He spoke about Saxony, about his parents, about his friend the tailor, Schönheit, and so on and so forth.

I sympathized with his distress and it grieved me that my father and Karl Ivanych, whom I loved almost equally, had not seen eye to eye. I betook myself back to my corner, where I squatted on my heels and pondered how understanding might be restored between them.

When Karl Ivanych returned to the schoolroom he told me to get up and prepare my exercise-book for dictation. When everything was ready he lowered himself majestically into his arm-chair and in a voice which seemed to issue from a great depth began to dictate as follows:

‘Von al-len Lei-den-schaf-ten die grau-samste ist… haben Sie geschrieben?’ 1Here he paused, slowly took a pinch of snuff, and continued with renewed energy – ‘die grausamste ist die Un-dank-bar-keit… ein grosses U’2 I looked at him after I had written the last word, expecting the next sentence.

‘Punctum,’3 he said with a scarcely perceptible smile and made a sign for us to hand him our copy-books.

He read this dictum, which gave utterance to his innermost thought, several times over with varying intonations and with an expression of the greatest satisfaction. Then he set us a history lesson and seated himself at the window. His face was not so morose as it had been: it was now eloquent of the gratification a man feels who has worthily avenged an insult.

It was a quarter to one. But Karl Ivanych apparently had no intention of letting us go: he kept setting us new tasks. Lassitude and hunger increased in equal proportion. I noted with great impatience all the signs which betokened the near approach of dinner. There was the woman with her dishcloth to wash the plates; now I could hear the rattling of china in the pantry, and the dining-room table being pulled out and chairs put in place. Then Mimi came in from the garden with Lyuba and Katya (Katya was Mimi’s twelve-year-old daughter); but nothing was to be seen of Foka – Foka was the major-domo who always appeared to announce that dinner was ready. Only then could we throw aside our books and race downstairs, regardless of Karl Ivanych.

Footsteps now on the stairs; but it was not Foka! I knew his step by heart and could always recognize the sound of his boots. The door opened and there stood a figure totally unknown to me.

5 • ‘GOD’S FOOL’

Into the room walked a man of about fifty with a long pale pock-marked face, long grey hair and a scanty reddish beard. He was so tall that to get through the door he was obliged not only to incline his head but to bend his whole body. He wore a tattered garment, something between a peasant tunic and a cassock; in his hand he carried a huge staff. As he entered the room he used the staff to strike the floor with all his might and then, wrinkling his brows and opening his mouth extremely wide, he burst into a terrible and unnatural laugh. He was blind in one eye, and the white iris of that eye darted about incessantly and imparted to his face, already ill-favoured, a still more repellent expression.

‘Aha, caught!’ he shouted, running up to Volodya with short steps, and seizing him by the head he began a careful examination of its crown. Then with a perfectly serious face he left Volodya, came up to the table and started blowing under the oil-cloth and making the sign of the cross over it. ‘O-oh, what a pity!… O-oh, sad!… The dears… will fly away,’ he said in a voice trembling with tears, gazing feelingly at Volodya and wiping away the tears, which were actually falling, with his sleeve.

His voice was rough and hoarse, his movements hasty and jerky, his speech devoid of sense and incoherent (he never used any pronouns), but his intonations were so touching and his grotesque yellow face at times assumed such a frankly sorrowful expression that as one listened to him it was impossible to repress a mingled feeling of compassion, fear and sadness.

He was the saintly fool and pilgrim, Grisha.

Where had he come from? Who were his parents? What had induced him to adopt the wandering life he led? No one knew. All I know is that from the age of fifteen he had been one of ‘God’s fools’, who went barefoot winter and summer, visited monasteries, gave little ikons to those he took a fancy to, and uttered enigmatic sayings which some people accepted as prophecies; that nobody had ever known him otherwise, that occasionally he would visit my grandmother’s house and that some said he was the unfortunate son of wealthy parents, a pure soul, while others held that he was simply a lazy peasant.

At last the long-wished-for and punctual Foka appeared and we went downstairs. Grisha, sobbing and continuing to talk all sorts of nonsense, followed us, thumping every step on the stairs with his staff. Papa and mamma were walking up and down the drawing-room arm in arm, discussing something in low tones. Marya Ivanovna sat stiffly in one of the arm-chairs that were symmetrically arranged at right angles near the sofa, and in a stern but subdued voice exhorted the girls who sat beside her. As soon as Karl Ivanych entered the room she glanced at him and immediately turned away, her face assuming an expression which might have been interpreted to mean: ‘You are beneath my notice, Karl Ivanych.’ It was plain from the girls’ eyes that they had some very important news to communicate to us at the first possible opportunity; but to jump up and come over to us would have been a breach of Mimi’s rules. We had first to approach her and say, ‘Bonjour, Mimi,’ with a bow and a scrape, and only after that were we allowed to speak.

What an intolerable creature that Mimi was! One could hardly talk about anything in her presence: she considered everything unseemly. In addition, she was continually nagging us, ‘Parlez donc franςais!’ 1 and that, of course, just when we wanted to chatter in Russian. Or at dinner just when you were beginning to enjoy something specially nice and wanted to be left in peace she would be sure to come out with her ‘Mangez donc avec du pain’2 or ‘Comment est-ce que vous tenez votre fourchette?’ 3 – ‘What business are we of hers?’ we would think. ‘Let her see to the girls, we have Karl Ivanych to look after us.’ I fully shared his dislike for some people.

‘Ask mamma to make them take us hunting too,’ Katya said to me in a whisper, catching hold of me by the jacket when the grown-ups had preceded us into the dining-room.

‘All right, we’ll try to.’

Grisha ate in the dining-room but at a separate table; he did not lift his eyes from his plate, and every now and then sighed and made terrible faces, and kept saying, as if to himself: ‘A pity! flown away… the dove will fly to heaven… Oh, there is a stone on the grave!…’ and so on.

Mamma had been upset ever since the morning; Grisha’s presence, his words and his behaviour seemed to make her more so.

‘Oh yes, there is something I almost forgot to ask you,’ she said, handing my father a plate of soup.

‘What is it?’

‘Please have your dreadful dogs shut up: they nearly bit poor Grisha as he crossed the courtyard. They might attack the children too.’

Hearing himself mentioned, Grisha turned towards our table and began to exhibit the torn tails of his clothes and, continuing to chew, he muttered:

‘Wanted to bite to death… God would not allow. Sin to set dogs on a person! A great sin! Don’t beat, elder,1 why beat? God will forgive… Times are different now.’

‘What is he saying?’ asked papa, scrutinizing him sharply and severely. ‘I don’t understand a word.’

‘I do,’ answered mamma.