Chapter 1
The child was born into a wealthy family in the Southwest region, in the dead of night. The young mother lay in a deep stupor, but when the newborn’s first cry, soft and plaintive, echoed in the room, she thrashed about in her bed with closed eyes. Her lips whispered something, and on her pale face, with its soft, almost childlike features, appeared a grimace of impatient suffering, like a spoiled child experiencing an unfamiliar sorrow.
The grandmother leaned her ear to the mother’s quietly whispering lips.
“Why… why is he doing that?” the sick woman asked barely audibly.
The grandmother didn’t understand the question. The child cried out again. A reflection of acute suffering crossed the sick woman’s face, and a large tear slipped from her closed eyes.
“Why, why?” her lips continued to whisper softly.
This time, the grandmother understood the question and calmly replied:
“You’re asking why the child is crying? It’s always like this, calm down.”
But the mother couldn’t calm down. She flinched each time the child cried anew and kept repeating with angry impatience:
“Why… so… so horrible?”
The grandmother heard nothing unusual in the child’s cry and, seeing that the mother was speaking as if in a hazy stupor and likely just delirious, left her and attended to the child.
The young mother fell silent, and only at times did some heavy suffering, unable to break out in movement or words, squeeze large tears from her eyes. They seeped through her thick eyelashes and quietly rolled down her pale, marble-like cheeks.
Perhaps the mother’s heart sensed that along with the newborn child, a dark, inescapable sorrow had come into the world, hovering over the cradle to accompany the new life until the grave.
Or perhaps, it was indeed delirium. Be that as it may, the child was born blind.
II
At first, no one noticed. The boy looked with the same dull, unfocused gaze that all newborns have up to a certain age. Days passed, and the new life was now counted in weeks. His eyes cleared, the hazy film lifted, and his pupils became defined. But the child didn’t turn his head towards the bright ray of light that entered the room with the cheerful chirping of birds and the rustling of the green beech trees swaying by the windows in the dense village garden. The mother, having recovered, was the first to anxiously notice the strange expression on the child’s face, which remained still and somehow unnaturally serious.
The young woman looked at people like a frightened dove, asking:
“Tell me, why is he like this?”
“Like what?” strangers asked indifferently. “He’s no different from other children his age.”
“Look how strangely he’s searching for something with his hands…”
“A child can’t yet coordinate hand movements with visual impressions,” the doctor replied.
“Why does he always look in the same direction?… Is he… is he blind?” A terrible realization suddenly burst from the mother’s chest, and no one could console her.
The doctor took the child in his arms, quickly turned him towards the light, and looked into his eyes. He seemed slightly flustered and, after uttering a few meaningless phrases, left, promising to return in a couple of days.
The mother wept and thrashed like a wounded bird, pressing the child to her chest, while the boy’s eyes continued to gaze with the same unmoving, stern look.
The doctor did indeed return in a couple of days, bringing an ophthalmoscope with him. He lit a candle, moved it closer to and further away from the child’s eye, peered into it, and finally said with a troubled expression:
“Unfortunately, madam, you were not mistaken… The boy is indeed blind, and hopelessly so…”
The mother listened to this news with quiet sorrow.
“I knew it long ago,” she said softly.
III
The family in which the blind boy was born was small. Besides the previously mentioned individuals, it also consisted of the father and “Uncle Maxim,” as he was called by all household members without exception, and even by outsiders. The father resembled a thousand other rural landowners in the Southwest region: he was good-natured, perhaps even kind, looked after his workers well, and dearly loved building and rebuilding mills. This occupation consumed almost all of his time, and thus his voice was heard in the house only at certain, specific hours of the day, coinciding with dinner, breakfast, and other similar events. On these occasions, he would always utter the unchanging phrase: “Are you well, my little dove?” — after which he would sit down at the table and say almost nothing else, perhaps occasionally mentioning something about oak shafts and gears. Understandably, his peaceful and unassuming existence had little impact on his son’s character. Uncle Maxim, however, was of an entirely different sort. Ten years before the events described, Uncle Maxim was known as the most dangerous brawler not only in the vicinity of his estate but even in Kyiv “at the Contracts.” Everyone wondered how such a terrible brother could have emerged in such a respectable family in every sense, as was the family of Pani Popelska, née Yatsenko. No one knew how to properly interact with him or how to please him. He responded to the politeness of the gentry with insolence, and he indulged the peasants’ willfulness and rudeness, to which even the meekest of “szlachta” would certainly have responded with slaps. Finally, to the great joy of all right-thinking people, Uncle Maxim became very angry with the Austrians for some reason and went to Italy: there he joined another brawler and heretic – Garibaldi, who, as the landowners recounted with horror, had become sworn brothers with the devil and held the Pope himself in no regard. Of course, in this way Maxim eternally damned his restless schismatic soul, but “the Contracts” proceeded with fewer scandals, and many noble mothers stopped worrying about the fate of their sons.
The Austrians must also have been deeply angered by Uncle Maxim. From time to time, his name was mentioned in dispatches in “Kurierka”, the landowners’ long-favored newspaper, among the desperate Garibaldian comrades, until one day, from the same “Kurierka”, the gentry learned that Maxim had fallen with his horse on the battlefield. The enraged Austrians, who had evidently long been sharpening their teeth on the inveterate Volynian (who, almost alone, in the opinion of his compatriots, was still upholding Garibaldi), hacked him to pieces like cabbage.
“Maxim ended badly,” the gentry told themselves, attributing this to the special intercession of St. Peter for his vicar. Maxim was considered dead.
It turned out, however, that Austrian sabers had not managed to drive Maxim’s stubborn soul out of him, and it remained, albeit in a severely damaged body. The Garibaldian brawlers carried their worthy comrade out of the fray, took him somewhere to a hospital, and then, a few years later, Maxim unexpectedly appeared at his sister’s house, where he remained.
Now he was no longer interested in duels. His right leg had been completely amputated, so he walked with a crutch, and his left arm was injured and only good for leaning on a stick somehow. And generally, he had become more serious, settled down, and only occasionally did his sharp tongue act as accurately as his saber once did. He stopped going to “the Contracts,” rarely appeared in society, and spent most of his time in his library reading some books about which no one knew anything, except for the assumption that the books were utterly godless. He also wrote something, but since his works never appeared in “Kurierka”, no one attached serious importance to them.
At the time when the new being appeared and began to grow in the village house, silvery streaks of gray were already breaking through Uncle Maxim’s closely cropped hair. His shoulders were raised from constantly leaning on crutches, and his torso had taken on a square shape. His strange appearance, grimly furrowed brows, the sound of his crutches, and the clouds of tobacco smoke with which he constantly surrounded himself, never letting the pipe out of his mouth — all this frightened outsiders, and only those close to the invalid knew that in the mutilated body beat a warm and kind heart, and in the large, square head, covered with bristly, thick hair, an restless thought worked.
But even close people did not know what question this thought was working on at that time. They only saw that Uncle Maxim, surrounded by blue smoke, sometimes sat motionless for hours, with a misty gaze and grimly furrowed thick brows. Meanwhile, the crippled fighter thought that life is a struggle and that there is no place for invalids in it. It occurred to him that he had forever dropped out of the ranks and was now needlessly burdening the baggage train; it seemed to him that he was a knight, unhorsed by life and cast down into the dust. Was it not cowardly to writhe in the dust like a crushed worm; was it not cowardly to cling to the victor’s stirrup, begging for the pitiful remnants of one’s own existence?
While Uncle Maxim coolly and courageously discussed this burning thought, weighing and comparing arguments for and against, a new being, whom fate had destined to come into the world already an invalid, began to flash before his eyes. At first, he paid no attention to the blind child, but then the strange similarity of the boy’s fate to his own interested Uncle Maxim.
“Hmm… yes,” he said thoughtfully one day, glancing sideways at the boy, “this lad is also an invalid. If you put the two of us together, you’d probably get one miserable little human.”
From then on, his gaze rested on the child more and more often.
IV
The child was born blind. Who was to blame for his misfortune? No one! Not only was there no hint of anyone’s “ill will,” but even the very cause of the misfortune was hidden somewhere deep within the mysterious and complex processes of life. Yet, with every glance at the blind boy, the mother’s heart was squeezed with sharp pain. Of course, she suffered in this case as a mother, reflecting her son’s ailment and with a grim premonition of the difficult future that awaited her child; but, besides these feelings, deep in the young woman’s heart also gnawed the awareness that the cause of the misfortune lay as a formidable possibility in those who had given him life… This was enough for the little being with beautiful, but sightless eyes, to become the center of the family, an unconscious despot, with whose slightest whim everything in the house conformed.
It’s unknown what would have become of the boy over time, predisposed to baseless bitterness by his misfortune and in whom everything around him sought to develop egoism, if strange fate and Austrian sabers hadn’t forced Uncle Maxim to settle in the village, in his sister’s family.
The presence of the blind boy in the house gradually and imperceptibly gave the active mind of the mutilated fighter a different direction. He still spent hours smoking his pipe, but in his eyes, instead of deep and dull pain, there was now the thoughtful expression of an interested observer. And the more Uncle Maxim observed, the more often his thick brows furrowed, and the more intensely he puffed on his pipe. Finally, one day he decided to intervene.
“This lad,” he said, blowing ring after ring, “will be much unhappier than I am. It would have been better if he hadn’t been born.”
The young woman lowered her head, and a tear fell onto her work.
“It’s cruel to remind me of this, Max,” she said softly, “to remind me without purpose…”
“I’m only telling the truth,” Maxim replied. “I don’t have a leg or an arm, but I have eyes. The lad has no eyes, and in time he’ll have neither hands, nor legs, nor will…”
“Why then?”
“Understand me, Anna,” Maxim said more gently. “I wouldn’t needlessly tell you cruel things. The boy has a delicate nervous system. He still has every chance to develop his other abilities to such an extent that it could at least partially compensate for his blindness. But for that, he needs exercise, and exercise is only brought about by necessity. Foolish over-protectiveness, eliminating the need for effort from him, kills all his chances for a fuller life.”
The mother was intelligent and therefore managed to overcome the immediate impulse that made her rush headlong at every plaintive cry of the child. A few months after this conversation, the boy crawled freely and quickly through the rooms, sharpening his hearing to every sound and, with an unusual liveliness not seen in other children, felt every object that fell into his hands.
V
He soon learned to recognize his mother by her gait, the rustle of her dress, and other elusive signs, accessible only to him. No matter how many people were in the room or how they moved, he always unerringly went in the direction where she sat. When she unexpectedly picked him up, he immediately knew he was with his mother. But when others picked him up, he quickly began to feel the person’s face with his little hands and soon recognized the nanny, Uncle Maxim, and his father. However, if he encountered a stranger, the movements of his small hands became slower: the boy cautiously and intently ran them over the unfamiliar face, and his features expressed strained attention; it was as if he was “looking closely” with his fingertips.
By nature, he was a very lively and active child, but as months passed, his blindness increasingly left its mark on his developing temperament. His lively movements gradually faded; he started to retreat into secluded corners and would sit there quietly for hours, his features frozen, as if listening intently to something. When the room was quiet and the variety of sounds didn’t distract him, the child seemed to be thinking about something with a puzzled and surprised expression on his beautiful, unnaturally serious face.
Uncle Maxim guessed correctly: the boy’s delicate and rich nervous system was asserting itself, and through heightened sensitivity to touch and hearing, it seemed to strive to restore the fullness of his perceptions to a certain extent. Everyone was amazed by the striking subtlety of his touch. At times, it even seemed he was not oblivious to the sensation of colors; when brightly colored scraps of fabric fell into his hands, he would linger on them longer with his sensitive fingers, and an expression of astonishing attention would cross his face. However, as time went on, it became increasingly clear that the development of his perceptiveness was mainly leaning towards hearing.
Soon, he had perfectly learned the rooms by their sounds: he distinguished the footsteps of household members, the creak of the chair under his invalid uncle, the dry, measured rustle of thread in his mother’s hands, and the steady ticking of the wall clock. Sometimes, crawling along the wall, he would keenly listen to a faint rustle, inaudible to others, and, raising his hand, would reach for a fly scurrying on the wallpaper. When the startled insect took off and flew away, an expression of painful bewilderment appeared on the blind boy’s face. He couldn’t account for the mysterious disappearance of the fly. But later, even in such cases, his face retained an expression of thoughtful attention; he would turn his head in the direction where the fly had flown – his keen hearing caught the faint hum of its wings in the air.
The world, sparkling, moving, and sounding around him, penetrated the blind boy’s small head primarily in the form of sounds, and his perceptions took shape in these forms. A peculiar attentiveness to sounds would settle on his face: his lower jaw would subtly drop forward on his thin, elongated neck. His eyebrows became unusually mobile, and his beautiful, yet unmoving eyes gave the blind boy’s face a stern yet touching imprint.
VI
The third winter of his life was nearing its end. Outside, the snow was already melting, spring streams chimed, and with that, the boy’s health, which had been faltering all winter and thus kept him indoors, began to improve.
The second window frames were removed, and spring burst into the room with double force. The laughing spring sun looked into the light-filled windows, the still-bare branches of the beech trees swayed, and in the distance, dark fields stretched out, where patches of melting snow lay in some places, and in others, young grass was just breaking through with a barely noticeable green. Everyone breathed more freely and better; spring was reflected in everyone as a surge of renewed and vigorous life force.
For the blind boy, it burst into the room only with its hurried sounds. He heard how the spring waters rushed, as if chasing each other, leaping over stones, cutting deep into the softened earth; the beech branches whispered outside the windows, clashing and rattling with light taps against the glass. And the hurried spring drip from the icicles hanging on the roof, caught by the morning frost and now warmed by the sun, tapped with a thousand ringing beats. These sounds fell into the room like bright and resonant pebbles, quickly tapping out a shimmering cascade. From time to time, through this ringing and noise, the calls of cranes smoothly drifted from a distant height and gradually died away, as if gently melting into the air.
On the boy’s face, this awakening of nature manifested as a painful bewilderment. He strained his eyebrows, stretched his neck, listened intently, and then, as if alarmed by the incomprehensible commotion of sounds, suddenly reached out, searching for his mother, and rushed to her, pressing himself tightly against her chest.
“What’s wrong with him?” the mother asked herself and others.
Uncle Maxim looked intently at the boy’s face but couldn’t explain his inexplicable anxiety.
“He… can’t understand,” the mother guessed, catching an expression of painful bewilderment and questioning on her son’s face.
Indeed, the child was alarmed and restless: he would either catch new sounds or be surprised that the old ones, to which he had begun to grow accustomed, suddenly fell silent and disappeared somewhere.
VII
The chaos of spring’s disarray subsided. Under the sun’s warm rays, nature’s work increasingly settled into its routine; life seemed to intensify, its forward momentum quickening, like the accelerating speed of a train. Young grass greened the meadows, and the scent of birch buds filled the air.
They decided to take the boy out to the field, to the bank of the nearby river.
His mother led him by the hand. Beside them, Uncle Maxim walked on his crutches, and they all headed towards a riverside hillock, which the sun and wind had sufficiently dried. It was green with thick turf and offered a view of the distant expanse.
The bright day struck the eyes of the mother and Maxim. Sunlight warmed their faces, and the spring wind, as if flapping invisible wings, dispelled this warmth, replacing it with a fresh coolness. Something intoxicatingly delightful, even languid, drifted in the air.
The mother felt the child’s small hand clench tightly in hers, but the intoxicating breath of spring made her less sensitive to this manifestation of childish anxiety. She breathed deeply and walked forward without turning; if she had, she would have seen a strange expression on the boy’s face. He turned his open eyes towards the sun with silent wonder. His lips parted; he inhaled the air in quick gulps, like a fish taken out of water; an expression of painful rapture occasionally broke through his helplessly bewildered little face, running across it in nervous spasms, illuminating it for a moment, only to be immediately replaced by an expression of wonder bordering on fright and bewildered questioning. Only his eyes retained that same calm and fixed, sightless gaze.
Reaching the hillock, all three sat down. When the mother lifted the boy from the ground to seat him more comfortably, he again clutched convulsively at her dress; it seemed he feared he would fall somewhere, as if not feeling the ground beneath him. But the mother, this time too, did not notice the anxious movement, because her eyes and attention were captivated by the marvelous spring scene.
It was noon. The sun rolled quietly across the blue sky. From the hill where they sat, the widely flooded river was visible. It had already carried away its ice floes, and only occasionally did the last of them float and melt here and there on its surface, standing out as white specks. On the floodplains, water stood in wide lagoons; white clouds, reflecting in them along with the overturned azure vault, floated quietly in the depths and disappeared, as if they too were melting, like the ice floes. At times, a light ripple ran from the wind, sparkling in the sun. Further beyond the river, the dark, steamed fields stretched, shimmering with a swirling, wavering haze that obscured distant straw-roofed huts and the vaguely outlined blue strip of forest. The earth seemed to sigh, and something rose from it to the sky, like clouds of sacrificial incense.
Nature stretched all around, like a grand temple prepared for a celebration. But for the blind boy, it was only an immense darkness, unusually agitated around him, stirring, rumbling, and ringing, reaching out to him, touching his soul from all sides with yet unknown, unusual impressions, from whose influx the child’s heart painfully throbbed.
From his very first steps, when the rays of the warm day struck his face, warming his tender skin, he instinctively turned his sightless eyes towards the sun, as if feeling towards what center everything around him gravitated. For him, there was neither this transparent distance, nor the azure vault, nor the widely spread horizon. He only felt something material, caressing and warm, touching his face with a gentle, warming touch. Then something cool and light, though less light than the warmth of the sun’s rays, lifted this languor from his face and swept over him with a sensation of fresh coolness. In the rooms, the boy was used to moving freely, feeling emptiness around him. Here, however, he was enveloped by strangely alternating waves, sometimes gently caressing, sometimes tickling and intoxicating. The warm touches of the sun were quickly fanned away by something, and a current of wind, ringing in his ears, encompassing his face, temples, head all the way to the back of his neck, stretched around him, as if trying to pick up the boy, to carry him somewhere into a space he could not see, carrying away his consciousness, inducing a forgetful languor. It was then that the boy’s hand clutched his mother’s hand more tightly, and his heart sank, seeming about to stop beating altogether.
When he was seated, he seemed to calm down somewhat. Now, despite the strange sensation that overwhelmed his entire being, he still began to distinguish individual sounds. Dark, caressing waves continued to rush irresistibly, and it seemed to him that they penetrated inside his body, as the beats of his stirred blood rose and fell with the beats of these waves. But now they brought with them either the bright trill of a lark, or the quiet rustle of a blooming birch, or the barely audible splashes of the river. A swallow whistled with a light wing, drawing whimsical circles nearby, midges buzzed, and above it all, a long and mournful cry of a ploughman in the plain, urging his oxen over the freshly ploughed strip, occasionally drifted.
But the boy could not grasp these sounds in their entirety, could not connect them, arrange them into perspective. They seemed to fall, penetrating his dark little head, one after another, sometimes quiet, indistinct, sometimes loud, bright, deafening. At times, they crowded together simultaneously, unpleasantly mixing into an incomprehensible disharmony. And the wind from the field continued to whistle in his ears, and it seemed to the boy that the waves were running faster and their rumble obscured all other sounds, which now came from somewhere else, like a memory of yesterday. And as the sounds dimmed, a sensation of tickling languor poured into the boy’s chest. His face twitched with rhythmic undulations; his eyes closed then opened again, his eyebrows moved anxiously, and in all his features, a question emerged, a heavy effort of thought and imagination. His consciousness, not yet strengthened and overwhelmed with new sensations, began to falter: it still struggled with the impressions flooding in from all sides, striving to hold its ground amidst them, to merge them into a whole and thus master them, conquer them. But the task was beyond the dark brain of the child, who lacked visual representations for this work.
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