Old Izergil and other stories / Старуха Изергиль и другие рассказы. Книга для чтения на английском языке

The door was opened for us by a big woman, about forty years of age, with a large pock-marked face, merry eyes and thick red lips, which were stretched in a pleasant smile.

“What welcome guests!” she cried in a singsong voice. And Sasha, placing his hands on her ample shoulders and bringing his face close to hers, said:

“Many happy returns of the day, Stepanida Yakimovna, and congratulations on receiving the holy mysteries!”

“But I didn’t go to communion!” protested Stepakha.

“It’s all the same!” answered Sashka, kissing her three times on the lips, after which both wiped away the traces of the kisses, Stepakha with the palm of her hand and Sashka with his cap.

In the dark anteroom, encumbered with pokers, baskets and wash tubs, they found Stepakha’s daughter, Pasha, busy with the samovar. Pasha was a young girl with large, bulging eyes that stared with stupid astonishment, typical of children who suffered from rickets. She had a wonderfully thick plait of hair of a soft golden colour.

“Many happy returns, Panya!”

“All right,” answered the girl.

“You dummy!” exclaimed Stepakha. “You should say Thank you.’“

“Oh, all right!” retorted the girl angrily.

A third of the laundress’ habitation was taken up by a large oven, and where the shelves for the bathers used to be there was; now a wide bed. In the corner, under the icons, stood a table, laid out for tea, and at the wall stood a wide bench, on which it was convenient to place the wash tub. A shaggy dog looked through the open window like a beggar, resting his heavy paws with their broken claws upon the window sill. On the window sills there were flower pots with geraniums and fuchsias.

“She knows how to live,” said Sashka, looking round the squalid room and winking to me, as much as to say: “I’m joking!”

The hostess carefully drew a pie from the oven and flipped its rosy crust with her fingernail. Pasha brought in the samovar, glistening like the sun, and cast an angry glance at Sashka. But he said, licking his lips:

“Hell! I must get married! I do love pie!”

“One doesn’t marry for the sake of pie,” observed Stepakha, gravely.

“Oh. I understand that!”

The buxom laundress laughed merrily at this, but her eyes were grave when she said:

“You’ll marry one day and forget me.”

“But how many have you forgotten?” retorted Sashka with a grin.

Stepakha also smiled. Dressed as she was, too gaudily for her age, she resembled not a laundress, but a matchmaker, or a fortune teller.

Her daughter, looking like a silent gnome out of a sad fairy tale, was unwanted here, and indeed seemed to be totally unwanted on earth. She ate very carefully, as if she were rating not pie, but fish that was full of bones. And every now and again she slowly turned her large eyes towards Sashka and gazed into his thin mobile face in a queer way, as if she were blind.

The dog whined pitifully at the window. The brassy strains of martial music, the steady tramp of hundreds of heavy marching feel, and the beat of a base drum keeping them in step, came floating in from the street.

Stepakha said to her daughter:

“Why don’t you run out and look at the soldiers?” don’t want to.”

“This is fine!” exclaimed Sashka, throwing the dog a piece of pie crust. “I don’t think I need anything more!”

Stepakha looked at him with motherly eyes, and straightening her blouse over her high breast she said with a sigh:

“No, that’s not true. There’s a lot more things you need.”

“What I just said was quite true.” answered Sash-ka. “I don’t need anything more now, if only Pashka would stop boring through me with her eyes.”

“A fat lot I care about you,” the girl retorted softly and contemptuously. Her mother angrily raised her eyebrows, but pursed her lips and said nothing.

Sashka moved in his scat uneasily and looking sideways at the girl said ardently:

“I feel as though I have a hole in my soul. So help me God! I would like my soul to be full, and calm, but I cannot fill it! Do you understand me, Maximich? When I feel bad I want to feel good. And when I get a happy hour I begin to feel bored! Why is that?”

He was already “feeling bored.” I could see that. His eyes were roaming restlessly round the room as if taking in its squalor; a critical and ironical spark flashed in them. Obviously, he felt out of place here, and had only just realized it.

He talked warmly about the wrongs that were done in the world, and about the blindness of men who had grown accustomed to these wrongs and failed to see them. His thoughts flitted about like frightened mice, and it was difficult to keep pace with their rapid changes.

“Everything is all wrong – that’s what I see! You have a church in one place and next to it you have the devil knows what! Innokenti Vassilievich Zemskov writes poetry like this:

Thanks for those few flashes
Which lit up the gloom of my heart, For those sweet moments of contact
With your body divine.

But it did not prevent him from cheating his sister out of her house by a lawsuit; and the other day he pulled his parlour maid Nastya by the hair.”

“What did he do that for?” asked Stepakha, glancing at her rough hands, which were as red as the feet of a goose. Her face had suddenly become hard and she lowered her eyes.

“I don’t know… Nastya wanted to take him to court for it, but he gave her three roubles and she let it drop, the fool!”

Suddenly Sashka jumped up and said:

“It’s time for us to go!”

“Where to?” the hostess asked.

“We have some business to do,” said Sashka untruthfully. “I’ll look in in the evening.”

He offered Pasha his hand, but the girl looked at his fingers for a moment or so, not daring to touch them, and then she took Sashka’s hand and shook it in a way that seemed as if she were pushing it away.

We went out. In the yard Sashka mumbled as he pulled his cap tightly over his head:

“The devil! That girl doesn’t like me… and I feel ashamed in her presence. I won’t go there tonight.”

Unpleasant thoughts appeared on his face, like a rash. He blushed.

“I must give Stepakha up,” he said. “It’s not a nice business! She’s twice my age, and…”

But by the time we turned the corner he was already laughing and saying to himself cheerfully, without a trace of boastfulness:

“She loves me. She tends me like a flower. So help me God! It makes me feel ashamed. Sometimes I feel so good being with her… better than with my own mother! It’s simply wonderful. I tell you, brother, they are troublesome things, are women. But they’re a good lot for all that. They deserve all our love… But is it possible to love them all?”