knife—an old clasp-knife with a wooden handle. The knife I had
searched for the morning after the murder. The knife which could have
dropped out of my pocket when I bent over the watchman on the
pontoon bridge. The knife on whose handle Pyotr Skovorodnikov had
burned out my name with a magnifying glass.
Looking back on it now I begin to realise that the officials who sat
behind high barriers in dimly-lit halls would not have believed my story
anyway. But at the time! The more I thought about it the heavier it
weighed on my mind. It was my fault, then, that they had arrested
Father. It was my fault that we were now going hungry. It was my fault
that Mother had had to sell the new cloth coat for which she had been
saving a whole year, my fault that she had had to go to the 'Chambers'
and speak in such an unfamiliar voice and bow so humbly to that
unseen person with the long, horrible, dry fingers in which there slowly
dangled a pair of spectacles.
Never before had I felt my dumbness so strongly.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE VILLAGE
The last of the rafts had passed down the river. The lights in the
rafters' drifting huts were no longer visible at night when I woke up.
There was emptiness on the river, emptiness in the yard and emptiness
in the house.
Mother did washing in the hospital. She left the house first thing in
the morning while we were still asleep, and I went to the
Skovorodnikovs and listened to the old man swearing to himself.
Grey and unkempt, in steel-rimmed glasses, he sat on a low leather-
covered stool in the little dark kitchen, stitching boots. When he was not
stitching boots he was making nets or carving figures of birds and
horses out of aspen wood. He had brought this trade with him from the
Volga, where he had been born.
He was fond of me, probably because I was the only person he could
talk to without being answered back. He cursed doctors, officials,
tradesmen, and, with especial virulence, priests.
'If a man be dying, dare he murmur against it? The priests say no. But
I say yes! What is murmuring?'
I didn't know what murmuring meant.
19
'Murmuring is discontent. And what is discontent? It's wanting more
than's been allotted to you. The priests say you mustn't. Why?'
I didn't know why.
'Because 'dust thou art and to dust thou shalt return'. To the earth,
that is.'
He gave a bitter laugh.
'And what does the earth need? No more than is allotted to it.'
So it was autumn now, and even the crabs, which had lately become a
staple item in our domestic fare, had hidden themselves away in their
holes and refused to be enticed out by my frogs. We were going hungry,
and Mother finally decided to send me and my sister to the village.
I had never been in the country, but I knew that my father had a farm
there. A farm! How disappointed I was on discovering that this was
simply a cottage with a household plot, a little, overgrown vegetable
garden in the middle of which stood a few aged apple trees.
The house was a small one, which having once slumped on its side,
remained leaning sideways. The roof was tilted, the window-panes were
smashed and the base logs were bent. The Russian stove seemed to be
all right until we started a fire in it. Smoke-blackened benches were
ranged around the walls, and in one corner hung an icon, on whose
grimy panels a face could just be made out.
Whatever its faults, it was our house, and we undid our bundles,
stuffed out mattresses with straw, glazed the windows and settled down
to live in it.
Mother stayed with us only about three weeks, then went back to
town. Grandma Petrovna agreed to take her place. She was Father's
aunt, and that made her a sort of grandmother to us. She was a kind-
hearted old woman, even though it was hard to get used to her grey
beard and moustache. The only drawback was that she herself needed
looking after. In fact, my sister and I looked after her all the winter,
carrying water and heating her stove, since her cottage, which was little
better than ours, was quite close.
That winter I grew attached to my sister. She was getting on for eight.
Everyone in our family was dark, but she was fair, with fuzzy little
pigtails and blue eyes. We were all rather taciturn, especially Mother,
but my sister would start off talking the moment she opened her eyes. I
never saw her cry, and it was the easiest thing in the world to make her
laugh. Her name was Sanya, too, the same as mine—1 being Alexander
and she Alexandra. Aunt Dasha had taught her to sing, and every
evening she sang long songs in such a serious, thin little voice that you
couldn't help laughing.
And how handy she was at housekeeping, and she only seven, mind
you! Of course, running the house was a simple affair—in one corner of
the attic lay potatoes, in another beets, cabbages, onions and salt. For
bread we went to Petrovna's.
So there we were, two children in an empty house, in a remote
snowed-up village. Every morning we used to tread a path in the snow
to Petrovna's cottage. Only in the evenings did we feel a bit scared. It
was so quiet you could almost hear the soft sound of the falling snow,
and amidst this stillness the wind would suddenly start moaning in the
chimney.
20
CHAPTER FIVE
DOCTOR IVAN IVANOVICH.
I LEARN TO SPEAK
Then one evening, when we had just gone to bed and my sister had
just fallen silent, dropping off to sleep as she always did with the last
