Ringing. Sounds familiar from childhood: first the scraping of the wire against the wall, then a short, pathetic ringing in the kitchen. It was my father coming back from the club. I got up and went to the kitchen. The cook Aksinya, seeing me, clasped her hands and for some reason burst into tears.
‘‘My child!’’ she said softly. ‘‘Dear! Oh Lord!’’
And she began crumpling her apron in her hands from agitation. On the windowsill stood quart bottles with berries and vodka. I poured myself a teacupful and greedily drank it off, because I was very thirsty. Aksinya had only recently washed the tables and benches, and there was the smell of a bright, cozy kitchen kept by a neat cook. And once, in our childhood, this smell and the chirping of a cricket used to entice us children here to the kitchen and disposed us to fairy tales, to playing kings...
‘‘And where is Cleopatra?’’ Aksinya asked softly, hurriedly, with bated breath. ‘‘And where’s your hat, dearie? And they say your wife has gone to Petersburg?’’
She had served us back in my mother’s time, and used to bathe me and Cleopatra in a tub, and for her now we were still children who needed admonishing. In a quarter of an hour or so, she laid out for me all her considerations, which she, with the reasonableness of an old servant, had accumulated in the quiet of this kitchen all the while we hadn’t seen each other. She said that the doctor could be made to marry Cleopatra—all we needed was to give him a scare, and if the petition was written properly, the bishop would annul his first marriage; that it would be good to sell Dubechnya in secret from my wife and put the money in the bank under my own name; and if my sister and I bowed down at my father’s feet and begged him properly, he might forgive us; that a prayer service should be offered to the Queen of Heaven...
‘‘Well, go, dearie, talk to him,’’ she said, hearing my father cough. ‘‘Go and talk to him, bow to him, your head won’t fall off.’’
I went. Father was sitting at the table drawing up the plan for a summer house with Gothic windows and a fat turret that resembled a fire tower—something extraordinarily obstinate and giftless. Going into his study, I stopped in such a way that I was able to see this drawing. I didn’t know why I had come to my father, but I remember that, when I saw his fleshless face, his red neck, his shadow on the wall, I wanted to throw myself on his neck and, as Aksinya had instructed me, bow down at his feet; but the sight of the summer house with its Gothic windows and fat turret held me back.
‘‘Good evening,’’ I said.
He glanced at me and at once lowered his eyes to his drawing.
‘‘What do you want?’’ he asked after a pause.
‘‘I’ve come to tell you—my sister is very ill. She will die soon,’’ I added in a muted voice.
‘‘Well, then?’’ my father sighed, taking off his spectacles and putting them on the table. ‘‘As you sow, so shall you reap. As you sow,’’ he repeated, getting up from the table, ‘‘so shall you reap. I ask you to remember how you came to me two years ago, and in this very same place I begged you, I implored you to abandon your errors, reminding you of duty, honor, and your responsibility to your ancestors, whose traditions we should sacredly preserve. Did you obey me? You scorned my advice and stubbornly went on holding to your wrong views; what’s more, you dragged your sister into your errors as well and caused her to lose her morality and shame. Now you’ve both gotten into a bad way. Well, then? As you sow, so shall you reap!’’
He was saying this and pacing the study. He probably thought I had come to him to acknowledge my guilt, and he probably expected me to start interceding for myself and my sister. I was cold, I was trembling as in a fever, and I spoke with difficulty, in a hoarse voice.
‘‘And I, too, ask you to remember,’’ I said, ‘‘how in this same place I implored you to understand me, to think, to decide together how we should live and for what, and in response you began talking about our ancestors, about our grandfather who wrote poetry. You have now been told that your only daughter is hopelessly ill, and again you talk about ancestors, traditions... And such light-mindedness in old age, when death is not far off, when you have some five or ten years left to live!’’
‘‘What have you come here for?’’ my father asked sternly, obviously offended that I had reproached him for light-mindedness.
‘‘I don’t know. I love you, I’m inexpressibly sorry that we are so distant from each other—and so I’ve come. I still love you, but my sister has broken with you definitively. She doesn’t forgive and will never forgive. Your name alone arouses loathing in her for the past, for this life.’’
‘‘And who is to blame?’’ my father cried. ‘‘You yourself are to blame, you scoundrel!’’
‘‘Yes, let me be to blame,’’ I said. ‘‘I confess, I’m to blame in many ways, but why is this life of yours, which you also consider obligatory for us—why is it so dull, so giftless, why is it that there are no people in any one of these houses you’ve been building for thirty years now from whom I could learn how to live so as not to be to blame? Not a single honest man in the whole town! These houses of yours are cursed nests in which mothers and daughters are pushed out of this world, children are tortured... My poor mother!’’ I went on desperately. ‘‘My poor sister! You have to stupefy yourself with vodka, cards, gossip, you have to fawn, play the hypocrite, or spend decade after decade drawing plans, to ignore all the horror hidden in these houses. Our town has existed for hundreds of years, and in all that time it hasn’t given our motherland a single useful man—not one! You’ve stifled in the womb everything that had the least bit of life or brightness! A town of shopkeepers, tavern keepers, clerks, hypocrites, a needless, useless town, for which not a single soul would be sorry if it suddenly sank into the earth.’’
‘‘I do not wish to listen to you, you scoundrel!’’ said my father and picked up the ruler from the table. ‘‘You’re drunk! You dare not appear this way before your father! I tell you for the last time, and you tell it to your immoral sister, that you will get nothing from me. I have torn my disobedient children out of my heart, and if they suffer from their disobedience and stubbornness, I am not sorry for them. You can go back where you came from! God has been pleased to punish me with you, but I endure this test with humility and, like Job, find consolation in suffering and continual toil. You must not cross my threshold until you mend your ways. I am a just man, everything I say is useful, and if you want good for yourself, then you should remember all your life what I have said and am saying to you.’’
I waved my hand and left. After that, I don’t remember what happened during the night and the next day.
They say I walked the streets hatless, staggering, and singing loudly, and that crowds of boys followed me and shouted:
‘‘Small Profit! Small Profit!’’
XX
IF I HAD THE desire to order myself a ring, I would choose this inscription: ‘‘Nothing passes.’’ I believe that nothing passes without a trace and that each of our smallest steps has significance for the present and the future.
What I have lived through has not gone in vain. My great misfortunes, my patience, have touched the hearts of the townspeople, and they no longer call me ‘‘Small Profit,’’ they don’t laugh at me, and when I go through the market, they no longer pour water on me. They’ve grown used to my being a workman, and see nothing odd in the fact that I, a nobleman, carry buckets of paint and put in windowpanes; on the contrary, they willingly give me orders, and I’m now considered a good craftsman and the best contractor after Radish, who, though he has recovered from his illness and, as always, paints the cupolas of bell towers without scaffolding, is no longer able to manage his boys; in place of him, I run around town and look for orders, I hire and pay the boys, I borrow money at high interest. And now, having become a contractor, I understand how it’s possible, for the sake of a pennyworth job, to run around town for three days hunting up roofers. People are polite to me, they address me formally, and I’m treated to tea in the houses I work in, and they send to ask if I’d like to have dinner. Children and young girls often come and look at me with curiosity and sadness.