“But you see they have whiskers.”

“There’s nothing wrong with whiskers—they’d be like reins, the whiskers. Or else, you’d have a spider, as enormous as what? A spider the size of a kitten, even that would be frightful. If only I had legs! I’d work real hard, and I’d feed up my whole menagerie. I’d go into the business, and I’d buy a house for Mammy in the green fields. Have you ever been in the green fields?”

“Sure.”

“Tell me about it, will you?”

I began to tell him about fields and meadows. He listened eagerly without interrupting, his eyelashes dropped over his eyes and his little mouth opened slowly as though he were falling asleep. Seeing this, I began to speak more quietly. But his mother came in with the boiling samovar in her hands, a paper bag under her arm, and a bottle of vodka tucked in her breast.

“Here I am.”

“I liked that,” sighed the boy, opening his eyes wide. “An empty place—just nothing but grass and flowers. Mammy, why don’t you get a carriage and take me to the green fields? This way I’ll croak, and I’ll never see them. My word, Mammy, but you’re a bitch,” he concluded, in a sad abused tone.

His mother chided him tenderly:

“Don’t you swear, you mustn’t. You’re still little.…”

“ ‘Don’t swear! It’s all very well for you: you go where you please, just like a dog. You’re a lucky one. Listen—” he turned to me—“did God make the green fields?”

“Certainly.”

“Well, what for?”

“So people can go out on a jaunt.”

“Green fields,” said the boy, smiling pensively and sighing. “I would take my menagerie there, and I would let them all loose—run along, brothers! Listen: where do they make God—at the poor-house?”¹

His mother shrieked and was literally bowled over with laughter. She fell upon the bed and shouted, kicking her legs.

“Good Lord! What a…Darling! Why, the icon-painters.…It’s side-splitting! He’s the limit!”

Lenka looked at her with a smile, and swore at her tenderly in filthy language.

“She carries on like a child. Doesn’t she love to laugh!”

And he repeated the dirty word.

“Let her laugh,” I said. “You don’t mind.”

“No, I don’t,” Lenka agreed. “I’m only angry at her when she doesn’t wash the window. I beg her and beg her: clean the window, I can’t see God’s light. But she keeps on forgetting.”

The woman, chuckling now and then, washed the tea-things, winked at me with her light blue eyes, and said: