“He’s dead! Egorushka, are you really dead? Oh, God—and his little hands are quite cold!”
She dashed out to her neighbours, she aroused the whole neighbourhood with her shrill cries. Inquisitive women soon filled the house.
“I struck him ever so lightly with a thin twig,” the mother wailed. “Then my angel lay down on the bench, cried a little, then grew quiet and went to sleep, and in the morning he gave up his soul to God.”
Held by a heavy, death-like sleep, Egorka lay there motionless and to all appearances lifeless, and listened to his mother’s wailing and to the discordant clamour of voices. And he heard his mother keening over him:
“Those accursed Jews have sucked out all his blood! It was not the first time that I beat my little darling! It used to be that I’d beat him and put a bit of salt on afterwards, and nothing would come of it—and here I’ve hit him with a little twig and he, my handsome darling, my little angel....”
Egorka heard her groans and wondered at his fettered helplessness and immobility. He seemed to hear the noise of some one else’s body—he realized that it was his own as it was put on the floor to be washed. He had an intense longing to stir, to rise, but he could not. He thought:
“I have died: what are they going to do with me now?”
And again he thought:
“Why is it that my soul is not leaving my body? I do not feel that I have arms or legs, yet I can hear.”
He wondered and waited. Then, with a sudden powerless exertion, he tried to wake from his death-like sleep, to return to himself, to run away from the dark grave—and again his helpless will drooped, and again he waited.