“Bring in the prisoner Vesovshchikov!”

And he started to read out some sort of document, holding it up to his face.

Nikolai was brought in.

“Hat off!” cried the officer, interrupting his reading.

Rybin went up to Vlasova and, nudging her with his shoulder, said quietly:

“Don’t get worked up, mother…”

“How can I take my hat off, if my arms are being held?” asked Nikolai, drowning out the reading of the record of proceedings.

The officer threw the document onto the table:

“Sign it!”

The mother watched the record being signed, and her excitement was extinguished, her heart sank and tears of hurt and impotence welled up in her eyes. She had cried these tears for the twenty years of her marriage, but in recent years had almost forgotten their bitter taste; the officer looked at her and, wrinkling his face fastidiously, remarked:

“Your howling is premature, madam! Mind you don’t run out of tears for later on!”

Embittered again, she said:

“A mother has tears enough for everything, for everything! If you have a mother, then she knows it, yes!”

The officer filed his papers away into a nice new briefcase with a shiny lock.

“Move!” he commanded.

“Goodbye for now, Andrei, goodbye for now, Nikolai!” said Pavel warmly and quietly, shaking his comrades’ hands.

“Precisely – for now!” the officer repeated with a grin.

Vesovshchikov wheezed loudly. The blood had flowed into his thick neck, and there was harsh malice sparkling in his eyes. The Ukrainian was all flashing smiles, nodding his head and saying something to the mother, while she made the sign of the cross over him, as well as saying:

“God sees the righteous…”

The crowd of men in grey greatcoats finally tumbled out into the lobby and, with their spurs ringing, disappeared. Last to go out was Rybin, who said pensively, after his dark eyes had cast an attentive gaze at Pavel:

“So, farewell!”

And, coughing into his beard, he went out unhurriedly into the lobby.

With his hands folded behind his back, Pavel walked slowly around the room, stepping over the books and linen lying about on the floor, and said dolefully:

“You see how it’s done?…”

Scrutinizing the ransacked room in bewilderment, the mother whispered miserably:

“Why was Nikolai rude to him?”

“He must have got scared,” said Pavel quietly.

“Came and seized and took away,” muttered the mother, spreading her arms.

Her son had been left at home, and her heart began beating more calmly, but her thought was fixed upon a fact that it could not embrace:

“That yellow one jeers and threatens…”

“All right, Mother dear!” said Pavel, suddenly decisive: “Let’s clear all this up…”

He had said “Mother” and “dear” as he did only when he felt close to her. She moved towards him, looked into his face and quietly asked:

“Are you upset?”

“Yes!” he replied. “It’s hard! I’d rather have been with them…”

He seemed to her to have tears in his eyes and, wanting to comfort him, dimly feeling his pain, she said with a sigh:

“Just wait – they’ll take you too!…”

“They will!” he responded.

After a pause, the mother remarked sadly:

“How stern you are, Pasha! You might try comforting me some time! As it is, I say something terrible, and then you say something even worse.”

He glanced at her, went over and quietly said:

“I don’t know how, Mama! You have to get used to that.”

She sighed and, after a pause, suppressing a tremor of fear, began:

“Do they maybe torture people? Tear their bodies, break their bones? When I think of that, Pasha dear, I’m frightened!…”

“They break your spirit… That hurts more, when dirty hands are laid on your spirit…”

XI

It became known next day that Bukin, Samoilov, Somov and five others had been arrested. Fedya Mazin dropped in that evening: there had been a search of his house, too, and, pleased with that, he felt himself a hero.

“Were you afraid, Fedya?” asked the mother.

He turned pale, his face became sharp and his nostrils quivered.

“I was afraid the officer was going to hit me! He’s black-bearded, fat, his fingers are all covered in fur and he’s got dark glasses on his nose, as though he’s eyeless. He was shouting and stamping his feet! I’m going to rot in prison, he says! And I’ve never been beaten, not by my father or mother – I’m an only son, and they loved me.”

He closed his eyes for an instant, pursed his lips, fluffed up the hair on his head with a quick gesture of both hands and, gazing at Pavel with reddened eyes, said:

“If anyone ever hits me, I’ll launch myself into him, the whole of me, like a knife, get my teeth into him – so he’d better finish me off at once!”

“You’re slim, thin!” exclaimed the mother. “How are you going to fight?”

“I will!” Fedya replied quietly.

When he had gone, the mother said to Pavel:

“He’ll be the first one of all to break!…”

Pavel remained silent.

A few minutes later, the door into the kitchen opened slowly and in came Rybin.

“Hello!” he said with a grin. “Here I am again. Yesterday I was brought here, but today I’ve come myself!” He shook Pavel’s hand hard, took the mother by the shoulder and asked:

“Will you give me some tea?”

In silence Pavel scrutinized his swarthy, broad face, covered by its thick black beard, and his dark eyes. In his calm gaze there was the light of something significant.

The mother went off into the kitchen to put the samovar on. Rybin sat down, stroked his beard and, putting his elbows on the table, cast his dark gaze over Pavel.

“So, then!” he said, as though continuing an interrupted conversation. “I need to talk to you openly. I’ve been looking you over for a long time. We live almost next door to one another; I see a lot of people visiting you, but there’s no drunkenness or bad behaviour. That’s the first thing. If people aren’t behaving badly, they’re immediately noticeable – what’s going on? Right. I’ve been an irritation to people myself by keeping out of things.”

His words flowed heavily, but fluently, he stroked his beard with a black hand and looked Pavel intently in the face.

“People started talking about you. The people I lodge with call you a heretic; you don’t go to church. I don’t either. Then these leaflets appeared. Was it you that thought them up?”

“It was!” replied Pavel.

“Oh, it was you, was it?” exclaimed his mother in alarm, glancing in from the kitchen. “Not just you!”

Pavel grinned. Rybin too.

“Right!” he said.

The mother inhaled noisily through her nose and went away, a little offended that they had paid no attention to her words.

“The leaflets – that was a good idea. They stir people up. Were there nineteen?”

“Yes!” replied Pavel.

“I read them all, then! Right. There are things in them that are hard to understand, things that are unnecessary – well, when someone’s got a lot to say, he’s bound to use the odd word he needn’t…”

Rybin smiled; his teeth were white and strong.

“Then the search. That more than anything won me over.