Who art Thou?
I
ONE year follows after another, the centuries pass away, and still to man is never revealed the mystery of the world and the greater mystery of his own soul.
Man seeks and questions, but does not find an answer. Wise men are as children; they do not know. And there are some people who have not even got so far as to ask the question:
"Who am I?"
It was the end of May and already hot weather in the large town. In the side-street it was hot and stifling, and still worse in the courtyard. The brownish-red iron roofs of the five-storey stone buildings on each of the four sides of the yard were burning hot, as were also the large cobble-stones of its dirty pavement. A new house was being built at the side, just such another ugly heap of pretension, a modern building with an ugly front. From this building came a pungent smell of lime and dry brick-dust.
Several children were running about in the yard, shrieking and quarrelling. They belonged to the door-keeper, the servants, and the humbler inhabitants of the building. Little twelve-year-old Grishka, the son of Anushka, the cook at No. 17, looked out on them all from the fourth-floor kitchen window. He lay on his stomach in the window-seat, his thin little legs in their short dark-blue knickers, and his bare feet stretched out behind him.
Grishka's mother wouldn't let him go out into the yard this morning; she was in a bad temper. She remembered that Grishka had broken a cup yesterday; and though he had been beaten then as a punishment, she had reminded him of it again this morning.
"You're just spoilt," said she. "There's no need for you to run about in the yard. You'll stay indoors to-day, and you can learn your lessons."
"I haven't got any examination," Grishka reminded her with some pride. And as usual, when he remembered his school triumphs he laughed joyfully. But his mother looked sternly at him and said:
"Well, all the same, you'll stay indoors unless you want a whipping. What are you grinning at? If I were you I shouldn't find anything to laugh about."
Anushka was fond of repeating this phrase—quite enigmatical to Grishka. Ever since her husband's death, which obliged her to go out as a servant, she had looked upon Grishka and herself as unhappy creatures, and when she thought about the child's future she always painted it in dark colours. Grishka ceased to smile and began to feel uncomfortable.
However, he didn't much want to go into the yard. He wasn't dull indoors. He had a picture-book which he hadn't yet read, and he betook himself to that enjoyment. But he didn't read for very long. He climbed up on the window-seat and looked out upon the children in the yard. Presently, trying to forget a slight headache, he let himself dream a little.
To dream—that was Grishka's favourite occupation. He imagined all sorts of things in all sorts of ways, but he himself was always in the centre—he dreamed about himself and the world. When he went to bed Grishka always tried to think of something tender, joyful, a little painful and shameful perhaps, and sometimes dreadful. Then a pleasant feeling stole over him, though the day might have been an unpleasant one. Many unpleasant things often fell to his lot in the day-time, this poor little boy, brought up in the kitchen with his poor, irritable, capricious, discontented mother. But the more unpleasantnesses there were, the pleasanter it was to console himself by his fancies. It was with a mixture of feelings that he snuggled his head into the pillow and imagined terrible things.
When he woke in the morning Grishka never hurried to get up. It was dark and stuffy in the corridor where he slept; the box on which his bed was made up was not so soft as the spring mattress on the mistress's bed where he had sometimes thrown himself when his mother wasn't looking and the people of the house were away. But all the same it was comfortable and quiet there as long as he didn't remember that it was time to go to school, or on a holiday, until his mother called to him to get up. And this only happened when it was necessary to send him to a shop to buy something, or for him to help in some way. At other times his mother didn't trouble about him, and she was even glad to think he was asleep and not bothering her, not getting in her way or staring at what she was doing.
"It's tiring enough without you," she often said to him.
And so Grishka often lay in bed quite a long time, nestling under the torn wadded quilt covering him both winter and summer, though in summer, and when there was a big fire in the kitchen, it was very hot for him. And again he would dream of something pleasant, joyful, gay, but not at all dreadful.
The most insignificant reasons gave rise to Grishka's varied dreams. Sometimes he had enjoyed reading a story or a fairy tale from some old and torn book, one of those given out by the teacher at school once a week from the school library; sometimes he remembered a curious episode from a book he had been reading aloud to his mother. Everything that happened, everything heard by him from somebody or other that excited his imagination, set him dreaming and imagining in his own way.
He went every day to a school in the town and learnt easily but moderately, only—he had no time. There was so much to dream about. Also, whenever his mother was free to sit down with some sewing or knitting, Grishka had to read aloud to her some novel or other. She was very fond of novels, though she had never learnt to read herself, and she liked to listen to stories of adventure, and was greatly attracted by the adventures of Sherlock Holmes and The Key of Happiness. But she also listened greedily to old novels of Dickens and Thackeray and Eliot. Anushka got some books to read from her mistress, some from the girl student who lived in No. 14.
Anushka had a good memory for the stories she had heard, and she loved to tell them in detail to her friends—to the seamstress Dusha, and to the housemaid of the general's wife at No. 3.
And so very often in the evenings, planting his elbows affectedly on the white wooden kitchen table, pressing his thin little chest in his blue cotton shirt up against it, crossing under the table his spindly legs that were too short to reach the floor, Grishka used to read aloud, quickly and clearly, not understanding all he read, but often very much agitated by the love passages. He was much interested in situations of difficulty and danger, but still more in the scenes of love or jealousy or tenderness, in caressing words, in words expressing the passion, the torture, and the languor of lovers whose happiness was frustrated by the evil of others.
And most of all in his dreams Grishka pictured to himself beautiful ladies who smiled and were tender and gentle, though occasionally cruel, and graceful, fair-haired, blue-eyed pages. The beautiful ladies had ruby lips, and they kissed so sweetly and smiled so tenderly and spoke so gently, and yet their words were sometimes without mercy; they had soft white hands with long thin fingers—soft hands, though they were sometimes strong and cruel, and they could promise all the joy and pain that one human being can give to another. The sweet young pages all had long golden curls reaching to their shoulders; their blue eyes sparkled; they wore pointed slippers and white silk stockings on their shapely legs. Grishka heard their careless laughter, their rosy lips bloomed tranquilly, the crimson of their cheeks glowed brightly; if there were any tears shed sometimes, they came only from the eyes of the sweet little pages. The ladies themselves, beautiful and merciless as they were, never wept, they could only laugh and caress and torture.
For some days past Grishka had been occupied in dreaming about some far-off beautiful and happy land in which wise people dwelt—people, of course, quite unlike all those he saw about him in this dull house that seemed to him like a prison, in these stifling roads and side-streets, everywhere in this dull northern metropolis. What sort of people lived in it? Here were no beautiful and affectionate ladies like those of his dreams, but self-important and rude mistresses and peasant servants, women and girls, noisy, quarrelsome, bad. There were no knights or pages either. No one wore his lady's scarf, and he had never heard of any one fighting giants in order to protect the weak. The gentlemen here were unpleasant and remote, and either rude or contemptuously familiar; the peasants were also rude, and they were also remote from Grishka, and their simplicity was as dreadful to him and as artful as the incomprehensible complexity of the gentlefolk.
Nothing that Grishka saw in real life pleased him; it all afflicted his tender soul. He even hated his own name. Even when his mother in a rare interval of unexpected tenderness would suddenly begin to call him Grishenka, even this pet name did not please him. But this stupid diminutive Grishka, the name everybody called him by—his mother, her mistress, the young ladies, and every one in the yard,—seemed altogether foreign, altogether unsuitable to what he thought himself. It seemed to him sometimes that it would drop from him, as a badly stuck-on label comes off a wine-bottle.
II
Anushka wanted to put a dish on the window-seat. She seized Grishka's thin ankles in her large rough hand and dragged him down, saying in a needlessly rough way:
"You sprawl about everywhere. And even without you there's not enough room, no place to stand anything."
Grishka sprang away. He looked with frightened eyes at the stern, lean face of his mother, red from the heat of the kitchen stove, and at her red arms, bare to the elbow. It was stifling in the kitchen; something was smoking and spluttering on the stove; there was a bitter smell and a smell of burning. The door on to the outer stairway was open. Grishka stood at the door, then, seeing his mother busy at the stove and taking no notice of him, he went out on to the staircase. It was only then, when he felt the hard dirty pavement of the landing under his feet, that he noticed that his head was aching and giddy; he felt faint, his body was overcome by a feverish lassitude.
"How stuffy it was in the kitchen," he thought.
He looked about him in a kind of perplexity, at the grey stone steps of the staircase, worn and dirty, running upwards and downwards from the narrow landing on which he stood. Opposite their door on the other side of the landing was another door, and from behind it came the sounds of two women's shrill voices; some one was scolding another. The words rained out like drops of lead from a carelessly unscrewn hanging lamp, and it seemed to Grishka that they must be running about on the dry kitchen floor and making a noise, knocking themselves against the iron and the stove. There were many words, but they all ran into one another in a shrieking hubbub of scolding words. Grishka laughed mirthlessly. He knew the people in that flat were always quarrelling, and that they often beat their naughty, dirty little children.
There was a window on the landing like the one in the kitchen, and from it one could look out on to the same crowded, uninteresting world—the red roofs, the yellow walls, the dusty yard. Everything was strange, foreign, unnecessary—quite unlike the sweet intimate figures of his dreams.
Grishka climbed up on to the worn slab of the window-seat, and leaned his back up against one of the wide-open frames, but he did not look out into the yard. A brightly decorated palace showed itself to his gaze; he saw in front of him a door leading to the apartment of the auburn-haired Princess Turandina. The door was opened wide, and the princess herself, seated before a high narrow window, weaving fine linen, looked round at the sound of the opening door, and stopping with her shapely white hand the noisily humming spinning-wheel, looked at him with a tender smile, saying:
"Come nearer to me, dear boy. I have waited a long time for you. Don't be afraid, come along."
Grishka went up to her and knelt at her feet, and she asked him:
"Do you know who I am?"
Grishka was charmed by the golden tones of her voice, and he answered:
"Yes, I know who you are. You are the most beautiful Princess Turandina, daughter of the mighty king of this land, Turandon."
The princess smiled gaily and said to him:
"Yes, you know that, but you don't know all. I learnt from my father, the wise King Turandon, how to weave spells and enchantments, and I am able to do with you as I will. I wanted to have a little game with you, and so I cast a spell over you and you went away from your princely home and from your father, and now, you see, you have forgotten your real name, and you have become the child of a cook, and you are called by the name of Grishka. You have forgotten who you are, and you can't remember until I choose that you should."
"Who am I?" asked Grishka.
Turandina laughed. An evil light gleamed in her cornflower-blue eyes like the light in the eyes of a young witch not yet accustomed to the art of sorcery. Her long fingers pressed hard against the boy's thin shoulder. She teased him, speaking like a little street-girl:
"Shan't tell you. Shan't tell you for anything. Guess yourself. Shan't tell you, shan't. If you don't guess yourself you'll always be called Grishka. Listen, there's your mother the cook calling you. Go along and be obedient to her. Go quickly or she'll beat you."
III
Grishka listened; he heard his mother's harsh voice calling from the kitchen:
"Grishka, Grishka, where are you? you bad boy, where have you hidden yourself?"
Grishka jumped quickly down from the window-seat and ran into the kitchen. He knew when his mother called like that he mustn't dawdle, he must go at once. And all the more just now when his mother was busy preparing dinner. She was always angry then, and especially when the kitchen was hot and stuffy. The bright apartment of the Princess Turandina faded from his sight. The blue smoke of something burning on the kitchen stove floated out to him. He was again conscious that his head ached and swam; he at once felt tired and languid.
His mother called out to him:
"Now look lively; run along quickly to Milligan's and buy half a pound of lemon biscuits and a shillingsworth of cakes. Hurry up, I've just got to take in tea; the mistress has some visitors—some devil has brought them here at this outlandish hour."
Grishka ran off into the corridor to find his shoes and stockings, but Anushka cried after him angrily:
"What are you doing there? There's no time to get your shoes—go as you are. You must run there and back in no time."
Grishka took the money, a silver rouble, and held it tight in his burning palm. Then he put on his hat and ran off down the staircase. And as he ran he thought:
"Who am I? How can I have forgotten my real name?"
He had a long way to go, several streets away, because the cakes his mother wanted couldn't be got in the shop opposite but only in this distant one. The mistress thought that the cakes in the shop near by were always fly-blown and not well made, but those in the other shop, where she herself made purchases, were good and clean and specially nice.
"Who am I?" thought Grishka persistently.
All his dreams about the beautiful Princess Turandina were interrupted by this tiresome question. He ran along quickly in his bare feet on the hard pavements of the noisy streets, meeting many strangers, getting in front of strangers, among this multitude of rough, unpleasant people, all hurrying somewhere, pushing their way along and looking contemptuously at little Grishka in his blue print shirt and short little dark-blue knickers. Grishka was again conscious of the strangeness and incongruity of the fact that he, who knew so many delightful stories, and who loved to dream about fair ladies, should be living in this dull and cruel town, should have grown up in just this place, in a wretched stuffy kitchen, where everything was so strange and foreign to him.
He remembered how, a few days ago, the captain's son, Volodya, who lived in No. 24 flat, had called across from the second-floor window of the opposite block and asked him to come and have a talk. Volodya was the same age as Grishka, a lively, affectionate boy, and the two children sat down on the window-seat and chatted gaily together. Suddenly the door opened, and Volodya's mother, a sour-faced woman, appeared on the threshold. Screwing up her eyes, she scrutinised Grishka from head to foot, making him feel suddenly frightened, and then she drawled, in a contemptuous tone of voice:
"What's this, Volodya? Why have you got this wretched little barefooted boy here? Go off indoors, and in future don't dare to try and make his acquaintance."
Volodya got red and muttered something or other, but Grishka had already run off home to the kitchen.
Now, in the street, he thought to himself:
"It's impossible that it's all like that. I can't be really only Grishka, the cook's little boy, whom nice children like Volodya and the general's son aren't allowed to know."
And in the baker's shop, when he was buying the cakes he had been sent for—none of which would fall to his own share,—and all along his homeward way, Grishka was thinking sometimes about the beautiful Turandina, the proud and wise princess, sometimes of the strange actuality of the life around him, and he thought again:
"Who am I? And what is my own real name?"
He imagined that he was the son of an emperor, and that the proud palace of his forefathers stood in a beautiful far-off land. He had long been suffering from a grievous complaint, and lay in his quiet sleeping-chamber. He was lying on a soft down bed under a golden canopy, covered by a light satin counterpane, and in his delirium he imagined himself to be Grishka, the cook's little son. Through the wide open window was wafted in to the sick child the sweet scent of flowering roses, the voices of his beloved nightingales, and the splash of a pearly fountain. His mother, the Empress, sat at the head of his bed, and wept as she caressed her child. Her eyes were gentle and full of sorrow, her hands were soft, for she never washed the clothes or prepared the dinner or did sewing. When this dear mother of his worked with her fingers she only embroidered in coloured silks on golden canvas for satin cushions, and from under her delicate fingers there grew crimson roses, white lilies, and peacocks with long eye-laden tails. She was weeping now because her son lay ill, and because when at times he opened his fever-dimmed eyes he spoke strange words in an unintelligible language.
But the day would come when the little prince would recover his health and would rise from his royal bed and would remember who he was and what was his real name, and then he would laugh at his delirious fancies.
IV
Grishka felt more joyful when this thought came into his mind. He ran along more quickly, noticing nothing around him. But suddenly an unexpected shock brought him to his senses. He felt frightened, even before he understood what had taken place.
The bag containing the cakes and biscuits fell from his hand, the thin paper burst, and the yellow lemon biscuits were scattered over the worn and dirty grey pavement.
"You horrid little boy, how dare you knock into me!" cried the shrill voice of a tall stout lady against whom Grishka had run.
She smelt unpleasantly of scent, and she held up to her small angry eyes a horrible tortoiseshell lorgnette. Her whole face looked rude and angry and repulsive, and Grishka was filled with terror and distress. He looked up at her in fright, and did not know what to do. He thought that perhaps dvorniks and policemen, dreadful fantastic beings, would come from all directions and seize him and drag him away somewhere.
By the side of the lady stood a young man, very much overdressed, wearing a top hat and horrible yellow gloves. He looked down upon Grishka with his fierce protrud- ing reddish eyes, and everything about him looked red and angry.
"Good-for-nothing little hooligan," he hissed through his teeth.
With a careless movement he knocked off the child's cap from his head, gave him a box on the ear, and turning again to the lady, said:
"Come along, mamma. It's not worth having anything more to do with such a creature."
"But what a rude and daring boy he is," said the lady, turning away. "Dirty little ragamuffin, where were you pushing yourself? You've quite upset me. Fancy not being able to walk quietly along the streets. What can the policemen be doing?"
The lady and her companion, talking angrily to one another, walked away. Grishka picked up his cap and collected as many as he could of the scattered cakes and biscuits, putting them into the torn paper bag, and ran off home. He felt ashamed and he wanted to weep, but no tears came. He could no longer dream about Turandina, and he thought:
"She's just as bad as everybody here. She cast me into a terrible dream, and I shall never wake out of that dream, and for ever I shall be unable to remember my real name. And I shall never be able to answer truly the question, 'Who am I?'"
Who am I, sent into this world by an unknown will for an unknown end? If I am a slave, then whence have I the power to judge and to condemn, and whence come my lofty desires? If I am more than a slave, then why does all the world around me lie in wickedness, ugliness, and falsehood?
Who am I?
The cruel but still beautiful Turandina laughs at poor Grishka, at his dreams and his vain questionings.