When I asked my nurse why she insisted upon using it, she said, “Because it means awake, and you have kept us awake ever since you were born.” Then I hated the name still more.
One day—I think I was not yet four—I was brought to judgment before my mother for having scratched and beaten a young servant girl because she had called me by that hated nickname. My mother never could punish me, for whenever I offended, which was often, I threw my arms around her and kissed her, and the rising anger quickly vanished. Unconsciously this grew to be a trick which I knew would save me and I practiced it on this occasion. As I held my arms around my mother’s neck and pressed kisses upon her responsive lips, she said, “I will tell you why the servants call you Uri, if you promise that you will not grow angry if they call you by that name.”
Then she told me in that sweet, low voice which never had a harsh note, and which I shall never hear again in this world: “Before you were born, the sky was red at night for months; a comet, which is a star with a long tail, travelled through the heavens, and the peasants were so frightened that they did not leave their isbas at night, and the inns were silent and deserted. The witch”—and here I began to shudder; for she was still living and had frightened me many a time—“the witch went about through the street, crying: ‘There will be war! There will be war!’” In the Slavic language the word for war is strangely euphonious—Voyna.
“Bude Voyna! Bude Voyna!” And mother imitated the voice of the witch so that I shook from fear; for war held unknown terrors and the sight of a gun always threw me into a panic. To this day I feel something of childhood’s dread at sight of a gun or pistol.
“It wasn’t long before soldiers came,” mother continued—“and they blew the trumpet at the town hall and all the able-bodied men had to go to be examined. I wept day and night because your father was young and strong and the trumpet called him away from me and from four little children and from you who were not yet born.
“Many people who had money buried it in the garden or hid it in their bake-ovens and much of it was lost or destroyed; for numbers of the men were killed and when their wives started fires in the bake-ovens, the money went up the chimneys in smoke.
“‘Just let them come!’ your father said, ‘just let those Prussians come, and we will wring their necks like chickens!’
“No, your father did not have to go away to war, the war came to us. One night the sky looked as if it were burning up and the stars were like fiery coals. A haze hung around them as if each star had a halo. The witch ran through the street as if possessed, crying: ‘Bude Voyna! Bude Voyna!’ and before morning, the battle came nearer and nearer to us. Bullets flew through the window-panes and the peasants’ straw-thatched isbas were set on fire. It was a terrible day and a frightful night.
“Your father was with the wounded and the dying and he came home in the gray morning with his hands and his garments covered with blood. The next day the war was over. The soldiers were gone and the Prussians were the victors.
“Then again the witch ran through the street, crying: ‘There will be sickness! There will be sickness!’ and evil smells rose from the ground and men were smitten by the cholera. Your father went out again to care for the sick and the dying; one evening when he came home he himself was a victim of the disease and in the morning he was dead.