Winter evenings also had their charm. The entire family shut itself up, shivering, into the main house, Isolated by snow and silence. The tile stoves crackled. Time passed with delectable slowness. Numb with contentment, little Leo told himself that no house in the whole world was more beautiful than the one in which he had been born. Yet the amenities here were primitive; apart from a few mahogany stands and one or two winged armchairs, all the furniture had been hewn and put together by the muzhiks; the only note of luxury was the gilt of the frames around the mirrors and paintings. Even the children's shoes were made by the village cobbler.
Before going to bed they said good-night to the grownups and kissed their hands. If they had been good, they were allowed a few extra minutes in the drawing room. Grandmother, with a ruchcd lxmnct on her head, laid out her eternal "traveler's solitaire" on a little table. Beside her on the divan sat the wife of a Tula gunsmith whom she had adopted for a friend and who wore cartridge belts over her jacket. The gunsmith's wife spun wool and, now and then, she would knock her spindle against the wall, in which she had finally gouged a hole. One aunt read aloud, the other knitted or did needlepoint; Papa, his pipe between his teeth, stared absently at the cards and, curled up on a chair, Milka, his whippet, blinked and yawned.
When the grownups gave the children the order to retire, the fun was not yet over for at least one of them: it was the custom in the family for them to take turns spending the night with their grandmother, Pelagya Nikolayevna. The instant he entered her room, Leo fell into a state of ecstasy. He watched her—corpulent and white, in her nightdress and white cap—as she washed her hands. To amuse him she made soap bubbles between her wrinkled yellow fingers. An old man sat in the window bay: Leo Stepanovich, whom Prince Volkonsky had bought long ago for his gifts as a storyteller. He was blind, which was why lie was also allowed to be present during Ilcr Highness' toilette. A bowl containing some scraps from the master's meal was brought to him there. When Pelagya Nikolaycvna had completed her ablutions she climbed up into her bed, Leo jumped into his, and a maid put out the candles, leaving only a vigil light burning in the corner in front of the icons. In this eerie light the matriarch, leaning back against her pillows, her head upright under her white nightcap, looked down on the world as from a throne of snow. Ilcr shadow wavered on the wall. 'Hie blind man began his tale in a drawling voice: "Once there was a powerful king who had an only son . . ."
Leo, fascinated by this hieratic grandmother, did not listen: was she asleep, or did she hear everything that was said? lie could not tell. Sometimes the bard, draped in his cloak, deferentially asked, "Do you command me to procccd?" The reply snapped down, dictatorial, from the summit of the bed: "Yes; go on." And he resumed his tale, mixing Russian folklore with tales from Scheherazade. Lulled by the monotonous murmur, Leo's eyes closed, and he carried away into his dreams a mask of an ancient queen under a beribboned lace cap.
In the morning Grandmother made more soap bubbles between her fingers without losing a whit of her majesty. Sometimes she took the children to gather hazelnuts. She would climb into the famous yellow cabriolet and two servants—Petrushka and Matyusha—would harness themselves to the shafts and pull her along the paths. In the woods they reverently bent down the branches for their mistress, who chose the ripest nuts and stuffed them in a bag. Her grandsons raced around her, scavenging and squabbling. "I remember Grandmother," Tolstoy later wrote, "the hazel grove, the pungent smell of its leaves, the servants, the yellow cabriolet, the sun, and they all melt together into a single impression of radiance."5 In reality, Pelagya Nikolayevna was a narrow-minded woman, capricious and despotic, hard on those who served her but indulgent to the point of spinelcssness with her son and grandchildren.
Alexandra Ilinichna, called Aunt Aline—the sister of Nicholas Ilich Tolstoy—was a very different proposition. She had married Count Ostcn-Sakcn when she was very young, and shortly after their wedding he had gone berserk and tried to kill her. The first time he wounded her with a pistol shot; and the second time, while she was recovering, he came into her room and tried to cut out her tongue with a razor. While the maniac was being shut up in an asylum, his wife, who was pregnant, gave birth to a stillborn child. Ilcr relatives were afraid she would not be able to bear the awful news, and gave out that the baby was alive; they brought her a girl child, Pashenka, to whom a servant, the wife of the Tolstoy cook, had just given birth. The real mother did not dream of protesting against a decision from such high quarters, and so Pashenka was raised in the master's house, not learning the secret of her birth until long afterward. The hapless Aline must have been crushed when she learned of the subterfuge; but she tried not to blame anyone and to remain as fond of Pashenka as before, and sought consolation in prayer. Having lost her husband and her home, she lived in her brother's house, voluntarily did without comfort and service, scrupulously observed all fasts, gave her money to the poor, read nothing but the lives of the saints, and spent her time talking to the pilgrims, the simpletons, monks, nuns and half-mad holy men who stopped at the house to rest between stations on a pilgrimage. It was said that she had been very pretty and coquettish in her youth, that her blue eyes had turned many young men's heads at the balls, that she had played the harp and could rccite French verse. How was one to believe it, looking at this mummy draped in dark cloth, who dedicated body and soul to God? Little Leo smcllcd a very particular acid odor in the wake of his Aunt Aline which was due, he thought, to the 'lack of attention the old lady paid to her toilette."
'llie odor given off by Prascovya Isaycvna, the housekeeper, was one of sweetish resin: one of her duties, as official responsible for administering enemas to the children, was to collect their chamberpots in her room and burn lozenges from the Far East in them. She said the lozenges, which she called "Ochakov essence," had been brought back by Leo's grandfather when he went to fight the Turks, "on horse, on foot and ever)' other way." She had known this grandfather very well; long ago, he had refused to let her marry Tikhon, the flutist-serf; she had held Maman in her arms; she was a hundred, a thousand, years old; nothing could leave the cupboards, chests, cellar or storerooms without her personal authorization. . . . When Nicholas Ilich Tolstoy became engaged to Princess Marya, the princess wanted to free Prascovya Isayevna in return for her services. When she saw the paper containing her release, Prascovya Isaycvna bristled and cried out, with tears in her eyes, "I guess you must not like me, mistress, since you're sending me away!" And so she stayed on in the house, a servant.
Among the other servants, there was Tatyana Philippovna, the children's maid, tiny and dark-skinned; the old nursemaid Anushka, who had only one tooth in the middle of her mouth; Nicholas Philippich, the coachman, surrounded by the rich aroma of horse dung; Akim, the gardener's assistant, an inoffensive simpleton who addressed God as "my doctor, my druggist"—in all, some thirty persons, most of whom had no specific duties and loitered about in the pantry and halls, warming themselves by the stoves, gossiping around the samovars and snoring in unused rooms. In addition to this permanent staff, there were the guests who came for a few days and forgot to go away again, poor relations and their servants, orphans and wards taken in some softhearted evening, Russian, French and German tutors, whose turnover was more rapid—a large floating population basking in the master's bounty, feeding at his table and singing his praises.
The number of inmates doubled at the approach of the holidays. For Christmas and the New Year, neighbors, servants and peasants dressed up in costumes and flocked into the big house, led by old Gregory scraping at his fiddle. The disguises were always the same: a bear and his trainer, bandits and Turks, muzhiks dressed as women or women dressed as muzhiks. They went from room to room, bowed low before the masters, and received small presents. The two aunts dressed the children, who were quarreling by the costume trunk over who was to wear the gem-studded belt and who the gold-embroidered muslin jacket. Staring into the mirror, with a turban on his head and a black mustache drawn on his face with burnt cork, little Leo, paralyzed with admiration, imagined that he was seeing one of those heroes whose exploits the blind storyteller related to put Grandmother to sleep. But, to his disgust, when his make-up was washed off again there was die same old baby face, with its shapeless nose and thick lips and little gray eyes. A big, fat boy, a "patapouf," like Papa said.