I had known Pasinkov a very long while, almost from childhood. He had
been brought up at the same private school, kept by a German,
Winterkeller, at which I had spent three years. Yakov's father, a poor
major on the retired list, a very honest man, but a little deranged
mentally, had brought him, when a boy of seven, to this German; had
paid for him for a year in advance, and had then left Moscow and been
lost sight of completely.... From time to time there were dark, strange
rumours about him. Eight years later it was known as a positive fact
that he had been drowned in a flood when crossing the Irtish. What had
taken him to Siberia, God knows. Yakov had no other relations; his
mother had long been dead. He was simply left stranded on
Winterkeller's hands. Yakov had, it is true, a distant relation, a
great-aunt; but she was so poor, that she was afraid at first to go to
her nephew, for fear she should have the care of him thrust upon her.
Her fears turned out to be groundless; the kind-hearted German kept
Yakov with him, let him study with his other pupils, fed him (dessert,
however, was not offered him except on Sundays), and rigged him out in
clothes cut out of the cast-off morning-gowns--usually
snuff-coloured--of his mother, an old Livonian lady, still alert and
active in spite of her great age. Owing to all these circumstances, and
owing generally to Yakov's inferior position in the school, his
schoolfellows treated him in rather a casual fashion, looked down upon
him, and used to call him 'mammy's dressing-gown,' the 'nephew of the
mob-cap' (his aunt invariably wore a very peculiar mob-cap with a bunch
of yellow ribbons sticking straight upright, like a globe artichoke,
upon it), and sometimes the 'son of Yermak' (because his father had,
like that hero, been drowned in the Irtish). But in spite of those
nicknames, in spite of his ridiculous garb, and his absolute
destitution, every one was fond of him, and indeed it was impossible