I
Almost all his life long Kuzma had dreamed of writing, of obtaining an
education. Verses did not count. He had dallied with verses as a mere
child. He longed to narrate how he had come to naught; to depict, with
unprecedented ruthlessness, his poverty and that dreadful factor in his
commonplace life which had crippled him, made of him a barren fig-tree.
When he reviewed his life in his own mind he both condemned and
acquitted himself. Yes, he was an indigent petty townsman who, almost
up to the age of fifteen, had been able to read only by spelling
out every word. But his history was the history of all self-taught
Russians. He had been born in a country which had more than a hundred
million illiterate inhabitants. He had grown up in the Black Suburb,
where down to the present day men fight to the death with their fists.
In his childhood he had seen dirt and drunkenness, laziness and
boredom. His childhood had furnished only one poetical impression:
there had been the dark cemetery grove, and the pasture on the hill
behind the Suburb, and beyond that--space, the hot mirage of the
steppe, a white cottage beneath a poplar-tree in the far distance. But
he had been taught to look upon even this cottage with scorn: Little
Russians dwelt there, and, of course, they were so stupid that in reply
to the question, “Little Russians, where are your kettles?”[14] they
said: “Do you need to be told that they are under the wagons?” He and
Tikhon had been taught the alphabet and figures by a neighbour named
Byelkin, whose trade was to make rubber overshoes in moulds; but he had
taught them because he never had any work--for what demand was there in
the Suburb for overshoes?--and because it was always agreeable to pull
some one’s hair, and because a man cannot sit for ever on the earth
wall alongside his hut absolutely idle, with his frowsy head bent and
exposed to the sun, doing nothing but spit in the dust between his bare
feet.
In Matorin’s shop the brothers had speedily attained to writing and
reading, and Kuzma had begun to be attracted by the little books which
the accordeon-player, old Balashkin, the eccentric free-thinker of the
bazaar, gave him. But what chance for reading was there in the shop?
Matorin very often shouted: “I’ll box your ears for those books of
yours, you abominable little devil!”
That was an old story; but Kuzma wished to recall, also, the morals of
the bazaar. In the bazaar he had picked up much that was opprobrious.
There he and his brother had been taught to sneer at the poverty of
their mother, at her having taken to drink, abandoned as she was by her
adolescent sons. There they once played the following prank: Every day,
on his way from the library, the son of the tailor Vitebsky passed the
door of the shop--a Jew aged sixteen, with a pallid greyish face; a
terribly lean, big-eared fellow who wore spectacles and industriously
read as he walked, his book held close up to his eyes. So they threw
some bricks and rubbish on the sidewalk--and the Jew (“that learned
man!”) stumbled so successfully that he bruised his knees, elbows, and
teeth to the point of bleeding. Then Kuzma started to write. He began a
story about a merchant who, driving by night in a fearful thunderstorm
through the Murom forests, came upon an encampment of bandits and got
his throat cut. Kuzma fervently set forth his remarks and thoughts on
the brink of death, his grief over his iniquitous life, “so prematurely
cut short.” But the bazaar mercilessly threw cold water on it.
“Well, you are a queer one, Lord forgive us!” it pronounced, merrily
and insolently, through Tikhon’s mouth. “‘Prematurely’! That
pot-bellied devil ought to have been done for long before! Well, and
how did you know what he was thinking about? They cut his throat,
didn’t they?”
Then Kuzma wrote, in the style of Koltzoff, a ballad about an extremely
ancient knight who bequeathed to his son a faithful steed. “He carried
me in my youth!” exclaimed the hero in the ballad. But Tikhon merely
shook his head over that.
“Really!” said he, “how old was that horse? Akh, Kuzma! Kuzma! You’d
better compose something practical--well, about the war, for example.”
And Kuzma, catering to the taste of the market-place, began with great
zeal to write about what the bazaar was discussing at the moment--the
Russo-Turkish war: about how--
“In the year of seventy-seven
The Turk set out to fight;
He advanced with his hordes
And tried to capture Russia”
and how those hordes
In uncouth nightcaps
Crept stealthily to the Tsar-Cannon.[15]
Later on it pained him to realize how much stupidity and ignorance
this doggerel contained, the servile quality of its language, and
its Russian scorn for foreign headgear. With pain he recalled much
else. For example, Zadonsk. One day there he was overcome by a
passionate longing for repentance, a terror lest his mother, who had
died, practically, of starvation, had bitterly reported in heaven
her sorrowful life; and he set forth on foot to the abode of a holy
man. Once there, he did nothing whatever except to read to assembled
admirers, with malicious joy, a “sheet” which had made a special
impression on him: how a certain village scribe had taken it into his
head to reject the authorities and the Church, and God had waxed so
wroth that “this aristocrat was laid low on his bed of death,” his
malady such that “he devoured more than a pig, and shrieked that that
was not enough, and withered away until he was unrecognizable.” And
Kuzma’s entire youth was spent in just such affairs! He thought and
professed one thing--and said and did something entirely different.
Aspiring to write and reckoning up the sum-total of his life, Kuzma
shook his head mournfully: “A genuine Russian trait, sir! The sowing
was half peas, half thistles.”
It seemed as if he had been merry in his youth, kind, tender, quick to
understand, eager to learn. But was it really so? He was not Tikhon, of
course. But why had he, equally with Tikhon, assimilated so promptly
the savagery of those who surrounded him? Why had he, kind and tender
as he was, so mercilessly neglected his mother? Why had the bazaar so
long reigned supreme over his heart, which was toiling so ardently over
books? Why, why was he--a barren fig-tree?
Tikhon had been in the habit of keeping most of his earnings in
one common money-box: they had decided to set up in business for
themselves. Kuzma surrendered his money with a full, hearty confidence
which Tikhon never possessed. But his mother, his mother! He groaned
as he recalled how, poverty-stricken as she was, she had bestowed her
blessing on him, had given him her sole treasure, a relic of her better
days, which had been preserved at the bottom of her chest--a small
silver-mounted holy picture. And the fact that he had groaned was good,
also; but all the same his money had gone to Tikhon.