“For us there are no nations, no tribes; there are only comrades, only enemies. All workers are our comrades, all rich people, all governments are our enemies. When you run your kind eyes over the earth, when you see how many of us workers there are, how much strength we bring, such joy embraces your heart, there’s such a great celebration inside your breast! And the Frenchman and the German feel the same, nenko, when they look at life, and the Italian rejoices in just the same way. We’re all children of one mother – the invincible idea of the brotherhood of the working people of all the countries of the earth. It warms us, it’s the sun in the sky of justice, and that sky is in the heart of the worker, and whoever he might be, whatever he might call himself, a socialist is our brother in spirit always, now, in days to come and to the end of time!”

This childlike but strong faith sprang up among them ever more frequently, kept rising and growing in its mighty strength. And when the mother saw it, she involuntarily sensed that something truly had come into the world that was great and radiant, like the sun in the sky she could see.

They often sang songs. They sang simple songs known to all, loudly and cheerfully, but sometimes they struck up new ones, particularly harmonious somehow, but sombre and with unusual tunes. These were sung in low tones, seriously, as if they were something from church. The faces of the singers paled and flushed, and great power could be sensed in the resonant words.

One of the new songs in particular troubled and agitated the woman.* Nowhere to be heard in this song were the sad meditations of an injured soul, roaming lonely down the dark paths of sorrowful bewilderment, or the groans of a soul cowed by need, intimidated by fear, characterless and colourless. And there was no sound in it of the melancholy sighs of a force thirsting indefinitely for space, nor of the provocative cries of a bold recklessness that is indifferent in its readiness to shatter both good and evil. There was no blind sense in it of vengeance and hurt, capable of destroying everything and powerless to create anything: there was nothing to be heard in this song of the old world of the slave.

The mother disliked the sharp words and the severe tune, but behind the words and the tune there was something bigger, which drowned the sound and the word with its power and wakened in the heart a presentiment of something thought could not encompass. This something she could see in the faces and the eyes of the youngsters, she could feel it in their breasts and, yielding to the power of the song, which could not fit into the words and the sounds, she always listened to it with particular attention and with more profound disquiet than she did all the other songs.

This song was sung more quietly than the others, but it sounded more powerful than all of them and enveloped people like the air of a March day, the first day of the coming spring.

“It’s time we started singing this in the street!” said Vesovshchikov morosely.

When his father again stole something and went to prison, Nikolai declared to his comrades calmly:

“Now we can meet at my house…”

Almost every evening after work, one or other of his comrades would sit with Pavel, and they would read and copy things out from books, preoccupied, without finding time to have a wash. They ate dinner and drank tea with books in their hands, and their talk was ever more incomprehensible to the mother.

“We need a newspaper!” Pavel would often say.

Life was becoming hurried and feverish, people rushed ever more quickly from one book to another, like bees from flower to flower.

“People are talking about us!” said Vesovshchikov one day. “We’re likely to come to grief soon…”

“That’s what a quail is for, to get caught in someone’s net,” responded the Ukrainian.

The mother liked him more and more. When he called her nenko, it was as if the word were stroking her cheeks with the soft hand of a child. On Sundays he would chop firewood, if Pavel had no time, and one day he arrived with a plank on his shoulder and, picking up the axe, quickly and skilfully replaced the rotten step on the porch; and another time, just as inconspicuously, he mended a collapsed fence. He whistled as he worked, and his whistling was beautifully sad.

One day the mother said to her son:

“Let’s take the Ukrainian in as our lodger. It’ll be better for both of you, not running to see one another.”

“Why make things awkward for yourself?” asked Pavel, shrugging his shoulders.

“What a question! I’ve felt awkward all my life without knowing why; for a good person I don’t mind!”

“Do as you like!” her son responded. “If he comes, I’ll be glad…”

And the Ukrainian moved in with them.

VIII

The small house on the outskirts of the settlement was catching people’s attention; its walls had already been probed by dozens of suspicious looks. Fluttering restlessly above it were the mottled wings of rumour – people were trying to excite fear, to reveal something concealed behind the walls of the house above the gully. They would look in at the windows at night, and sometimes someone would knock on a window pane and quickly, fearfully run away.

One day, Vlasova was stopped on the street by the innkeeper Beguntsov, a little old man of good appearance, who always wore a black silk kerchief on his flabby red neck and a lilac-coloured thick plush waistcoat on his chest. On his nose, sharp and shiny, sat a pair of tortoiseshell glasses, and for that reason he was known as Bone Eyes.

Having stopped Vlasova, in a single breath and without waiting for any replies, he showered her with dry, highfalutin words:

“Pelageya Nilovna, how are you faring? How’s the son? You don’t mean to marry him off, eh? A youth in his absolute prime for marriage. Marrying a son off early renders parents’ lives more restful. Within a family, a man is better kept in both spirit and flesh, within a family he’s like a mushroom in vinegar! In your place I should marry him off. Our times demand the strict surveillance of a man’s being, or else people start living out of their own heads. Disorder gets underway in their thoughts, and their deeds are worthy of censure. Youngsters pass God’s church by, shun public places and, gathering in secret, in corners, they whisper. Why do they whisper, permit me to enquire? Why do they avoid other people? All that a man dare not say in front of others – in an inn, for example – what is that? A mystery! And the place for a mystery is our holy church of apostolic zeal. And all other secret things, done in corners, result from mental delusion! I wish you good health!”

With a fancifully crooked arm he doffed his cap, waved it in the air and went away, leaving the mother bewildered.

The Vlasovs’ neighbour, too, Maria Korsunova, a smith’s widow who sold food at the factory gates, upon meeting the mother at the market, said:

“Keep an eye on your son, Pelageya!”

“What is it?” asked the mother.

“There’s a rumour going round!” Maria informed her mysteriously. “A bad one, mother dear! About him organizing a sort of artel, like the flagellants.* Sects is what they call it.