I became hysterical, and throwing myself at him like a ferocious animal, I screamed at the top of my voice:
“You villain. You deceived me. You never did love me. You are a scoundrel. May God curse you.”
Vasili tried to calm me. He tried to approach me, but I repulsed him. He cried, he begged, he implored me to believe that he loved me, and that he would marry me. But I would not listen to him. I trembled with rage, seized by a fit of uncontrollable temper. He left me in tears.
I did not see Vasili for two days. Neither did his brother nor sister-in-law. He had disappeared. When he returned, he presented a pitiable sight. His haggard face, the appearance of his clothes, and the odour of vodka told the story of his two-days’ debauch.
“Ah, Marusia, Marusia,” he lamented, gripping my arms. “What have you done, what have you done? I loved you so much. And you would not understand me. You have ruined my life and your own.”
My heart was wrung with pity for Vasili. Life to me then was a labyrinth of blind alleys, tangled, bewildering. It is now clear to me that Vasili did love me genuinely, and that he had indulged in the wild orgy to forget himself and drown the pain I had caused him. But I did not understand it then. Had I loved him truly, it might all have been different. But a single thought dominated my mind. “He had promised to marry me and failed.” Marriage had become to me the symbol of a life of independence and freedom.
The Lazovs left. They gave me money and gifts. But my heart was like a deserted ruin in the winter, echoing with the howls of wild beasts. Instead of a life of freedom, my parents’ basement awaited me. And deep in my bosom lurked a dread of the unknown. …
I returned home. My sisters had already noticed a different air about me. Perhaps they had seen me with Vasili at one time or another. Whatever the cause, they had their suspicions, and did not fail to communicate them to my mother. It required little scrutiny for her to observe that from a shy little girl I had blossomed forth into a young woman. And then there began days and nights of torture for me.
My father quickly got wind of what had happened at the Lazovs. He was merciless and threw himself upon me with a whip, nearly lashing me to death, accompanying each blow with epithets that burned into me more than the lashes of the whip. He also beat my mother when she attempted to intervene on my behalf.
My father would come home drunk almost every day, and immediately take to lashing me. Often he would drive me and my mother barefoot out of the house, and sometimes we shivered for hours in the snow, hugging the icy walls.
Life became an actual inferno. Day and night I prayed to God that I might fall ill and die. But God remained deaf. And still I felt that only illness could save me from the daily punishment. “I must get ill,” I said to myself. And so I lay on the oven at night to heat my body, and then went out and rolled in the snow. I did it several times, but without avail. I could not fall ill.
Amid these insufferable conditions, I met the new year of 1905. My married sister had invited me to take part in a masquerade. My father would not hear, at first, of my going out for an evening, but consented after repeated entreaties. I dressed as a boy, this being the first time I ever wore a man’s clothes. After the dancing we visited some friends of my sister’s, where I met a soldier, just returned from the front. He was a common muzhik, of rough appearance and vulgar speech, and at least ten years older than myself. He immediately began to court me. His name was Afanasy Bochkarev.
It was not long afterwards that I met Bochkarev again in the house of a married sister of his. He invited me to go out for a walk, and then suddenly proposed that I should marry him. It came to me so unexpectedly that I had no time for consideration. Anything seemed preferable to the daily torments of home. If I had sought death to escape my father, why not marry this boorish muzhik? And I consented without further thought.
My father objected to my marrying since I was not yet sixteen, but without avail. As Bochkarev was penniless, and I had no money, we decided to work together and save. Our marriage was a hasty affair. The only impression of it that remains with me is my feeling of relief at escaping from my father’s brutal hands. Alas! Little did I then suspect that I was exchanging one form of torture for another.
On the day following our marriage, which took place in the early spring, Afanasy and I went down to the river to hire ourselves as day labourers. We helped to load and unload lumber barges. Hard work never daunted me, and I would have been satisfied, had it only been possible for me to get along with Afanasy otherwise. But he also drank, while I did not, and intoxication invariably brutalized him. He knew of my affair with Lazov, and would use it as a pretext for punishing me.
“That officer is still in your head,” he would shout. “Wait, I’ll knock him out of it.” And he would proceed to do so.
Summer came. Afanasy and I found work with an asphalte business. We made floors at the prison, university and other public buildings. We paved some streets with asphalte. Our work with the
