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Through Russia

M >> Maxim Gorky >> Through Russia




"How will he live?" thoughtfully she said with a sigh--then
added:

"You have helped me, and I thank you. Yes, my thanks are yours,
though I cannot tell whether or not your assistance will have
helped HIM."

And, drinking the rest of her tea, she ate a morsel of bread,
then made the sign of the cross. And subsequently, as I was
putting up my things, she continued to rock herself to and fro,
to give little starts and cries, and to gaze thoughtfully at
the ground with eyes which had now regained their original
colour. At last she rose to her feet.

"You are not going yet? " I queried protestingly.

"Yes, I must."

"But--"

"The Blessed Virgin will go with me. So please hand me over the
child."

"No, I will carry him."

And, after a contest for the honour, she yielded, and we walked
away side by side.

"I only wish I were a little steadier on my feet," she remarked
with an apologetic smile as she laid a hand upon my shoulder,

Meanwhile, the new citizen of Russia, the little human being of an
unknown future, was snoring soundly in my arms as the sea
plashed and murmured, and threw off its white shavings, and the
bushes whispered together, and the sun (now arrived at the
meridian) shone brightly upon us all.

In calm content it was that we walked; save that now and then
the mother would halt, draw a deep breath, raise her head, scan
the sea and the forest and the hills, and peer into her son's
face. And as she did so, even the mist begotten of tears of
suffering could not dim the wonderful brilliancy and clearness
of her eyes. For with the sombre fire of inexhaustible love were
those eyes aflame.

Once, as she halted, she exclaimed:

"0 God, 0 Mother of God, how good it all is! Would that for
ever I could walk thus, yes, walk and walk unto the very end of
the world! All that I should need would be that thou, my son, my
darling son, shouldst, borne upon thy mother's breast, grow and
wax strong!"

And the sea murmured and murmured.



THE ICEBREAKER

On a frozen river near a certain Russian town, a gang of seven
carpenters were hastily repairing an icebreaker which the
townsfolk had stripped for firewood.

That year spring happened to be late in arriving, and youthful
March looked more like October, and only at noon, and that not
on every day, did the pale, wintry sun show himself in the
overcast heavens, or, glimmering in blue spaces between clouds,
contemplate the earth with a squinting, malevolent eye.

The day in question was the Friday in Holy Week, and, as night
drew on, drippings were becoming congealed into icicles half an
arshin long, and in the snow-stripped ice of the river only the
dun hue of the wintry clouds was reflected.

As the carpenters worked there kept mournfully, insistently
echoing from the town the coppery note of bells; and at
intervals heads would raise themselves, and blue eyes would gleam
thoughtfully through the same grey fog in which the town lay
enveloped, and an axe uplifted would hover a moment in the air
as though fearing with its descent to cleave the luscious flood
of sound.

Scattered over the spacious river-track were dark pine branches,
projecting obliquely from the ice, to mark paths, open spaces,
and cracks on the surface; and where they reared themselves
aloft, these branches looked like the cramped, distorted arms of
drowning men.

From the river came a whiff of gloom and depression. Covered
over with sodden slush, it stretched with irksome rigidity
towards the misty quarter whence blew a languid, sluggish, damp,
cold wind.

Suddenly the foreman, one Ossip, a cleanly built, upright
little peasant with a neatly curling, silvery beard, ruddy
cheeks, and a flexible neck, a man everywhere and always in
evidence, shouted:

"Look alive there, my hearties!"

Presently he turned his attention to myself, and smiled
insinuatingly.

"Inspector," he said, "what are you trying to poke out of
the sky with that squat nose of yours? And why are you here at
all? You come from the contractor, you say? -- from Vasili
Sergeitch? Well, well! Then your job is to hurry us up, to keep
barking out,' Mind what you are doing, such-and-such gang! ' Yet
there you stand-blinking over your task like an object dried
stiff! It's not to blink that you're here, but to play the
watchdog upon us, and to keep an eye open, and your tongue on
the wag. So issue your commands, young cockerel."

Then he shouted to the workmen:

"Now, then! No shirking! Is the job going to be finished
tonight, or is it not? "

As a matter of fact, he himself was the worst shirker in the
artel [Workman's union]. True, he was also a first-rate hand at
his trade, and a man who could work quickly and well and with
skill and concentration; but, unfortunately, he hated putting
himself out, and preferred to spend his time spinning
arresting yarns. For instance, on the present occasion he chose
the moment when work was proceeding with a swing, when everyone
was busily and silently and wholeheartedly labouring with the
object of running the job through to the end, to begin in his
musical voice:

"Look here, lads. Once upon a time--"

And though for the first two or three minutes the men appeared
not to hear him, and continued their planing and chopping as
before, the moment came when the soft tenor accents caught and
held the men's attention, as they trickled and burbled forth.
Then, screwing up his bright eyes with a humorous air, and
twisting his curly beard between his fingers, Ossip gave a
complacent click of his tongue, and continued measuredly, and
with deliberation:

"So he seized hold of the tench, and thrust it back into the
cave. And as he turned to proceed through the forest he thought
to himself: 'Now I must keep my eyes about me.' And suddenly,
from somewhere (no one could have said where), a woman's voice
shrieked: 'Elesi-a-ah! Elesia-ah!'"

Here a tall, lanky Morduine named Leuka, with, as surname,
Narodetz, a young fellow whose small eyes wore always an
expression of astonishment, laid aside his axe, and stood gaping.

"And from the cave a deep bass voice replied: 'Elesi-a-ah!'
while at the same moment the tench sprang from the cave, and,
champing its jaws, wriggled and wriggled back to the slough."

Here an old soldier named Saniavin, a morose man, a tippler,
and a sufferer from asthma and an inexplicable grudge against
life in general, croaked out:

"How could your tench have wriggled across dry land if it was a
fish?"

"Can, for that matter, a fish speak?" was Ossip's
good-humoured retort.

All of which inspired Mokei Budirin, a grey-headed muzhik of a
cast of countenance canine in the prominence of his jaws and the
recession of his forehead, and taciturn withal, though not
otherwise remarkable, to give slow, nasal utterance to his
favourite formula.

"That is true enough," he said.

For never could anything be spoken of that was grim or
marvellous or lewd or malicious, but Budirin at once re-echoed
softly, but in a tone of unshakable conviction: "That is true
enough."

Thereafter he would tap me on the breast with his hard and
ponderous fist.

Presently work again underwent an interruption through the fact
that Yakov Boev, a man who possessed both a stammer and a
squint, became similarly filled with a desire to tell us
something about a fish. Yet from the moment that he began his
narrative everyone declined to believe it, and laughed at his
broken verbiage as, frequently invoking the Deity, and cursing,
and brandishing his awl, and viciously swallowing spittle, he
shouted amid general ridicule:

"Once-once upon a time there lived a man. Yes, other folk
before YOU have believed my tale. Indeed, it is no more than the
truth that I'm going to tell you. Very well! Cackle away, and be
damned!"

Here everyone without exception dropped his work to shout with
merriment and clap his hands: with the result that, doffing his
cap, and thereby disclosing a silvered, symmetrically shaped
head with one bald spot amid its one dark portion, Ossip was
forced to shout severely:

"Hi, you Budirin! You've had your say, and given us some fun,
and there must be no more of it."

"But I had only just begun what I want to say," the old soldier
grumbled, spitting upon the palms of his hands.

Next, Ossip turned to myself.

"Inspector," he began . . .

It is my opinion that in thus hindering the men from work
through his tale-telling, Ossip had some definite end in view. I
could not say precisely what that end was, but it must have been
the object either of cloaking his own laziness or of giving the
men a rest. On the other hand, whenever the contractor was
present he, Ossip, bore himself with humble obsequiousness , and
continued to assume a guise of simplicity which none the less
did not prevent him, on the advent of each Saturday, from
inducing his employer to bestow a pourboire upon the artel.

And though this same Ossip was an artelui, and a director of the
artel, his senior co-members bore him no affection, but, rather,
looked upon him as a wag or trifler, and treated him as of no
importance. And, similarly, the younger members of the artel
liked well enough to listen to his tales, but declined to take
him seriously, and, in some cases, regarded him with
ill-concealed, or openly expressed, distrust.

Once the Morduine, a man of education with whom, on occasions, I
held discussions on intimate subjects, replied to a question of
mine on the subject of Ossip:

"I scarcely know. Goodness alone knows! No, I do not know
anything about him."

To which, after a pause, he added:

"Once a fellow named Mikhailo, a clever fellow who is now dead,
insulted Ossip by saying to him: 'Do you call yourself a man?
Why, regarded as a workman, you're as lifeless as a doornail,
while, seeing that you weren't born to be a master, you'll all
your life continue chattering in corners, like a plummet
swinging at the end of a string!' Yes, and that was true enough."

Lastly. after another pause the Morduine concluded:

"No matter. He is not such a bad sort."

My own position among these men was a position of some
awkwardness, for, a young fellow of only fifteen, I had been
appointed by the contractor, a distant relative of mine, to the
task of superintending the expenditure of material. That is to
say, I had to see to it that the carpenters did not make away
with nails, or dispose of planks in return for drink. Yet all
the time my presence was practically useless, seeing that the
men stole nails as though I were not even in existence and
strove to show me that among them I was a person too many, a
sheer incubus, and seized every opportunity of giving me covert
jogs with a beam, and similarly affronting me.

This, of course, made my relations with them highly difficult,
embarrassing, and irksome; and though moments occurred when I
longed to say something that might ingratiate me, and
endeavoured to effect an advance in that direction, the words
always failed me at the necessary juncture, and I found myself
lying crushed as before under a burdensome sense of the
superfluity of my existence.

Again, if ever I tried to make an entry as to some material
which had been used, Ossip would approach me, and, for instance,
say:

"Is it jotted down, eh? Then let me look at it."

And, eyeing the notebook with a frown, he would add vaguely:

"What a nice hand you write!" (He himself could write only in
printing fashion, in the large scriptory characters of the
Ecclesiastical Rubric, not in those of the ordinary kind.)

"For example, that scoop there--what does IT say?"

"It is the word 'Good.'"

"'Good'? But what a slip-knot of a thing! And what are those
words THERE, on THAT line?"

"They say, 'Planks, 1 vershok by 9 arshini, 5.'"

"No, six was the number used."

"No, five."

"Five? Why, the soldier broke one, didn't he?"

"Yes, but never mind--at least it wasn't a plank that was
wanted."

"Oh! Well, I may tell you that he took the two pieces to the
tavern to get drink with."

Then, glancing into my face with his cornflower-blue eyes and
quiet, quizzical smile, he would say without the least confusion
as he twisted the ringlets of his beard:

"Put down '6.' And see here, young cockerel. The weather has
turned wet and cold, and the work is hard, and sometimes folk
need to have their spirits cheered and raised with a drop of
liquor. So don't you be too hard upon us, for God won't think
the more of you for being strict."

And as he thus talked to me in his slow and kindly, but
semi-affected, fashion--bespattering me, as it were, with wordy
sawdust--I would suddenly grow blind of an eye and silently show
him the corrected figure.

"That's it--that's right. And how fine the figure looks now, as
it squats there like a merchant's buxom, comely dame!"

Then he would be seen triumphantly telling his mates of his
success; then, I would find myself feeling acutely conscious of
the fact that everyone was despising me for my complacence Yes,
grown sick beyond endurance with a yearning for some thing which
it could not descry, my fifteen-year-old heart would dissolve in
a flood of mortified tears, and there would pass through my
brain the despondent, aching thought:

"Oh, what a sad, uncomfortable world is this! How should Ossip
have known so well that I should not re-correct the 6 into a 5,
or that I should not tell the contractor that the men have
bartered a plank for liquor?"

Again, there befell an occasion when the men stole two pounds'
weight of five vershok mandrels and bolts.

"Look here," I said to Ossip warningly. "I am going to report
this."

"All right," he agreed with a twitch of his grey eyebrows.
"Though what such a trifle can matter I fail to see. Yes, go
and report every mother's son of them."

And to the men themselves he shouted:

"Hi, boobies! Each of you now stands docked for some mandrels
and bolts."

"Why?" was the old soldier's grim inquiry.

"Because you DO so stand," carelessly retorted the other.

With snarls thereafter, the men eyed me covertly, until I began
to feel that very likely I should not do as I had threatened,
and even that so to do might not be expedient.

"But look here," said I to Ossip. "I am going to give the
contractor notice, and let all of you go to the devil. For if I
were to remain with you much longer I too should become a thief."

Ossip stroked his beard awhile, and pondered. Then he seated
himself beside me, and said in an undertone:

"That is true."

"Well?"

"But things are always so. The truth is that it's time you
departed. What sort of a watchman, of a checker, are you? In
jobs of this kind what a man needs to know is the meaning of
property. He needs to have in him the spirit of a dog, so that
he shall look after his master's stuff as he would look after
the skin which his mother has put on to his own body. But you,
you young puppy, haven't the slightest notion of what property
means. In fact, were anyone to go and tell Vasili Sergeitch
about the way in which you keep letting us off, he'd give it you
in the neck. Yes, you're no good to him at all, but just an
expense: whereas when a man serves a master he ought, do you
understand, to be PROFITABLE to that master."

He rolled and handed me a cigarette.

"Smoke this," said he, "and perhaps it'll make your brain work
easier. If only you had been of a less awkward, uncomfortable
nature, I should have said to you, 'Go and join the priests;
but, as things are, you aren't the right sort for that--you're
too stiff and unbending, and would never make headway even with
an abbot. No, you're not the sort to play cards with. A monk is
like a jackdaw--he chatters without knowing what he is chattering
about, and pays no heed to the root of things, so busy is he
with stuffing himself full with the grain. I say this to you
with absolute earnestness, for I perceive you to be strange to
our ways--a cuckoo that has blundered into the wrong nest."

And, doffing his cap, a gesture which he never failed to execute
when he had something particularly important to say, he added
humbly and sonorously as he glanced at the grey firmament:

"In the sight of the Lord our ways are the ways of thieves, and
such as will never gain of Him salvation."

"And that is true enough," responded Mokei Budirin after the
fashion of a clarionet.

From that time forth, Ossip of the curly, silvered head, bright
eyes, and shadowy soul became an object of agreeable interest
for me. Indeed, there grew up between us a species of
friendship, even though I could see that a civil bearing towards
me in public was a thing that it hurt him to maintain. At all
events, in the presence of others he avoided my glance, and his
eyes, clear, unsullied, and fight blue in tint, wavered
unsteadily, and his lips twitched and assumed an artificially
unpleasant expression, while he uttered some such speech as:

"Hi, you Makarei, see that you keep your eyes open, and cam
your pay, or that pig of a soldier will be making away with more
nails!"

But at other times, when we were alone together, he would speak
to me kindly and instructively, while his eyes would dance and
gleam with a faint, grave, knowing smile, and dart blue rays
direct into mine, while for my part, as I listened to his words,
I took every one of them to be absolutely true and balanced,
despite their strange delivery.

"A man's duty consists in being good," I remarked on one
occasion.

"Yes, of course," assented Ossip, though the next moment he
veiled his eyes with a smile, and added in an undertone:
"But what do you understand by the term 'good'? In my opinion,
unless virtue be to their advantage, folk spit upon that
'goodness,' that 'honourableness,' of yours. Hence, the better
plan is to pay folk court, and be civil to them, and flatter and
cajole every mother's son of them. Yes, do that, and your
'goodness' will have a chance of bringing you in some return. Not
that I do not say that to be 'good,' to be able to look your
own ugly jowl in the face in a mirror, is pleasant enough; but,
as I see the matter, it is all one to other people whether you
be a cardsharper or a priest so long as you're polite, and let
down your neighbours lightly. That's what they want."

For my part I never, at that period, grew weary of watching my
fellows, for it was my constant idea that some day one of them
would be able to raise me to a higher level, and to bring me to
an understanding of this unintelligible and complicated
existence of ours. Hence I kept asking myself the restless, the
importunate question:

"What precisely is the human soul?

Certain souls, I thought, existed which seemed like balls of
copper, for, solid and immovable, they reflected things from
their own point of view alone, in a dull and irregular and
distorted fashion. And souls, I thought, existed which seemed as
flat as mirrors, and, for all intents and purposes, had no
existence at all.

And in every case the human soul seemed formless, like a cloud,
and as murkily mutable as an imitation opal, a thing which
altered according to the colour of what adjoined it.

Only as regarded the soul of the intelligent Ossip was I
absolutely at a loss, absolutely unable to reach a conclusion.

Pondering these and similar matters in my mind, I, on the day of
which I speak, stood gazing at the river, and at the town under
the hill, as I listened to the bells. Rearing themselves aloft
like the organ pipes in my favourite Polish-Roman Catholic
church, the steeples of the town had their crosses dimly
sparkling as though the latter had been stars imprisoned in a
murky sky. Yet it was as though those stars hoped eventually to
ascend into the purer firmament above the wind-torn clouds that
they sparkled; and as I stood watching the clouds glide onward,
and momentarily efface with their shadows, the town's
multifarious hues, I marked the fact that although, whenever
dark-blue cavities in their substance permitted the beams of the
sun to illuminate the buildings below, those buildings' roofs
assumed tints of increased cheerfulness. The clouds seemed to
glide the faster to veil the beams, while the humid shadows grew
more opaque-- and the scene darkened as though only for a moment
had it assumed a semblance of joy.

The buildings of the town (looking like heaps of muddy snow),
the black, naked earth around those buildings, the trees in the
gardens, the hummocks of piled-up soil, the dull grey glimmer of
the window panes of the houses--all these things reminded me of
winter, even though the misty breath of the northern spring was
beginning to steal over the whole.

Presently a young fellow with flaxen hair, a pendent underlip,
and a tall, ungainly figure, by name Mishuk Diatlov, essayed to
troll the stanza:

"That morn to him the maiden came,
To find his soul had fled."

Whereupon the old soldier shouted:

"Hi, you! Have you forgotten the day?"

And even Boev saw fit to take umbrage at the singing, and,
threatening Diatlov with his fist, to rap out:

"Ah, sobatchnia dusha!" ["Soul of a dog."]

"What a rude, rough, primitive lot we Russians are!" commented
Ossip, seating himself atop of the icebreaker, and screwing up
his eyes to measure its fall. "To speak plainly, we Russians
are sheer barbarians. Once upon a time, I may tell you, an
anchorite happened to be on his travels; and as the people came
pressing around him, and kneeling to him, and tearfully
beseeching him with the words, '0h holy father, intercede for us
with the wolves which are devouring our substance!' he replied:
'Ha! Are you, or are you not, Orthodox Christians? See that I
assign you not to condign perdition!' Yes, angry, in very truth
he was. Nay, he even spat in the people's faces. Yet in reality
he was a kindly old man, for his eyes kept shedding tears
equally with theirs."

Twenty sazheni below the icebreaker was a gang of barefooted
sailors, engaged in hacking out the floes from under their
barges; and as they shattered the brittle, greyish-blue crust on
the river, the mattocks rang out, and the sharp blades of the
icecutters gleamed as they thrust the broken fragments under the
surface. Meanwhile, there could be heard a bubbling of water, and
the sound of rivulets trickling down to the sandy margin of the
river. And similarly among our own gang was there audible a
scraping of planes, and a screeching of saws, and a clattering
of iron braces as they were driven into the smooth yellow wood,
while through all the web of these sounds there ran the
ceaseless song of the bells, a song so softened by distance as
to thrill the soul, much as though dingy, burdensome labour were
holding revel in honour of spring, and calling upon the latter
to spread itself over the starved, naked surface of the
gradually thawing ground.

At this point someone shouted hoarsely:

"Go and fetch the German. We have not got hands enough."

And from the bank someone bawled in reply:

"Where IS he?"

"In the tavern. That is where you must go and look for him."

And as they made themselves heard, the voices floated up
turgidly into the sodden air, spread themselves over the river's
mournful void, and died away,

Meanwhile our men worked with industry and speed, but not
without a fault or two, for their thoughts were fixed upon the
town and its washhouses and churches. And particularly restless
was Sashok Diatlov, a man whose hair, as flaxen as that of his
brother, seemed to have been boiled in lye. At intervals,
glancing up-river, this well-built, sturdy young fellow would
say softly to his brother:

"It's cracking now, eh?"

And, certainly, the ice had "moved" two nights ago, so that
since yesterday morning the river watchmen had refused to permit
horsed vehicles to cross, and only a few beadlike pedestrians
now were making their way along the marked-out ice paths, while,
as they proceeded, one could hear the water slapping against the
planks as the latter bent under the travellers' weight.

"Yes, it IS cracking," at length Mishuk replied with a hoist
of his ginger eyebrows.

Ossip too scanned the river from under his hand. Then he said to
Mishuk:

"Pah! It is the dry squeak of the planes in your own hand that
you keep hearing, so go on with your work, you son of a beldame.
And as for you, Inspector, do you help me to speed up the men
instead of burying your nose in your notebook."

By this time there remained only two more hours for work, and
the arch of the icebreaker had been wholly sheathed in
butter-tinted scantlings, and nothing required to be added to it
save the great iron braces. Unfortunately, Boev and Saniavin,
the men who had been engaged upon the task of cutting out the
sockets for the braces, had worked so amiss, and run their lines
so straight, that, when it came to the point, the arms of the
braces refused to sink properly into the wood.

"Oh, you cock-eyed fool of a Morduine!" shouted Ossip, smiting
his fist against the side of his cap. "Do you call THAT sort of
thing work?"

At this juncture there came from somewhere on the bank a
seemingly exultant shout of:

"Ah! NOW it's giving way!"

And almost at the same moment, there stole over the river a sort
of rustle, a sort of quiet crunching which made the projecting
pine branches quiver as though they were trying to catch at
something, while, shouldering their mattocks, the barefooted
sailors noisily hastened aboard their barges with the aid of
rope ladders.

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