Stories Page 4

  “What’s there for me to do at your place?”

  “There’s nothing to do there, of course, just … anyway there’s the household … Things to be seen to … You’re the master … Look at you, shot a grouse, Yegor Vlasych! Why don’t you sit down and rest …”

  As she says all this, Pelageya laughs like a fool and looks up at Yegor’s face … Her own face breathes happiness …

  “Sit down? Why not …” Yegor says in an indifferent tone and picks a spot between two pine saplings. “Why are you standing? Sit down, too!”

  Pelageya sits down a bit further away in a patch of sun and, ashamed of her joy, covers her smiling mouth with her hand. Two minutes pass in silence.

  “If only you’d come one little time,” Pelageya says softly.

  “What for?” sighs Yegor, taking off his cap and wiping his red forehead with his sleeve. “There’s no need. To stop by for an hour or two—dally around, get you stirred up—and my soul can’t stand living all the time in the village … You know I’m a spoiled man … I want there to be a bed, and good tea, and delicate conversation … I want to have all the degrees, and in the village there you’ve got poverty, soot … I couldn’t even live there a day. Suppose they issued a decree that I absolutely had to live with you, I’d either burn down the cottage or lay hands on myself. From early on I’ve been spoiled like this, there’s no help for it.”

  “Where do you live now?”

  “At the squire Dmitri Ivanych’s, as a hunter. I furnish game for his table, but it’s more like … he keeps me because he’s pleased to.”

  “It’s not a dignified thing to do, Yegor Vlasych … For people it’s just toying, but for you it’s like a trade … a real occupation …”

  “You don’t understand, stupid,” says Yegor, dreamily looking at the sky. “In all your born days you’ve never understood and never will understand what kind of a man I am … To you, I’m a crazy, lost man, but for somebody who understands, I’m the best shot in the whole district. The gentlemen feel it and even printed something about me in a magazine. Nobody can match me in the line of hunting … And if I scorn your village occupations, it’s not because I’m spoiled or proud. Right from infancy, you know, I’ve never known any occupation but guns and dogs. Take away my gun, I’ll get a fishing pole, take away the fishing pole, I’ll hunt bare-handed. Well, and I also did some horse-trading, roamed around the fairs whenever I had some money, and you know yourself, if any peasant gets in with hunters or horse traders, it’s good-bye to the plough. Once a free spirit settles in a man, there’s no getting it out of him. It’s like when a squire goes to the actors or into some other kind of artistry, then for him there’s no being an official or a landowner. You’re a woman, you don’t understand, and it takes understanding.”

  “I understand, Yegor Vlasych.”

  “Meaning you don’t understand, since you’re about to cry …”

  “I … I’m not crying …” says Pelageya, turning away. “It’s a sin, Yegor Vlasych! You could spend at least one little day with me, poor woman. It’s twelve years since I married you, and … and never once was there any love between us! … I … I’m not crying.

  “Love …” Yegor mutters, scratching his arm. “There can’t be any love. It’s just in name that we’re man and wife, but is it really so? For you I’m a wild man, and for me you’re a simple woman, with no understanding. Do we make a couple? I’m free, spoiled, loose, and you’re a barefoot farm worker, you live in dirt, you never straighten your back. I think like this about myself, that I’m first in the line of hunting, but you look at me with pity … What kind of couple are we?”

  “But we were married in church, Yegor Vlasych!” Pelageya sobs.

  “Not freely… Did you forget? You can thank Count Sergei Pavlych … and yourself. The count was envious that I was a better shot than he was, kept me drunk for a whole month, and a drunk man can not only be married off but can even be seduced into a different faith. In revenge he up and married me to you … A huntsman to a cow girl. You could see I was drunk, why did you marry me? You’re not a serf, you could have told him no! Of course, a cow girl’s lucky to marry a huntsman, but we need to be reasonable. Well, so now you can suffer and cry. It’s a joke for the count, but you cry … beat your head on the wall …”

  Silence ensues. Three wild ducks fly over the clearing. Yegor looks at them and follows them with his eyes until they turn into three barely visible specks and go down far beyond the forest.

  “How do you live?” he asks, shifting his eyes from the ducks to Pelageya.

  “I go out to work now, and in winter I take a baby from the orphanage and nurse him with a bottle. They give me a rouble and a half a month.” So-o …

  Again silence. From the harvested rows comes a soft song, which breaks off at the very beginning. It is too hot for singing …

  “They say you put up a new cottage for Akulina,” says Pelageya.

  Yegor is silent.

  “It means she’s after your own heart …”

  “That’s just your luck, your fate!” says the hunter, stretching. “Bear with it, orphan. But, anyhow, good-bye, we’ve talked too much … I’ve got to make it to Boltovo by evening …”

  Yegor gets up, stretches, shoulders his gun. Pelageya stands up.

  “And when will you come to the village?” she asks softly.

  “No point. I’ll never come sober, and when I’m drunk there’s not much profit for you. I get angry when I’m drunk … Good-bye!”

  “Good-bye, Yegor Vlasych …”

  Yegor puts his cap on the back of his head and, clucking for his dog, continues on his way. Pelageya stays where she is and looks at his back … She sees his moving shoulder blades, his dashing head, his lazy, nonchalant stride, and her eyes fill with sadness and a tender caress … Her gaze moves over the tall, skinny figure of her husband and caresses and fondles it … He seems to feel this gaze, stops, and looks back … He is silent, but Pelageya can see from his face, from his raised shoulders, that he wants to say something to her. She timidly goes up to him and looks at him with imploring eyes.

  “For you!” he says, turning away

  He hands her a worn rouble and quickly walks off.

  “Good-bye, Yegor Vlasych!” she says, mechanically accepting the rouble.

  He walks down the long road straight as a stretched-out belt … She stands pale, motionless as a statue, and catches his every step with her eyes. But now the red color of his shirt merges with the dark color of his trousers, his steps can no longer be seen, the dog is indistinguishable from his boots. Only his visored cap can still be seen, but … suddenly Yegor turns sharply to the right in the clearing and the cap disappears into the greenery.

  “Good-bye, Yegor Vlasych!” Pelageya whispers and stands on tiptoe so as at least to see the white cap one more time.

  JULY 1885

  THE MALEFACTOR

  Before the examining magistrate stands a puny, exceedingly scrawny little peasant in a calico shirt and patched trousers. His face is overgrown with hair and eaten with pockmarks, and his eyes, barely visible through his thick, beetling brows, have an expression of sullen sternness. On his head a whole mop of long-uncombed, matted hair, which endows him with a still greater spiderlike sternness. He is barefoot.

  “Denis Grigoriev!” the magistrate begins. “Come closer and answer my questions. On the seventh day of July instant the railroad watchman Ivan Semyonovich Akinfov, proceeding along the line in the morning, at the ninety-first mile post found you unscrewing one of the nuts by means of which the rails are fastened to the ties. Here is that nut! … With which nut he also detained you. Is that how it went?”

  “Wha?”

  “Did it all go as Akinfov explains?”

  “Sure it did.”

  “Good. Now, why were you unscrewing the nut?”

  “Wha?”

  “Drop this ‘wha?’ of yours and answer the question: why were you unscrewing the nut?”

&
nbsp; “If I didn’t need it, I wouldn’t have been unscrewing it,” croaks Denis, looking askance at the ceiling.

  “And why did you need this nut?”

  “That nut there? We make sinkers out of ’em …”

  “We who?”

  “Us folk … the Klimovo peasants, that is.”

  “Listen, brother, don’t play the idiot here. Talk sense. There’s no point in lying about sinkers!”

  “Never lied in all my born days, so now I’m lying …” mumbles Denis, blinking his eyes. “Could we do without a sinker, Your Honor? If you put a live worm or a minnow on a hook, how’ll it ever go down without a sinker? Lying …” Denis smirks. “Who the devil needs live bait if it floats up top! Your perch, your pike, your burbot always bites on the bottom, and if the bait floats up top, it’s only good for catching gobies, and even that’s rare … Gobies don’t live in our river … It’s a fish that likes space.”

  “What are you telling me about gobies for?”

  “Wha? But you asked yourself! The gentry here fish the same way, too. Not even the merest lad would go fishing without a sinker. Of course, if somebody’s got no sense at all, he’ll try and fish without a sinker. A fool is as a fool does …”

  “So you tell me that you were unscrewing this nut in order to make a sinker out of it?”

  “What else? Can’t play knucklebones with it!”

  “But you could use a bit of lead for a sinker, a bullet … a nail of some sort…”

  “You won’t find lead lying about, you’ve got to buy it, and a nail’s no good. There nothing better than a nut … It’s heavy, and it’s got a hole in it.”

  “He pretends to be such a fool! As if he was born yesterday or fell from the moon! Don’t you understand, dunderhead, what this unscrewing leads to? If the watchman hadn’t spotted it, a train might have gone off the rails, people might have been killed! You’d have killed people!”

  “God forbid, Your Honor! Why kill? Are we heathens or villains of some kind? Thank the Lord, my good sir, we’ve lived our life without any killing, such thoughts never even enter our head … Queen of Heaven, save us and have mercy … How could you, sir!”

  “And what do you think causes train accidents? Unscrew two or three nuts, and you’ve got yourself an accident!”

  Denis smirks and squints his eyes mistrustfully at the magistrate.

  “Well! All these years the whole village has been unscrewing nuts and the Lord’s preserved us, so now it’s an accident … killing people … If I took away the rail or, let’s say, put a log across the tracks, well, then the train might go off, but this … pah! a nut!”

  “But you must understand, the nuts fasten the rail to the tie!”

  “We understand that … We don’t unscrew all of them … we leave some … We don’t do it mindlessly … we understand …”

  Denis yawns and makes a cross over his mouth.

  “Last year a train went off the rails here,” says the magistrate, “now I see why …”

  “Beg pardon, sir?”

  “Now, I said, I see why a train went off the rails last year … I understand!”

  “That’s what you get educated for, so you’ll understand, most merciful judges … The Lord knew who to give understanding to … And here you’ve considered how and what, but a watchman’s the same as a peasant, he’s got no understanding, he just grabs you by the scruff of the neck and drags you off… Reason first, and then drag! Like they say—peasant head, peasant thoughts … Write this down, too, Your Honor, that he hit me twice in the teeth and the chest.”

  “When they searched your place, they found a second nut … When and where did you unscrew it?”

  “You mean the one that was under the little red trunk?”

  “I don’t know where it was, I only know they found it. When did you unscrew it?”

  “I didn’t unscrew it, it was Ignashka, the son of one-eyed Semyon, gave it to me. I mean the one that was under the little trunk, and the one that was in the sledge in the yard I unscrewed along with Mitrofan.”

  “Which Mitrofan?”

  “Mitrofan Petrov … You’ve never heard of him? He makes nets and sells them to the gentry. He needs a lot of these same nuts. Reckon maybe a dozen for each net …”

  “Listen … Article one thousand and eighty-one of the Criminal Code says that any deliberate damage to the railways, in case it endangers the transport availing itself of those railways, and with the perpetrator’s knowledge that the consequences thereof will be an accident—understand? knowledge! And you couldn’t help knowing what this unscrewing would lead to—will be punishable by a term at hard labor.”

  “Of course, you know best … We’re ignorant folk … what do we understand?”

  “You understand everything! You’re lying and dissembling!”

  “Why lie? Ask in the village, if you don’t believe me … Without a sinker you only get bleak. You won’t even get gudgeon, the worst of the lot, without a sinker.”

  “Next you’ll be talking about gobies again!” the magistrate smiles.

  “We’ve got no gobies here … If we fish on top without a sinker, using butterflies for bait, we get chub, and even that’s rare.”

  “Well, be quiet …”

  Silence ensues. Denis shifts from one foot to the other, stares at the table covered with green baize, and blinks his eyes strenuously, as if what he sees before him is not baize but the sun. The magistrate is writing rapidly.

  “Can I go?” asks Denis, after some silence.

  “No. I must put you under arrest and send you to prison.”

  Denis stops blinking and, raising his thick eyebrows, looks questioningly at the official.

  “That is, how do you mean—to prison? Your Honor! I haven’t got time, I have to go to the fair, and also get three roubles from Yegor for the lard …”

  “Quiet, don’t disturb me …”

  “To prison … If it was for something, I’d go, but like this … for a fleabite … Why? Seems I didn’t steal, I didn’t fight … And if you’ve got doubts about the arrears, Your Honor, don’t believe the headman … Better ask mister permanent member … An ungodly fellow, that headman …”

  “Quiet!”

  “I’m quiet as it is …” mutters Denis. “I’ll swear an oath the headman’s accounts are a pack of lies … We’re three brothers: Kuzma Grigoriev, that is, and Yegor Grigoriev, and me, Denis Grigoriev…”

  “You’re disturbing me … Hey, Semyon!” shouts the magistrate. “Take him away!”

  “We’re three brothers,” mutters Denis, as two stalwart soldiers take him and lead him from the chamber. “Brother’s not answerable for brother. Kuzma doesn’t pay and you, Denis, have to answer … Judges! Our late master, the general, died, may he rest in peace, otherwise he’d show you judges something … You’ve got to judge knowingly, not just anyhow… Give a whipping, even, but so as it’s for a reason, in all fairness …”

  JULY 1885

  PANIKHIDA

  In the church of the Mother of God Hodigitria,1 the one in the village of Verkhnie Zaprudy, the morning liturgy has just ended. People have begun moving and pouring out of the church. The only one who does not stir is the shopkeeper Andrei Andreich, the Verkhnie Zaprudy intellectual and old-timer. He leans his elbow on the railing of the choir to the right and waits. His clean-shaven, fat face, bumpy from former pimples, on this occasion expresses two opposite feelings: humility before inscrutable destiny, and a dumb, boundless haughtiness before all those passing kaftans and motley kerchiefs. He is smartly dressed for Sunday. He is wearing a flannel coat with yellow ivory buttons, dark blue, straight-legged trousers, and stout galoshes, the same huge, clumsy galoshes that are met with only on the feet of people who are positive, sensible, and have firm religious convictions.

  His swollen, lazy eyes are turned to the iconostasis.2 He sees the long-familiar faces of the saints, the caretaker Matvei puffing his cheeks to blow out the candles, the darkened icon stands, the wo
rn rug, the beadle Lopukhov, who rushes from the sanctuary and brings the warden a prosphora3 … All this he has seen over and over again, like his own five fingers … One thing, however, is somewhat strange and unusual: Father Grigory is standing by the north door, still in his vestments, blinking angrily with his thick eyebrows.

  “Who is he blinking at, God be with him?” thinks the shopkeeper. “Ah, now he’s beckoning with his finger! And, mercy me, stamping his foot … Holy Mother, what a thing! Who is it at?”

  Andrei Andreich turns around and sees that the church is already quite empty There are about a dozen people crowding at the door, and with their backs turned to the sanctuary

  “Come when you’re called! Why are you standing there like a statue?” he hears the angry voice of Father Grigory “It’s you I’m calling!”

  The shopkeeper looks at the red, wrathful face of Father Grigory and only now realizes that the blinking of the eyebrows and beckoning of the finger may be addressed to him. He gives a start, separates himself from the choir, and, stamping his stout galoshes, goes hesitantly towards the sanctuary.

  “Andrei Andreich, was it you who sent in a note about the departed Maria?” the priest asks, angrily looking up at his fat, sweaty face.

  “It was.”

  “So, then, it was you who wrote this? You?”

  And Father Grigory angrily thrusts a little note into his eyes. And in this note, which Andrei Andreich sent in with a prosphora for the proskomedia,4 there is written in big, unsteady-looking letters:

  “For the departed servant of God, the harlot Maria.”

  “It was … I wrote it, sir …” the shopkeeper replies.

  “But how did you dare to write that?” the priest draws out in a whisper, and in his hoarse whisper both wrath and fear can be heard.