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tube with two round knobs at the ends, one of them flat and slightly bigger, the other small and deeper. We remembered that Ivan Ivanovich had taken this from his knapsack together with other instruments when he had looked into my ear.
    Where had he gone? Ivan Ivanovich!
    He had vanished, gone without saying a word to anyone!

CHAPTER SIX
FATHER 'S DEATH.
    I REFUSE TO SPEAK
    All through the winter I practised speaking. First thing in the morning, barely awake, I uttered loudly six words which Ivan Ivanovich had instructed me to say every day: "hen", "saddle", "box", "snow", "drink" and
    "Abraham". How difficult it was! And how well, how differently my sister pronounced these words.
    But I kept at it. I repeated them a thousand times a day, like an incantation that was to help me somehow. I even dreamed them. I dreamed of some mysterious Abraham putting a hen in a box or going out of the house in a hat, carrying a saddle on his shoulder.
    My tongue would not obey me, my lips barely stirred. Many a time I felt like hitting Sanya, who could not help laughing at me. In the night I woke up, heavy with misery, feeling that II would never learn to speak and would always remain a freak, as my Mother had once called me. The next moment I was trying to pronounce that word too-"freak". I remember succeeding at last and falling asleep happy.
    The day when, on waking up, I did not utter my six magic words, was one of the saddest in my life.
    Petrovna woke us early that day, which was odd in itself, because it was we who usually went to her in the mornings to light the fire and put on the kettle. She came in, tapping her stick and stopped in front of the icon.
    She stood there for some time, muttering and crossing herself. Then she called to my sister and bade her laght the lamp.
    Years later, a grown-up man, I saw a picture of Baba-Yaga in a fairy-tale book. She was the image of Petrovna-the same bent, bearded figure leaning on a gnarled stick. But Petrovna was a kind Baba-Yaga, and that day
    ... that day she sat down on a bench with a heavy sigh, and I even thought I saw tears rolling down her beard. "Get down, Sanya!" she said. "Come to me."
    I went up to her.
    "You're a big boy now, Sanya," she went on, patting me on the head.
    "Yesterday a letter came from your mother saying that Ivan is ill."
    She wept.
    "He was taken very bad in prison. His head and legs have swollen up.
    She writes that she doesn't know whether he's still alive or not." My sister started crying.
    "Ah well, it's God's will," Petrovna said. "God's will," she repeated with angry vehemence and looked up at the icon again.
    She had only told us that Father had fallen ill, but that evening, in church, I realised that he was dead. Grandma had taken us to church to "pray for his health", as she said.
    Oddly enough, after three months spent in the village, I hardly knew anybody except two or three boys with whom I went: skiing. I never went anywhere because I was ashamed of my handicap. And now, in church, I saw our whole village-a crowd of women and old men, poorly dressed, silent and as cheerless as we were. They stood in darkness; candles were burning only in the front, where thie priest was reading prayers in a long-drawn-out manner.
    Many people were sighing and crossing themselves.
    They were doing this because he was dead, and my sister and I were standing in the darkness of the church because he had died. And we were standing and "praying for his health" because he was dead.
    Petrovna took my sister back with her, and I went home and sat on for a long time without lighting the lamp. The cockroaches, which Grandma had brought to us on purpose-for good luck-rustled on the cold stove. I ate potatoes and wept.
    Dead, and I would never see him again! There they were, carrying him out of the Chambers, out of that room where Mother and I had handed in the petition... I stopped eating and clenched my teeth at the memory of that cold voice and the hand with the long dry