I never could avoid passing up that street—it was the shortest way—but I began to get up earlier, in order not to meet the man. However, in a few days I saw him again, sitting on the steps and stroking a smoke-colored cat which lay on his knees. When I was about three paces from him he jumped up, seized the cat by the legs, and dashed its head against the stone balustrade, so that I was splashed with the warm blood. He then hurled the cat under my feet and stood at the gate, crying:
"What now?"
What could I do? We rolled about the yard like two curs, and afterward, as I sat on a grassy slope, nearly crazy with inexpressible grief, I bit my lips to keep myself from howling. When I remember it I shiver with a feeling of sickening repulsion, amazed that I did not go out of my mind and kill some one.
Why do I relate these abominations? So that you may know, kind sirs, that is not all past and done with! You have a liking for grim fantasies; you are delighted with horrible stories well told; the grotesquely terrible excites you pleasantly. But I know of genuine horrors, everyday terrors, and I have an undeniable right to excite you unpleasantly by telling you about them, in order that you may remember how w? live, and under what circumstances. A low and unclean life it is, ours, and that is the truth!
I am a lover of humanity and I have no desire to make any one miserable, but one must not be sentimental, nor hide the grim truth with the motley words of beautiful lies. Let us face life as it is! All that is good and human in our hearts and brains needs renewing. What went to my head most of all was the attitude of the average man toward women. From my reading of novels I had learned to look upon woman as the best and most significant thing in life. Grandmother had strengthened me in this belief by her stories about Our Lady and Vassilissia the Wise. What I knew of the unhappy laundress, Natalia, and those hundred and thousands of glances and smiles which I observed, with which women, the mothers of life, adorn this life of sordid joys, sordid loves, also helped me.
The books of Turgenieff sang the praises of woman, and with all the good I knew about women I had adorned the image of Queen Margot in my memory. Heine and Turgenieff especially gave me much that was precious for this purpose.
In the evenings as I was returning from the marketplace I used to halt on the hill by the walls of the Kreml and look at the sun setting beyond the Volga. Fiery streams flowed over the heavens; the terrestrial, beloved river had turned purple and blue. Sometimes in such moments the land looked like an enormous convict barge; it had the appearance of a pig being lazily towed along by an invisible steamer.
But I thought more often of the great world, of towns which I had read about, of foreign countries where people lived in a different manner. Writers of other countries depicted life as cleaner, more attractive, less burdensome than that life which seethed sluggishly and monotonously around me. This thought calmed my disturbed spirit, aroused visions of the possibility of a different life for me.
And I felt that I should meet some simple-minded, wise man who would lead me on that broad, bright road.
One day as I sat on a bench by the walls of the Kreml my Uncle Yaakov appeared at my side. I had not noticed his approach, and I did not recognize him at once. Although we had lived in the same town during several years, we had met seldom, and then only accidentally and for a mere glimpse of each other.