“And Moscow is a big city. All the houses are manors, there are lots of horses, but no sheep, and the dogs aren’t fierce. There’s no children’s procession with the star2 here, and they don’t let anybody sing in the choir,3 and once in the window of a shop I saw hooks for sale with lines for all kinds of fish, really worth it, there was even one hook that would hold a thirty-pound sheatfish. And I saw shops selling all kind of guns like our squire’s, worth maybe a hundred roubles each … And in the butcher shops there are blackcock, and hazel grouse, and hares, but where they go to hunt them the shop clerks won’t tell.
“Dear grandpa, when the masters have a Christmas tree party with treats, take a gilded nut for me and hide it in the green chest. Ask the young miss, Olga Ignatievna, and tell her it’s for Vanka.”
Vanka sighed spasmodically and again stared at the window. He remembered how his grandfather always went to the forest to fetch a Christmas tree for the masters and took his grandson with him. They had a merry time! His grandfather grunted, and the frost grunted, and, looking at them, Vanka also grunted. Usually, before cutting down the tree, his grandfather smoked his pipe or took a long pinch of snuff, while he chuckled at the freezing Vaniushka … The young fir trees, shrouded in hoarfrost, stand motionless, waiting to see which of them is to die. Out of nowhere, a hare shoots like an arrow across the snowdrifts … His grandfather cannot help shouting:
“Catch him, catch him … catch him! Ah, the short-tailed devil!”
The cut-down tree would be lugged to the master’s house, and there they would start decorating it … The young miss, Olga Ignatievna, Vanka’s favorite, was the busiest of all. When Vanka’s mother Pelageya was still alive and worked in the master’s house as a maid, Olga Ignatievna used to give Vanka fruit drops and, having nothing to do, taught him to read, to write, to count to a hundred, and even to dance the quadrille. But when Pelageya died, the orphaned Vanka was packed off to his grandfather in the servants’ kitchen, and from the kitchen to Moscow, to the shoemaker Aliakhin …
“Come, dear grandpa,” Vanka went on, “by Christ God I beg you, take me away from here. Have pity on me, a wretched orphan, because everybody beats me, and I’m so hungry, and it’s so dreary I can’t tell you, I just cry all the time. And the other day the master hit me on the head with a last, so that I fell down and barely recovered. My life is going bad, worse than any dog’s … And I also send greetings to Alyona, to one-eyed Yegorka, and to the coachman, and don’t give my harmonica away to anybody. I remain your grandson, Ivan Zhukov, dear grandpa, come.”
Vanka folded the written sheet in four and put it into an envelope he had bought the day before for a kopeck … After thinking a little, he dipped his pen and wrote the address:
To Grandpa in the Village.
Then he scratched his head, reflected, and added: “Konstantin Makarych.” Pleased that he had not been disturbed at his writing, he put on his hat and, without getting into his coat, ran outside in just his shirt …
The clerks at the butcher shop, whom he had asked the day before, had told him that letters are put in mailboxes, and from the mailboxes are carried all over the world on troikas of post-horses with drunken drivers and jingling bells. Vanka ran over to the nearest mailbox and put the precious letter into the slot …
Lulled by sweet hopes, an hour later he was fast asleep … He dreamed of a stove. On the stove sits his grandfather, his bare feet hanging down. He is reading Vanka’s letter to the kitchen maids … Eel walks around the stove, wagging his tail …
DECEMBER 1886
SLEEPY
Night. The nanny Varka, a girl of about thirteen, is rocking a cradle in which a baby lies, and murmuring barely audibly:
Hush-a-bye, baby,
I’ll sing you a song …
A green oil lamp is burning before an icon; a rope is stretched across the whole room from corner to corner, with swaddling clothes and large black trousers hanging on it. A big green spot from the icon lamp falls on the ceiling, and the swaddling clothes and trousers cast long shadows on the stove, the cradle, and Varka … When the icon lamp begins to flicker, the spot and the shadows come alive and start moving as if in the wind. It is stuffy. There is a smell of cabbage soup and shoemaker’s supplies.
The baby is crying. He became hoarse and exhausted from crying long ago, but he goes on howling, and no one knows when he will quiet down. And Varka is sleepy. Her eyes close, her head droops down, her neck aches. She cannot move her eyelids or her lips, and it seems to her that her face has become dry and stiff and her head is as small as the head of a pin.
“Hush-a-bye, baby,” she murmurs, “I’ll feed you by and by …”
A cricket chirps from the stove. In the next room, behind the door, the master and his apprentice Afanasy are snoring … The cradle creaks pitifully, Varka herself is murmuring—and all this merges into the lulling night music that is so sweet to hear when you are going to bed. But now this music is only vexing and oppressive, because it makes her drowsy, yet she cannot sleep. God forbid that Varka should fall asleep, or the masters will give her a beating.
The icon lamp flickers. The green spot and the shadows begin to move, getting into Varka’s fixed, half-open eyes and forming dim reveries in her half-sleeping brain. She sees dark clouds chasing each other across the sky and crying like babies. But now the wind has blown, the clouds have vanished, and Varka sees a broad highway covered with liquid mud. Down the highway stretches a string of carts, people trudge along with bundles on their backs, and some sort of shadows flit back and forth. Forest can be seen on both sides through the cold, harsh fog. Suddenly the shadows and the people with bundles drop down in the liquid mud. “Why is that?” asks Varka. “To sleep, to sleep,” comes the answer. And they fall fast asleep, sleep sweetly, and crows and magpies sit on the telegraph wires, crying like babies, trying to wake them up.
“Hush-a-bye, baby, I’ll sing you a song …” murmurs Varka, and now she sees herself in a dark, stuffy cottage.
Her late father, Yefim Stepanov, is thrashing on the floor. She does not see him, but she hears him moaning and rolling on the floor in pain. His rupture, as he puts it, “is acting up.” The pain is so intense that he cannot utter a single word and only sucks in air, his teeth chattering like a drum rolclass="underline"
“Rat-a-tat-tat-tat …”
Her mother Pelageya has run to the manor to tell the masters that Yefim is dying. She has been gone for a long time and ought to be back. Varka lies on the stove, awake, and listens to her father’s “rat-a-tat-tat.” But now she hears someone drive up to the cottage. The masters have sent the young doctor, who came from town for a visit. The doctor enters the cottage. He cannot be seen in the darkness, but she hears him cough and clack the door.
“Light a lamp,” he says.
“Rat-a-tat-tat …” answers Yefim.
Pelageya rushes to the stove and starts looking for the crock of matches. A minute passes in silence. The doctor feels in his pockets and lights his own match.
“One moment, good man, one moment,” says Pelageya, rushing out of the cottage and coming back shortly with a candle end.
Yefim’s cheeks are pink, his eyes shine, and his gaze is somehow sharp, as if Yefim can see through both the cottage and the doctor.
“Well, so? What’s this you’re up to?” the doctor says, bending over him. “Aha! Have you had it long?”
“What, sir? It’s time to die, Your Honor … I’m done living …”