“Of course she was wrong to do what she did,” the housemaids would say in undertones when they gathered in our nursery to confer with Nanny, as was their habit after every important event. “Well all right then, so the general could have given her a good tongue lashing, the mistress could have punished her herself, the way it’s done in other houses. That doesn’t hurt so much, you can bear it. But now, all of a sudden, see what they thought up! To go and kiss the hand of such a little cricket, such a snotnose as Feklusha, right in front of everybody! Who could stand such an insult!”
Maria Vasilievna did not regain consciousness for a long time. Her seizures recurred again and again over an interval of several hours. She would blink,
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become conscious for a moment and then suddenly start thrashing around and screaming again. The doctor had to be called from town.
With each passing minute, sympathy for the patient increased and indignation against the masters grew. I remember my mother coming into the nursery in the middle of the day. Seeing Nanny brewing tea with a good deal of fuss and concern at that unusual hour, she asked quite innocently, “For whom are you doing this, Nanny?”
“For Maria Vasilievna, naturally! What do you think—is it your opinion that she, a sick woman, should be left without tea? We servants, we still have a Christian heart!” Nanny replied, in such a coarse and challenging tone of voice that my mother grew quite embarrassed and hurried away.
And yet a few hours earlier, that very same Nanny, if she had been given her way, would have been capable of beating Maria Vasilievna half to death. The seamstress recovered within a few days, to my parents’ great joy. She took up her life in the house just as before. No one mentioned what had taken place. I believe that even among the servants there was no one who would have reproached her for the past.
But as for me, from that day on I felt a strange pity for her, mixed with an instinctive horror. I no longer ran to her room as I used to do. If I met her in the hall I couldn’t keep from pressing myself against the wall, and I tried not to look at her. I kept imagining that she would fall on the floor right then and there and start thrashing and screaming.
Maria Vasilievna must have been aware of my alienation from her, and she tried to win back my old affection by various means. I remember that almost every day she would think up different little surprises for me: now she would bring me colored scraps of cloth, now she would sew a new dress for my doll. But none of this helped. The feeling of secret terror would not pass, and I ran away the moment I found myself alone with her. And soon after that, I came under the supervision of my new governess, who put a stop to all my friendly relations with the servants.
But I vividly recall the following scene. I was already seven or eight years old. One evening, the night before some holiday—the Annunciation [25 March], perhaps—I was running down the hall past Maria Vasilievna’s room. Suddenly she looked out and called to me.
“Young lady, young lady! Come in and see me. Look what a lovely lark I baked for you out of dough!”
It was half dark in the long hall, and no one was there but Maria Vasilievna and myself. Looking at her white face with its great, dark eyes, I suddenly felt an eerie sensation. Instead of answering her, I dashed away headlong.
She called after me. “What is it, young lady? I can see that you don’t like me at all any more. I disgust you!”
Sofiia Kovalevskaia, A Thief in the House
39
It wasn’t so much her words as the tone of voice in which she said them that shook me. I didn’t stop, but kept on running. But then, on returning to the classroom and calming down after my fright, I couldn’t forget the sound of that voice—hollow, despondent.
I was not myself all evening. No matter how I tried to suppress the unpleasant gnawing sensation inside of me by playing, by prankishness, I couldn’t make the feeling go away. The thought of Maria Vasilievna wouldn’t leave my mind. And, as always happens with a person one hurts, she suddenly seemed terribly nice to me, and I began to feel drawn to her.
I couldn’t bring myself to tell my governess what had happened. Children are always embarrassed to talk about their feelings. Moreover, since we were forbidden to fraternize with the servants, I knew that the governess would in all likelihood praise me for my behavior. And yet I felt with every instinct that there was nothing praiseworthy about it.
After evening tea, when it was time for me to go to bed, I decided to drop in to see Maria Vasilievna instead of going straight to my room. This was a kind of sacrifice on my part, for it meant running alone down a long, deserted, and by now quite dark hall which I always feared and avoided in the evening. But now a desperate bravery came to the fore. I ran without stopping to take a breath. Puffing and panting, I tore into her room like a hurricane.
Maria Vasilievna had already had her supper. Because of the holiday, she wasn’t working but sitting at the table, covered with a clean white cloth, and reading some religious book. The lamp glimmered in front of the icons. After the frightening dark hall, the little room seemed uncommonly light and cozy, and Maria Vasilievna herself so kind and good!
“I came to ask you to forgive me dear, dear Maria Vasilievna!” I said in one breath. Before I could finish, she had already grabbed me and started covering me with kisses. She kissed me so violently and for such a long time that I felt the eerie sensation once more. I was already trying to figure out how to get out of her grasp without offending her again, when a cruel attack of coughing forced her to release me from her embrace at last.
This dreadful cough tormented her more and more. “I barked like a dog all night,” she would say of herself, with a kind of sullen irony.
With each day that passed she grew paler and more withdrawn, but she stubbornly resisted all my mother’s suggestions that she consult a doctor. She even showed an angry irritation when anyone mentioned her illness. In this way, she dragged out another two or three years. She was on her feet almost to the end. She went to bed only a few days before she died; and her final hours, they said, were horribly painful.
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My father ordered a very opulent funeral (by village standards) to be arranged for her. Not only all the servants, but all our family attended it as well, even the master himself. Feklusha, too, walked behind the coffin and sobbed bitterly. The only one missing was Filip Matveevich. He did not wait for her to die. He had left us a few months earlier for another and better-paying job, somewhere in the vicinity of Dinaburg.
Chapter Four
Oleg Pantiukhov, A Student’s Summer
Ivan Bunin, Nobel laureate in literature, once wrote: “Our children and grandchildren will be unable to comprehend that Russia in which we once . . . lived, which we appreciated, failed to understand; all that might, complexity, wealth, and happiness.” True or not, our understanding of that Russia is made substantially richer and clearer by the memoirs of Oleg Pantiukhov: Schooling. The cadet corps. Exams. Trips abroad. The Caucasus. Correspondence with parents. A visit to the monasteries on Solovki. The centennial celebrations of Pushkin’s birth. Through all these descriptions we gain insight into distant values and sensibilities. Taken from Oleg Pantiukhov, O dniakh bylykh [Of By-gone Days]. Maplewood, N.J.: Durand Press, 1969.