If only I had been able to speak then!
I wanted to tell her everything, absolutely everything—how I had
stolen away to the Sands to catch crabs and how the dark man with the
walking stick had appeared in the gap in the ramparts and how he had
sworn and ground his teeth and then spat in the fire and gone off. No
easy thing for a boy of eight who could barely utter two or three
inarticulate words.
'The children are upset too,' Aunt Dasha said with a sigh when I had
stopped, thinking I had made myself clear, and looked at Mother.
'It isn't that. He wants to tell me something. Is there something you
know, Sanya?'
Oh, if only I could speak! I started again, describing what I had seen.
Mother understood me better than anyone else, but this time I saw with
despair that she did not understand a word. How could she? How far
removed from that scene on the pontoon bridge were the attempts of
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that thin, dark little boy to describe it, as he flung himself about the
room, clad in nothing but his shirt. At one moment he threw himself
upon the bed to show how soundly his father had slept that night, the
next he jumped on to a chair and raised tightly clenched fists over a
puzzled-looking Aunt Dasha.
After a while she made the sign of the cross over me. 'The boys must
have been beating him.'
I shook my head vigorously.
'He's telling how they arrested his father,' said Mother. 'How the
policeman threatened him. Isn't that right, Sanya?'
I started to cry, my face buried in her lap. She carried me to the bed
and I lay there for a long time, listening to them talking and thinking
how to communicate to them my amazing secret.
CHAPTER THREE
THE PETITION
I am sure that in the long run I would have managed it somehow, if
Mother hadn't taken ill the next morning. She had always seemed a bit
queer to me, but I had never seen her so queer before.
Previously, when she would suddenly start standing at the window for
hours on end, or jumping up in the middle of the night and sitting at the
table in her nightdress until the morning. Father would take her back to
the home village for a few days, and she would come back recovered.
But Father wasn't there any more, and, besides, it was doubtful whether
the trip would have helped her now.
She stood in the passage, bareheaded and barefooted, and did not
even turn her head when somebody came into the house. She was silent
all the time, except when she uttered two or three words in a distracted
manner.
What's more, she seemed to be afraid of me, somehow. When I started
to 'speak', she stopped up her ears with a tortured expression. She
passed a hand over her eyes and forehead as if trying to recollect
something. She was so queer that even Aunt Dasha crossed herself
furtively when Mother, in answer to her pleadings, turned and fixed her
with a dreadful stare.
It must have been a fortnight before she came round. She still had fits
of absent-mindedness, but little by little she began to talk, go outside
into the yard and work. Ever more often now the word 'petition' was on
her lips. The first to utter it was old Skovorodnikov, then Aunt Dasha
picked it up, and after her the whole yard. A petition must be lodged!
That day Mother went out and took us with her-me and my sister. We
were going to the 'Chambers' to hand in a petition. The 'Chambers'
were a dark building behind tall iron railings in Market Square.
My sister and I waited for a long time, sitting on an iron seat in the
dimly lit high-ceilinged corridor. Messengers hurried to and fro with
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papers, doors slammed. Then Mother came back, seized my sister's
hand, and we all started off at a run. The room we went into was
barriered off, and I couldn't see the person to whom Mother was
speaking and bowing humbly. But I heard a cold indifferent voice, and
this voice, to my horror, was saying something which I alone in all the
world could disprove.
'Ivan Grigoriev...' I heard the rustle of pages being turned over.
'Article 1454 of the Criminal Code. Premeditated murder. What do you
want, my dear woman?'
'Your Honour,' my mother said in a tense unfamiliar voice, 'he's not
guilty. He never killed anyone.'
'The court will go into that.'
I had been standing all the time on tiptoes, my head thrown back so
far that it bade fair to drop off, but all I could see across the barrier was
a hand with long dry fingers, in which a pair of spectacles was being
slowly dangled.
'Your Honour,' Mother said again, 'I want to hand in a petition to the
court. Our whole yard has signed it.'
'You may lodge a petition on payment of one ruble stamp duty.'
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'It's been paid. It wasn't his knife they found, Your Honour.'
Knife? Had I heard aright?
'On that point we have the evidence of the accused himself.'
'Maybe it was a week since he lost it.'
Looking up, I could see Mother's lips trembling.
'Someone would have picked it up, my dear woman. Anyway, the
court will go into that.'
I heard nothing more. At that moment it dawned on me why my
father had been arrested. It wasn't he, it was me who had lost that
