'Fine! Try again.'
I said it again.
'Now whistle.'
I whistled.
'Now say 'oo'.'
I said 'oo'.
'You're a lazybones, that's what the matter with you! Now, then,
repeat after me...'
He did not know that I spoke everything in my mind. I'm sure that's
the reason why I have remembered my earliest years so distinctly. But
my dumb mental speech fell far short of all those 'ees', ''os' and 'yoos',
of all those unfamiliar movements of lips, tongue and throat in which
the simplest words got stuck. I managed to repeat after him separate
sounds, chiefly vowel sounds, but putting them together and uttering
them smoothly, without 'barking', the way he bade me, was some job.
Three words I coped with at once: they were 'ear', 'mamma' and
'stove'. It was as if I had pronounced them before and merely had to
recall them. As a matter of fact that's how it was. Mother told that I had
begun to speak at the age of two and then had suddenly gone dumb after
an illness.
My teacher slept on the floor, slipping some shiny metallic object
under his mattress and using his sheepskin coat as a blanket, but I kept
tossing about, drinking water, sitting up in bed and gazing at the
frostwork on the window. I was thinking of how I would go home and
start talking to Mother and Aunt Dasha. I recollected the moment when
I first realised that I couldn't speak: it was in the evening, and Mother
thought I was asleep; pale, erect, with black plaits hanging down in
front, she gazed at me for a long time. It was then that there first
occurred to me the bitter thought that was to poison my early years:
'I'm not as good as others, and she's ashamed of me.'
I kept repeating 'ее', 'о', 'уоо' all night, too happy to go to sleep I did
not doze off until dawn. Sanya woke me when the day was full.
'I've been over to Grandma's, and you're still asleep,' she rattled off.
'Grandma's kitten has got lost. Where's Ivan Ivanovich?'
His mattress lay on the floor and you could still see the depressions
where his head, shoulders and legs had been. But Ivan Ivanovich
himself was not there. He used to put his knapsack under his head, but
that too was missing. He used to cover himself with his sheepskin coat,
but that too was gone.
'Ivan Ivanovich!'
We ran up into the attic, but there was nobody there.
'I swear to God he was asleep when I went to Grandma's. I remember
looking at him and thinking: while he's asleep I'll run over to
Grandma's. Oh, Sanya, look!'
On the table lay a little black tube with two round knobs at the ends,
one of them flat and slightly bigger, the other small and deeper. We
remembered that Ivan Ivanovich had taken this from his knapsack
together with other instruments when he had looked into my ear.
Where had he gone? Ivan Ivanovich!
He had vanished, gone without saying a word to anyone!
23
CHAPTER SIX
FATHER 'S DEATH.
I REFUSE TO SPEAК
All through the winter I practised speaking. First thing in the
morning, barely awake, I uttered loudly six words which Ivan Ivanovich
had instructed me to say every day: 'hen', 'saddle', 'box', 'snow',
'drink' and 'Abraham'. How difficult it was! And how well, how
differently my sister pronounced these words.
But I kept at it. I repeated them a thousand times a day, like an
incantation that was to help me somehow. I even dreamed them. I
dreamed of some mysterious Abraham putting a hen in a box or going
out of the house in a hat, carrying a saddle on his shoulder.
My tongue would not obey me, my lips barely stirred. Many a time I
felt like hitting Sanya, who could not help laughing at me. In the night I
woke up, heavy with misery, feeling that II would never learn to speak
and would always remain a freak, as my Mother had once called me. The
next moment I was trying to pronounce that word too—'freak'. I
remember succeeding at last and falling asleep happy.
The day when, on waking up, I did not utter my six magic words, was
one of the saddest in my life.
Petrovna woke us early that day, which was odd in itself, because it
was we who usually went to her in the mornings to light the fire and put
on the kettle. She came in, tapping her stick and stopped in front of the
icon. She stood there for some time, muttering and crossing herself.
Then she called to my sister and bade her light the lamp.
Years later, a grown-up man, I saw a picture of Baba-Yaga in a fairy-
tale book. She was the image of Petrovna—the same bent, bearded
figure leaning on a gnarled stick. But Petrovna was a kind Baba-Yaga,
and that day ... that day she sat down on a bench with a heavy sigh, and
I even thought I saw tears rolling down her beard. 'Get down, Sanya!'
she said. 'Come to me.' I went up to her.
'You're a big boy now, Sanya,' she went on, patting me on the head.
'Yesterday a letter came from your mother saying that Ivan is ill.'
She wept.
'He was taken very bad in prison. His head and legs have swollen up.
She writes that she doesn't know whether he's still alive or not.' My
sister started crying.
'Ah well, it's God's will,' Petrovna said. 'God's will,' she repeated
with angry vehemence and looked up at the icon again.
She had only told us that Father had fallen ill, but that evening, in
church, I realised that he was dead. Grandma had taken us to church to
'pray for his health', as she said.
Oddly enough, after three months spent in the village, I hardly knew
anybody except two or three boys with whom I went: skiing. I never
went anywhere because I was ashamed of my handicap. And now, in
