Zoya was only allowed to play with Shura near the house, inside the fence, so that he should not get hurt by one of the horses or cows which grazed freely on the meadow nearby. But with the older girls, Manya and Tasya, she would go a long way off, to the fields and the river, a merry little brook, where you could bathe all day long with no fear of drowning.
Zoya used to spend hours chasing butterflies with a net and gathering flowers, then she would go bathing, and—at the age of five!—even wash her own linen in the brook, dry it in the sun and come home in clean clothes!
"Look, Mummy," she would say, gazing up into my eyes, "did I do the washing well? You aren't angry, are you?"
Even now I can see her five-year-old face, ruddy and sunburnt, with clear grey eyes. A brief summer shower has just passed, and the sun is again shining warmly; the wind sweeps the last clouds from the high-celled sky into the void beyond the horizon; heavy drops drip off the trees; and Zoya patters up to me across the warm puddles, laughing and showing me how wet her frock is …
I can see her riding out to a distant meadow for the hay in a rickety, squeaking cart, pulled at a jolting trot by an ancient nag. She would come back on top of a high load, and together with the grownups stir and spread out the scented hay to dry behind the barn; and then jump and roll about in its soft waves; and at last, blissfully tired, curl up into a ball there and fall fast asleep.
And what fun it was to climb trees! To scramble up so high that it gave you a fright to look down, and your heart missed a beat when you happened to catch hold of a thin branch. And then to climb down carefully, feeling the branches with your bare toes, and trying not to tear your dress…
And it was even jollier to climb onto the roof of the barn or up to the belfry—the favourite observation point of the village children. You had the whole village before you on the palm of your hand, and over there—fields, fields rolling endlessly and distant villages…And what was beyond them? Far, far away?
Coming home at last, Zoya would sit down beside me and ask, "Mummy, what is there beyond our Aspen Woods?"
"Just a village called Peaceful Farms."
"And what's beyond the village?"
"Solovyanka."
"And what's beyond Solovyanka?"
"Pavlovka, Alexandrovka, Prudki."
"And beyond that? But what is beyond Kirsanov? And is Moscow beyond Tambov?" And she would say with a sigh, "Wouldn't I just like to go there!"
When Father had nothing to do she would climb onto his knee and ply him with all sorts of questions, some of them entirely unexpected. And she used to listen to what was going on in the world as if she were listening to the most wonderful fairy tale of all: about the high mountains, the blue seas and the dense forests, about the big distant towns and about the people who live there: At such moments Zoya was all ears: her mouth opened a little, her eyes shone, and at times it almost seemed that she forgot to breathe In the end, overwhelmed by the novelty of it all, she would fall asleep in her father's lap.
Four-year-old Shura, noisy and carefree, was always up to some kind of prank.
"Shura's pocket is moving!" Zoya exclaimed in surprise once.
And it really was moving!
"What have you got there?"
Quite simple: the pocket is full of cockchafers. They are squirming about and trying to escape, but Shura squeezes his pocket in his fist. Poor beetles!
What do I not find in those pockets of his in the evenings! A slingshot, pieces of tin and glass, hooks, stones, strictly forbidden matches, and a multitude of other things. There was always a bruise on Shura's forehead, and his hands and legs were torn and scratched, his knees cut. To sit still was torture for him, the cruelest punishment. He runs and hops and jumps from early morning until I call in the children to supper and to bed. How often have 1 seen him running about the yard after the rain, beating the puddles with a stick! Spray flies in sparkling fountains over his head, he is wet through, but he seems not to notice it—he beats even harder with his stick and bursts into a song of his own composing. I cannot understand the words, all that I can hear is a kind of exultant war cry: "Tramba-bam! Baram-barn!" But it is quite understandable: Shura must give vent to his delight at everything which surrounds him, he must express how overjoyed he is by the sun and the trees and the warm deep puddles!
Zoya was Shura's constant playmate, and she used to run about just as noisily, gaily and obliviously happy. But she was also able to sit and listen for a long time, and when she did so, her eyes were attentive and her dark brows slightly drawn together. Sometimes I would come upon her by a fallen birch tree not far from the house, sitting with her chin in her cupped hands, with a faraway look in her eyes.
"What are you doing here?" I would ask.
"I'm thinking," Zoya would answer.
Of those far-off days, which have now blended so much, there is one I remember quite clearly. Anatoly Petrovich and I had come on a visit to my old folks bringing the children with us. We had scarcely arrived when Grandad Timofei Semyonovich pounced upon Zoya.
"And why did you tell me a fib yesterday, you little rascal?"
"What fib?"
"I asked you what you had done with my specs and you said you hadn't seen them. And afterwards I found them under the bench—it must have been you who hid them there."
Zoya frowned at Grandad and made no reply. But a little later, when they invited us to table, she said, "I won't come. If you don't believe me, I won't eat." "Now, now! Forget it! Come and sit down." "No, I won't sit down."
And she did not, either. And I could see that Grandad was deeply discomfited, sitting there in front of his five- year-old granddaughter. On the way back I scolded her a little, but Zoya gulped back her tears, and kept repeating: "I did not to-touch his spectacles. I to-told the truth and he di-did not believe me." And I felt that the child was deeply hurt.
Zoya and Father were great friends. She loved to be with him even when he was busy and had no time for her. And she did not simply follow him about, she noticed things.
"Look, Daddy can do everything," she told Shura.
True enough, Anatoly Petrovich could tackle any job. This was admitted by all who knew him. He was the eldest son in the family and had lost his father early, and from early youth he had ploughed and sown and reaped. Even so, he had found time to do a lot of work in the library and the village reading room. The people of the village loved and respected Anatoly Petrovich, trusted him, would ask for his advice about family and other matters, and, whenever a trustworthy man for some control commission had to be chosen—to check the work of a cooperation or an association—they would say: "Anatoly Petrovich is the man! You can't take him in, he always gets to the bottom of things."
One other thing about him attracted people: his blunt honesty. If someone came to him for advice and he saw that that man was not right he would not hesitate to say: "You're in the wrong. I will not take your side.
People far older than himself, even the village greybeards, came to him for advice.
"Anatoly Petrovich never barters with his conscience," I used to hear from many different people.
For all that, he was very modest and never boasted of his knowledge.
You could ask him about anything and get the right answer to all your questions. He had read very much and could relate what he had read clearly and well. Zoya would sit for a long time in the village reading room listening to him reading the papers to the peasants and telling them about the events through which our country was then passing, or about the Civil War, and about Lenin. His listeners were always bombarding him with questions.
"They were wonderful, Anatoly Petrovich, the things you told us about electricity, but what about the tractor—that's even more wonderful, isn't it? And how are you going to get a big thing like that to turn round on our strips of land? And yes, there's another thing: Is there really a machine that reaps and threshes and pours pure grain into the sacks?"
Once Zoya asked me, "Why does everybody love Daddy so much?"
"Well, what would you say?"
Zoya lapsed into silence, but in the evening when I was tucking her up in bed, she whispered in my ear, "Daddy is clever, he knows everything. And very kind…"
Next: Seeing the World