keeps quiet, pretending, the young rascal! Well, tell me all about it.'
And I told her about the freezing doctor who had knocked at our
cottage one night, how we had hidden him for three days and nights,
how he had taught me to say 'ее', 'о' and 'yoo' and the word ‘ear'
26
CHAPTER EIGHT
PYOTR SKOVORODNIKOV
Aunt Dasha said that I had changed a lot since I had begun to speak. I
felt this myself too. The previous summer I had shunned the other boys,
restrained by a painful sense of my own deficiency. I was morbidly shy,
sullen, and very sad. Now I was so different it was hard to believe.
In two or three months I had caught up with the boys of my own age.
Pyotr Skovorodnikov, who was twelve, became my best friend. He was a
lanky, ginger boy with a will of his own.
It was at Pyotr's that I saw books for the first time in my life. They
were Tales of Derringdo in Previous Wars, Yuri Miloslavsky and A
Guide to Letter Writing on the cover of which was a picture of a
bewhiskered young man in a red shirt with a pen in his hand, and above
him, in a pale-blue oval frame, young woman.
It was over this Guide to Letter Writing which we read together, that
we became friends. There was something mysterious about those
different modes of address: 'My dear friend', or 'Dear Sir'. I was
reminded of the navigating officer's letter and recited it aloud for the
first time.
We were sitting in Cathedral Gardens. Across the river we could see
OUT yard and the houses, looking very small, much smaller than they
really were. There was tiny Aunt Dasha coming out onto her doorstep
and sitting down there to clean fish. I could almost see the silvery scales
flying about and falling glistening at her feet. And there was Karlusha,
the town's madman, always scowling or grinning, walking along the
bank and stopping at our gate-to talk to Aunt Dasha, probably.
I kept looking at them all the time I was reciting the letter. Pyotr
listened attentively.
'Gee, isn't that smashing!' he said. 'What a memory. I knew it, too, but
I'd forgotten it.' Unfortunately, we rarely spent our time together so
well. Pyotr was busy; he was employed 'selling cigarettes for the
Chinese'. The Chinese, who lived in the Pokrovsky quarter, made
cigarettes and employed boys to sell them. I can see one of them as if he
were before me now, a man named Li-small, sallow, with a weazened
face, but fairly good-natured: he was considered more generous with the
'treat' allowance than the other Chinese. This allowance formed our
clear wage (later I, too, took up this trade). We were allowed to treat
everyone-'Please, have a smoke'-but the customer who was naive
enough to accept the invitation always paid cash down for it. This
money was ours. The cigarettes were packed in boxes of two hundred
and fifty, labelled 'Katyk', 'Alexander III', and we sold them at the
railway station, alongside the trains, and on the boulevards.
The autumn of 1917 was drawing near, and I should not be telling the
truth if I tried to make out that I saw, felt or in the least understood the
profound significance of those days for me, for the entire country and
the world at large. I saw nothing and understood nothing. I had even
forgotten the vague excitement which I had experienced in the spring,
when we were living in the country. I simply lived from day to day,
27
trading in cigarettes and catching crabs—yellow, green and grey crabs,
with never any luck for a blue one.
This easy life was to end all too soon, however.
CHAPTER NINE
STROKE, STROKE, STROKE, FIVE, TWENTY, A HUNDRED...
He must have been coming to our place before we got back to town,
because everyone in the yard knew him, and that attitude of faint
amusement towards him on the part of the Skovorodnikovs and Aunt
Dasha had already taken shape. But now he began to call nearly every
day. Sometimes he brought something, but, honestly, I never ate a
single of his plums, or his pods, or his caramels.
He had curly hair—even his moustache was curly—and he was pie-
faced, but fairly well-built. He had a deep voice, which I found very
unpleasant. He was taking treatment for black-heads, which were very
noticeable on his swarthy skin. But for all his pimples and curls, for all
his deep repulsive voice, Mother, unfortunately, had taken a fancy to
him. Why else should he be visiting us almost every day? Yes, she liked
him. She became quite a different woman when he was there, laughing
and almost as talkative as he was. Once I found her sitting by herself,
smiling, and I guessed from her face that she was thinking of him. On
another occasion, when talking to Aunt Dasha, she said of someone:
'Ever so many abnormalities.' Those words were his.
His name was Timoshkin, but for some reason he called himself
Scaramouch—to this day I can't make out what he meant by it. I only
remember that he liked to tell my mother that 'life had tossed him
about like a twig'. In saying this he would put on a meaningful look and
gaze at Mother with an air of fatuous profundity.
And this Scaramouch now visited us every evening. Here is one such
evening.
The kitchen lamp hangs on the wall and my shock-headed shadow
covers the exercise book, ink-well and my hand as it moves the squeaky
pen laboriously across the paper.
I am sitting at the table, my tongue pushing out my cheek with the
effort of concentration, and tracing strokes with my pen-one stroke, a
second, a third, a hundredth, a thousandth. I must have made a million
strokes, because my teacher had declared that until they are
'popindicular', I cannot make any further progress. He is sitting beside
me, teaching me, with now and again an indulgent glance at Mother. He
teaches me not only how to write, but how to live, too, and those endless
stupid moralisings make me feel dizzy. The strokes come out wonky,
