“Our Lady, most holy Mother of God! Where did it go?”
“Your Orelian priggers took it on the ice.”
“So that’s why we heard you cry ‘Help.’ I said to my sister, ‘Let’s send our fullers—I think I hear Misha’s innocent voice.’ ”
“Oh, yes! By the time your fullers woke up and came out, there wouldn’t even have been a name left to us … No, it wasn’t us crying ‘Help,’ it was the thieves; and we defended ourselves.”
Mama and my aunt boiled up.
“What? Can Misha have shown his strength?”
“Yes, our Misha played the main part—he may have let my hat slip, but he did take back his watch.”
I can see mama is glad that I’ve done so well, but she says:
“Ah, Misha, Misha! And I begged you so not to drink anything and not to stay out late, till the thieves’ time. Why didn’t you listen to me?”
“Forgive me, mama,” I say, “but I didn’t drink anything, and I didn’t dare leave uncle there alone. You can see for yourself, if he’d come home alone, he might have gotten into some big trouble.”
“He’s had his hat taken as it is.”
“Well, so what! … You can always get yourself a hat.”
“Of course—thank God you took back your watch.”
“Yes, mama, I took it. And, oh, how I took it! I knocked him down in a trice, stopped his mouth with my sleeve so that he wouldn’t cry out, put my other hand into his breast pocket and pulled out my watch, and then uncle and I started pummeling him.”
“Well, that was pointless.”
“Not at all! Let the rascal remember it.”
“The watch wasn’t damaged?”
“No, I don’t think so—only the chain seems to be broken …”
And with those words I took the watch from my pocket and examined the chain, but my aunt looks closely and asks:
“Whose watch might that be?”
“What do you mean, whose? It’s mine, of course.”
“But yours had a rim.”
“Well, so?”
And I look myself and suddenly see: in fact, this watch doesn’t have a gold rim, but instead of that it has a silver face with a shepherd and shepherdess on it, and little sheep at their feet …
I started shaking all over.
“What is this??! It’s not my watch!”
And they all just stood there, not comprehending.
My aunt says:
“How about that!”
My uncle reassures us:
“Wait,” he says, “don’t be frightened. The thief must have made off with Mishutka’s watch, and this one he took earlier from somebody else.”
But I flung the filched watch on the table and, so as not to see it, rushed to my room. And there I hear my watch on the wall above my bed ticking away: tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock.
I jump up to it with a candle and see—that’s it, my watch with the rim … Hanging there quite nicely, where it belongs!
Here I slapped myself on the forehead as hard as I could and started, not crying, but howling …
“Lord God! Who have I robbed?”
XIII
Mama, my aunt, my uncle—everybody got frightened, came running, shook me.
“What’s the matter? What’s the matter? Calm down!”
“Please,” I say, “leave me alone! How can I calm down if I’ve robbed a man?”
Mama started crying.
“He’s gone mad,” she says. “He must have seen something horrible!”
“I certainly did, mama! … What do I do now!!”
“What was it that you saw?”
“That there. Look for yourself.”
“What? Where?”
“That, that there! Look! Don’t you see what it is?”
They looked at the wall where I was pointing and saw the silver watch with the gold rim that my uncle had given me, hanging on the wall and ticking away quite calmly …
My uncle was the first to recover his reason.
“Holy God,” he says, “isn’t that your watch?”
“Yes, of course it is!”
“So it must be you didn’t take it with you, but left it here?”
“You can see I did.”
“And that one … that one … Whose is that one you took?”
“How should I know?”
“What is this! My little sisters, my dear ones! Misha and I have robbed somebody!”
Mama’s legs gave way under her: she cried out as she stood there and sat down on the floor right where she was.
I rushed to pick her up, but she said wrathfully:
“Away, robber!”
My aunt just made crosses in all directions and muttered:
“Holy God, holy God, holy God!”
But mama clutched her head and whispered:
“They beat somebody, they robbed somebody, and they don’t know who!”
My uncle picked her up and tried to calm her:
“Calm yourself now, it wasn’t a good man we beat.”
“How do you know? Maybe he was; maybe it was somebody going to fetch a doctor for a sick man.”
My uncle says:
“And what about my hat? Why did he snatch my hat?”
“God knows about your hat and where you left it.”
My uncle was offended, but mama paid no attention to him and turned to me again.
“I’ve kept my boy in the fear of God for so many years, and this is what he prepared himself for: thief or none, but he looks like one … After this no sensible girl in Orel will marry you, because now everybody, everybody, will know you’re a prigger.”
I couldn’t help myself and said loudly:
“For pity’s sake, mama, what kind of a prigger am I? It’s all a mistake!”
But she didn’t want to listen, and kept rapping me on the head with her knuckles and wailing woefully:13
“I taught you: my child, live far from wickedness, do not go gambling and merrymaking, do not drink two cups in a single gulp, do not fall asleep in a secluded place, lest your costly trousers be taken off you, lest great shame and disgrace overtake you, and through you your family suffer idle reproach and revilement. I taught you: my child, do not go to dicers and taverners, do not think how to steal and rob, but you did not want to heed your mother. Now take off your fine clothes and put on pot-house rags, and wait till the watchmen knock at our gates and Tsyganok himself comes barging into our honest house.”
She kept wailing like that and rapping me on the head with her knuckles.
But when my aunt heard about Tsyganok, she cried out:
“Lord, save us from bloody men and from Arid!”14
My God! In other words, our house turned into a veritable hell.
My aunt and mama embraced each other and, in that embrace, withdrew weeping. Only my uncle and I remained.
I sat down, leaned on the table, and I don’t remember how many hours I went on sitting there. I kept thinking: who was it that I robbed? Maybe it was the Frenchman Saint-Vincent coming from a lesson, or the secretary from the office who lives in the house of Strakhov, the marshal of the nobility15 … I was sorry for each of them. And what if it was my godfather Kulabukhov coming from the other side after visiting the treasury secretary! … He wanted to pass by quietly, so as not to be seen with a little sack, and I up and worked him over … A godson! … his own godfather!
“I’ll go to the attic and hang myself. There’s nothing else left for me.”
And my uncle was just fiercely drinking tea, and then he comes up to me somehow—I didn’t even see how—and says:
“Enough sitting and moping, we must act.”
“Why, yes,” I reply, “of course, if we can find out whose watch I took …”
“Never mind. Get up quickly, and we’ll go together and declare everything ourselves.”
“Who are we going to declare it to?”
“To your Tsyganok himself, naturally.”
“How shameful to confess it!”
“What can we do? Do you think I’m eager to go to Tsyganok? … But all the same, it’s better to own up to it ourselves than to have him come looking for us: take both watches and let’s go.”
I agreed.
I took both my own watch, which my uncle had given me, and the one I had brought home that night, and, without saying good-bye to mama, we left.