Read R1 - Rusalka for Free Online Page B

makes-believe. Everybody has terrible hidden powers, everybody is going to get back at the fools around him. And then you grow
up
, boy!"
     
    "Everybody says I'm just unlucky," Sasha cried. "But I
wanted
Mischa to fall in a puddle, you understand? I
wanted
us to get through the gates and them not to follow and the bar fell down—"
     
    "So did I
want
it, boy, luck's got nothing to do with it."
     
    "It does with me! My parents' house
burned
, Pyetr Illitch. Mischa fell in a puddle and we got through the gates and they haven't found us. Sometimes it's good and sometimes it's bad, but you can't always tell whether a thing's going to be good or bad when you wish for it, you can say I don't want my father to hit me anymore and your house can burn down—"
     
    The boy was crying.
     
    "That's nonsense," Pyetr said.
     
    Sasha sniffed, turned his face away and rubbed his eyes as they walked.
     
    "Did your uncle tell you that?"
     
    "Our neighbor did. Our house burned down. People say I'm a jinx, uncle Fedya wouldn't let me come near the customers, he said if things ever did go wrong, people would believe it was my fault."
     
    "Kind of him."
     
    "But it's not just bad luck! Things happen that I
want
."
     
    "So why don't you want to be tsar?"
     
    Sasha sniffed again, and said nothing to that.
     
    "So don't say things happen that you want," Pyetr said.
     
    "You can't say how it could happen. If you wish for things like that, the tsar might die, there might be a war. I don't wish for things like that. I don't even want to think about things like that!"
     
    "Large thoughts. What
do
you wish for, boy?"
     
    "I don't."
     
    "Don't make wishes? Wish we were out of this, if you believe it'll work."
     
    "You don't understand. You can't wish for things like that. If we were dead we'd be out of this. It can come true that way. You have to think of something that hasn't got any harm in it, and even then you don't know if you've thought of everything—"
     
    "So you try not to wish for anything, you try not to want anything. That's really hell, Sasha Vasilyevitch. That's
hell
you live in."
     
    Sasha wiped his nose.
     
    Pyetr was amazed at his own stupidity, to be betrayed by everyone he knew, and find himself doing it all over again, believing the boy with a conviction and a trust he had never placed in anyone so much as now—seeing he had lately had his own delusions, chased his own moonbeams—which had, whatever else, at least been pleasant while they lasted.
     
    Not Sasha's.
     
    Poor crazed lad, he thought. The boy's not altogether sane. At least they've not encouraged him to be.
     
    "You don't go at things the right way, boy. You've been wishing for things
likely
to happen. What you do, you wish for the tsar himself to ride along and recognize us both for the honest, upstanding sort we are, and make us rich and happy. Wish for us both to marry tsarevnas and die at a hundred and twenty, rich as lords and surrounded by great-grandchildren—"
     
    "It doesn't work that way."
     
    "You're too honest, Sasha Vasilyevitch. You should learn to laugh. That's your trouble. You're too serious." He clapped Sasha on the shoulder as they walked—which was a very good thing, because he turned his ankle on a rock and depended on that hold quite suddenly.
     
    "Pyetr!"
     
    He got his feet under him again, with Sasha's help. "Joke," he said.
     
    But it had hurt. He walked a few more steps, Sasha never letting him go.
     
    "I think I'd better sit down for a while," he said, short of breath. "I've come a long way for a man in my condition. Have pity."
     
    Sasha snatched up standing weeds, gathering dry ones that way, the same way a good stableboy never took hay or straw from the damp ground. He gathered another armload and piled it over Pyetr's arms, Pyetr lying on a mat of more such weeds, against a thorn-bush with tightly-laced branches, the best shelter Sasha could find in this season before leaves were out.
     
    No blankets,