never quarrelled with my workmates. All day long there was an endless torrent of abuse, obscene oaths, and sentiments such as ‘Damn your eyes!’ or ‘Blast your guts!’ were typical. However, we were all good friends. The lads suspected I was some kind of religious fanatic and poked good-humoured fun at me, saying that even my own father had disowned me. Then they would tell me that they seldom showed up at church and that many of them hadn’t been to confession for ten years. They tried to justify this slackness by saying that painters were the black sheep of humanity.
The other men respected me and looked up to me. They were obviously pleased that I didn’t smoke or drink, that I led a quiet, steady life. But they were rather shocked when I didn’t help them steal drying oil or join them when they went to ask customers for tips. Stealing employers’ oil and paint was common practice among painters and decorators and was not considered a crime. Remarkably, even someone as virtuous as Radish always took some whiting and oil after work, and even respectable old men with their own houses in Makarikha weren’t above asking for tips. I would feel angry and ashamed when the lads, at the start or finish of some job, would all go cringing before some little pipsqueak, humbly thanking him for the ten copecks he gave them.
They behaved like sly courtiers to customers and almost every day I was reminded of Shakespeare’s Polonius.
‘Oh, it looks like rain,’ a customer would remark, glancing at the sky.
‘Yes, sir, no doubt about it,’ the painters would agree.
‘On the other hand, those aren’t rain clouds. Perhaps it’s not going to rain.’
‘Oh, no, sir, that’s for sure!’
Behind customers’ backs their attitude was usually ironical – when they saw a gentleman, for example, sitting on his balcony with a newspaper they would remark, ‘Can sit reading his paper all right, but I dare say he’s got nothing to eat.’
I never visited my family. When I returned from work I would often find brief, worried notes from my sister, about Father. One day he’d been unusually pensive over dinner and had eaten nothing. Or he’d fallen down. Or he’d locked himself in his room and had not emerged for a long time. News like this worried me and kept me awake. I even used to walk past our house in Great Dvoryansky Street at night, looking into the dark windows and trying to find out if things were all right at home. On Sundays my sister would visit me, but she did this furtively, pretending she had come to see Nanny, not me. If she came into my room she would invariably look very pale, w
ith tear-stained eyes, and she would immediately start crying.
‘Father will never get over it!’ she said. ‘If something should happen to him, God forbid, it will be on your conscience for the rest of your life. It’s dreadful, Misail! I beg you, turn over a new leaf, for Mother’s sake!’
‘My dear sister,’ I said, ‘how can I turn over a new leaf when I’m convinced that I’m acting according to my conscience? Try and understand that!’
‘I know you’re obeying your conscience, but why can’t you do it differently, without upsetting everyone?’
‘Oh, goodness gracious!’ the old woman would sigh from behind the door. ‘It’s all up with you! There’s trouble brewing, my dears, there’s trouble brewing!’
VI
One Sunday Dr Blagovo paid me an unexpected visit. He was wearing a tunic over his silk shirt and high, patent-leather boots.
‘I’ve come to see you!’ he began, pressing my hand like a student. ‘Every day I hear things about you and I’ve been meaning to come and have a heart-to-heart with you, as they say. It’s deadly boring in this town. They all seem dead and there’s no one you can have a conversation with. God, it’s hot!’ he went on, taking his tunic off, leaving just his silk shirt. ‘My dear chap, please let’s talk!’
I myself felt bored and for a long time had been wanting some other company than house-painters. I was genuinely delighted to see him.
‘Let me begin,’ he said, sitting on my bed, ‘by saying how deeply I feel for you and how deeply I respect the kind of life you’re leading. You’re misunderstood in this town, but there’s no one capable of understanding you here. As you know only too well, with one or two exceptions, they’re all a lot of pig-faced freaks.5 Right away, at the picnic, I guessed the kind of person you were. You are a noble, honest person with high principles. I respect you and it’s a great honour to shake you by the hand!’ he continued rapturously. ‘To change your life as drastically and abruptly as you did, you first had to experience a complex emotional crisis. To continue as you are, always true to your convictions, you must try and put your heart and soul into it, day after day, never flagging. And now for a start, tell me if you agree that if you exercised your willpower, effort, all your potential, on something else – on eventually becoming a great scholar or artist – would your life be richer, deeper, more productive, in every respect?’