In the darkness and damp of the autumn evening there was an accordion squealing, someone’s loud singing, someone cursing with foul words and the anxious sound of women’s tired, irritated voices…

Life in the Vlasovs’ little house flowed more quietly and serenely than before, and somewhat differently to everywhere else in the settlement. Their house stood on the edge of the settlement, by a short but steep descent to a marsh. A third of the house was occupied by the kitchen and, separated from it by a thin partition, the small room where the mother slept. The remaining two thirds were a square room with two windows; in one corner of it was Pavel’s bed, in the corner with the icons a table and two benches. A few chairs, a chest of drawers for linen, on top of it a small mirror, a chest for clothes, a clock on the wall and two icons in the corner – and that was it.

Pavel did everything a young lad needs to: he bought an accordion, a shirt with a starched front, a bright tie, galoshes, a walking stick, and he became just the same as all adolescents of his age. He went to parties, learnt to dance the quadrille and the polka, returned home on holidays the worse for drink and always suffered a lot from the vodka. In the morning he would have a headache, heartburn would be a torment, and his face would be pale and miserable.

One day his mother asked him:

“Well, did you have fun yesterday?”

He replied with morose irritation:

“I was bored stiff! I’d be better off going fishing. Or else I’ll buy myself a gun.”

He worked zealously, without taking extra days off or being fined, he was taciturn, and his blue eyes, big, like his mother’s, had a discontented look. He did not buy himself a gun, nor did he take up fishing, but he began diverging noticeably from everyone else’s beaten track: he attended parties more rarely, and although he would go off out somewhere on holidays, he would come back sober. Keeping a vigilant eye on him, his mother saw that her son’s swarthy face was becoming sharper, the look in his eyes was more and more serious, and his lips were tightly compressed with a strange severity. It seemed as if he was silently angry with something or some illness was nagging at him. His comrades used to drop in to see him before, but now, never finding him at home, they stopped coming. It was nice for the mother to see her son becoming different from the youngsters at the factory, but when she noticed he was fixedly and stubbornly swimming off somewhere away from the dark stream of life, this elicited a feeling of vague apprehension in her soul.

“Are you, perhaps, unwell, Pavlusha?” she sometimes asked him.

“No, I’m well!” he replied.

“You’re very thin!” his mother would say with a sigh.

He began bringing books home and tried to read them unnoticed, and when he had read them, he would hide them somewhere. Sometimes he would copy things out of the books onto a separate piece of paper, and he would hide that too…

They spoke little and saw little of one another. In the morning he would drink his tea in silence and go off to work; at noon he would come to have dinner, and they would toss some insignificant words about at the table, and again he would disappear until evening. And in the evening he would wash thoroughly, have dinner and afterwards spend a long time reading his books. On holidays he would go off early in the morning and return late at night. She knew that he went into town, that there he was sometimes at the theatre, but nobody came from town to see him. It seemed to her that with the passage of time her son was talking less and less, but at the same time she noticed that he occasionally used new words of some sort, incomprehensible to her, while the rude and abrupt expressions she was used to were disappearing from his speech. A lot of little things appeared in his behaviour that caught her attention: he gave up foppishness, began to be more concerned with the cleanliness of his body and clothing, moved with greater freedom and agility and, becoming outwardly more plain and simple and soft, he aroused his mother’s anxious attention. And there was something new in his attitude to his mother: he sometimes swept the floor in his room, on holidays he tidied up his bedding himself, and he tried to make her work easier in general. Nobody in the settlement did that…

One day he brought home a picture and hung it on the wall – three people in conversation were walking somewhere, easy and cheerful.

“It’s the risen Christ going to Emmaus!”* Pavel explained.

His mother liked the picture, but she thought:

“You respect Christ, yet you don’t go to church…”

There were more and more books appearing on the shelf that had been nicely made for Pavel by a comrade who was a carpenter. The room acquired a pleasant appearance.

He addressed her formally and politely called her “Mamasha”, but sometimes, suddenly, he would speak to her lovingly:

“Please don’t worry yourself, Mother – I’ll be back home late…”

She liked this: she could sense in his words something serious and powerful.

But her anxiety grew. Without becoming clearer over time, it touched her heart ever more sharply with a presentiment of something unusual. At times the mother would feel discontented with her son and think:

“Everyone’s like everyone else, but he’s like a monk. Really very severe. It’s wrong at his age…”

Sometimes she thought:

“Maybe he’s found himself some girl or other?”

But running around with girls demands money, and he gave almost his entire earnings to her.

Thus the weeks and months went by, and there passed, unnoticed, two years of this strange, silent life, full of vague thoughts and apprehensions that were forever growing.

IV

One day after dinner, Pavel lowered the blind at the window, sat down in the corner and started reading, having hung a tin lamp on the wall above his head. His mother cleared away the crockery and, coming out of the kitchen, approached him cautiously. He raised his head and looked into her face enquiringly.

“It’s all right, Pasha, it’s nothing!” she said hurriedly, walking away with her brows shifting in embarrassment. But after standing motionless in the middle of the kitchen for a minute, pensive and preoccupied, she washed her hands clean and went back out to her son.

“I want to ask you,” she said quietly, “what it is you’re always reading?”

He put his book down.

“Have a seat, Mamasha…”

The mother sank down heavily beside him, then straightened and pricked up her ears, expecting something important.

Without looking at her, in a low voice and for some reason very sternly, Pavel began:

“I’m reading forbidden books.