Stories Page 7
When we left the church after the liturgy, it was no longer night. Morning was coming. The stars had faded and the sky was gray-blue, sullen. The cast-iron slabs, the tombstones, and the buds on the trees were covered with dew. There was a sharp feeling of freshness in the air. Outside the churchyard there was no more of that animation I had seen at night. Horses and people seemed tired, sleepy, they barely moved, and all that was left of the pitch barrels was heaps of black ashes. When a man is tired and wants to sleep, it seems to him that nature is in the same state. It seemed to me that the trees and young grass were asleep. It seemed that even the bells did not ring as loudly and gaily as at night. The restlessness was over, and all that was left of the excitement was a pleasant languor, a desire for sleep and warmth.
Now I could see the river with both its banks. Hills of light mist hovered over it here and there. The water breathed out cold and severity. When I jumped aboard the ferry, someone’s britzka already stood there, and some twenty men and women. The damp and, as it seemed to me, sleepy cable stretched far across the wide river and in places disappeared in the white mist.
“Christ is risen! Is there anybody else?” a quiet voice asked.
I recognized the voice of Ieronym. Now the darkness of night did not prevent me from seeing the monk. He was a tall, narrow-shouldered man of about thirty-five, with large, rounded features, half-closed, lazy-looking eyes, and a disheveled, wedge-shaped beard. He looked extraordinarily sad and weary.
“They still haven’t relieved you?” I was surprised.
“Me, sir?” he asked, turning his chilled, dew-covered face to me and smiling. “Now there won’t be anyone to relieve me till morning. They’ll all go to the father archimandrite’s to break the fast, sir.”10
He and some little peasant in a red fur hat that looked like the bast pots they sell honey in, leaned on the cable, gave a concerted grunt, and the ferry moved off.
We floated along, disturbing the lazily rising mist as we went. Everyone was silent. Ieronym mechanically worked with one hand. For a long time he looked us over with his meek, dull eyes, then rested his gaze on the rosy, black-browed face of a young merchant’s wife, who stood next to me on the ferry and silently shrank away from the mist that embraced her. He did not take his eyes off her face all the while we crossed.
This prolonged gaze had little of the masculine in it. It seems to me that in the woman’s face Ieronym was seeking the soft and tender features of his deceased friend.
APRIL 1886
VANKA
Vanka Zhukov, a nine-year-old boy, sent three months earlier to be apprenticed to the shoemaker Aliakhin, did not go to bed on Christmas eve. He waited till master and apprentices went to church, then took a bottle of ink and a pen with a rusty nib from the master’s cupboard, spread out a rumpled sheet of paper in front of him, and began to write. Before tracing the first letter, he looked fearfully several times at the doors and windows, cast a sidelong glance at the dark icon, surrounded on both sides by long shelves of shoe lasts, and heaved a choking sigh. The paper lay on a bench, and he himself knelt down by the bench.
“Dear grandpa, Konstantin Makarych!” he wrote. “So I’m writing you a letter. I wish you a Merry Christmas and all good things from the Lord God. I have no father or mother, you are the only one I have left.”
Vanka’s eyes moved to the dark window, in which the reflection of his candle flickered, and vividly imagined his grandfather, Konstantin Makarych, who worked as a night watchman at the Zhivarevs’. He was a small, skinny, but remarkably nimble and lively old fellow of about sixty-five, with an eternally laughing face and drunken eyes. He spent his days sleeping in the servants’ quarters or bantering with the kitchen maids, and during the night, wrapped in a roomy winter coat, he walked around the estate beating on his clapper.1 Behind him, their heads hanging, trotted the old bitch Chestnut and little Eel, so called because of his black color and long, weasel-like body. This Eel was remarkably respectful and gentle, looked with equal tenderness on his own people and on strangers, but enjoyed no credit. His respectfulness and humility concealed a most Jesuitical insidiousness. No one knew better than he how to sneak up and nip you on the leg, how to get into the cellar or steal a peasant’s chicken. He had been beaten to pulp more than once, twice he had been hung, every week he was thrashed till he was half dead, but he always recovered.
His grandfather is probably standing by the gate now, squinting his eyes at the bright red windows of the village church, stamping his felt boots, and bantering with the servants. His clapper hangs from his belt. He clasps his hands, hunches up from the cold, and, with an old man’s titter, pinches a maid or a kitchen girl.
“How about a little snuff?” he says, offering his snuffbox to the women.
The women take snuff and sneeze. His grandfather goes into indescribable raptures, dissolves in merry laughter, and shouts:
“Tear it off, it’s frozen!”
They also give snuff to the dogs. Chestnut sneezes, turns her nose away, and goes off feeling offended. But Eel, being respectful, does not sneeze and wags his tail. And the weather is magnificent. The air is still, transparent, and fresh. The night is dark, but the whole village can be seen, the white roofs with little curls of smoke coming from the chimneys, the trees silvered with hoarfrost, the snowdrifts. The whole sky is strewn with merrily twinkling stars, and the Milky Way is as clearly outlined as if it had been washed and scoured with snow for the feast …
Vanka sighed, dipped his pen, and went on writing:
“And yesterday they gave me what-for. The master dragged me out to the yard by the hair and thrashed me with a belt, because I was rocking their baby in the cradle and accidentally fell asleep. And last week the mistress told me to clean a herring, and I started with the tail, so she took the herring and began shoving its head into my mug. The apprentices poke fun at me, send me to the pothouse for vodka, and tell me to steal pickles from the master, and the master beats me with whatever he can find. And there’s nothing to eat. They give me bread in the morning, kasha for dinner, and bread again in the evening, and as for tea or cabbage soup, that the masters grub up themselves. And they make me sleep in the front hall, and when their baby cries I don’t sleep at all, I rock the cradle. Dear grandpa, do me this mercy, take me home to the village, I just can’t stand it … I go down on my knees to you, and I’ll pray to God eternally for you, take me away from here or I’ll die …”
Vanka twisted his lips, rubbed his eyes with his black fist, and gave a sob.
“I’ll rub your tobacco for you,” he went on, “pray to God for you, and if there’s ever any reason, you can whip me like a farmer’s goat. And if you think there’ll be no work for me, I’ll ask the steward for Christ’s sake to let me polish the boots or go instead of Fedka to help the shepherd. Dear grandpa, I can’t stand it, it’s simply killing me. I thought of running away on foot to the village, but I have no boots, I’m afraid of freezing. And when I grow up, I’ll feed you for it, and I won’t let anybody harm you, and when you die, I’ll pray for the repose of your soul, as I do for my mama Pelageya.
“And Moscow is a big city. All the houses are manors, there are lots of horses, but no sheep, and the dogs aren’t fierce. There’s no children’s procession with the star2 here, and they don’t let anybody sing in the choir,3 and once in the window of a shop I saw hooks for sale with lines for all kinds of fish, really worth it, there was even one hook that would hold a thirty-pound sheatfish. And I saw shops selling all kind of guns like our squire’s, worth maybe a hundred roubles each … And in the butcher shops there are blackcock, and hazel grouse, and hares, but where they go to hunt them the shop clerks won’t tell.
“Dear grandpa, when the masters have a Christmas tree party with treats, take a gilded nut for me and hide it in the green chest. Ask the young miss, Olga Ignatievna, and tell her it’s for Vanka.”
Vanka sighed spasmodically and again stared at the window. He remembered how his grandfather always went
to the forest to fetch a Christmas tree for the masters and took his grandson with him. They had a merry time! His grandfather grunted, and the frost grunted, and, looking at them, Vanka also grunted. Usually, before cutting down the tree, his grandfather smoked his pipe or took a long pinch of snuff, while he chuckled at the freezing Vaniushka … The young fir trees, shrouded in hoarfrost, stand motionless, waiting to see which of them is to die. Out of nowhere, a hare shoots like an arrow across the snowdrifts … His grandfather cannot help shouting:
“Catch him, catch him … catch him! Ah, the short-tailed devil!”
The cut-down tree would be lugged to the master’s house, and there they would start decorating it … The young miss, Olga Ignatievna, Vanka’s favorite, was the busiest of all. When Vanka’s mother Pelageya was still alive and worked in the master’s house as a maid, Olga Ignatievna used to give Vanka fruit drops and, having nothing to do, taught him to read, to write, to count to a hundred, and even to dance the quadrille. But when Pelageya died, the orphaned Vanka was packed off to his grandfather in the servants’ kitchen, and from the kitchen to Moscow, to the shoemaker Aliakhin …
“Come, dear grandpa,” Vanka went on, “by Christ God I beg you, take me away from here. Have pity on me, a wretched orphan, because everybody beats me, and I’m so hungry, and it’s so dreary I can’t tell you, I just cry all the time. And the other day the master hit me on the head with a last, so that I fell down and barely recovered. My life is going bad, worse than any dog’s … And I also send greetings to Alyona, to one-eyed Yegorka, and to the coachman, and don’t give my harmonica away to anybody. I remain your grandson, Ivan Zhukov, dear grandpa, come.”
Vanka folded the written sheet in four and put it into an envelope he had bought the day before for a kopeck … After thinking a little, he dipped his pen and wrote the address:
To Grandpa in the Village.
Then he scratched his head, reflected, and added: “Konstantin Makarych.” Pleased that he had not been disturbed at his writing, he put on his hat and, without getting into his coat, ran outside in just his shirt …
The clerks at the butcher shop, whom he had asked the day before, had told him that letters are put in mailboxes, and from the mailboxes are carried all over the world on troikas of post-horses with drunken drivers and jingling bells. Vanka ran over to the nearest mailbox and put the precious letter into the slot …
Lulled by sweet hopes, an hour later he was fast asleep … He dreamed of a stove. On the stove sits his grandfather, his bare feet hanging down. He is reading Vanka’s letter to the kitchen maids … Eel walks around the stove, wagging his tail …
DECEMBER 1886
SLEEPY
Night. The nanny Varka, a girl of about thirteen, is rocking a cradle in which a baby lies, and murmuring barely audibly:
Hush-a-bye, baby,
I’ll sing you a song …
A green oil lamp is burning before an icon; a rope is stretched across the whole room from corner to corner, with swaddling clothes and large black trousers hanging on it. A big green spot from the icon lamp falls on the ceiling, and the swaddling clothes and trousers cast long shadows on the stove, the cradle, and Varka … When the icon lamp begins to flicker, the spot and the shadows come alive and start moving as if in the wind. It is stuffy. There is a smell of cabbage soup and shoemaker’s supplies.
The baby is crying. He became hoarse and exhausted from crying long ago, but he goes on howling, and no one knows when he will quiet down. And Varka is sleepy. Her eyes close, her head droops down, her neck aches. She cannot move her eyelids or her lips, and it seems to her that her face has become dry and stiff and her head is as small as the head of a pin.
“Hush-a-bye, baby,” she murmurs, “I’ll feed you by and by …”
A cricket chirps from the stove. In the next room, behind the door, the master and his apprentice Afanasy are snoring … The cradle creaks pitifully, Varka herself is murmuring—and all this merges into the lulling night music that is so sweet to hear when you are going to bed. But now this music is only vexing and oppressive, because it makes her drowsy, yet she cannot sleep. God forbid that Varka should fall asleep, or the masters will give her a beating.
The icon lamp flickers. The green spot and the shadows begin to move, getting into Varka’s fixed, half-open eyes and forming dim reveries in her half-sleeping brain. She sees dark clouds chasing each other across the sky and crying like babies. But now the wind has blown, the clouds have vanished, and Varka sees a broad highway covered with liquid mud. Down the highway stretches a string of carts, people trudge along with bundles on their backs, and some sort of shadows flit back and forth. Forest can be seen on both sides through the cold, harsh fog. Suddenly the shadows and the people with bundles drop down in the liquid mud. “Why is that?” asks Varka. “To sleep, to sleep,” comes the answer. And they fall fast asleep, sleep sweetly, and crows and magpies sit on the telegraph wires, crying like babies, trying to wake them up.
“Hush-a-bye, baby, I’ll sing you a song …” murmurs Varka, and now she sees herself in a dark, stuffy cottage.
Her late father, Yefim Stepanov, is thrashing on the floor. She does not see him, but she hears him moaning and rolling on the floor in pain. His rupture, as he puts it, “is acting up.” The pain is so intense that he cannot utter a single word and only sucks in air, his teeth chattering like a drum roll:
“Rat-a-tat-tat-tat …”
Her mother Pelageya has run to the manor to tell the masters that Yefim is dying. She has been gone for a long time and ought to be back. Varka lies on the stove, awake, and listens to her father’s “rat-a-tat-tat.” But now she hears someone drive up to the cottage. The masters have sent the young doctor, who came from town for a visit. The doctor enters the cottage. He cannot be seen in the darkness, but she hears him cough and clack the door.
“Light a lamp,” he says.
“Rat-a-tat-tat …” answers Yefim.
Pelageya rushes to the stove and starts looking for the crock of matches. A minute passes in silence. The doctor feels in his pockets and lights his own match.
“One moment, good man, one moment,” says Pelageya, rushing out of the cottage and coming back shortly with a candle end.
Yefim’s cheeks are pink, his eyes shine, and his gaze is somehow sharp, as if Yefim can see through both the cottage and the doctor.
“Well, so? What’s this you’re up to?” the doctor says, bending over him. “Aha! Have you had it long?”
“What, sir? It’s time to die, Your Honor … I’m done living …”
“Enough of that nonsense … We’ll cure you!”
“As you like, Your Honor, my humble thanks, only we do understand … Since death has come, there’s no use.”
The doctor fusses over Yefim for a quarter of an hour. Then he gets up and says:
“I can do nothing … You must go to the hospital, they’ll do surgery on you. Go right now … Go without fail! It’s a bit late, everybody’s asleep there, but never mind, I’ll give you a note. Do you hear me?”
“How is he going to get there, good man?” says Pelageya. “We have no horse.”
“Never mind, I’ll ask the masters, they’ll give you a horse.”
The doctor leaves, the candle goes out, and again she hears “rat-a-tat-tat” … Half an hour later somebody drives up to the cottage. The masters have sent a gig to go to the hospital. Yefim gets ready and goes …
Now comes a fine, clear morning. Pelageya is not home: she has gone to the hospital to find out what is happening with Yefim. Somewhere a baby is crying, and Varka hears someone singing with her own voice:
“Hush-a-bye, baby, I’ll sing you a song …”
Pelageya comes back. She crosses herself and whispers:
“They set it during the night, but by morning he gave up his soul to God … The kingdom of heaven, eternal rest … They say they caught it too late … He should have come earlier …”
Varka goes to the woods and wee
ps there, but suddenly somebody hits her on the back of the head so hard that she bumps her forehead against a birch. She lifts her eyes and sees before her the shoemaker, her master.
“What’s this, you mangy girl?” he says. “The little one’s crying, and you sleep?”
He twists her ear painfully, and she shakes her head, rocks the cradle, and murmurs her song. The green spot and the shadows of the trousers and swaddling clothes ripple, wink at her, and soon invade her brain again. Again she sees the highway covered with liquid mud. Shadows and people with bundles on their backs sprawl about, fast asleep. Looking at them, Varka passionately longs to sleep; it would be such a pleasure to lie down, but her mother Pelageya walks beside her and hurries her. They are hastening to town to find work.
“Give alms, for Christ’s sake!” her mother asks passersby “Show God’s mercy, merciful people.”
“Give me the baby!” somebody’s familiar voice answers her. “Give me the baby!” the same voice repeats, angrily and sharply now. “Sleeping, you slut?”
Varka jumps up and, looking around her, understands what is the matter: there is no road, no Pelageya, no passersby, but only her mistress standing in the middle of the room, come to nurse her baby. While the fat, broad-shouldered mistress nurses and quiets the baby, Varka stands and looks at her, waiting till she is finished. Outside the windows the air is turning blue, the shadows and the green spot on the ceiling are becoming noticeably paler. It will soon be morning.
“Take him!” says the mistress, buttoning her nightshirt over her breasts. “He’s crying. Must be the evil eye.”
Varka takes the baby, lays him in the cradle, and again begins to rock. The green spot and the shadows gradually disappear, and there is nothing left to get into her head and cloud her brain. And she is as sleepy as before, so terribly sleepy! Varka lays her head on the edge of the cradle and rocks with her whole body, so as to overcome sleep, but her eyes keep closing all the same and her head is heavy.