One evening my brother came to see us. After drinking tea and chatting with the children, who were always glad to see him, he suddenly fell silent, tugged at his capacious, tightly packed case, and looked meaningfully at us. We at once realized that he had something in store for us.
"What have you got there, Uncle Sergei?" asked Zoya.
He did not answer at once. Winking at her with the air of a conspirator, he opened his case unhurriedly, took out some drawings and began to go through them. We waited patiently.
"These draughts," said Sergei at last, "have to be copied. What mark did you get for drawing, Shura?" "He gets 'excellent,' " answered Zoya.
"Well then, Shura my boy, I've got a job for you. It's a good man's job, and you'll be helping the family. Here is my instrument case. It dales back to my institute days, but the instruments work well, everything's in order. You have India ink, haven't you?"
"Yes, and tracing paper, too," put in Zoya.
"Well, that's fine! Move a bit closer, and I'll show you what's what. The work's not complicated, but it needs great precision and accuracy, and will keep you on your toes."
Zoya sat down beside her uncle. Shura who had been standing with his back to the stove did not stir from the spot and did not say a word. Sergei shot a glance at him, then bent over the drawings and began to explain the task.
Both my brother and I understood what was the matter.
One trait in Shura's character had always worried me greatly: his obstinacy. For example, Shura loves music, he has a good ear, and has been playing on his father's guitar for a long time now. Sometimes it happens, of course, that he doesn't catch a tune at once. If I tell him, "You're wrong there, this is how it goes," Shura hears me out, then answers, cool as can be, "But I like it better this way," and goes on playing in his own fashion. He knows perfectly well that I am right, and next time he will strike the right note, but not this time. He lives by a firm rule: all decisions, big and small, he adopts independently— nobody can tell him what to do, he is a grown-up man, he knows everything and understands everything himself!
Apparently, his uncle's suggestion had seemed to him an attempt on his dearly-loved independence, on his right to manage himself. And while Sergei explained what should be done and how, Shura listened attentively and silently from a distance. As for Serge!—he gave Shura no further attention.
When he was already at the door, my brother remarked o no one in particular, "I'll need the drawings in exactly a week."
Zoya took up her physics book. I, as usual, began correcting the copybooks of my pupils. Shura opened a book. For some time after my brother's departure the room was quiet. But then Zoya got up, stretched herself and shook her head (she had a habit of tossing back a dark lock of hair which was always falling over her right eyebrow). I saw that she had finished her homework.
"Well, it's time we started. We can finish half of it tonight, can't we, Mummy?" Zoya said, and began to spread out the drawings on the table.
Shura dropped his book, glanced at his sister and said moodily, "Sit down and read your My Universities. (in those days Zoya was reading Gorky's autobiographical trilogy) I can draw better. I'll manage without you."
But Zoya did not listen to him. Together they occupied the whole table with their drawings, and I had to move to the very edge with my notebooks. Soon the children were deep in their work. And as often happened when sewing or washing or clearing away—when doing any job demanding not the whole of a man but only a true hand and eye—Zoya struck up quietly:
Oh, the rustling sheen of the blue-green grass,
Oh, the blue-green grass of the steppe!
Those far-oft deeds
Will forever last,
Though the thunder has long rolled past.
Shura listened in silence. Then, he joined in, softly at first. Then his voice gathered strength and mingled with Zoya's, and the two rang out pure and clear. They finished the song about the Cossack girl who fell in battle, fighting the bandit atamans, and Zoya began another, which we all loved, and which Anatoly Petrovich once used to sing:
Roars and groans the Dnieper broad,
The angry wind tears off the leaves,
Low lies the lofty forest bowed,
In threatening waves the water heaves.
And thus they worked and sang, and somehow I could hear them without listening: it was not the words that reached me, but the melody and feeling with which they sang. And I was happy, very happy.
In a week's time Shura took the finished work to his uncle and came back grinning broadly, with a fresh packet of drawings.
"He liked them! We'll have the money in a week. Do you hear that, Ma? Our money, Zoya's and mine, earned all by ourselves!"
"And didn't Uncle Sergei have anything else to say?" I asked.
Shura shot me a shrewd glance and laughed. "He also said, 'That's the way, my boy!'
And a week later, when I woke up in the morning, I saw on the chair beside me two pairs of stockings and a very beautiful white silk collar—the children had bought them for me out of their first earnings. And there too, in an envelope, lay the rest of the money.
And tong after, coming home of an evening, I quite often heard my children singing while I was still on the steps. I knew then that they were busy again with their drawings.
Next: Vera Sergeyevna