removed from that scene on the pontoon bridge were the attempts of
16
that thin, dark little boy to describe it, as he flung himself about the
room, clad in nothing but his shirt. At one moment he threw himself
upon the bed to show how soundly his father had slept that night, the
next he jumped on to a chair and raised tightly clenched fists over a
puzzled-looking Aunt Dasha.
After a while she made the sign of the cross over me. "The boys must
have been beating him."
I shook my head vigorously.
"He's telling how they arrested his father," said Mother. "How the
policeman threatened him. Isn't that right, Sanya?"
I started to cry, my face buried in her lap. She carried me to the bed
and I lay there for a long time, listening to them talking and thinking
how to communicate to them my amazing secret.
CHAPTER THREE
THE PETITION
I am sure that in the long run I would have managed it somehow, if
Mother hadn't taken ill the next morning. She had always seemed a bit
queer to me, but I had never seen her so queer before.
Previously, when she would suddenly start standing at the window for
hours on end, or jumping up in the middle of the night and sitting at the
table in her nightdress until the morning. Father would take her back to
the home village for a few days, and she would come back recovered.
But Father wasn't there any more, and, besides, it was doubtful whether
the trip would have helped her now.
She stood in the passage, bareheaded and barefooted, and did not
even turn her head when somebody came into the house. She was silent
all the time, except when she uttered two or three words in a distracted
manner.
What's more, she seemed to be afraid of me, somehow. When I started
to "speak", she stopped up her ears with a tortured expression. She
passed a hand over her eyes and forehead as if trying to recollect
something. She was so queer that even Aunt Dasha crossed herself
furtively when Mother, in answer to her pleadings, turned and fixed her
with a dreadful stare.
It must have been a fortnight before she came round. She still had fits
of absent-mindedness, but little by little she began to talk, go outside
into the yard and work. Ever more often now the word "petition" was on
her lips. The first to utter it was old Skovorodnikov, then Aunt Dasha
picked it up, and after her the whole yard. A petition must be lodged!
That day Mother went out and took us with her-me and my sister. We
were going to the "Chambers" to hand in a petition. The "Chambers"
were a dark building behind tall iron railings in Market Square.
My sister and I waited for a long time, sitting on an iron seat in the
dimly lit high-ceilinged corridor. Messengers hurried to and fro with
17
papers, doors slammed. Then Mother came back, seized my sister's
hand, and we all started off at a run. The room we went into was
barriered off, and I couldn't see the person to whom Mother was
speaking and bowing humbly. But I heard a cold indifferent voice, and
this voice, to my horror, was saying something which I alone in all the
world could disprove.
"Ivan Grigoriev..." I heard the rustle of pages being turned over.
"Article 1454 of the Criminal Code. Premeditated murder. What do you
want, my dear woman?"
"Your Honour," my mother said in a tense unfamiliar voice, "he's not
guilty. He never killed anyone."
"The court will go into that."
I had been standing all the time on tiptoes, my head thrown back so
far that it bade fair to drop off, but all I could see across the barrier was
a hand with long dry fingers, in which a pair of spectacles was being
slowly dangled.
"Your Honour," Mother said again, "I want to hand in a petition to the
court. Our whole yard has signed it."
"You may lodge a petition on payment of one ruble stamp duty."
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"It's been paid. It wasn't his knife they found, Your Honour."
Knife? Had I heard aright?
"On that point we have the evidence of the accused himself."
"Maybe it was a week since he lost it."
Looking up, I could see Mother's lips trembling.
"Someone would have picked it up, my dear woman. Anyway, the
court will go into that."
I heard nothing more. At that moment it dawned on me why my
father had been arrested. It wasn't he, it was me who had lost that
knife—an old clasp-knife with a wooden handle. The knife I had
searched for the morning after the murder. The knife which could have
dropped out of my pocket when I bent over the watchman on the
pontoon bridge. The knife on whose handle Pyotr Skovorodnikov had
burned out my name with a magnifying glass.
Looking back on it now I begin to realise that the officials who sat
behind high barriers in dimly-lit halls would not have believed my story
anyway. But at the time! The more I thought about it the heavier it
weighed on my mind. It was my fault, then, that they had arrested
Father. It was my fault that we were now going hungry. It was my fault
that Mother had had to sell the new cloth coat for which she had been
saving a whole year, my fault that she had had to go to the "Chambers"
and speak in such an unfamiliar voice and bow so humbly to that
unseen person with the long, horrible, dry fingers in which there slowly
dangled a pair of spectacles.
Never before had I felt my dumbness so strongly.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE VILLAGE
The last of the rafts had passed down the river. The lights in the
rafters' drifting huts were no longer visible at night when I woke up.
There was emptiness on the river, emptiness in the yard and emptiness
in the house.
Mother did washing in the hospital. She left the house first thing in
the morning while we were still asleep, and I went to the
Skovorodnikovs and listened to the old man swearing to himself.
Grey and unkempt, in steel-rimmed glasses, he sat on a low leather-
covered stool in the little dark kitchen, stitching boots. When he was not
stitching boots he was making nets or carving figures of birds and
horses out of aspen wood. He had brought this trade with him from the
Volga, where he had been born.
He was fond of me, probably because I was the only person he could
talk to without being answered back. He cursed doctors, officials,
tradesmen, and, with especial virulence, priests.
"If a man be dying, dare he murmur against it? The priests say no. But
I say yes! What is murmuring?"
I didn't know what murmuring meant.
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"Murmuring is discontent. And what is discontent? It's wanting more
than's been allotted to you. The priests say you mustn't. Why?"
I didn't know why.
"Because 'dust thou art and to dust thou shalt return'. To the earth,
that is."
He gave a bitter laugh.
"And what does the earth need? No more than is allotted to it."
So it was autumn now, and even the crabs, which had lately become a
staple item in our domestic fare, had hidden themselves away in their