Fifty-Two Stories

GRISHA

GRISHA, A CHUBBY LITTLE BOY, born two years and eight months ago, is strolling with his nanny along the boulevard. He is wearing a long padded coat, a scarf, a big hat with a fuzzy button, and warm galoshes. He feels stifled and hot, and the shiny April sun adds to it by shining straight into his eyes and stinging his eyelids.

His whole clumsy figure, stepping timidly and uncertainly, expresses the utmost perplexity.

Up to now Grisha has known only a rectangular world, where his bed stands in one corner, his nanny’s trunk in another, a chair in a third, and in the fourth an icon lamp burns. If you peek under the bed, you see a doll with a broken-off arm and a drum, and behind the nanny’s trunk there are a great many different things: empty spools, scraps of paper, a lidless box, and a broken toy clown. Besides the nanny and Grisha, this world is often visited by Mama and the cat. Mama looks like a doll, and the cat like Papa’s fur coat, only the fur coat has no eyes or tail. From this world, which is called the children’s room, a door leads to a space where they have dinner and drink tea. There Grisha’s chair stands on its long legs and a clock hangs, which exists only in order to swing its pendulum and chime. From the dining room you can go on to a room with red armchairs. Here there is a dark spot on the rug, for which they still shake their fingers at Grisha. Beyond this room there is yet another, where he is not allowed to go and where Papa lurks—a person mysterious in the highest degree! The nanny and Mama are understandable: they dress Grisha, feed him, and put him to bed, but what Papa exists for—nobody knows. There is yet another mysterious person—the aunt who gave Grisha the drum. She appears and then disappears. Where does she disappear to? More than once Grisha looked under the bed, behind the trunk, and under the sofa, but she was not there…

In this new world, where the sun dazzles his eyes, there are so many papas, mamas, and aunts that you do not know who to run to. But most strange and absurd of all are the horses. Grisha looks at their moving legs and cannot understand anything. He looks at the nanny, so that she can resolve his perplexity, but she is silent.

Suddenly he hears a terrible stomping…Down the boulevard, at a measured pace, a crowd of soldiers with red faces and with bath besoms¹ under their arms moves straight towards him. Grisha turns cold all over with terror and looks questioningly at the nanny: is this dangerous? But the nanny does not flee and does not cry, meaning it is not dangerous. Grisha follows the soldiers with his eyes and starts marching in step himself.

Two big cats with long muzzles, tongues hanging out and tails sticking up, run across the boulevard. Grisha thinks that he, too, has to run, and he runs after the cats.

“Stop!” cries the nanny, seizing him roughly by the shoulders. “Where are you going? Who told you to get up to mischief?”

Here some other nanny sits and holds a little basin of oranges. Grisha passes by her and silently takes an orange.

“What’d you do that for?” cries his companion, slapping him on the hand and snatching the orange from him. “Fool!”

Now Grisha would very happily pick up a little piece of glass that is lying at his feet and shining like an icon lamp, but he is afraid his hand will be slapped again.

“My greetings to you!” Grisha suddenly hears someone’s loud, deep voice just by his ear, and he sees a tall man with shiny buttons.

To his great pleasure, this man gives the nanny his hand, stops beside her, and starts to talk. The brightness of the sun, the noise of the carriages, the horses, the shiny buttons—it is all so strikingly new and not frightening that Grisha’s soul is filled with a feeling of delight, and he bursts out laughing.

“Let’s go, let’s go,” he cries to the man with the shiny buttons, pulling at the skirt of his coat.

“Go where?” the man asks.

“Let’s go!” Grisha insists.

He would like to say that it would be nice to take Papa, Mama, and the cat along, but his tongue simply does not say what it should.

A little later the nanny turns off the boulevard and leads Grisha into a big courtyard, where there is still snow. And the man with the shiny buttons also goes with them. They carefully avoid the piles of snow and the puddles, then go up a dirty, dark stairway to a room. Here there is a lot of smoke, the smell of a roast, and some woman is standing by a stove and frying beef patties. The cook and the nanny exchange kisses and, along with the man, sit down on a bench and begin to talk softly. Grisha, all bundled up, feels unbearably hot and stifled.

“Why all this?” he thinks, looking around.

He sees a dark ceiling, an oven fork with two prongs, the stove which looks like a big, black hole…

“Ma-a-ma!” he drawls.

“Now, now, now!” shouts the nanny. “You can wait!”

The cook puts a bottle, two glasses, and a pie on the table. The two women and the man with the shiny buttons clink and drink several times, and the man embraces now the nanny, now the cook. And then all three begin to sing softly.

Grisha reaches out for the pie, and they give him a piece. He eats and watches the nanny drink…He, too, wants to drink.

“Give! Give, Nanny!” he asks.

The cook lets him take a sip from her glass. He rolls his eyes, winces, coughs, and waves his hands for a long time afterwards, and the cook looks at him and laughs.

On returning home, Grisha begins to tell Mama, the walls, and the bed where he was and what he saw. He speaks not so much with his tongue as with his face and hands. He shows how the sun shines, how the horses run, how the frightening stove stares, and how the cook drinks…

In the evening he simply cannot fall asleep. Soldiers with besoms, big cats, horses, a piece of glass, a basin of oranges, the shiny buttons—it all gathers in a heap and presses down on his brain. He tosses from side to side, babbles, and finally, unable to bear his agitation, he starts to cry.

“You have a fever!” says his mama, putting her palm to his forehead. “What could have caused it?”

“Stove!” weeps Grisha. “Go away, stove!”

“He must have eaten something…,” his mama decides.

And Grisha, bursting with the impressions of the new life he has just experienced, receives from his mama a spoonful of castor oil.

1886