“Oh, for Heaven’s sake, what are you saying?” cried his mother in the
greatest horror. “Oh, Sami, is it possible?”
Then she lifted Sami gently and continued in a trembling voice:
“Come, sit down beside me and tell me all about it. Is she really dead?
Oh, when did it happen? How did it come so quickly?”
Sami willingly dropped down on a chair beside his mother. But then he
buried his face in his hands and went on sobbing again.
“Oh, I can’t bear it, I must go away, mother, I can’t bear it here any
longer, it is all over!”
“Oh, Sami, where would you go?” said his mother, weeping. “We have
already come over the mountains, where would you go from here?”
“I must go across the water, as far as I possibly can, I can’t stay here
any longer. I cannot, mother,” declared Sami. “I must go across the great
water as far as possible!”
“Oh, not that!” cried Mary Ann. “Don’t be so rash! Wait a little, until
you can think more calmly; it will seem different to you.”
“No, mother, no, I must go away. I am forced to it; I can’t do any
different,” cried Sami, almost wild.
His mother looked at him in terror, but she said nothing more. She seemed
to hear her father saying: “It can’t be helped. He takes it from his
grandfather.” And with a sigh she said:
“It will have to be so.”
Then there sounded from the bundle a strange peeping, exactly as if a
chicken were smothering inside. “What have you put in the bundle, Sami?”
asked the mother, going towards it, to loosen the firmly tied apron.
“That’s so, I had almost forgotten it, mother,” replied Sami, wiping
his eyes, “I have brought the little boy to you, I don’t know what to
do with it.”
“Oh, how could you pack him up so! Yes, yes, you poor little thing,” said
the grandmother soothingly, taking the diminutive Sami out of one
wrapping and then a second and a third.
The father Sami had wrapped the little baby first in its clothes, then in
a shawl, and then in the apron as tight as possible, so that it couldn’t
slip out on the way, and fall on the ground. When little Sami was freed
from the smothering wrappings and could move his arms and legs he fought
with all his limbs in the air and screamed so pitifully that his
grandmother thought it seemed exactly as if he already knew what a great
misfortune had come to him.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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