And as he leaves he tells her in his slow, methodical, and serious voice: ‘Don’t you dare eat that bread. That’s my bread.’
Toward the end he also liked hanging her by her feet as well, the same way he had hung the chicken. Probably he would hang her, step aside, and sit down to have his porridge. When he had finished his meal he would suddenly seize the strap again and set to work on the hanging woman. The little girl, all a-tremble and huddled on the stove, would steal a wild glance at her mother hanging by her heels and try to hide again.
The mother hanged herself on a May morning, a bright spring day, probably. She had been seen the night before, beaten and completely crazed. Before her death she had also made a trip to the village court, and there it was that they mumbled to her, ‘Learn to live together.’
When the rope tightened around the mother’s neck and she was making her last strangled cries, the little girl called out from the corner: ‘Mamma, why are you choking?’ Then she cautiously approached her, called out to the hanging woman, gazed wildly at her. In the course of the morning she came out of her corner to look at the mother again, until the father finally returned.
And now we see him before the court – solemn, puffy-faced, closely following the proceedings. He denies everything. ‘We never spoke a sharp word to each other,’ he says, dropping a few of his words like precious pearls. The jury leaves, and after a ‘brief deliberation’ they bring in the verdict: ‘Guilty, but with recommendation for clemency.’
Note that the girl testified against her father. She told everything and, they say, wrung tears from the spectators. Had it not been for the ‘clemency’ of the jury he would have been exiled to Siberia. But with ‘clemency’ he need spend only eight months in prison and then come home and ask that his daughter, who testified against him on behalf of her mother, be returned to him. Once again he will have someone to hang by the heels.
‘A recommendation for clemency!’ And this verdict was given in full cognizance of the facts. They knew what awaited the child. Clemency to whom, and for what? You feel as if you are in some sort of whirlwind that’s caught you up and twists and turns you around.
Wait a moment, I’ll tell you one more story.
Once, before the new courts were established (not long before, however), I read of this particular little incident in our newspapers: a mother was holding in her arms her baby of a year or fourteen months. Children of that age are teething; they are ailing and cry and suffer a good deal. It seems the mother lost patience with the baby; perhaps she was very busy, and here she had to carry this child and listen to its heart-rending cries. She got angry.
But can such a small child be beaten for something like this? It’s a pity to strike it, and what can it understand anyway? It’s so helpless and can’t do a thing for itself. And even if you do beat it, it won’t stop crying. Its little tears will just keep pouring out and it will put its arms around you; or else it will start to kiss you and just go on crying. So she didn’t beat the child. A samovar full of boiling water stood in the room. She put the child’s little hand right under the tap and opened it. She held the child’s hand under the boiling water for a good ten seconds.
That’s a fact; I read it. But now imagine if this happened today and the woman was brought to trial. The jury goes out and, ‘after a brief deliberation,’ brings in the verdict: ‘Recommendation for clemency.’
Well, imagine: I invite mothers, at least, to imagine it. And the defence lawyer, no doubt, would probably start twisting the facts:
‘Gentlemen of the jury, this is not what one could call a humane act, but you must consider the case as a whole; you must take into account the circumstances, the environment. This woman is poor; she is the only person working in the household; she puts up with a lot. She had not even the means to hire a nurse for her child. It is only natural that at a moment when, filled with anger caused by the corroding environment, so to say, gentlemen, it is only natural that she should have put the child’s hand under the samovar tap . . ., and so . . .’
Oh, of course I fully appreciate the value of the legal profession; it is an elevated calling and a universally respected one. But one cannot help sometimes looking at it from a particular point of view – a frivolous one, I agree – but involuntary nonetheless: what an unbearable job it must be at times, one thinks. The lawyer dodges, twists himself around like a snake, lies against his own conscience, against his own convictions, against all morality, against all humanity! No, truly, he earns his money.
‘Come, come!’ exclaims suddenly the sarcastic voice we heard before. ‘Why this is all nonsense, nothing but a product of your imagination. A jury never brought in such a verdict. No lawyer ever contorted the facts like that. You made it all up.’
But the wife, hung by her heels like a chicken; the ‘This is my bread, don’t you dare eat it’; the girl trembling on the stove, listening for half an hour to her mother’s cries; and ‘Mamma, why are you choking?’ – isn’t that just the same as the hand under the boiling water? Why it’s almost the same!
‘Backwardness, ignorance, the environment – have some pity,’ the peasant’s lawyer insisted. Yet millions of them do exist and not all hang their wives by their heels! There ought to be some limit here On the other hand, take an educated person: suppose he hangs his wife by her heels? Enough contortions, gentlemen of the bar. Enough of your ‘environment.’
(1873)
The End
