watched intently, my father's rigid face, as though I expected
something of him; while my mother slowly bowed down to the ground,
slowly rose again, and pressed her fingers firmly to her forehead, her
shoulders, and her chest, as she crossed herself. I had not a single
idea in my head; I was utterly numb, but I felt something terrible was
happening to me.... Death looked me in the face that day and took note
of me.

We moved to Moscow after my father's death for a very simple cause: all
our estate was sold up by auction for debts--that is, absolutely all,
except one little village, the one in which I am at this moment living
out my magnificent existence. I must admit that, in spite of my youth
at the time, I grieved over the sale of our home, or rather, in
reality, I grieved over our garden. Almost my only bright memories are
associated with our garden. It was there that one mild spring evening I
buried my best friend, an old bob-tailed, crook-pawed dog, Trix. It was
there that, hidden in the long grass, I used to eat stolen
apples--sweet, red, Novgorod apples they were. There, too, I saw for
the first time, among the ripe raspberry bushes, the housemaid Klavdia,
who, in spite of her turned-up nose and habit of giggling in her
kerchief, aroused such a tender passion in me that I could hardly
breathe, and stood faint and tongue-tied in her presence; and once at
Easter, when it came to her turn to kiss my seignorial hand, I almost
flung myself at her feet to kiss her down-trodden goat-skin slippers.
My God! Can all that be twenty years ago? It seems not long ago that I
used to ride on my shaggy chestnut pony along the old fence of our
garden, and, standing up in the stirrups, used to pick the two-coloured
poplar leaves. While a man is living he is not conscious of his own
life; it becomes audible to him, like a sound, after the lapse of time.