And nobody treated me as mercilessly as precisely those who still recently had been simple people themselves and had earned their crust of bread by common labor. In the market, when I passed a hardware store, they poured water on me as if accidentally and once even threw a stick at me. And one fishmonger, a gray-haired old man, stood in my way and said, looking at me with spite:
‘‘It’s not you who’s to be pitied, you fool! It’s your father!’’
And my acquaintances, on meeting me, were for some reason embarrassed. Some looked upon me as an eccentric and buffoon, others felt sorry for me, still others did not know how to treat me, and it was hard to understand them. One afternoon, in one of the lanes near our Bolshaya Dvoryanskaya, I met Anyuta Blagovo. I was on my way to work and was carrying two long brushes and a bucket of paint. Recognizing me, Anyuta blushed.
‘‘I beg you not to greet me in the street,’’ she said nervously, sternly, in a trembling voice, without offering me her hand, and tears suddenly glistened in her eyes. ‘‘If, in your opinion, all this is necessary, then so be it... so be it, but I beg you not to approach me!’’
I now lived not on Bolshaya Dvoryanskaya but in the suburb of Makarikha, with my nanny Karpovna, a kind but gloomy old woman who always anticipated something bad, was afraid of all dreams in general, and saw bad omens even in the bees and wasps that flew into her room. And the fact that I had become a worker, in her opinion, did not presage anything good.
‘‘It’ll be your head!’’ she repeated mournfully, shaking her head. ‘‘So it will!’’
With her in her little house lived her adopted son Prokofy, a butcher, a huge, clumsy fellow of about thirty, red- haired, with a stiff mustache. Meeting me in the front hall, he would silently and deferentially make way for me, and if he was drunk, he would give me a five-finger salute. He took his dinner in the evenings, and I could hear him through the wooden partition grunting and sighing as he drank glass after glass.
‘‘Mama!’’ he would call in a low voice.
‘‘Well?’’ Karpovna would answer (she loved her adopted son to distraction). ‘‘What is it, sonny?’’
‘‘I can do you this indulgence, mama. For all my earthly life, I’ll feed you in your old age in this vale, and when you die, I’ll bury you at my own expense. I’ve said it, and it’s so.’’
I got up every day before sunrise and went to bed early. We housepainters ate a lot and slept soundly, only for some reason my heart beat hard during the night. I never quarreled with my comrades. Abuse, desperate curses, and such wishes as that your eyes should burst, or you should drop dead from cholera, never ceased all day, but nonetheless we still lived together amicably. The boys suspected I was a religious sectarian and made fun of me good-naturedly, saying that even my own father had renounced me, telling me straight off that they seldom saw the inside of God’s church themselves, and that many of them hadn’t gone to confession for ten years, and justifying such dissipation by saying that a housepainter is among people what a jackdaw is among birds.
The boys respected me and treated me with deference; they apparently liked it that I didn’t drink, didn’t smoke, and led a quiet, sedate life. They were only unpleasantly shocked that I didn’t take part in stealing drying oil and didn’t go to the clients with them to ask for a tip. Stealing the owner’s oil and paint was habitual among housepainters and was not considered theft, and remarkably, even such an upright man as Radish, each time he left a job, took along a little whiting and oil. And even venerable old men, who owned their own houses in Makarikha, weren’t ashamed to ask for a tip, and I found it vexing and shameful when the boys would go in a bunch to congratulate some nonentity for the start or the finish and, getting ten kopecks from him, thank him humbly.
With clients, they behaved like wily courtiers, and I recalled Shakespeare’s Polonius almost every day.
‘‘But surely it’s going to rain,’’ the client would say, looking at the sky.
‘‘It is, it certainly is!’’ the painters would agree.
‘‘Though the clouds aren’t the rainy sort. Perhaps it won’t rain.’’
‘‘It won’t, Your Honor! It sure won’t.’’
Behind their backs, their attitude to the clients was generally ironic, and when, for instance, they saw a gentleman sitting on a balcony with a newspaper, they would observe:
‘‘Reads the newspaper, but I bet he’s got nothing to eat.’’
I never went home to my family. On returning from work, I often found notes, short and anxious, in which my sister wrote to me about father: now he was somehow especially preoccupied and ate nothing at dinner, now he lost his balance, now he locked himself in his study and didn’t come out for a long time. Such news disturbed me, I couldn’t sleep, and sometimes even went past our house on Bolshaya Dvoryanskaya at night, looking into the dark windows and trying to make out whether everything was all right at home. On Sundays my sister came to see me, but on the sly, as if not to me but to our nanny. And if she came into my room, she would be very pale, with tearful eyes, and would begin to cry at once.
‘‘Our father won’t survive it!’’ she would say. ‘‘If, God forbid, something should happen to him, your conscience will torment you all your life. It’s terrible, Misail! I implore you in our mother’s name: mend your ways!’’
‘‘Sister, dear,’’ I would say, ‘‘how can I mend my ways if I’m convinced that I’m acting according to conscience? Try to understand!’’
‘‘I know it’s according to conscience, but maybe it could be done somehow differently, so as not to upset anyone.’’
‘‘Oh, dear me!’’ the old woman would sigh behind the door. ‘‘It’ll be your head! There’ll be trouble, my dearies, there’ll be trouble!’’
VI
ONE SUNDAY, DR. BLAGOVO unexpectedly appeared at my place. He was wearing a tunic over a silk shirt, and high patent-leather boots.
‘‘I’ve come to see you!’’ he began, shaking my hand firmly, student-fashion. ‘‘I hear about you every day and keep intending to come and have, as they say, a heart-to-heart talk. It’s terribly boring in town, not a single live soul, nobody to talk to. Heavenly Mother, it’s hot!’’ he went on, taking off his tunic and remaining in nothing but the silk shirt. ‘‘Dear heart, allow me to talk with you!’’
I was bored myself and had long wanted to be in the society of other than housepainters. I was sincerely glad to see him.
‘‘I’ll begin by saying,’’ he said, sitting down on my bed, ‘‘that I sympathize with you wholeheartedly and deeply respect this life of yours. Here in town you’re not understood, and there’s nobody to understand you, because, you
