Stories Read online

  “They’ll throw Pavel Ivanych into the water now…” says the soldier with the sling. “In a sack and into the water.”

  “Yes. That’s how it’s done.”

  “It’s better to lie in the ground at home. At least your mother can come to the grave and cry a little.”

  “That’s a fact.”

  There is a smell of dung and hay. Oxen are standing along the rail, their heads hanging. One, two, three … eight head! And here is a little horse. Gusev reaches out to stroke it, but it tosses its head, bares its teeth, and tries to bite his sleeve.

  “Cur-r-rse you …” Gusev says angrily.

  The two of them, he and the soldier, quietly make their way to the bow, then stand side by side and silently look up, then down. Above them is the deep sky, bright stars, peace and quiet—exactly as at home in the village—but below is darkness and disorder. The high waves roar for no known reason. Each wave, whichever you look at, tries to rise higher than all, and pushes and drives out the last; and noisily sweeping towards it, its white mane gleaming, comes a third just as fierce and hideous.

  The sea has no sense or pity. If the ship were smaller and not made of thick iron, the waves would break it up without mercy and devour all the people, saints and sinners alike. The ship, too, has a senseless and cruel expression. This beaked monster pushes on and cuts through millions of waves as it goes; it fears neither darkness, nor wind, nor space, nor solitude, it cares about nothing, and if the ocean had its own people, this monster would also crush them, saints and sinners alike.

  “Where are we now?” asks Gusev.

  “I don’t know. Must be the ocean.”

  “There’s no land to be seen …”

  “Land, hah! They say it’ll be seven days before we see land.”

  The two soldiers look at the white foam gleaming with phosphorus, and think silently. Gusev is the first to break the silence.

  “There’s nothing frightening,” he says. “It’s just eerie, like sitting in a dark forest, but if, say, they lowered a boat now, and the officer told me to go fifty miles out to sea and start fishing—I’d go. Or say a Christian fell into the water now—I’d fall in after him. I wouldn’t go saving a German4 or a Chink, but I’d go in after a Christian.”

  “But isn’t it frightening to die?”

  “It is. I’m sorry about our farm. My brother at home, you know, he’s not a steady man: he gets drunk, beats his wife for nothing, doesn’t honor his parents. Without me it’ll all be lost, and my father and the old woman, for all I know, may have to go begging. Anyhow, brother, my legs won’t hold me up, and it’s stifling here … Let’s go to bed.”

  V

  Gusev goes back to the sick bay and lies down on his cot. As before he suffers from some vague yearning, and he cannot figure out what he wants. There is a weight on his chest, a throbbing in his head, his mouth is so dry that he can hardly move his tongue. He dozes and mutters and, tormented by nightmares, coughing, and stuffiness, falls fast asleep towards morning. He dreams that they have just taken the bread out of the oven in the barracks, and he gets into the oven and has a steambath, lashing himself with birch branches. He sleeps for two days, and on the third day two sailors come from topside and carry him out of the sick bay.

  He is sewn up in canvas and, to weight him down, two iron bars are put in with him. Sewn up in canvas, he comes to resemble a carrot or a black radish, wide at the head, narrow towards the foot … Before sunset he is taken out on deck and laid on a plank; one end of the plank rests on the rail, the other on a box placed on a stool. Discharged soldiers and the ship’s crew stand around him with their hats off.

  “Blessed is our God,” the priest begins, “always, now, and ever, and unto ages of ages!”

  “Amen!” sing three sailors.

  The discharged soldiers and the crew cross themselves and keep looking askance at the waves. It is strange that a man has been sewn up in canvas and will presently be thrown into the waves. Can it really happen to anyone?

  The priest sprinkles Gusev with some soil and bows. They sing “Memory Eternal.”5

  The man on watch lifts the end of the plank. Gusev slides off, falls head down, then turns over in the air and—splash! Foam covers him, and for a moment he seems to be wrapped in lace, but the moment passes—and he disappears into the waves.

  He goes quickly towards the bottom. Will he get there? The bottom, they say, is three miles down. After some ten or twelve fathoms he begins to go slower and slower, sways rhythmically, as if pondering, and, borne by the current, drifts more quickly sideways than down.

  But now he meets on his way a school of little fish, which are known as pilot fish. Seeing a dark body, the fish stop stock-still, and suddenly they all turn around at once and disappear. In less than a minute, swift as arrows, they rush back at Gusev, piercing the water in zigzags around him …

  After that another dark body appears. It is a shark. Grandly and casually, as if not noticing Gusev, it swims under him, and he comes down on its back, then it turns belly up, basking in the warm, transparent water, and lazily opens its jaws with their twin rows of teeth. The pilot fish are delighted; they have stopped and wait to see what will happen. After playing with the body, the shark casually puts its jaws under it, touches it warily with its teeth, and the canvas rips open the whole length of the body, from head to foot; one of the bars falls out and, frightening the pilot fish, striking the shark on the side, quickly goes to the bottom.

  And up above just then, on the side where the sun goes down, clouds are massing; one cloud resembles a triumphal arch, another a lion, a third a pair of scissors … A broad green shaft comes from behind the clouds and stretches to the very middle of the sky; shortly afterwards a violet shaft lies next to it, then a golden one, then a pink one … The sky turns a soft lilac. Seeing this magnificent, enchanting sky, the ocean frowns at first, but soon itself takes on such tender, joyful, passionate colors as human tongue can hardly name.

  DECEMBER 1890

  PEASANT WOMEN

  In the village of Raibuzh, just across the street from the church, stands a two-storied house with a stone foundation and an iron roof The owner, Filipp Ivanovich Kashin, nicknamed Dyudya, lives on the lower floor with his family, and on the upper floor, which is usually very hot in summer and very cold in winter, he lodges passing officials, merchants, and landowners. Dyudya rents out plots of land, runs a pothouse on the high road, trades in tar, honey, cattle, and sable, and has already saved up some eight thousand, which he has sitting in the bank in town.

  His elder son Fyodor works as a senior mechanic in a factory and, as the peasants say of him, has risen so high in the world that nobody can touch him. Fyodor’s wife Sofya, a homely and sickly woman, lives in her father-in-law’s house, weeps all the time, and goes to the clinic for treatment every Sunday. Dyudya’s second son, hunchbacked Alyoshka, lives in his father’s house. He was recently married to Varvara, who was taken from a poor family: she is a young woman, beautiful, healthy, and smartly dressed. When officials and merchants stop there, they always ask that the samovar be served and the beds be made by no one but Varvara.

  On one June evening, when the sun was setting and the air smelled of hay, warm manure, and fresh milk, a simple cart drove into Dyudya’s yard carrying three people: a man of about thirty in a cotton suit, beside him a seven- or eight-year-old boy in a long black frock coat with big bone buttons, and a young fellow in a red shirt as driver.

  The fellow unharnessed the horses and went to walk them up and down in the street, and the traveler washed, prayed facing the church, then spread out a rug by the cart and sat down with the boy to have supper; he ate unhurriedly, gravely, and Dyudya, who had seen many travelers in his day, recognized him by his manners as a practical and serious man who knew his own worth.

  Dyudya sat on the porch in his waistcoat, without a hat, and waited for the traveler to speak. He was used to travelers telling all sorts of stories in the evening before bed, and he l
iked it. His old wife Afanasyevna and his daughter-in-law Sofya were milking the cows in the shed; the other daughter-in-law, Varvara, was sitting at an open window upstairs eating sunflower seeds.

  “The boy would be your son, then?” Dyudya asked the traveler.

  “No, he’s adopted, an orphan. I took him in for the saving of my soul.”

  They fell to talking. The traveler turned out to be a garrulous and eloquent man, and Dyudya learned from the conversation that he was a tradesman from town, a house-owner, that his name was Matvei Savvich, that he was now on his way to look at the orchards he rented from German colonists, and that the boy’s name was Kuzka. It was a hot and stuffy evening, and nobody felt like sleeping. When darkness came and pale stars twinkled here and there in the sky, Matvei Savvich began to tell where he got his Kuzka from. Afanasyevna and Sofya stood a little way off and listened. And Kuzka went to the gate.

  “This, grandpa, is a detailed story in the extreme,” Matvei Savvich began, “and if I was to tell you everything as it was, the night wouldn’t be long enough. About ten years ago in our street, just next to my place, in a little house that’s now a candle factory and a creamery, there lived an old widow named Marfa Simonovna Kapluntsev, and she had two sons: one worked as a conductor for the railway, and the other, Vasya, the same age as me, lived with his mother. The late old man Kapluntsev kept horses, five pair, and sent carters around town; his widow kept up the business and ordered the carters about no worse than the deceased, so that some days she cleared up to five roubles in profit. And the boy, too, made a bit of money. He bred pedigree pigeons and sold them to fanciers; he used to spend all his time on the roof, throwing a broom up and whistling, and his tumbler pigeons would fly up into the sky, but it wasn’t high enough, he wanted them to fly still higher. He caught finches and starlings, made cages … A trifling thing, but the trifles would add up to ten roubles a month. Well, sir, after a while the old woman lost the use of her legs and took to her bed. Owing to that fact, the house was left without a mistress, and that’s the same as a man without an eye. The old woman stirred herself and decided to get her Vasya married. The matchmaker was sent for, this and that, women’s talk, and our Vasya went to look himself up a bride. He picked out the widow Samokhvalikha’s Mashenka. Without more ado the couple got blessed and the whole thing was put together in a week. The girl was young, about seventeen, short, scanty, but with a fair and pleasant face, and with all the qualities, like a young lady; and the dowry wasn’t bad either—five hundred roubles in cash, a cow, linen … And three days after the wedding, as if her heart could sense it, the old woman departed for the heavenly Jerusalem, where there’s no sickness or sighing.1 The young couple paid her their respects and began life together. They lived in splendid fashion for about half a year, then suddenly a new woe. Misfortunes never come singly: Vasya was summoned to the office to draw lots. They took him, the dear heart, as a soldier and didn’t even shorten his term. They shaved his head and drove him to the Kingdom of Poland. It was God’s will, nothing to be done. He was all right as he took leave of his wife in the yard, but when he gave a last look at the hayloft with his pigeons, he dissolved in floods of tears. It was a pity to see. At first, so as not to be bored, Mashenka took in her mother; the mother stayed till this Kuzka was born, then went to Oboyan to her other daughter, also married, and Mashenka was left alone with the baby. Five carters, all drunken folk, mischievous; horses, wagons, then a fence would collapse, or the soot would catch fire in the chimney—not a woman’s business, so she started turning to me, in neighborly fashion, for every trifle. Well, I’d come and take care of it, give her advice … You know, there was nothing for it but to go in, have some tea, talk a bit. I was a young man, of a mental sort, liked to talk about various subjects, and she was educated and polite, too. She dressed neatly, went about with a parasol in summer. I’d start on divinity or politics with her, and she’d be flattered and treat me to tea and preserves … In short, not to embroider on it, I’ll tell you, grandpa, that before a year was out the unclean spirit, the enemy of the human race, got me worked up. I began to notice that if I didn’t go to her one day, I’d feel out of sorts, bored. And I kept inventing some reason to go to her. ‘It’s time you put your winter sashes in,’ I’d say, and I’d spend the whole day loitering around her place, putting the sashes in and doing it so as there were two sashes left for the next day. ‘I must count up Vasya’s pigeons, to make sure none gets lost,’ and the like. I kept talking with her over the fence, and in the end, to save going the long way round, I made a little gate in it. There’s a lot of evil and all sorts of vileness in this world from the female sex. Not only us sinners but even holy men have been led astray. Mashenka didn’t do anything to turn me away from her. Instead of remembering her husband and minding herself, she fell in love with me. I began to notice that she was bored, too, and kept walking near the fence and looking into my yard through the cracks. The brains in my head whirled with fantasy. On Thursday in Holy Week,2 early, at daybreak, I went to the market, and as I passed her gate, the unclean one was right there. I looked—her gate had a little lattice at the top—and she was already up and standing in the middle of the yard feeding the ducks. I couldn’t help myself and called to her. She came up and looked at me through the lattice. Fair little face, tender eyes, still sleepy … I liked her very much and began paying her compliments, as if we weren’t by the gate but at a birthday party, and she blushed, laughed, and kept looking right into my eyes without blinking. I lost my mind and started explaining my amorous feelings to her … She opened the gate and let me in, and from that morning on we began to live as husband and wife.”

  Hunchbacked Alyoshka came into the yard from outside and, breathless, not looking at anyone, ran into the house; a moment later he came running out with an accordion, the copper money jingling in his pocket, and disappeared through the gate, cracking sunflower seeds as he ran.

  “And who’s that one?” asked Matvei Savvich.

  “Our son, Alexei,” Dyudya answered. “Gone carousing, the scoundrel. God wronged him with a hump, so we don’t ask too much.”

  “And he keeps on carousing, carousing with the boys,” Afanasyevna sighed. “We married him off before Lent, thinking he’d get better, but he got even worse.”

  “Useless. Just gave a stranger girl a stroke of good luck for nothing,” said Dyudya.

  Somewhere behind the church they started singing a magnificent, melancholy song. It was impossible to make out the words, only the voices could be heard: two tenors and a bass. Everyone began to listen, and it became very quiet in the yard … Two voices suddenly broke off the song with a peal of laughter, while the third, a tenor, went on singing and struck such a high note that everyone inadvertently looked up, as if the voice in its high pitch had reached to the very sky. Varvara came out of the house and, shielding her eyes with her hand as if from the sun, looked at the church.

  “It’s the priest’s sons and the schoolmaster,” she said.

  Again the three voices sang together. Matvei Savvich sighed and went on.

  “That’s how it was, grandpa. About two years later a letter came from Vasya in Warsaw. He wrote that his superiors were sending him home to recuperate. He was sick. By then I’d gotten that silliness out of my head, and a good match had been found for me, and I only didn’t know how to loose myself from this little love of mine. Every day I meant to talk with Mashenka, only I didn’t know how to approach her so as to avoid any female screaming. The letter untied my hands. Mashenka and I read it, she turned white as snow, and I said: ‘Thank God, now you’ll be your husband’s wife again.’ And she to me: ‘I won’t live with him.’ ‘But he’s your husband, isn’t he?’ I say. ‘It’s easy for you … I never loved him and married him against my will. My mother told me to.’ ‘Don’t go dodging, foolish woman,’ I say, ‘tell me: were you married in church or not?’ ‘I was,’ she says, ‘but I love you and will live with you till I die. Let people laugh … I don’t care…’
‘You’re pious,’ I say, ‘you read the Scriptures, and what does it say there?’”

  “You married a husband, you must live with your husband,” said Dyudya.

  “Husband and wife are one flesh. ‘You and I have sinned,’ I say, ‘and enough, we should be ashamed and fear God. Let’s confess to Vasya,’ I say, ‘he’s a peaceable man, timid—he won’t kill us. And it’s better,’ I say, ‘to suffer torment in this world from your lawful husband than gnash your teeth at the Last Judgment.’ The woman won’t hear any of it, she stands her ground, and that’s that. ‘I love you,’ is all she says! Vasya came on Saturday, on the eve of the Trinity,3 early in the morning. I could see everything through the fence: he ran into the house, came out a moment later with Kuzka in his arms, laughing and crying and kissing Kuzka, and looking at the hayloft—he’s sorry to leave Kuzka, but wants to see his pigeons. A tender man he was, a sensitive one. The day passed well, quietly and modestly. The bells rang for the evening vigil, and I think: tomorrow’s the Trinity, why don’t they decorate the gates and fence with greenery?4 Something’s wrong, I think. I went over to them. I see him sitting on the floor in the middle of the room, his eyes wandering like a drunk man’s, tears running down his cheeks, his hands shaking; he’s taking pretzels, beads, gingerbread, and other treats from his bundle and scattering them around the floor. Kuzka—he was three years old then—is crawling around, chewing gingerbread, and Mashenka is standing by the stove, pale, trembling all over, and murmuring: ‘I’m not your wife, I don’t want to live with you’—and all sorts of foolishness. I bow down at Vasya’s feet and say: ‘We’re guilty before you, Vassily Maximych, forgive us for Christ’s sake!’ Then I got up and said this to Mashenka: ‘You, Marya Semyonovna,’ I say, ‘should wash Vassily Maximych’s feet now and drink the dirty water. And be his obedient wife, and pray to God for me, that He in His mercy,’ I say, ‘may forgive me my trespass.’ I was as if inspired by an angel in heaven, so I admonished her, and I spoke with such feeling that I was even moved to tears. A couple of days later, Vasya comes to me. ‘I forgive you, Matyusha, you and my wife, God be with you,’ he says. ‘She’s a soldier’s wife, it’s women’s business, she’s young, it’s hard for her to mind herself. She’s not the first, and she won’t be the last. Only,’ he says, ‘I ask you to live as if there was nothing between you and never show anything, and I’ll try to please her in everything,’ he says, ‘so she’ll come to love me again.’ He gave me his hand, had some tea, and left feeling cheerful. Well, I thought, thank God, and I was glad that everything had come out so well. But as soon as Vasya left, Mashenka came. A real punishment! She hangs on my neck, cries and begs: ‘For God’s sake, don’t abandon me, I can’t live without you.’”