Now Petrushka and Nastya were running far behind the train along the sandy path beside the rails. Petrushka was holding on to Nastya’s hand as he had before, and dragging her behind him when her running couldn’t keep up with his.
Ivanov dropped his bag from the car onto the ground, and then lowered himself to the bottom step and dropped off on to the sandy little road along which his children were running toward him.
THE THIRD SON
AN OLD WOMAN DIED in a provincial town. Her husband, a seventy-year-old worker living on a pension, went to the telegraph office and sent off six telegrams to various districts of the country, all with the same wording: “Your mother has died come Father.”
The elderly clerk in the telegraph office counted the money for a long time, figured it wrong, and wrote out the receipts and stamped them with shaking hands. The old man looked gently at her through the wooden window out of his reddened eyes, and thought absentmindedly about something, trying to distract his heart from its grief. It seemed to him the elderly clerk had a broken heart, too, and a soul that was permanently confused—maybe she was a widow, or a wife abandoned in ill will.
So here she was, working slowly, getting the change mixed up, her memory and her attention wandering; even for ordinary, uncomplicated work a person needs to have happiness inside him.
The old father went back home after the telegrams had been sent; he sat down on the bench next to the long table, at the cold feet of his dead wife, and he smoked, and whispered to himself a few melancholy words, looked after the lonely gray bird hopping on the little perch in its cage, sometimes quietly cried a little, and then calmed down, wound up his pocket watch, looked at the window beyond which the weather was changing back and forth— first leaves would fall with flakes of wet, tired snow, then it would rain, then the late sun would shine, as cold as a star—and the old man was waiting for his sons.
The oldest son arrived by airplaine the next day. The other five sons had arrived by the end of two more days.
One of them, the third in age, came with his daughter, a little girl of six who had never before seen her grandfather.
On the fourth day their mother was still lying on the table, but her body did not smell of death, so neat and tidy was it from her illness and from her dry exhaustion; having given abundant, healthy life to her sons, the old woman had kept for herself only her small, spare body, and she had tried to save it for a long time, no matter how wretched it was, so she could love her children and be proud of them until she died.
The big men—ranging in age from twenty to forty—stood around the coffin on the table without talking. There were six of them, and the seventh was the father, smaller than the youngest of his sons and weaker, too. He held his granddaughter in his arms, her eyes blinking in terror at the sight of this strange, dead old woman, who barely looked at her out of unblinking white eyes all but closed under their eyelids.
The sons silently wept their occasional, controlled tears, twisting their faces to endure their grief in silence. The father was no longer crying, he had cried himself out before the others, and now he was looking at his half-dozen powerful sons with concealed emotion, and with inappropriate joy. Two of them were sailors—ship captains—one was a Moscow actor, another—the one with the daughter—was a physicist, and a Communist, while the youngest son was studying to be an agronomist, and the oldest was working as foreman of a department in an airplane factory and wore a ribbon on his chest awarded him for his achievement as a worker. All six of them and their father stood quietly around their dead mother and mourned her wordlessly, hiding from each other their despair, their memories of their childhood, of the vanished happiness of that love which had welled up without interruption and freely in their mother’s heart and which had always found them— across thousands of miles. They had felt this constantly and instinctively, and been made stronger for feeling it and bolder in achieving success in their lives. Now their mother had been transformed into a corpse, she could no longer love anyone, and she lay there like any indifferent, strange, old woman.
Each of her sons felt lonely now, and frightened, as if a lamp had been burning somewhere on the windowsill of an old house in a dark field, and it had lit up the night and the flying beetles and the blue grass, the swarms of midges in the air—the whole world of childhood around that old house abandoned by those who had been born in it; the doors had never been locked in that house, so that anyone who left it could come back, but no one had returned. And now it was as if the light had suddenly gone out in that window in the night, and reality had been transformed into remembrance.
When she was dying, the old woman had instructed her husband to have a priest celebrate a requiem for the dead over her while her body was still lying in the house, but then to take her out and bury her in her grave without a priest, so as not to offend her sons and so that they could walk behind her coffin. The old woman did not believe in God as much as she wanted her husband, whom she had loved all her life, to mourn her more deeply and to grieve for her to the sound of prayer-singing and in the light of the wax candles above her lifeless face; she didn’t want to part from life without a celebration and without leaving some memory of herself behind. After their children’s arrival, the old man looked for a long time for some kind of priest and finally in the evening brought back with him a man, also elderly, dressed in ordinary, nonclerical clothes, pink-faced with the flush of vegetarian, Lenten eating, and with lively eyes in which some sort of small thoughts, for some special purpose, were glistening. The priest arrived holding an army officer’s map case against his thigh; he carried his spiritual requirements in it: incense, thin candles, a book, the vestment to hang around his neck, and a small censer hanging on a chain. He set up the candles quickly around the coffin and lit them, blew on the incense burning in the censer, and without any warning started to mutter, as he walked, what he read from the book. The sons who were in the room stood up; they felt uncomfortable and somehow a little ashamed. They stood there in a file in front of the coffin without moving, their eyes cast down. The old priest sang and muttered there in front of them without hurrying, almost ironically, watching these sons of the dead woman out of small, understanding eyes. Partly he was a little afraid of them, partly he respected them, and it was clear that he was not far from starting up a conversation with them, even from expressing his own enthusiasm for the building of socialism. But the sons were silent, no one—not even the old husband—crossed himself; this was an honor guard around a coffin and not participation in any divine service.
When the priest had finished his requiem, he quickly packed up his things, blew out the candles burning around the coffin, and put all his property back in the officer’s map case. The father put some money in his hand, and the priest, without delaying, made his way through the ranks of the six big men without looking at them, and meekly disappeared outside the door. Actually, he would have stayed in this house for the funeral repast with pleasure, he would have talked about the perspectives of war and revolution, and been comforted for a long time by this meeting with representatives of the new world which he secretly admired but which he couldn’t make his way into; when he was alone he used to dream of sometime accomplishing some kind of heroic feat so he could burst into the brilliant future together with this new generation—to this end he had even submitted a petition to the local airfield, asking that he be taken up to a great height and dropped by parachute without an oxygen mask, but they had given him no answer.