And laughingly she told me this:

“You see, a monk barged in here once, a bulky man, and says: ‘See here, you’re an oakum-picker, can you make me a rope ladder?’ And I, I’d never heard of such ladders. ‘No,’ says I, ‘I can’t.’ ‘Then I’ll teach you,’ says he. He opened his cassock and there was a long strong thinnish rope all round his belly He taught me. I twist it and twist it and think to myself: what does he want it for? Perhaps he wants to rob a church.”

She laughed aloud, hugging her son’s shoulders, stroking him all the while.

“Oh, these cunning fellows! He came when he said he would, and I said to him: ‘Here, if this is to steal with, I won’t have anything to do with it.’ And he laughs slyly. ‘No,’ he says, ‘that’s for climbing over a wall. We have a great high wall, and we’re sinful folk, and the sin is on the other side of the wall—understand?’ Well, I understood. He needed it to go to women at night. He and I had a laugh together over it.”

“You certainly like to laugh,” the boy said, in the tone of an older person. “You’d better heat the samovar.”

“But we haven’t any sugar.”

“Go buy some.”

“But we haven’t any money.”

“All because you’re such a guzzler. Get some from him.” He turned to me.

“Got money?”

I gave the woman some money. She jumped to her feet, took from the stove a little battered tarnished samovar and disappeared behind the door, humming through her nose.

“Mom!” her son shouted after her. “Wash the window. I can’t see anything! A smart little baggage, I’m telling you,” he continued, carefully placing the boxes of insects on the shelves. They were of cardboard and suspended on strings from nails driven into the cracks between the bricks of the damp wall. “A worker…When once she starts picking oakum, she raises such a dust that you almost choke. I shout: ‘Mammy, carry me out into the court-yard or I’ll choke here.’ But she says: ‘Have patience. I’ll be lonesome without you.’ She loves me, and that’s all there is to it. She picks and sings. She knows a thousand songs.”

Full of eagerness, his marvelous eyes flashing, he raised his thick eyebrows and sang in a hoarse alto:

Arina lay on a featherbed…

I listened for a while, then I said:

“A very dirty song.”

“They’re all like that,” Lenka declared with assurance. Suddenly he started. “Listen! There’s the music! Quick, lift me up!”

I lifted his light little bones in their bag of thin gray skin. Eagerly he stuck his head out of the open window, and grew still, while his withered legs swung impotently, scraping against the wall. In the court-yard a barrel-organ squeaked irritatedly, spitting out shreds of melody. A deep-voiced child cried merrily, and a dog howled. Lenka listened to this music and hummed gently through his teeth in time with it.

The dust in the cellar settled, and the place grew lighter. A cheap clock hung over his mother’s bed; the pendulum, the size of a copper coin, crawled limpingly. The dishes on the hearth were dirty, a thick layer of dust rested on everything, particularly in the corners, where the cobwebs hung in dirty shreds.