“Katya! Katya!”
“Oh, little fool! Oh, my darling! Katya’s coming!” cried the old woman, running towards her.
V
Seryozha lay in bed in his little room, which was just an oblong bite taken out of the kitchen. His bed was the original kang of this Korean house—a brick-and-plaster oven. On it—since it was summer—were spread all the winter quilts and blankets to intervene between Seryozha’s heavy young bones and the hard kang. The colder it grew in autumn, the more quilts were taken from beneath his body to be placed above it. Seryozha always connected winter with heavy dreaming, since at that season he always had to sleep flat on his back to save his hip bones from contact with the almost unpadded heated kang. But now, in summer, there were three quilts beneath him, and Seryozha could lie comfortably on his side, bent into the shape of a query mark, glaring at the window. The window, carved by Anna long ago with a blunt saw out of the boards of the outer wall, was high up in the corner made by the flimsy kitchen partition and the ceiling. It was very crooked. Anna was, in all her contrivings, too ardent ever to measure things. “I work by eye only,” she would boast, triumphantly daring you to make the obvious retort as she flaunted her results all askew.
Seryozha glared at the window till the foolish, crooked block of sunny morning light printed itself on his retina, so that when his eye wandered, a black crooked window was stamped all over the room. He was so full of angry single-hearted determination that, as he clenched his teeth, he felt as if his burning self, pregnant with its passion to get its own way, was too big for his skin; he had to keep his aching jaws and the smarting muscles round his eyes locked against its rising, bursting growth. There seemed to be a kind of explosion impending of swelling, thwarted will.
“Kept at home like a little schoolboy,” he thought, tears of irritation squeezing out of the corners of his eyes. Seoul, the city denied, rose like a palace before him. He thought of his mother in a distorted paroxysm of anger. Her ungainliness, her uncontrolled loud voice, her dusty abundant hair, her thick ankles, the hiccups that afflicted her when she was agitated—all made her a hateful effigy in his mind, into which he stuck pins of impotent protest.
He felt alternately rooted to this unloved little house—and far away, walking heroically along a resilient bright road—stopping where he liked—getting wet when he liked—never having to argue—kicking the behinds of rude little Chinese boys—buying sweets and cigarettes recklessly—banging his stick against trees with a various resonance—lighting little fires at the feet of fantastic rocks. Then suddenly—zip—his future telescoped, his traveling thoughts were snatched back to reality—back to prison, as the Reverend Mr. Butters’s pince-nez, when he let them go, were snatched back to concealment by a spring under his lapel.
Seryozha’s dog, with a coarse, confident scratch born of long habit, threw open the latchless door from the kitchen and came in. Seeing Seryozha awake, the dog began to curtsy, to make a little falsetto humming noise through its nose, to wag about two-thirds of its spine—from shoulderblades to tail tip—as it waltzed about the floor, never taking its eyes from Seryozha’s face. Seryozha glared at the dog, making no answer to its extravagant greeting. He was fond of the dog, or rather, fundamentally accustomed to it; he felt as if the dog were part of himself, so it never occurred to him to be responsive or polite to it. Sometimes, to the dog’s rapturous delight, he swung it about by the teeth, or threw it violently across the room in a frenzy of joviality. But he stared moodily through it, and the dog, though experience had not given it much ground for hope, redoubled its efforts. It reared itself delicately up and planted one tentative paw on the edge of the kang, swishing its tail wildly from side to side. No protest, no encouragement. It stretched its neck shyly forward and lightly licked the tip of Seryozha’s nose. As if this chaste kiss—like the prince’s kiss on the lips of the Sleeping Beauty—had called the dormant energies of the prostrate god into action, Seryozha suddenly sat up, and his bare leg, swinging out of bed with a scythe-like action, cut down the erect figure of the dog as though it had been a swathe of corn. Seryozha had heard through the door left open by the dog’s exuberant entrance sounds of someone in the kitchen. He could begin worrying his mother again. The impotent watches of the night were past.
The dog picked itself up, pleased. For it, too, the day had begun. It began scratching its mastoid energetically.
Seryozha pulled on his trousers, wriggled his blouse over his head, and, while still buckling his belt, was in the kitchen, glaring across the table at his mother.
Anna, dressed in a cotton underbodice that much accentuated her stout flabby bust, a crocheted shawl, and a thick crimson flounced petticoat, was sitting at the table, playing patience. She looked up, a little abashed, as Seryozha came in, and mumbled in tones that sank lower and lower, “I was looking through the cupboard for that bar of washing-soap—I am sure I did not use it up; it is somewhere, I know—and I came across the old pack of cards and I thought I would try if I could remember that game that Mrs. Atkinson …” Her voice faded away into a deep growling, “The four on the five and then the king goes up. …”
Her son’s
