Grisha, a chubby little boy born only two years and eight months ago,
was out walking on the boulevard with his nurse. He wore a long, wadded
burnoose, a large cap with a furry knob, a muffler, and wool-lined
goloshes. He felt stuffy and hot, and, in addition, the waxing sun of
April was beating directly into his face and making his eyelids smart.
Every inch of his awkward little figure, with its timid, uncertain
steps, bespoke a boundless perplexity.
Until that day the only universe known to Grisha had been square. In one
corner of it stood his crib, in another stood nurse’s trunk, in the
third was a chair, and in the fourth a little icon lamp. If you looked
under the bed you saw a doll with one arm and a drum; behind nurse’s
trunk were a great many various objects: a few empty spools, some scraps
of paper, a box without a lid, and a broken jumping-jack. In this world,
besides nurse and Grisha, there often appeared mamma and the cat. Mamma
looked like a doll, and the cat looked like papa’s fur coat, only the
fur coat did not have eyes and a tail. From the world which was called
the nursery a door led to a place where people dined and drank tea.
There stood Grisha’s high chair and there hung the clock made to wag its
pendulum and strike. From the dining-room one could pass into another
room with big red chairs; there, on the floor, glowered a dark stain for
which people still shook their forefingers at Grisha. Still farther
beyond lay another room, where one was not allowed to go, and in which
one sometimes caught glimpses of papa, a very mysterious person! The
functions of mamma and nurse were obvious: they dressed Grisha, fed him,
and put him to bed; but why papa should be there was incomprehensible.
Aunty was also a puzzling person. She appeared and disappeared. Where
did she go? More than once Grisha had looked for her under the bed,
behind the trunk, and under the sofa, but she was not to be found.
In the new world where he now found himself, where the sun dazzled one’s
eyes, there were so many papas and mammas and aunties that one scarcely
knew which one to run to. But the funniest and oddest things of all were
the horses. Grisha stared at their moving legs and could not understand
them at all. He looked up at nurse, hoping that she might help him to
solve the riddle, but she answered nothing.
Suddenly he heard a terrible noise. Straight toward him down the street
came a squad of soldiers marching in step, with red faces and sticks
under their arms. Grisha’s blood ran cold with terror and he looked up
anxiously at his nurse to inquire if this were not dangerous. But nursie
neither ran away nor cried, so he decided it must be safe. He followed
the soldiers with his eyes and began marching in step with them.
Across the street ran two big, long-nosed cats, their tails sticking
straight up into the air and their tongues lolling out of their mouths.
Grisha felt that he, too, ought to run, and he started off in pursuit.
“Stop, stop!” cried nursie, seizing him roughly by the shoulder. “Where
are you going? Who told you to be naughty?”
But there sat a sort of nurse with a basket of oranges in her lap. As
Grisha passed her he silently took one.
“Don’t do that!” cried his fellow wayfarer, slapping his hand and
snatching the orange away from him. “Little stupid!”
Next, Grisha would gladly have picked up some of the slivers of glass
that rattled under his feet and glittered like icon lamps, but he was
afraid that his hand might be slapped again.
“Good day!” Grisha heard a loud, hoarse voice say over his very ear,
and, looking up, he caught sight of a tall person with shiny buttons.
To his great joy this man shook hands with nursie; they stood together
and entered into conversation. The sunlight, the rumbling of the
vehicles, the horses, the shiny buttons, all struck Grisha as so
amazingly new and yet unterrifying, that his heart overflowed with
delight and he began to laugh.
“Come! Come!” he cried to the man with the shiny buttons, pulling his
coat tails.
“Where to?” asked the man.
“Come!” Grisha insisted. He would have liked to say that it would be
nice to take papa and mamma and the cat along, too, but somehow his
tongue would not obey him.
In a few minutes nurse turned off the boulevard and led Grisha into a
large courtyard where the snow still lay on the ground. The man with
shiny buttons followed them. Carefully avoiding the puddles and lumps of
snow, they picked their way across the courtyard, mounted a dark, grimy
staircase, and entered a room where the air was heavy with smoke and a
strong smell of cooking. A woman was standing over a stove frying chops.
This cook and nurse embraced one another, and, sitting down on a bench
with the man, began talking in low voices. Bundled up as he was, Grisha
felt unbearably hot.
“What does this mean?” he asked himself, gazing about. He saw a dingy
ceiling, a two-pronged oven fork, and a stove with a huge oven mouth
gaping at him.
“Ma-a-m-ma!” he wailed.
“Now! Now!” his nurse called to him. “Be good!”
The cook set a bottle, two glasses, and a pie on the table. The two
women and the man with the shiny buttons touched glasses and each had
several drinks. The man embraced alternately the cook and the nurse.
Then all three began to sing softly.
Grisha stretched his hand toward the pie, and they gave him a piece. He
ate it and watched his nurse drinking. He wanted to drink, too.
“Give, nursie! Give!” he begged.
The cook gave him a drink out of her glass. He screwed up his eyes,
frowned, and coughed for a long time after that, beating the air with
his hands, while the cook watched him and laughed.
When he reached home, Grisha explained to mamma, the walls, and his crib
where he had been and what he had seen. He told it less with his tongue
than with his hands and his face; he showed how the sun had shone, how
the horses had trotted, how the terrible oven had gaped at him, and how
the cook had drunk.
That evening he could not possibly go to sleep. The soldiers with their
sticks, the great cats, the horses, the bits of glass, the basket of
oranges, the shiny buttons, all this lay piled on his brain and
oppressed him. He tossed from side to side, chattering to himself, and
finally, unable longer to endure his excitement, he burst into tears.
“Why, he has fever!” cried mamma, laying the palm of her hand on his
forehead. “What can be the reason?”
“The stove!” wept Grisha. “Go away, stove!”
“He has eaten something that has disagreed with him,” mamma concluded.
And, shaken by his impressions of a new life apprehended for the first
time, Grisha was given a spoonful of castor-oil by mamma.