“What have you done, Marusia? Take it back immediately,” he ordered. I began to cry and said that the sugar was not really Nastasia Leontievna’s, that the error had been made at the refinery. Then my father consented to keep it.
I returned to the shop and went to bed, but my eyes would not close; my conscience troubled me. “What if she suspects that a loaf of sugar was missing? What if she discovers that I have stolen it?” And a feeling of shame came over me. The following day I could not look straight into Nastasia Leontievna’s eyes. I felt guilty. My face burned. At every motion of hers my heart quivered in anticipation of the terrible disclosure. Finally she noticed that there was something the matter with me.
“What’s wrong with you, Marusia?” she questioned, drawing me close to her. “Are you not well?”
This hurt even more. The burden of the sin I had committed weighed heavier and heavier. It rapidly became unbearable. My conscience would not be quieted. At the end of a couple of restless days and sleepless nights I decided to confess. I went into Nastasia Leontievna’s bedroom when she was asleep. Rushing to her bed, I fell on my knees and broke into sobs. She awoke in alarm.
“What’s happened, child? What is it?”
Weeping, I told the story of my theft, begging forgiveness and promising never to steal again. Nastasia Leontievna calmed me and sent me back to bed, but she could not forgive my parents. Next morning she visited our home, remonstrating with my father for his failure to return the sugar and punish me. The shame and humiliation of my parents knew no bounds.
Sundays I spent at home, helping my mother in the house. I would go to the well, which was a considerable distance away, for water. My mother baked bread all the week and my father carried it to the market, selling it at ten kopeks a loaf. His temper was steadily getting worse, and it was not unusual for me to find my mother in the yard in tears after my father had come home drunk.
I was now fifteen and began to grow dissatisfied with my lot. Life was stirring within me and quickening my imagination. Everything that passed by and beyond the narrow little world in which I lived and laboured called me, beckoned to me, lured me. The impressions of that unfamiliar world which I had caught in the theatre had taken deep root in my soul and had kindled in me new ardours and desires. I wanted to dress nicely, to go out, to enjoy life’s pleasures. I wanted to be educated. I wanted to have enough money to secure my parents for ever from starvation and to be able to lead for a time, for a day even, an idle life, without having to rise with the sun, to scrub the floor or to wash clothes.
Ah! what would I not have given to taste the sweetness, the joy, that life held. But there seemed to be none for me. All day long I slaved in the little shop and kitchen. I never had a spare rouble. Something revolted within me against this bleak, purposeless, futureless existence.