though I know very well what I am in for, I quickly draw the sun, some
birds and clouds above the fence. Scaramouch glances at me as he talks,
and I hastily cover up the sun and the birds with my sleeve. Too late! He
picks up my exercise book. His eyebrows go up. I stand up.
"Now just have a look, Aksinya Fyodorovna, what your dear little son
has been doing!"
And my mother, who had never beaten us children while Father was
alive, seizes my ear and bangs my head on the table.
My lessons came to an end the day that Scaramouch moved into our
house. The day before that there had been the wedding, which Aunt
Dasha, pleading illness, did not attend. I remember how smart Mother
looked at the wedding. She wore a jacket of white velvet, a gift from the
bridegroom, and had her hair done like a girl's, with braids wound
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crosswise round her head. She talked and drank and smiled, but every
now and then she passed her hand across her face with a strange
expression. Scaramouch made a speech in which he drew attention to
the service he was rendering the poor family, which was "definitely
heading for ruin inasmuch as its erstwhile breadwinner had left behind
him a scene of devastation", and mentioned, among other things, that
he had opened to me the door of "general education", by which he
evidently meant those "popindicular" strokes of his.
I don't think Mother heard the speech at all. She sat with lowered
head at her bridegroom's side, and then, with a sudden frown, stared in
front of her with a look of perplexity.
Skovorodnikov, who had been drinking heavily, went up to her and
slapped her on the shoulder.
"Ah, Aksinya, you've given a lark to catch a..."
She smiled weakly, hastily.
For about two months after the wedding my stepfather worked in the
wharf office, and though it was very painful to see him come in and
sprawl in the place where my father used to sit, and eat with his spoon
from his plate, life was bearable so long as I kept to myself, ran away
and did not return home until he was asleep. But shortly he was kicked
out of the office for some shady business, and then life became
unbearable. The unhappy idea of taking in hand our upbringing, my and
my sister's, entered that muddled head of his, and from then on I did
not have a moment to myself.
Looking back, I realise that he had been employed in his youth as a
servant. Obviously, he must have seen somewhere all those absurd and
queer things he was making me and my sister perform.
First of all, he demanded that we come and greet him in the morning,
though we slept on the floor within two paces of his bed. And we did so.
But no power on earth could force me to say: "Good morning. Daddy!"
It wasn't a good morning, and he wasn't Daddy. We dare not sit down at
the table before him, and we had to ask permission to get up. We had to
thank him, though Mother still did the washing at the hospital, and my
sister cooked the dinner, which was bought with Mother's money and
mine. I remember the despair that seized me when poor Sanya rose
from the table and with the clumsy curtsy he had taught her, said for the
first time: "Thank you, Daddy." I felt like throwing my plate with the
unfinished porridge into that fat face! But I did not do it, and regret it to
this day.
CHAPTER TEN
AUNT DASHA
I would not, perhaps, be recalling this period of my life were it not for
the dear figure that rises before me—that of Aunt Dasha, whom, for the
first time, I then came consciously to appreciate and love.
I used to go to her and just sit there, saying nothing—she knew
everything as it was. To comfort me she used to tell me the story of her
life. At twenty-five she was already a widow. Her husband had been
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killed at the very beginning of the Russo-Japanese War. I learnt with
surprise that she was not yet forty. I had thought her an old woman,
especially when she put on her spectacles of an evening and read to us
those letters which the flood-water had brought to our yard (she was
still reading them). She read one letter every evening. It had become for
her a sort of ritual. The ritual began with her trying to guess the
contents of a letter from its envelope and from the address, which in
most cases had been entirely washed away.
And then would come the reading, performed unhurriedly, with long
sighs and grumblings when any words were illegible. Aunt Dasha
rejoiced with the strangers in their joys and shared with them their
sorrows; some she scolded, others she praised. In short, these letters
might have been addressed to her personally, the way she took them.
She read books in just the same way. She dealt with the family and love
affairs of dukes and counts, heroes of the supplements to the Homeland
magazine, as though all those dukes and counts lived in the yard next
door.
"That Baron L., now," she would say animatedly, "I knew he would jilt
Madame de Sans-le-Sou. My love, my love-and then this! A fine fellow, I
must say!"
When, escaping from the presence of Scaramouch I spent the
evenings with her, she was already finishing her mail, with only some
fifteen letters left to read. Among them was one which I must quote
here. Aunt Dasha could not understand it, but it seemed to me, already
at that time, that it had some bearing on the letter of the navigating
officer.
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Here it is (the opening lines Aunt Dasha was unable to decipher):
"One thing I beg of you: do not trust that man! It can positively be
said that we owe all our misfortunes to him alone. Suffice it to say that
most of the sixty dogs he sold to us at Archangel had had to be shot
while we were still at Novaya Zemlya. That's the price we had to pay for
that good office. Not I alone, but the whole expedition send him our
curses. We were taking a chance, we knew that we were running a risk,
but we did not expect such a blow. It remains for us to do all we can.
There is so much I could tell you about our voyage! Stories enough to
last Katya a whole winter. But what a price we are having to pay, good
God! I don't want you to think that our plight is hopeless. Still, you
shouldn't look forward too much-"
Aunt Dasha read it hesitatingly, glancing at me over her spectacles
with a schoolteacherish expression. I did not realise, listening to her,
that within several years I would be making painful efforts to recall
every word of this letter.
The letter was a long one, on seven or eight sheets—giving a detailed
account of life on an icebound ship that was slowly drifting northwards.
I was particularly amused to find out that there was ice even in the
cabins and every morning it had to be hacked away with an axe.
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I could recount in my own words how sailor Skachkov, while hunting a
bear, had fallen to his death in a crevasse, or how everyone was worn
out looking after sick engineer Tisse. But the only words I remember
from the original were the few lines I have quoted here. Aunt Dasha