In conjunction with him I remembered my father, as grandmother had seen him in her dream, with a walnut stick in his hand, and behind him a spotted dog running, with its tongue hanging out.
[CHAPTER XIII]
The icon-painting workshop occupied two rooms in a large house partly built of stone. One room had three windows overlooking the yard and one overlooking the garden; the other room had one window overlooking the garden and another facing the street. These windows were small and square, and their panes, irisated by age, unwillingly admitted the pale, diffused light of the winter days. Both rooms were closely packed with tables, and at every table sat the bent figures of icon-painters. From the ceilings were suspended glass balls full of water, which reflected the light from the lamps and threw it upon the square surfaces of the icons in white cold rays.
It was hot and stifling in the workshop. Here worked about twenty men, icon-painters, from Palekh, Kholia, and Mstir. They all sat down in cotton overalls with unfastened collars. They had drawers made of ticking, and were barefooted, or wore sandals. Over their heads stretched, like a blue veil, the smoke of cheap tobacco, and there was a thick smell of size, varnish, and rotten eggs. The melancholy Vlandimirski song flowed slowly, like resin:
How depraved the people have now become;
The boy ruined the girl, and cared not who knew.
They sang other melancholy songs, but this was the one they sang most often. Its long-drawn-out movement did not hinder one from thinking, did not impede the movement of the fine brush, made of weasel hair, over the surface of the icons, as it painted in the lines of the figure, and laid upon the emaciated faces of the saints the fine lines of suffering. By the windows the chaser, Golovev, plied his small hammer. He was a drunken old man with an enormous blue nose. The lazy stream of song was punctuated by the ceaseless dry tap of the hammer; it was like a worm gnawing at a tree. Some evil genius had divided the work into a long series of actions, bereft of beauty and incapable of arousing any love for the business, or interest in it. The squinting joiner, Panphil, ill-natured and malicious, brought the pieces of cypress and lilac-wood of different sizes, which he had planed and glued; the consumptive lad, Davidov, laid the colors on; his comrade, Sorokin, painted in the inscription; Milyashin outlined the design from the original with a pencil; old Golovev gilded it, and embossed the pattern in gold; the finishers drew the landscape, and the clothes of the figures; and then they were stood with faces or hands against the wall, waiting for the work of the face-painter.
It was very weird to see a large icon intended for an iconastasis, or the doors of the altar, standing against the wall without face, hands, or feet,—just the sacerdotal vestments, or the armor, and the short garments of archangels. These variously painted tablets suggested death. That which should have put life into them was absent, but it seemed as if it had been there, and had miraculously disappeared, leaving only its heavy vestments behind.
When the features had been painted in by the face-painter, the icon was handed to the workman, who filled in the design of the chaser. A different workman had to do the lettering, and the varnish was put on by the head workman himself Ivan Larionovich, a quiet man. He had a gray face; his beard, too, was gray, the hair fine and silky; his gray eyes were peculiarly deep and sad. He had a pleasant smile, but one could not smile at him. He made one feel awkward, somehow. He looked like the image of Simon Stolpnik, just as lean and emaciated, and his motionless eyes looked far away in the same abstracted manner, through people and walls.
Some days after I entered the workshop, the banner-worker, a Cossack of the Don, named Kapendiukhin, a handsome, mighty fellow, arrived in a state of intoxication. With clenched teeth and his gentle, womanish eyes blinking, he began to smash up everything with his iron fist, without uttering a word. Of medium height and well built, he cast himself on the workroom like a cat chasing rats in a cellar. The others lost their presence of mind, and hid themselves away in the corners, calling out to one another: