LUCK

To Y. P. Polonsky1

BY THE WIDE STEPPE ROAD known as the highway a herd of sheep was spending the night. It was watched over by two shepherds. One, an old man of around eighty, toothless, with a quivering face, was lying on his stomach just by the road, resting his elbows on the dusty leaves of a plantain; the other, a young fellow with bushy black eyebrows and no moustache, dressed in the burlap from which cheap sacks are made, lay on his back, his hands behind his head, looking up into the sky, where, just over his face, the Milky Way stretched and stars were drowsing.

The shepherds were not alone. Some two yards from them, in the darkness that covered the road, loomed the dark outline of a saddled horse, and beside it, leaning against the saddle, stood a man in high boots and a short jacket, by all appearances a landlord’s overseer. Judging by his erect and motionless figure, his manners, his treatment of the shepherds, the horse, he was a serious, reasonable man and knew his own worth; even in the darkness traces of military bearing were discernible in him and that grandly condescending expression which is acquired from frequent dealing with masters and stewards.

The sheep were sleeping. Against the gray background of the dawn, which was already beginning to cover the eastern part of the sky, the silhouettes of those that were not asleep could be seen; they stood with their heads lowered, thinking about something. Their thoughts, long, drawn-out, evoked only by impressions of the wide steppe and the sky, of days and nights, probably astonished and oppressed them to the point of stupefaction, and, standing now as if rooted to the spot, they noticed neither the stranger’s presence nor the restlessness of the dogs.

In the sleepy, static air hung a monotonous noise, without which there could be no summer steppe night; grasshoppers chirred incessantly, quails sang, and a half mile or so from the herd, in a ravine, where a brook flowed and pussywillows grew, young nightingales whistled languidly.

The overseer had stopped to ask the shepherds for fire to light his pipe. He silently lit up, smoked the whole pipe, then, without saying a word, leaned his elbow against the saddle and fell to thinking. The young shepherd paid no attention to him; he went on lying there and looking at the sky, but the old man studied the overseer for a long time and then asked:

“Might you be Pantelei from the Makarov estate?”

“Himself,” the overseer replied.

“Now I see. I couldn’t tell—so you’ll be a rich man.2 Where did God fetch you from?”

“The Kovylevsky tract.”

“That’s far off. Is it let out for sharecropping?”

“Various things. Some for sharecropping, some on lease, some for melon patches. In fact, I just went to the mill.”

A big old sheepdog of a dirty white color, shaggy, with clumps of fur around its eyes and nose, trying to seem indifferent to the presence of strangers, calmly circled the horse three times and suddenly, unexpectedly, with a vicious old dog’s wheezing, attacked the overseer from behind. The other dogs could not control themselves and jumped up from their places.

“Shush, damn you!” the old man shouted, rising on his elbow. “Ah, go burst, you fiendish creature!”

When the dogs calmed down, the old man assumed his former pose and said in a calm voice:

“And in Kovyli, right on Ascension Day, Efim Zhmenya died. Shouldn’t say it before sleep, it’s a sin to think of such people—he was a vile old man. You must have heard.”

“No, I haven’t.”

“Efim Zhmenya, Styopka the blacksmith’s uncle. Everybody around here knew him. Oh, yes, a cursed old man! Some sixty years I knew him, ever since the tsar Alexander, the one who drove the French out, was being brought from Taganrog to Moscow in a wagon.3 We went together to meet the dead tsar, and back then the high road didn’t go through Bakhmut, but from Esaulovka to Gorodishche, and where Kovyli is now there were bustards’ nests—you take a step and there’s a bustard’s nest. I noticed then that Zhmenya had given up his soul, and there was an unclean spirit in him. I’ve observed: if a man of the peasant order mostly keeps quiet, is interested in old women’s things, and prefers to live by himself, there’s little good in it, and this Efim, it so happens, was always silent, silent, ever since childhood, and looked askance at you, and kept pouting and puffing himself up, like a rooster in front of a hen. So that going to church, or hanging out with the lads in the street, or in a pot-house, just wasn’t his style, and he mostly sat alone or gossiping with old women. He was young, but already hired himself out to the beekeepers and melon-growers. It so happened good people would come to him at the melon patches, and his watermelons and muskmelons would whistle. Or once he caught a pike in front of people, and—ho-ho-ho!—it burst out laughing…”

“It happens,” said Pantelei.

The young shepherd turned on his side and, raising his black eyebrows, looked intently at the old man.

“Did you ever hear watermelons whistle?” he asked.

“Me, no, God spared me,” the old man sighed, “but people tell about it. It’s no great wonder…If unclean powers want to, they’ll whistle in a stone. Before the freedom,4 we had a rock humming for three days and three nights. I heard it myself. And the pike laughed because Zhmenya caught a demon, not a pike.”

The old man remembered something. He quickly got up on his knees and, huddling as if from the cold, nervously tucking his hands into his sleeves, murmured through his nose an old woman’s patter:

“God save us and have mercy! Once I was going along the riverbank to Novopavlovka. A thunderstorm was gathering, and there was such a gale, save us, Queen of Heaven, Holy Mother…I’m hurrying as fast as I can, and I see a white ox going down the path among the blackthorn bushes. The blackthorns were in bloom then. And I think: Whose ox is it? What ill wind brought him here? He goes along, swinging his tail and moo-o-o! Only this same ox, brothers, when I caught up with him, got close, and looked!—it was no ox now, it was Zhmenya. Holy, holy, holy! I made the sign of the cross, and he looks at me and mutters, his eyes bugging out. I was frightened, terribly! We walked side by side, I’m afraid to say a word to him—thunder rolls, lightning streaks the sky, the pussywillows bend down right to the water—suddenly, brothers, God punish me, so I die without repentance, a hare runs across our path…He runs, stops, and says in human language: ‘Hello, boys!’ Away, damn you!” the old man yelled at the shaggy dog, who was circling the horse again. “Ah, go croak!”

“It happens,” the overseer said, still leaning against the saddle and not stirring; he said it in a soundless, muted voice, the way people speak who are sunk in thought.

“It happens,” he repeated meaningfully and with conviction.

“Ohh, a fiendish old man he was!” the old man went on, not so heatedly now. “Five years after the freedom, we all flogged him in the village office, and to show his anger, he sent a throat ailment to everybody in Kovyli. A host of people died then, no counting them, like from cholera…”

“How did he send this ailment?” the young shepherd asked after a pause.

“As if we don’t know. No need for great wisdom here, if there’s the will. Zhmenya did people in with viper fat. It’s such stuff that, not just the fat itself, but even the smell kills people.”

“That’s right,” Pantelei agreed.

“Our boys wanted to kill him then, but the old men wouldn’t allow it. It was forbidden to kill him; he knew where the treasure was. Apart from him, not a single soul knew. Around here treasures have a spell on them, so that even if you happen on it, you don’t see it—but he saw it. He’d go along a riverbank or through a wood, and there would be little fires, fires, fires under the bushes or rocks…Little fires, as if from sulfur. I saw them myself. Everybody waited for Zhmenya to point the places out to people, or dig them up himself, but he—a real dog in the manger—went and died: didn’t dig it up himself, didn’t show anybody else.”

The overseer lit his pipe and for a moment revealed his big moustache and a sharp, stern, respectable-looking nose. Small circles of light jumped from his hands to his visored cap, flitted across the saddle over the horse’s back, and disappeared in the mane by its ears.

“In these parts there are many treasures,” he said.

And, slowly drawing on his pipe, he looked around, rested his gaze on the brightening east, and added:

“There must be treasures.”

“What’s there to talk about,” sighed the old man. “By the looks of it there are, brother, only there’s nobody to dig them up. Nobody knows the real places, and nowadays, most likely, all the treasures have a spell on them. To find them and see them, you’ve got to have a talisman, and without a talisman, my lad, you can’t do anything. Zhmenya had talismans, but was there any wheedling them out of him? The bald devil held on to them so nobody could get them.”

The young shepherd crept a couple of paces toward the old man, and, propping his head on his fists, fixed his unmoving gaze on him. A childlike expression of fear and curiosity lit up in his dark eyes and, as it seemed in the twilight, stretched and flattened the large features of his coarse young face. He listened intently.

“And in writings it’s written that there are many treasures here,” the old man went on. “What’s there to talk about…there’s nothing to say. An old soldier from Novopavlovsk was shown a tag in Ivanovka, and printed on this tag was the place, and even how many pounds of gold, and in what sort of vessel; this treasure could have been found long ago, only there’s a spell on it so you can’t get to it.”

“Why can’t you get to it, grandpa?” asked the young one.

“Must be there’s some reason, the soldier didn’t say. There’s a spell…You need a talisman.”

The old man spoke with enthusiasm, as if he were pouring out his soul before the passerby. Being unused to speaking much and quickly, he maundered, stammered, and, sensing the deficiency of his speech, tried to make up for it by gesticulating with his head, hands, and scrawny shoulders. With each movement, his sackcloth shirt crumpled, pulled up to the shoulders, and bared his back, blackened from sunburn and old age. He pulled it down, but it pulled up again at once. Finally, as if driven beyond all patience by the disobedient shirt, he jumped up and said bitterly:

“There is luck, but what’s the use of it if it’s buried in the ground? And so the good will perish for nothing, uselessly, like chaff or sheep dung! Yet there’s a lot of luck out there, such a lot, boy, that it would be enough for the whole district, but not a soul sees it! If people go on waiting, the masters will dig it up or the government will take it. The masters have already started digging up the barrows5…They’ve sniffed it out! They envy the peasants’ luck! The government also keeps its own counsel. In the law it’s written that if a peasant finds a treasure, he must report it to the authorities. Well, they’ll have a good wait! There’s stew, but not for you.”

The old man laughed contemptuously and sat down on the ground. The overseer listened with attention and nodded, but from the expression of his whole figure and from his silence it was obvious that nothing the old man was telling was new to him, that he had been thinking about it for a long time and knew much more than the old man did.

“In my lifetime, I must confess, I’ve sought out luck maybe a dozen times,” the old man said, scratching himself bashfully. “I searched in the right places, but it must be I kept hitting on treasures with a spell on them. My father also searched, and my brother—didn’t even find a blessed thing, so they just died luckless. A certain monk revealed to my brother Ilya, may he rest in peace, that in Taganrog, in the fortress, in a place under three stones, there is a treasure, and that the treasure has a spell on it, and back then—I remember, it was the year ’thirty-eight—there was an Armenian living in the Matveev Barrow who sold talismans. Ilya bought a talisman, took two lads with him, and went to Taganrog. Only he, my brother, comes to the place in the fortress, and in that same place stands a soldier with a gun.”

A sound burst through the still air and scattered over the steppe. Something far away made a terrible bang, struck against the stone, and raced over the steppe, going “takh! takh! takh! takh!” When the sound died away, the old man looked questioningly at the indifferent, motionlessly standing Pantelei.

“That was a bucket falling down a mineshaft,” said the young shepherd on reflection.

Dawn was breaking. The Milky Way was growing paler and gradually melted like snow, losing its contours. The sky was becoming somber and dull, so that it was impossible to tell whether it was clear or completely covered with clouds, and only by a clear, glossy strip in the east and the remaining stars here and there could you tell which it was.

The first morning breeze, without a murmur, went flitting down the road, cautiously stirring the spurge and the tall brown stems of last year’s weeds.

The overseer awoke from his thoughts and shook his head. He tugged at the saddle with both hands, felt the girth, and, as if undecided about mounting the horse, again stood thinking.

“Yes,” he said, “so near and yet so far…Luck is there, but there’s no knowing how to find it.”

And he turned his face to the shepherds. His stern face was sad and scornful, as in a disappointed man.

“Yes, so you die without seeing what this luck amounts to…,” he said slowly, raising his left foot to the stirrup. “Those who are younger might live to see it, but for us it’s time we stopped thinking about it.”

Stroking his long, dew-covered moustache, he seated himself heavily on the horse and, with a look as if he had forgotten something or not finished speaking, narrowed his eyes toward the distance. In the bluish distance, where the furthest visible hill merged with the mist, nothing stirred; the lookout and burial mounds that rose here and there on the horizon and the boundless steppe kept a severe and deathly watch; in their stillness and silence one sensed long ages and a total indifference to man; another thousand years will pass, billions of people will die, and they will stand there as they stand now, without the least regret for the dead or interest in the living, and not a single soul will know why they stand and what secret of the steppe is hidden beneath them.

Rooks awoke and flew silently and solitarily over the earth. Neither in the lazy flight of these long-lived birds, nor in the morning that was punctually repeated each day, nor in the boundlessness of the steppe—in none of it was any sense to be seen. The overseer grinned and said:

“Such vastness, Lord have mercy! Go find your luck! Here,” he went on, lowering his voice and making a serious face, “here for sure two treasures are buried. The masters don’t know about them, but the old peasants, especially the soldiers, have precise knowledge of them. Somewhere on that ridge” (the overseer pointed out the direction with his whip) “robbers once fell upon a caravan with gold; this gold was being transported from Petersburg to the emperor Peter, who was in Voronezh then building the fleet.6 The robbers killed the drivers and buried the gold, and later couldn’t find it. Our Don Cossacks buried the other treasure. In the year ’twelve they plundered no end of silver, and gold, and all sorts of goods from the French.7 On their way home, they heard that the authorities wanted to take all the gold and silver from them. Rather than give it to the authorities for nothing, the fine lads went and buried it, so that their children at least would get it, but where they buried it—nobody knows.”

“I’ve heard about those treasures,” the old man muttered sullenly.

“Yes.” Pantelei again fell to thinking. “So…”

Silence ensued. The overseer pensively looked into the distance, grinned, and touched the reins, still with that same expression as if he had forgotten something or not finished speaking. The horse set off reluctantly at a slow pace. Having gone about a hundred steps, Pantelei shook his head resolutely, awoke from his thoughts, and, whipping up his horse, went on at a canter.

The shepherds remained alone.

“That was Pantelei from the Makarov estate,” the old man said. “Gets a hundred and fifty roubles a year, plus grub. An educated man…”

The sheep—there were some three thousand of them—woke up and reluctantly, having nothing else to do, began grazing on the low, half-trampled grass. The sun was not up yet, but the barrows were all visible already, as was Saur’s Grave with its pointed peak,8 far off, looking like a cloud. If you climb up that grave, from it you can see the plain, as flat and boundless as the sky, you can see manor houses, German and Molokan farmsteads, villages, and a keen-sighted Kalmuk9 will even see the town and the railroad trains. Only from there can you see that in this world, besides the silent steppe and the age-old barrows, there is another life, which has nothing to do with buried treasure and sheep’s thoughts.

The old man felt around him, found his “gerlyga,” a long staff with a hook at the upper end, and stood up. He was silent and thoughtful. The childlike expression of fear and curiosity had not yet left the young man’s face. He was under the impression of what he had heard and waited impatiently for new stories.

“Grandpa,” he said, getting up and taking his gerlyga, “what did your brother Ilya do with that soldier?”

The old man did not hear the question. He glanced absently at the young man and replied, munching his lips:

“And you know, Sanka, I keep thinking about that tag they showed the soldier in Ivanovka. I didn’t tell Pantelei, God help him, but there was a place indicated on that tag that even an old woman could find. Do you know what place? Rich Ravine, at that place, you know, where it splits like a goose foot into three gullies. It’s in the middle one.”

“So you’re going to dig?”

“I’ll try my luck…”

“And what will you do with the treasure, grandpa, once you find it?”

“Who, me?” The old man grinned. “Hm!…Just let me find it, and then…I’ll give them all a hot time…Hm!…I know what to do…”

The old man was not able to say what he would do with the treasure if he found it. The question had probably presented itself to him that morning for the first time in his life, and judging by the expression of his face, carefree and indifferent, it did not seem important to him and worthy of reflection. In Sanka’s head another perplexity was stirring: why did only old men look for treasure, and what was the use of such earthly luck to people who might die of old age any day? But Sanka was unable to turn this perplexity into a question, and it was unlikely the old man would have found an answer for him.

Surrounded by a light haze, the enormous crimson sun appeared. Wide strips of light, still cold, bathing in the dewy grass, stretching out and looking cheerful, as if trying to show that they were not sick of it, began to spread over the ground. Silvery wormwood, the light blue flowers of wild onion, yellow rapeseed, cornflowers—all this multicolored joyfulness took the sunlight for its own smile.

The old man and Sanka split up and went to stand at the edges of the flock. They both stood like posts, not moving, looking at the ground and thinking. The former was still gripped by thoughts of luck, while the latter was thinking about what had been talked about during the night; he was interested not in luck itself, which he did not need or understand, but in the fantastic and fairy-tale nature of human luck.

A hundred or so sheep gave a start and, in some incomprehensible terror, as if at a signal, rushed away from the flock. And Sanka, as if the sheep’s thoughts, long and drawn-out, momentarily communicated themselves to him, also rushed away in the same incomprehensible animal terror, but at once came to his senses and shouted:

“Pah, you loonies! Gone hog wild, dad blast you!”

And when the sun, promising a long, invincible heat, began to scorch the earth, everything alive, that had moved and produced sounds during the night, sank into slumber. The old man and Sanka stood with their staffs at opposite ends of the herd, stood without moving, like fakirs at prayer, fixed on their thoughts. They no longer noticed each other, and each of them lived his own life. The sheep were also thinking…

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