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she! We were sitting in the kitchen in the evening, and she kept asking me how we had lived in the village, and answered her own questions.
    "Poor things, you must have felt pretty lonesome out there, all on your own. Who cooked for you? Petrovna? Petrovna."
    "No, not Petrovna," I said suddenly. "We did our own cooking."
    I shall never forget the look on Aunt Dasha's face when I uttered those words. Her mouth fell open and she shook her head and hiccupped.
    "And we weren't lonely," I added, laughing heartily. "We missed you, though, Aunt Dasha. Why didn't you come to see us?"
    She hugged me.
    "My darling, what's this? You can speak? You're able to speak? And he keeps quiet, pretending, the young rascal! Well, tell me all about it."
    And I told her about the freezing doctor who had knocked at our cottage one night, how we had hidden him for three days and nights, how he had taught me to say "ee", "o" and "yoo" and the word 'ear'

CHAPTER EIGHT
PYOTR SKOVORODNIKOV
    Aunt Dasha said that I had changed a lot since I had begun to speak. I felt this myself too. The previous summer I had shunned the other boys, restrained by a painful sense of my own deficiency. I was morbidly shy, sullen, and very sad. Now I was so different it was hard to believe.
    In two or three months I had caught up with the boys of my own age.
    Pyotr Skovorodnikov, who was twelve, became my best friend. He was a lanky, ginger boy with a will of his own.
    It was at Pyotr's that I saw books for the first time in my life. They were Tales of Derringdo in Previous Wars, Yuri Miloslavsky and A Guide to Letter Writing on the cover of which was a picture of a bewhiskered young man in a red shirt with a pen in his hand, and above him, in a pale-blue oval frame, young woman.
    It was over this Guide to Letter Writing which we read together, that we became friends. There was something mysterious about those different modes of address: "My dear friend", or "Dear Sir". I was reminded of the navigating officer's letter and recited it aloud for the first time.
    We were sitting in Cathedral Gardens. Across the river we could see OUT
    yard and the houses, looking very small, much smaller than they really were.
    There was tiny Aunt Dasha coming out onto her doorstep and sitting down there to clean fish. I could almost see the silvery scales flying about and falling glistening at her feet. And there was Karlusha, the town's madman, always scowling or grinning, walking along the bank and stopping at our gate-to talk to Aunt Dasha, probably.
    I kept looking at them all the time I was reciting the letter. Pyotr listened attentively.
    "Gee, isn't that smashing!" he said. "What a memory. I knew it, too, but I'd forgotten it." Unfortunately, we rarely spent our time together so well. Pyotr was busy; he was employed "selling cigarettes for the Chinese".
    The Chinese, who lived in the Pokrovsky quarter, made cigarettes and employed boys to sell them. I can see one of them as if he were before me now, a man named Li-small, sallow, with a weazened face, but fairly good-natured: he was considered more generous with the "treat" allowance than the other Chinese. This allowance formed our clear wage (later I, too, took up this trade). We were allowed to treat everyone-"Please, have a smoke"-but the customer who was naive enough to accept the invitation always paid cash down for it. This money was ours. The cigarettes were packed in boxes of two hundred and fifty, labelled "Katyk", "Alexander III", and we sold them at the railway station, alongside the trains, and on the boulevards.
    The autumn of 1917 was drawing near, and I should not be telling the truth if I tried to make out that I saw, felt or in the least understood the profound significance of those days for me, for the entire country and the world at large. I saw nothing and understood nothing. I had even forgotten the vague excitement which I had experienced in the spring, when we were living in the country. I simply lived from day to