Short Fiction by Leonid Andreyev (fastest ebook reader TXT) 📕

Petka’s days dragged on wonderfully monotonously, as like to one another as two brothers. Summer and winter alike he saw the same mirrors, one of which was cracked, and another was contorted and amusing. On the stained wall hung one and the same picture, representing two half-dressed women on the seashore, the only difference being that their pink bodies became more spotted with fly dirt, and that the black patch of soot became larger above the place where the common kerosene lamp gleamed all the whole winter’s day. And morning, evening, and the whole livelong day, there hung over Petka the one and the same abrupt cry, “Boy, water!” and he was always bringing it⁠—always. There were no holidays. On Sundays, when the windows of the stores and shops ceased to illuminate the street, those of the hairdresser’s till late at night cast a bright sheaf of light upon the pavement, and the passerby might observe a little thin figure huddled upon his seat in the corner, and immersed in something between thought and a heavy slumber. Petka slept a great deal, but still for some reason or other he was always wanting to sleep, and it often seemed to him that all around him was not real, but a very unpleasant dream. Ofttimes he would spill the water, or fail to hear the sharp call, “Boy, water!” He grew thinner and thinner, and unsightly scabs came out on his closely-cropped head. Even the not too fastidious customers looked with aversion on this thin, freckled boy, whose eyes were always sleepy, his mouth half-open, and his hands and neck ingrained with dirt. Round his eyes and under his nose faint lines were forming as though traced by a sharp needle, and they made him look like an aged dwarf.

Petka did not know whether he was happy or unhappy, but he did want to go to some other place; but where, or what, that place was he could not have told you. When his mother, the cook, Nadejda, paid him a visit, he would eat listlessly the sweets she brought him. He never, never complained, but only asked to be taken away from the place. But he soon forgot his request, and would coolly take leave of his mother, without asking when she was coming again. And Nadejda thought with sorrow that she had only one son⁠—and that one an imbecile.

How long he had lived in this fashion, Petka did not know, when suddenly one day his mother came to dinner, had a talk with Osip Abramovich, and told Petka that he was to be allowed to go to the bungalow at Tzaritzyno, where her master and mistress were living. At first, Petka could not realize the good news, but after a time his face broke out into faint wrinkles of soft laughter, and he began to hasten his mother’s departure. But for decency’s sake she had to talk to Osip Abramovich about his wife’s health, while Petka was gently dragging her by the hand and shoving her towards the door. He had no idea what a bungalow was like, but he supposed that it must be the very place which he had so longed to go to. With simple egotism he quite forgot Nikolka, who was standing there with his hands in his pockets endeavouring to regard Nadejda with his usual insolence. But instead of insolence there shone in his eyes a profound grief. He had no mother, and at that moment he would not have objected to having just such a stout one as Nadejda. The fact was that he too had never been at a bungalow.

The railway station with its many voices, with its bustle and the rumble of incoming trains, and the whistles of the engines, some thick and irate like the voice of Osip Abramovich, others thin and shrill like the voice of his sickly wife, with its hurrying passengers who kept coming and going in a continuous stream, as if there were no end to them⁠—all this presented itself for the first time to the puzzled gaze of Petka, and filled him with a feeling of excitement and impatience. Like his mother, he was afraid of being late, though it wanted a good half-hour to the time of the departure of the suburban train. But when they were once seated in the carriage, and the train had started, he stuck to the window, and only his cropped head kept turning about on his thin neck, as though on a metal spindle.

Petka had been born and bred in the city, and was now in the country for the first time in his life, and everything there was to him strikingly new and strange; that you could see so far; that the world looked like a lawn; and that the sky of this new world was so wonderfully bright and far-stretching⁠—just as if you were looking at it from the roof of a house! Petka looked at it from his own side, and when he turned to his mother, there was the same sky shining blue through the opposite window, and on its surface were flocking⁠—like little angels⁠—small, merry white flecks of clouds. Now Petka would turn back to his own window, now run over to the other side of the carriage, with confidence laying his ill-washed little hands on the shoulders and knees of strangers, who answered him back with a smile. But one gentleman who was reading a newspaper, and yawning all the time, either from excessive fatigue or from ennui, looked askance at the boy once or twice in not too friendly a manner, and Nadejda hastened to apologise:

“It is his first journey by rail⁠—and he is interested.”

“Humph,” growled the gentleman, and buried himself in his newspaper.

Nadejda would very much have liked to tell him, how that Petka had lived three years with a barber, who had promised to set him upon his feet; and that this would be a