flying about and falling glistening at her feet. And there was Karlusha,
the town's madman, always scowling or grinning, walking along the
bank and stopping at our gate-to talk to Aunt Dasha, probably.
I kept looking at them all the time I was reciting the letter. Pyotr
listened attentively.
"Gee, isn't that smashing!" he said. "What a memory. I knew it, too, but
I'd forgotten it." Unfortunately, we rarely spent our time together so
well. Pyotr was busy; he was employed "selling cigarettes for the
Chinese". The Chinese, who lived in the Pokrovsky quarter, made
cigarettes and employed boys to sell them. I can see one of them as if he
were before me now, a man named Li-small, sallow, with a weazened
face, but fairly good-natured: he was considered more generous with the
"treat" allowance than the other Chinese. This allowance formed our
clear wage (later I, too, took up this trade). We were allowed to treat
everyone-"Please, have a smoke"-but the customer who was naive
enough to accept the invitation always paid cash down for it. This
money was ours. The cigarettes were packed in boxes of two hundred
and fifty, labelled "Katyk", "Alexander III", and we sold them at the
railway station, alongside the trains, and on the boulevards.
The autumn of 1917 was drawing near, and I should not be telling the
truth if I tried to make out that I saw, felt or in the least understood the
profound significance of those days for me, for the entire country and
the world at large. I saw nothing and understood nothing. I had even
forgotten the vague excitement which I had experienced in the spring,
when we were living in the country. I simply lived from day to day,
27
trading in cigarettes and catching crabs—yellow, green and grey crabs,
with never any luck for a blue one.
This easy life was to end all too soon, however.
CHAPTER NINE
STROKE, STROKE, STROKE, FIVE, TWENTY, A HUNDRED...
He must have been coming to our place before we got back to town,
because everyone in the yard knew him, and that attitude of faint
amusement towards him on the part of the Skovorodnikovs and Aunt
Dasha had already taken shape. But now he began to call nearly every
day. Sometimes he brought something, but, honestly, I never ate a
single of his plums, or his pods, or his caramels.
He had curly hair—even his moustache was curly—and he was pie-
faced, but fairly well-built. He had a deep voice, which I found very
unpleasant. He was taking treatment for black-heads, which were very
noticeable on his swarthy skin. But for all his pimples and curls, for all
his deep repulsive voice, Mother, unfortunately, had taken a fancy to
him. Why else should he be visiting us almost every day? Yes, she liked
him. She became quite a different woman when he was there, laughing
and almost as talkative as he was. Once I found her sitting by herself,
smiling, and I guessed from her face that she was thinking of him. On
another occasion, when talking to Aunt Dasha, she said of someone:
"Ever so many abnormalities." Those words were his.
His name was Timoshkin, but for some reason he called himself
Scaramouch—to this day I can't make out what he meant by it. I only
remember that he liked to tell my mother that "life had tossed him
about like a twig". In saying this he would put on a meaningful look and
gaze at Mother with an air of fatuous profundity.
And this Scaramouch now visited us every evening. Here is one such
evening.
The kitchen lamp hangs on the wall and my shock-headed shadow
covers the exercise book, ink-well and my hand as it moves the squeaky
pen laboriously across the paper.
I am sitting at the table, my tongue pushing out my cheek with the
effort of concentration, and tracing strokes with my pen-one stroke, a
second, a third, a hundredth, a thousandth. I must have made a million
strokes, because my teacher had declared that until they are
"popindicular", I cannot make any further progress. He is sitting beside
me, teaching me, with now and again an indulgent glance at Mother. He
teaches me not only how to write, but how to live, too, and those endless
stupid moralisings make me feel dizzy. The strokes come out wonky,
pot-bellied, anything but straight and "popindicular".
"Every man's keen to snatch his titbit from life," he said. "And that's
what everyone should go after, it's only natural, man is made that way.
But will such a titbit guarantee security-that's another matter."
Stroke, stroke, stroke, five, twenty, a hundred...
"Now take me. I got into a difficult atmosphere from a child, and I
could never count on my mother's labour power. That was out of the
28
question. On the contrary, when our domestic affairs went to wrack and
ruin and my father, accused of horse-stealing, was sentenced to
imprisonment, it was I, and no other, who was obliged to become the
breadwinner."
Stroke, stroke, fat one, thin one, crooked one, five, twenty, a
hundred...
"The saddest thing of all was that my father, on coming out of prison,
took to drink, and when a man indulges in liquor his house goes to
wrack and ruin. Then death struck him down, most sudden and
untimely, being the result of his skinning the carcass of a horse."
I know exactly what happened afterwards to my teacher's father. He
became bloated and "the coffin they'd started to make had to be altered
in a hurry, because the figure of the dead man was three times its living
size". I once dreamt of this horrid death.
Stroke, stroke, stroke... The pen squeaks, stroke, blot...
"And so our family hearth became desolated. But I did not lose heart
and did not become a burden to my mother at the age of eleven."
My teacher looks at me. Though I'm only ten, I begin to fidget
uneasily on my stool.
"I entered the employ of a restaurant, and became a servant and
errand-boy, but was no longer an extra mouth living on my mother's
earnings."
My mother is sitting at the same table, listening to him spellbound.
She is mending shirts-Father's shirts-and I know who she is mending
them for. It is with presentiment of ill that I look up at my mother's pale
face, at her black hair parted in the middle, at her slim hands—and turn
back to my strokes. I feel like drawing one long line through the strokes,
they would make a lovely fence-but I mustn't. The strokes must be
"popindicular".
"Meanwhile," Scaramouch goes on, "my mother became noticeably
addicted to acts of charity. What do I do? Seeing that this tendency was
adversely affecting my development I turned to my uncle Nikita Zuyev
of never-to-be-forgotten memory, and asked him to influence my
mother."
This was the hundredth time I was hearing about that uncle of never-
to-be-forgotten memory, and I pictured a fat old man with the same
pimply face arriving in the village in a wide country sledge, taking off his
yellow sheepskin coat as he comes in, and crossing himself in front of
the icon. He beats the mother, while little Scaramouch stands by and
calmly watches his mother being beaten.
Strokes, strokes... But the fence is there already-done long ago, and