Childhood Boyhood And Youth

On the 12th of August 18 (just three days after my tenth birthday when I had been given such wonderful presents) I was awakened at seven oclock in the morning by Karl Ivanitch slapping the wall close to my head with a fly-flap made of sugar paper and a stick. He did this so roughly that he hit the image of my patron saint suspended to the oaken back of my bed and the dead fly fell down on my curls. I peeped out from under the coverlet steadied the still shaking image with my hand flicked the dead fly on to the floor and gazed at Karl Ivanitch with sleepy wrathful eyes. He in a parti-coloured wadded dressing-gown fastened about the waist with a wide belt of the same material a red knitted cap adorned with a tassel and soft slippers of goat skin went on walking round the walls and taking aim at and slapping flies.Suppose I thought to myself that I am only a small boy yet why should he disturb me? Why does he not go killing flies around Wolodas bed? No; Woloda is older than I and I am the youngest of the family so he torments me. That is what he thinks of all day longhow to tease me. He knows very well that he has woken me up and frightened me but he pretends not to notice it. Disgusting brute! And his dressing-gown and cap and tassel toothey are all of them disgusting.While I was thus inwardly venting my wrath upon Karl Ivanitch he had passed to his own bedstead looked at his watch (which hung suspended in a little shoe sewn with bugles) and deposited the fly-flap on a nail then evidently in the most cheerful mood possible he turned round to us. - Taken from Childhood Boyhood and Youth written by Leo Tolstoy