Two big cats with long muzzles, tongues hanging out and tails sticking up, run across the boulevard. Grisha thinks that he, too, has to run, and he runs after the cats.
“Stop!” cries the nanny, seizing him roughly by the shoulders. “Where are you going? Who told you to get up to mischief?”
Here some other nanny sits and holds a little basin of oranges. Grisha passes by her and silently takes an orange.
“What’d you do that for?” cries his companion, slapping him on the hand and snatching the orange from him. “Fool!”
Now Grisha would very happily pick up a little piece of glass that is lying at his feet and shining like an icon lamp, but he is afraid his hand will be slapped again.
“My greetings to you!” Grisha suddenly hears someone’s loud, deep voice just by his ear, and he sees a tall man with shiny buttons.
To his great pleasure, this man gives the nanny his hand, stops beside her, and starts to talk. The brightness of the sun, the noise of the carriages, the horses, the shiny buttons—it is all so strikingly new and not frightening that Grisha’s soul is filled with a feeling of delight, and he bursts out laughing.
“Let’s go, let’s go,” he cries to the man with the shiny buttons, pulling at the skirt of his coat.
“Go where?” the man asks.
“Let’s go!” Grisha insists.
He would like to say that it would be nice to take Papa, Mama, and the cat along, but his tongue simply does not say what it should.
A little later the nanny turns off the boulevard and leads Grisha into a big courtyard, where there is still snow. And the man with the shiny buttons also goes with them. They carefully avoid the piles of snow and the puddles, then go up a dirty, dark stairway to a room. Here there is a lot of smoke, the smell of a roast, and some woman is standing by a stove and frying beef patties. The cook and the nanny exchange kisses and, along with the man, sit down on a bench and begin to talk softly. Grisha, all bundled up, feels unbearably hot and stifled.
“Why all this?” he thinks, looking around.
He sees a dark ceiling, an oven fork with two prongs, the stove which looks like a big, black hole…
“Ma-a-ma!” he drawls.
“Now, now, now!” shouts the nanny. “You can wait!”
The cook puts a bottle, two glasses, and a pie on the table. The two women and the man with the shiny buttons clink and drink several times, and the man embraces now the nanny, now the cook. And then all three begin to sing softly.
Grisha reaches out for the pie, and they give him a piece. He eats and watches the nanny drink…He, too, wants to drink.
“Give! Give, Nanny!” he asks.
The cook lets him take a sip from her glass. He rolls his eyes, winces, coughs, and waves his hands for a long time afterwards, and the cook looks at him and laughs.
On returning home, Grisha begins to tell Mama, the walls, and the bed where he was and what he saw. He speaks not so much with his tongue as with his face and hands. He shows how the sun shines, how the horses run, how the frightening stove stares, and how the cook drinks…
In the evening he simply cannot fall asleep. Soldiers with besoms, big cats, horses, a piece of glass, a basin of oranges, the shiny buttons—it all gathers in a heap and presses down on his brain. He tosses from side to side, babbles, and finally, unable to bear his agitation, he starts to cry.
“You have a fever!” says his mama, putting her palm to his forehead. “What could have caused it?”
“Stove!” weeps Grisha. “Go away, stove!”
“He must have eaten something…,” his mama decides.
And Grisha, bursting with the impressions of the new life he has just experienced, receives from his mama a spoonful of castor oil.
1886
LADIES
FYODOR PETROVICH, DIRECTOR OF PUBLIC EDUCATION of N——sky Province, who considered himself a fair and magnanimous man, was once meeting with the teacher Vremensky in his chancellery.
“No, Mr. Vremensky,” he was saying, “your dismissal is unavoidable. With such a voice you cannot go on working as a teacher. How did you lose it?”
“I was sweaty and drank cold beer…,” the teacher wheezed.
“What a pity! A man works for fourteen years, and suddenly such a calamity! Devil knows, to go and ruin your career for such a trifling thing. What do you intend to do now?”
The teacher did not reply.
“Do you have a family?” asked the director.
“A wife and two children, Your Excellency…,” the teacher wheezed.
Silence ensued. The director got up from the desk and paced from corner to corner in agitation.
“I have no idea what to do with you!” he said. “You cannot be a teacher, you haven’t reached pension age…to abandon you to the mercy of fate, to the four winds, is somehow awkward. You’re one of our people, you’ve worked for fourteen years, which means it’s our duty to help you…But how? What can I do for you? Put yourself in my place: what can I do for you?”
Silence ensued. The director paced and kept thinking, and Vremensky, crushed by his grief, sat on the edge of the chair and also thought. Suddenly the director brightened up and even snapped his fingers.
“I’m surprised I didn’t think of it sooner!” he began speaking quickly. “Listen, here’s what I can offer you…Next week the clerk at our orphanage is going to retire. If you like, you can take his post! There you are!”
Vremensky, who had not expected such a favor, also brightened up.
“Excellent!” said the director. “Write an application today…”
Having dismissed Vremensky, Fyodor Petrovich felt relieved and even pleased: the stooping figure of the wheezing pedagogue was no longer sticking up in front of him, and it was pleasant to realize that in offering Vremensky the vacant post he had acted fairly and conscientiously, as a kind, perfectly decent man. But this good mood did not last long. When he came home and sat down to dinner, his wife, Nastasya Ivanovna, suddenly remembered:
“Ah, yes, I almost forgot! Yesterday Nina Sergeevna came to see me and solicited for a young man. They say there’s a vacancy opening up in the orphanage…”
“Yes, but that post has already been promised to someone else,” the director said and frowned. “And you know my rule: I never make appointments through connections.”
“I know, but for Nina Sergeevna I suppose you could make an exception. She loves us like her own, and we have yet to do anything good for her. So don’t even think of refusing her, Fedya. With your caprices you’ll offend both her and me.”
“Who is she recommending?”
“Polzukhin.”
“What Polzukhin? The one who played Chatsky at the New Year assembly?1 That fop? Not for anything!”
The director stopped eating.
“Not for anything!” he repeated. “God forbid!”
“Why not?”
“You see, my dear, if a young man doesn’t act directly, but through women, it means he’s trash! Why doesn’t he come to me himself?”
After dinner the director lay down on the sofa in his study and began to read the newspapers and letters he had received.
“Dear Fyodor Petrovich,” wrote the mayor’s wife, “you once said I was a reader of hearts and a knower of human nature. Now you can test that in practice. One of these days a young man will come to you to solicit the post of a clerk in our orphanage, a certain K. N. Polzukhin, whom I know to be an excellent young man. He is very likeable. Once you concern yourself with him, you will discover…,” etc.
“Not for anything!” the director said. “God forbid!”
After that not a day went by without the director receiving letters recommending Polzukhin. One fine morning Polzukhin himself appeared, a young man, portly, with a clean-shaven jockey’s face, in a new two-piece black suit…
“For matters of business I receive in the office, not here,” the director said drily, having heard out his request.