1

The krasovs’ great-grandfather, nicknamed Gypsy by the servants, had borzoi hounds set on him by his master, Durnovo. Gypsy had stolen his lover from him, his master. Durnovo ordered Gypsy to be taken out into the fields beyond Durnovka and sat on a knoll. He himself rode out with the pack, crying: “Tally-ho!” Gypsy, who had been sitting benumbed, made off at a run. But you shouldn’t run away from borzois.

The Krasovs’ grandfather was lucky enough to win his freedom. He left with his family for the town and soon made a name for himself: he became a renowned thief. He rented a shack in the Chornaya Sloboda for his wife and he settled her down to make lace to sell, while he himself, with a poor townsman, Belokopytov, went off around the province robbing churches. When he was caught, he conducted himself in such a way that for a long time people throughout the district were enraptured by him – he stands there, apparently, in a velveteen kaftan and goatskin boots with his cheekbones and eyes playing brazenly, and confesses most deferentially to even the very least of his countless jobs:

“Yes, sir. Yes, sir.”

And the Krasovs’ father was a small-time trader. He travelled around the district, lived at one time in his native Durnovka, and tried setting up a store there, but he went bust, turned to drink, went back to town and died. After working in stores, his sons, Tikhon and Kuzma, were in trade as well. They used to drag along in a cart with a locker in the middle and yell out dolefully:

“La-adies, wa-ares! La-adies, wa-ares!”

The wares – little mirrors, soaps, rings, cottons, kerchiefs, needles, pretzels – were in the locker. And in the cart was everything they got in exchange for the wares: dead cats, eggs, homespun canvas, old clothes…

But one day, after travelling for several years, the brothers almost knifed one another – and they parted, so as not to tempt fate. Kuzma got a job with a cattle-dealer, Tikhon rented a little inn on the highway at the station of Vorgol, some five versts* from Durnovka, and opened a tavern and a “taxable” store:* “trading in generel goods tea shoogar tabacco sigarets et setera”.

By the age of about forty, Tikhon’s beard was already silvery in places. But he was handsome, tall and slim, as before; stern of face, swarthy, a little pockmarked, broad in the shoulder and wiry, masterful and abrupt in his conversation, quick and agile in his movements. Only his brows had begun knitting ever more frequently, and his eyes flashing ever more sharply than before.

Tirelessly he would chase after the district policemen in those dark days of autumn when they exact taxes and sale after sale takes place in the village. Tirelessly he would buy up standing crops from landowners and rent land for a song… He lived for a long time with a mute cook – “it’s no bad thing, she can’t go spreading any gossip!” – and had a child with her, which she took into her bed and crushed in her sleep, and then he married a middle-aged housemaid of old Princess Shakhova’s. And after marrying and getting the dowry, he “finished off” the heir of the now impoverished Durnovo family, a plump, delicate young gentleman, bald at twenty-five, but with a magnificent chestnut-coloured beard. And the peasants just gasped in pride when he took over the Durnovo family’s small estate: after all, practically the whole of Durnovka was made up of Krasovs!

They gasped too at the way he contrived to be everywhere at once: selling, buying, on the estate almost every day, watching like a hawk over every speck of land… They gasped and said:

“He’s a brute! He’s the boss, though!”

Tikhon Ilyich himself persuaded them of this. He would often say edifyingly:

“We’re careful and we get along – catch you and we’ll put the bridle on. But justly so. I’m a Russian, brother. I don’t want anything of yours for nothing, but you bear it in mind: I’m damned if I’ll let you have a kopek of mine! Mollycoddle you – no, mark my words, that I won’t!”

And Nastasya Petrovna (yellow, swollen, with sparse, whitish hair, who, because of her continual pregnancies, always ending with still­born girls, walked like a duck, with her toes pointing inwards and rocking from side to side) would groan as she listened:

“Oh, what a simpleton, just look at you! Why take such trouble with him, the stupid thing? You try teaching him good sense, but nothing’s any use. Look at him standing with his legs apart – like some bukhara from Emir!”*

In the autumn, beside the inn, which stood with one side facing the highway and the other facing the station and the grain-elevator, there was the moaning and groaning of creaking wheels: strings of carts filled with grain were swinging round from both up the road and down. And pulleys were constantly squealing, now on the door to the tavern, where Nastasya Petrovna was serving, now on the door to the store – dark, dirty, smelling strongly of soap, herring, cheap tobacco, mint cake and paraffin. And ringing out constantly in the tavern was:

“Oo-ooph! That vodka of yours is strong stuff, Petrovna! Gave me a whack right in the forehead, the devil take it.”

“Like sugar on your lips, my dear!”

“Put snuff in it, do you?”

“Don’t be such an idiot!”

And the store was even busier:

“Ilyich! Can you weigh me out a pount of ham?”

“This year, brother, thanks be to God, I’ve got such a supply of ham, such a supply!”

“And how much is it?”

“Dirt cheap!”

“Storekeeper! Have you got any good tar?”

“Your grandfather never had such tar at his wedding, my dear!”

“And how much is it?”

The loss of hope of having children and the closing down of the taverns were the major events in Tikhon Ilyich’s life. He aged visibly when there was no longer any doubt that he wasn’t to be a father. At first he joked about it:

“No, sir, I shall get what I want,” he would say to acquaintances. “A man isn’t a man without children. Just like some barren patch of ground…”

Then he even began to be gripped by fear: what’s going on – one’s crushed a child in bed, the other keeps giving birth to dead ones! And the time of Nastasya Petrovna’s final pregnancy was an especially difficult one. Tikhon Ilyich was miserable, in a bad temper; Nastasya Petrovna prayed in secret, cried in secret, and she was pitiful when, by the light of the icon lamp, she would climb down quietly from the bed at night, thinking her husband was asleep, and start laboriously getting down on her knees, bowing to the floor with a whisper, looking up in anguish at the icons and rising agonizingly from her knees like an old woman. From childhood, without even daring to admit it to himself, Tikhon Ilyich had disliked icon lamps, their false church light: there had remained in his memory all his life that November night when, in the tiny, lop-sided shack in the Chornaya Sloboda, an icon lamp had been burning too – so meekly, gently and sadly – the shadows from its chains had been dark, it had been deathly quiet, and on the bench beneath the saints his father had lain motionless with his eyes closed, his sharp nose raised and his waxen hands clasped on his breast, while near to him, beyond the little window, curtained with a red cloth, some conscripts had been passing by with wildly melancholy songs, wailing, and concertinas bawling out of tune… Now the icon lamp burned constantly.

Some hawkers from Vladimir fed their horses at the inn – and in the house there appeared The New Complete Oracle and Wizard, foretelling the future from questions posed, with in addition The easiest method of fortune-telling with cards, beans and coffee. And in the evenings, Nastasya Petrovna would put on her glasses, roll herself a little ball of wax, and begin tossing it onto the rings of the oracle. And Tikhon Ilyich would throw sidelong glances. But all the answers given were crude, ominous or senseless.

“‘Does my husband love me?’” asked Nastasya Petrovna.

And the oracle replied:

“‘He loves you like a dog loves a stick.’”

“‘How many children will I have?’”

“‘Fate has doomed you to die, the field must be rid of its weeds.’”

Then Tikhon Ilyich said:

“Let me toss it…”

And asked the question:

“‘Should I instigate a lawsuit against the person concerned?’”

But he too got nonsense back:

“‘Count the teeth in your mouth.’”

Once, glancing into the otherwise empty kitchen, Tikhon Ilyich saw his wife beside the cook’s child’s cradle. A speckled chick was wandering along the window sill, cheeping and tapping its beak against the glass as it caught flies, while she was sitting on the plank bed, rocking the cradle and singing an old lullaby in a pitiful, tremulous voice:

Where lies my little baby?

Where now his tiny bed?

He’s in a lofty tower,

In a cradle painted bright.

No one come to visit us,

No, knock not at the tower!

His eyes are closed, he’s fast asleep

Behind a dark bed curtain

Of richly coloured taffeta…

And Tikhon Ilyich’s face was so changed at that moment that, when she glanced at him, Nastasya Petrovna was not embarrassed and did not quail – she just burst into tears and, blowing her nose, said quietly:

“For Christ’s sake, take me to the saint…”

And Tikhon Ilyich took her to Zadonsk. On the way, he was thinking God ought to punish him all the same for the fact that in his hustle and bustle he was only to be found in church at Easter. And blasphemous thoughts came into his head too: he kept comparing himself with the parents of saints who had also gone a long time without having children. This was not a clever thing to do, but he had already noticed long before that there was someone else inside him, stupider than he. Just before setting off he had received a letter from Athos: “Most God-fearing benefactor Tikhon Ilyich! Peace and salvation to you, the Lord’s blessing and the honest Protection of the All-glorified Mother of God from Her earthly lot, the holy Mount Athos! I had the happiness of hearing of your good deeds and of how you lovingly spare mites for the creation and decoration of God’s temples and for monastic cells. My hut through time has now reached such a state of dilapidation…” And Tikhon Ilyich had sent a tenner for repairs to the hut. The time had long gone when he had believed with naive pride that word of him really had reached Athos itself, he knew very well now that there were simply too many huts on Athos that had fallen into disrepair – and he had sent it all the same. But still it didn’t help, the pregnancy ended with utter torment: before giving birth to a last stillborn child, Nastasya Petrovna, while falling asleep, began shuddering, groaning, screaming… According to her, she was instantly gripped in her sleep by a kind of wild gaiety, combined with inexpressible terror: first she would see the Queen of Heaven coming towards her through the fields, all aglow with golden raiments, and from somewhere would come harmonious, ever swelling singing; then from underneath the bed would leap a little devil, indistinguishable from the darkness, yet clearly visible to her inner eye, and start belting something out on a harmonica in such a resonant, jaunty, boisterous way! It would have been easier to sleep not in the stuffy heat, on feather mattresses, but in the fresh air, under the overhang of the granaries. But Nastasya Petrovna was afraid:

“The dogs’ll come up and sniff around my head…”

When all hope of having children had gone, the thought occurred to him ever more frequently: “Who’s all this torment for, then, the devil take it?” And the state monopoly was rubbing salt in the wound. His hands started to shake, his brows to knit and rise as if in pain, his lip to twist – especially at the phrase which was always on his tongue: “bear it in mind”. He tried as before to look younger than he was – he wore foppish calfskin boots and an embroidered kosovorotka* under a double-breasted jacket. But his beard grew greyer, and thinner, and tangled…

And as if on purpose, the summer turned out hot and droughty. The rye failed completely. And complaining to customers became something to enjoy.

“We’re closing down, sir, closing down!” Tikhon Ilyich would say with joy of his trade in alcohol, rapping out every syllable. “What else! The state monopoly! The Minister of Finance fancies doing some selling himself!”

“Oh, just look at you!” groaned Nastasya Petrovna. “You’ll say too much one day, you will! They’ll send you where the raven never took any bones!”

“You can’t scare me!” Tikhon Ilyich would cut her off, raising his brows abruptly. “No, sir! You can’t put a gag on every mouth!”

And enunciating the words even more sharply, he would turn again to the customer:

“And the rye simply fills you with joy, sir! Bear it in mind: fills everyone with joy! Even in the night, sir – you can see it. You go out onto the doorstep, look into the moonlit fields: nothing there, sir, like a bald patch! You go out and look: it’s all shimmering!”

That year, during the fast before Peter and Paul’s Day,* Tikhon Ilyich spent four days in town at the fair and got even more upset – by his thoughts, the heat, sleepless nights. He usually set off for the fair with great enthusiasm. They would oil the carts in the twilight and fill them up with hay; into the one in which the master himself and his old workman were riding they put pillows and a chuika.* They would start out late at night and drag along, creaking, until dawn. At first they enjoyed friendly conversation, they smoked and told each other scary old stories about merchants murdered on the road and during overnight stops; then Tikhon Ilyich would settle down to sleep – and it was so pleasant hearing the voices of oncoming people in his sleep, feeling the cart rocking shakily and seeming to be forever going downhill, his cheek shifting about on the pillow, his cap falling off and the freshness of the night cooling his head; it was good too waking up before the sun on a pink dewy morning amidst matt-green crops, and catching sight in the distance of the cheerful whiteness of the town in the blue lowland, the gleam of its churches, and having a good yawn, crossing himself at the sound of distant bells and taking the reins from the hands of the sleepy old man, grown weak like a child in the morning chill, and pale as chalk in the light of the sunrise… Now Tikhon Ilyich sent the carts off with the foreman, and he himself travelled alone in a cabriolet. The night was warm and light, but nothing brought him any joy; the journey made him tired; the lights at the fair, in the jail and the hospital, which stood at the entrance to the town, could be seen for about ten versts across the steppe, and it seemed as if you would never reach them, those distant, sleepy lights. And it was so hot at the inn on Schepnaya Square, and the bedbugs bit so hard, and so frequently did voices ring out by the gates, such a clatter did the carts driving into the stone yard make, and so early did the cocks begin yelling and the pigeons cooing, and the pale light appear outside the open windows, that he got not a wink of sleep. He slept but little on the second night too, which he tried spending at the fair, in a cart: horses neighed, lights burned in tents, people walked and talked all around, and at dawn, when his eyelids were simply sticking together, bells started ringing in the jail and the hospital – and a cow set up an awful bellowing just above his head…

“Torment!” constantly came to mind during those days and nights.

The fair, sprawling over the common for an entire verst, was, as always, noisy and chaotic. There was a discordant hubbub – the neighing of horses, the trills of children’s whistles, the marches and polkas of the orchestrions crashing out on the carousels. A garrulous crowd of peasants, men and women, thronged from morning till evening down the dusty, dung-strewn lanes between the carts and tents, horses and cows, booths and food stalls, from which came the stinking fumes of greasy braziers. As always, there were swarms of horse-dealers, imparting terrible heat to every argument and deal; stretching out in endless lines with their nasal refrains were the blind and the poor, beggars and cripples, on crutches and trolleys; moving slowly in the midst of the crowd with its little bells ringing was the police chief’s troika, held in check by a coachman in a velveteen, sleeveless jacket and a little hat with peacock feathers… Tikhon Ilyich had a lot of customers. He was approached by black-haired gypsies, ginger-haired Polish Jews in canvas overalls and worn-down boots, tanned landowners in poddyovkas* and caps; he was approached by a handsome hussar, Prince Bakhtin, and his wife in an English suit, and by an ancient hero of Sebastopol, Khvostov – tall and bony, with amazing large features on his dark, wrinkled face, in a long uniform coat and sagging trousers, boots with wide toes and a big cap with a yellow band, from beneath which his hair, dyed a dead brown colour, was combed forwards onto his temples… Bakhtin, as he looked at a horse, leant back, gave a restrained smile into his moustache and tiny beard, and fidgeted with his leg in cherry-coloured breeches. Khvostov, after shuffling up to a horse which looked at him sidelong with a fiery eye, would stop in such a way that he seemed to be falling over, would raise a crutch and ask for the tenth time in a muffled, expressionless voice:

“How much are you asking?”

And everyone had to be answered. And Tikhon Ilyich did answer, but only with an effort, clenching his jaws, and he would demand such high prices that everyone went away with nothing.

He got very tanned, grew thinner and wan, got dusty, and felt mortal anguish and weakness throughout his body. He upset his stomach so much that he began having spasms. He was obliged to go to the hospital. But there he waited his turn for about two hours, sat in an echoing corridor sniffing the disagreeable smell of carbolic acid, and felt as though he were not Tikhon Ilyich, but were in the antechamber of his master or his superior. And when a heavy-breathing doctor, looking like a deacon, red-faced, light-eyed, in a black frockcoat that was too tight for him and smelt of copper, put his cold ear up against his chest, he hastened to say that his stomach was “almost better”, and only out of timidity did he not refuse castor oil. And returning to the fair, he swallowed down a glass of vodka with pepper and salt, and again began eating sausage and poor-quality bread, drinking tea, unboiled water, sour cabbage soup – but still he was unable to quench his thirst. Acquaintances invited him to “refresh himself with some beer” – and he went. The kvas* seller yelled:

“Have some kvas, it’s a kick in a glass! A kopek a time, the number one lemonade!”

And he stopped the kvas seller.

“He-ere’s ice cream!” cried the tenor voice of a bald, sweating ice-cream seller, a fat-bellied old man in a red shirt.

And from an ivory spoon he ate ice cream that was almost like snow, which made for a cruel ache in the temples.

The dusty common, pounded by feet, wheels and hoofs, and strewn with litter and dung, was already emptying – the fair was dispersing. But as if to spite somebody, Tikhon Ilyich continued to keep the unsold horses in the heat and the dust, continued to sit on the cart. Good Lord, what a land! Black earth an arshin* and a half deep, and what earth! But not five years go by without a famine. The town is famed throughout Russia for its trade in grain – but only a hundred people in the whole town have enough of that grain to eat. And the fair itself? Beggars, simpletons, blind men, cripples – and all the kind that make you feel scared and wretched just looking at them – a whole regiment of them!

Tikhon Ilyich drove home on a hot, sunny morning along the Old Highway. He drove first through the town and the market, then across the shallow little river, soured by the leatherworks, and, beyond the river, uphill, through the Chornaya Sloboda. He had once worked at the market, along with his brother, in Matorin’s store. Now everyone at the market bowed to him. His childhood had passed in the Sloboda – on this hillock, amidst sunken daub huts with rotten, blackened roofs, amidst the dung that they dry in front of them for fuel, amidst rubbish, cinders and rags… There was no trace now of the hut where Tikhon Ilyich had been born and grown up. In its place stood a new little plank-built house with a rusty sign over the entrance: “Ecclesiastical Tailor Sobolev”. Everything else in the Sloboda was as it had been: pigs and chickens beside the doorsteps; tall poles by the gates, and sheep’s horns on the poles; the large, pale faces of lace-makers peering out from behind pots of flowers through tiny little windows; barefooted little boys with one brace over their shoulders flying a paper kite with a bast tail; quiet, tow-haired little girls by the zavalinkas* playing their favourite game – dolls’ funerals… At the top of the hill, amidst fields, he crossed himself in the direction of the graveyard, behind whose fence, amongst old trees, there had once been the terrifying grave of the wealthy skinflint Zykov, which had fallen in at the very moment they had finished filling it up. And after giving it some thought, he turned the horse towards the gates of the graveyard.

By those big, white gates sat an old woman knitting a stocking, and looking like an old woman from a fairytale – with glasses, with a beak, with sunken lips – one of the widows who lived in the almshouse at the graveyard.

“Hello, granny!” cried Tikhon Ilyich, tying the horse to a pillar by the gates. “Can you look after my horse?”

The old woman stood up, bowed low and mumbled:

“I can, sir.”

Tikhon Ilyich took off his cap, rolled his eyes up towards his forehead and crossed himself once more in the direction of the painting of the Assumption of the Virgin above the gates, and added:

“Are there many of you here now?”

“A full dozen old women, sir.”

“Well, and do you argue a lot?”

“We do, sir…”

And Tikhon Ilyich set off unhurriedly between trees and crosses down the path leading to the old wooden church. At the fair he had had his hair cut, his beard evened up and shortened – and he looked much younger. He was made to look younger by his thinness after the illness. He was made to look younger by his tan – only the trimmed triangles on his temples had the whiteness of delicate skin. He was made to look younger by his memories of childhood and youth, and by his new canvas cap. He walked and gazed from side to side… How short and muddled life is! And what peace and quiet all around in this sunny calm, inside the fence of the old cemetery! A hot wind was rushing through the tops of the light trees, thinned out prematurely by the intense heat and allowing the cloudless sky to show through, and it swung their transparent, light shade over the stones and the monuments. And when it dropped, the hot sun warmed the flowers and grasses, the birds in the bushes sang sweetly, and the butterflies, in sweet languor, were dead still on the hot pathways… On one cross Tikhon Ilyich read:

What dreadful quit-rents

Death gathers from men!

But there was nothing dreadful around him. He walked, remarking even with a sort of pleasure that the graveyard was growing, that a lot of new mausoleums had appeared among the ancient gravestones in the form of coffins on legs, of heavy, cast-iron slabs, and of huge, crude, already rotting crosses, of which it was full. “Passed away on 7th November 1819 at five in the morning” – such inscriptions were terrible to read: death at the dawn of an inclement autumn day in an old provincial town is not a nice thing! But nearby, between the trees, shone the whiteness of a plaster angel with its eyes fixed upon the sky, and hammered out in golden letters on the plinth beneath it was: “Blessed are the dead that die in the Lord!” On the iron monument of some Collegiate Assessor,* made iridescent by bad weather and time, could be made out the verses:

He served the Tsar most honestly,

He loved his neighbour heartily,

Was honoured by his fellow men…

Those verses seemed false to Tikhon Ilyich. But – where is the truth? A human jawbone is lying about here in the bushes, looking as if it were made of dirty wax – all that remains of a man… But is it all? Flowers, ribbons, crosses, coffins and bones in the ground are rotting – all is death and decay! But Tikhon Ilyich walked on and read: “So also is the resurrection of the dead. It is sown in corruption; it is raised in incorruption.”*

All the inscriptions spoke touchingly of quiet and rest, of tenderness, of a love which seemingly does not and will not exist on earth, of people’s devotion to one another and obedience to God, of those fervent hopes for a future life and a reunion in another, blessed land, in all of which you believe only here, and of the equality which death alone brings – those moments when the dead beggar is kissed on the lips in a final kiss as a brother, and is made the equal of tsars and bishops… And there, inside the furthest corner of the fence, in elder bushes slumbering in the full heat of the sun, Tikhon Ilyich caught sight of a fresh, child’s grave, a cross, and on the cross a couplet:

quiet, leaves, now not one peep,

let my Kostya stay asleep!

– and, remembering his own child, crushed in its sleep by the mute cook, he began to blink at the tears that welled up.

No one ever rides along the highway that leads past the graveyard and disappears amidst undulating fields. They ride along the dusty cart track beside it. Tikhon Ilyich set off along the cart track too. Towards him rushed a peeling hire cab – provincial cab-drivers really get a move on! – and in the cab was a man from town out hunting: at his feet was a skewbald pointer, on his knees – a gun in a case, on his feet – high marsh waders, though there were no marshes whatsoever in the district. And Tikhon Ilyich clenched his teeth angrily: he’d like to see this loafer as a workman. The midday sun was scorching, the hot wind was blowing, the cloudless sky was becoming slate-coloured. And ever more angrily did Tikhon Ilyich turn away from the dust flying along the road, ever more anxiously did he squint at the scrawny crops, drying out prematurely.

At a measured pace, with tall staffs, walked crowds of female pilgrims, worn out with tiredness and the intense heat. They made low, humble bows to Tikhon Ilyich, but everything already seemed like falsity to him again now:

“So humble! But I bet they scrap like dogs when they stop for the night!”

Some drunken peasants returning from the fair were driving their wretched horses on, raising clouds of dust – they were ginger, greying, black-haired, but all equally ugly, scrawny and ragged. And overtaking their rattling carts, Tikhon Ilyich shook his head:

“Ugh, vagrants, the devil take you!”

One, wearing a cotton shirt that was ripped to shreds, was lying on his back asleep, rocking about like a dead man, with his head thrown back and his bloodied beard and swollen nose sticking up, covered in dried blood. Another was running to try and catch up with the hat that had been torn off by the wind; he stumbled, and with malicious pleasure Tikhon Ilyich walloped him with his knout. He came upon a cart filled with sieves, spades and peasant women; sitting with their backs to the horse, they shook and bumped up and down; one had a new child’s cap on her head with the peak at the back, another was singing, a third was waving her arms and yelling after Tikhon Ilyich with roars of laughter:

“Mister! You’ve lost your linchpin!”

And he held back his horse, allowed himself to be overtaken and walloped the woman with his knout as well.

Beyond the town gates, where the highway turned aside, where the rattling carts fell behind, and quietness, the space and heat of the steppe took hold, he again felt that the main thing in the world was, after all, “business”. Oh, what poverty there was all around! The peasants were completely destitute, there wasn’t a silver kopek left in the depleted little estates scattered around the district… A firm hand was needed here, a firm hand!

At the halfway point there was the large village of Rovnoye. The hot, dry wind was rushing along the empty streets and through the willows, scorched by the heat. By the doorsteps, chickens were busy covering themselves in cinders. Poking up crudely on the bare common was the weird-coloured church. Beyond the church, a shallow, clayey pond was shimmering in the sun below a dam of dung – thick, yellow water in which a herd of cows was standing, continually answering calls of nature, and a naked peasant was soaping his head. He had gone waist-deep into the water; on his chest there shone a copper cross, his neck and face were tanned black, while his trunk was astonishingly pale and white.

“Unbridle the horse, will you,” said Tikhon Ilyich, driving into the pond, which smelt of the herd.

The peasant tossed a marbled, bluish piece of soap onto the bank, black with cows’ droppings, and, with his head grey and soapy, covering himself modestly, he hastened to carry out the order. The horse fell upon the water greedily, but the water was so warm and unpleasant that it lifted its head and turned away. Whistling to it softly, Tikhon Ilyich shook his cap:

“What awful water you’ve got! Don’t drink it, do you?”

“And yours is sweet as sugar, is it?” the peasant retorted, gently and cheerfully. “We’ve always drunk it! Who cares about the water – it’s bread we haven’t got…”

Beyond Rovnoye the road set off between unbroken fields of rye – again, weak and scrawny, awash with cornflowers… And near Vyselki, not far from Durnovka, a cloud of rooks with open, silvery beaks was sitting on a hollow, gnarled brittle willow – they like the sites of fires for some reason: of Vyselki in those days there remained just the name alone – just the black shells of huts amidst debris. The debris was emitting a milky-bluish smoke, there was the sour smell of ashes… And the thought of fire struck through Tikhon Ilyich like lightning. “What a calamity!” he thought, turning pale. He had nothing insured, everything could be gone in an hour…

After the fast, after that memorable journey to the fair, Tikhon Ilyich started drinking – and quite often too, not getting drunk, but getting respectably red in the face. However, this did his business no harm at all, and, in his words, did his health no harm either. “Vodka polishes the blood,” he would say. Not infrequently now he would call his life a torment, a noose, a golden cage. But he strode along his path ever more surely, and several years passed so monotonously that everything merged into a single working day. And the new major events were things that had never been expected – war with Japan and revolution.

Talk of the war began, of course, with bragging. “The Cossack’ll soon cut the yellowskin to ribbons, brother!” But soon different words were heard.

“We don’t know what to do with our own land!” said Tikhon Ilyich in a stern, commanding tone. “This war, sir, is nothing but a nonsense!”

And he was stirred to gloating delight by news of the terrible defeats of the Russian army:

“Oh, wonderful! Let them have it, the motherfuckers!”

He was delighted at first by the Revolution too, he was delighted by the killings:

“The way he gave that minister one in the heart,” Tikhon Ilyich would sometimes say in the heat of rapture, “the way he gave it him – and there was nothing left of him but dust!”

Yet as soon as they started talking about the alienation of land, the rage began to awaken within him. “It’s all the Yids’ work! It’s all the Yids, sir, and those ragamuffins, the students, too!” And it was in­com­prehensible: everyone saying revolution, revolution, while all a­round – everything’s as before, humdrum: the sun shines, the rye blooms in the fields, carts drag their way to the station… Incomprehensible in their silence, in their evasive talk, were the peasants.

“It’s secretive they’ve become, sir, the peasants! It’s just awful, how secretive!” Tikhon Ilyich would say.

And forgetting about “the Yids”, he would add:

“Let’s suppose this whole tune’s not so devious, sir. Change the government and divide the land up equally – even a baby can understand that, sir. And so it’s perfectly clear who they’re supporting – the peasants, that is. But they’re keeping mum, of course. And so you have to keep your eyes on them and try to make them keep mum. Not set them off! Otherwise, watch out: if they sense success, sense they’re getting their way – they’ll smash everything to smithereens, sir!”

When he read or heard that they would only be taking land away from those who had more than five hundred desyatins,* he himself became “a troublemaker”. He even entered into arguments with the peasants. A peasant would happen to be standing by his store and saying:

“No, don’t go saying that, Ilyich. At a fair valuation, then you can – take it, that is. But otherwise – no, that’s not the right thing…”

It’s hot, there’s the smell of the pine planks piled up beside the barns opposite the yard. The hot locomotive of a goods train can be heard croaking, letting off steam behind the trees and the station buildings. Tikhon Ilyich stands hatless, narrowing his eyes and smiling slyly. He smiles and replies:

“Windbag! And if he doesn’t take charge of things, but idles around?”

“Who? The master? Well, that’s a different matter. There’s nothing wrong with taking the whole lot away from someone like that!”

“Well that’s just it!”

But different news would come – they’d be taking away less than five hundred desyatins too – and his soul was immediately gripped by distraction, suspicion, testiness. Everything that was done around the house began to seem repellent.

Yegorka, the assistant, was carrying flour sacks out of the store and starting to shake them out. The crown of his head wedge-like, his hair coarse and thick – “And why is it that fools have such thick hair?” – the forehead concave, the face like a lopsided egg, the eyes fishlike, goggling, and the eyelids with the white lashes of a calf seemingly stretched out onto them: it was as if there had been a shortage of skin, and if the fellow closed his eyes, he would have to let his mouth gape, and if he shut his mouth, he would need to open his eyelids wide. And Tikhon Ilyich cried angrily:

“Muddlehead! Bonehead! What are you shaking it onto me for?”

The cook was carrying out some little chest or other, opening it, putting it upside down onto the ground, and starting to bang on the bottom of it with her fist. And realizing what was going on, Tikhon Ilyich slowly shook his head:

“Oh, the housewives, God damn you! Knocking the cockroaches out, are you?”

“There’s simply masses of them here!” the cook replied joyfully. “Took a look, and it’s God’s horrors in there!”

And grinding his teeth, Tikhon Ilyich went out onto the highway and gazed for a long time into the undulating fields in the direction of Durnovka.

His living quarters, the kitchen, the store, and the barn where the alcohol used to be on sale – it all comprised the one unit under the one iron roof. Directly abutting it on three sides were the awnings of the farmyard, which was covered with straw – and the result was a cosy square. The barns stood opposite the house, across the road. To the right was the station, to the left the highway. Beyond the highway was a small birch wood. And when Tikhon Ilyich wasn’t himself, he would go out onto the highway. It ran off in a white ribbon, from one bump to the next, towards the south, dropping ever lower, along with the fields, and rising once more towards the horizon only from the distant hut where it was crossed by the railway coming from the south-east. And if one of the Durnovka peasants happened to be riding along – someone who was on the sensible, intelligent side, of course, for example Yakov, whom everyone called Yakov Mikitich because he was “rich” and mean, Tikhon Ilyich would stop him.

“You might at least buy a ruddy cap!” he cried with a grin.

Yakov, in a hat, a hempen shirt, short, sackcloth trousers and barefooted, was sitting on the edge of the cart. He pulled on the rope reins and stopped his well-fed mare.

“Hello, Tikhon Ilyich,” he said in a restrained voice.

“Hello! The hat, I’m saying, it’s time it was donated to the jackdaws for nesting!”

With a sly grin at the ground, Yakov nodded his head.

“It… how can I put it?… wouldn’t be a bad thing. But capital, for instance, doesn’t allow it.”

“That’s fine coming from you! We know the likes of you with your hard-luck stories! You’ve given your lass away, married off your lad, you’ve got a bit of money… What else do you want from the Lord God?”

This flattered Yakov, but made him even more reticent.

“Oh Lord!” he muttered in a tremulous voice and with a sigh. “Money… I’ve never had the habit of it, for instance… And the lad… what of the lad? The lad’s no joy… It’s got to be said straight – he’s no joy!”

Like many peasants, Yakov was very touchy, and especially when it came to his family and his business. He was very secretive, but here his touchiness got the upper hand, although it was revealed only in his abrupt, tremulous speech. And to stir him up completely, Tikhon Ilyich asked sympathetically:

“No joy? Well I never! And all because of his woman?”

Looking around, Yakov scratched his chest with his fingernails:

“Because of his woman, may she be struck down and paralysed…”

“Jealous, is he?”

“Yes… She says I’m screwing her…”

And Yakov’s eyes were darting about:

“She complained to her husband once, then she complained again! And that’s not all – she tried to poison me! When you catch cold sometimes, for instance… you have a little smoke to ease your chest… Well, and she put a roll-up under my pillow… If I hadn’t looked, I’d have been done for!”

“So what sort of a roll-up was it?”

“She’d ground up dead men’s bones and put that in instead of tobacco…”

“Your lad really is a fool! He should give the bloody woman a lesson the Russian way!”

“No chance! It was my chest, for instance, he went for! And writhing like a snake, he was… I grab him by the head, but his hair’s cut short… I grab him by his shirt front… but it’s a shame to rip a shirt!”

Tikhon Ilyich shook his head, was silent for a minute, and finally resolved upon it:

“Well, and how are things over there? Are you still waiting for a revolt?”

But here the secretiveness returned to Yakov at once. He grinned and waved a hand.

“Come on!” he muttered rapidly. “What on earth do we want that for – a revolt! Our folk are peaceful… Peaceful folk…”

And he pulled on the reins as if the horse were not standing still.

“So why was there a gathering on Sunday?” Tikhon Ilyich suddenly tossed out angrily.

“A gathering? The devil knows! They made a bit of a din, for instance…”

“And I know what they were making a din about! I know!”

“Well, I’m not hiding anything… They were chattering, for instance, about a directive, like, coming out… a directive’s apparently come out – on no account to work at the former price…”

It was very hurtful to think he was losing his heart for business because of some Durnovka or other. And there were only some thirty homesteads in that Durnovka. And it lay in a godforsaken ravine: a wide gully, on one side the huts, on the other the wretched little estate. And that wretched little estate was exchanging glances with the huts and waiting from day to day for some “directive”… Oh, if only he could take on a few Cossacks with whips!

But a “directive” did come out. The rumour spread one Sunday that there was a gathering in Durnovka, and a plan was being devised for an attack on the manor house. With maliciously joyful eyes, with a sensation of unusual strength and audacity, with a readiness to “break the horns of the Devil himself”, Tikhon Ilyich called out: “Harness the stallion to the cabriolet,” and ten minutes later he was already driving it alongside the highway towards Durnovka. The sun was setting after a rainy day into red-grey clouds, the tree trunks in the little birch wood were scarlet, the cart track, its violet-black mud standing out sharply amidst fresh greenery, was heavy. From the stallion’s haunches and the breeching that shifted about on them fell pink lather. Cracking the reins firmly, Tikhon Ilyich turned off away from the railway, bore to the right by a road through the fields and, catching sight of Durnovka, began for a moment to doubt the truth of the rumours about a revolt. Peace and quiet was all around, the larks were peacefully singing their evening songs, there was the simple, calm smell of damp earth and the sweetness of wild flowers… But suddenly his gaze fell upon the fallow alongside the estate, which was densely covered with yellow melilot: the peasants’ herd was grazing on the fallow! It had started, then! And jerking on the reins, Tikhon Ilyich flew past the herd, past the threshing barn, overgrown with burdock and nettles, past the low-growing cherry orchard, full of sparrows, past the stables and the servants’ hut, and galloped into the yard…

And then something ugly had happened: in the twilight, frozen with anger, hurt and fear, Tikhon Ilyich sat in a field in his cabriolet. His heart was pounding, his hands were trembling, his face was burning, his hearing was as sharp as a wild animal’s. He sat listening to the cries that carried from Durnovka and remembering how a crowd, which had seemed huge, had flocked, on seeing him, across the gully towards the manor house, had filled the yard with din and abuse, had bunched up by the porch and pressed him against the door. He had only had a knout in his hands. And he had brandished it, now retreating, now hurling himself desperately into the crowd. But even more freely and boldly had a stick been brandished by the advancing harness-maker – vicious, wiry, with a concave stomach, sharp-nosed, wearing boots and a purple cotton shirt. On behalf of the whole crowd he had yelled that a directive had come out to “get the thing done” – to get it done on the same day and at the same time throughout the province: to drive the itinerant farm labourers out of every estate, for locals to take over their work – at a rouble a day! And Tikhon Ilyich had yelled even more frenziedly, trying to drown the harness-maker out:

“A-ah! So that’s how it is! Learnt it all from the agitators, have you, you vagabond? Got the hang of things?”

And the harness-maker had caught his words tenaciously, on the wing:

“It’s you that’s the vagabond!” he had howled, with the blood rushing to his face. “You, you old fool! Don’t I know how much land you’ve got? How much, you cat-skinner? Two hundred desyatins? While I’ve got – damn it – all I’ve got is the size of your porch! And why? Who are you? Who are you, I’m asking you? What sort of stock are you made from?”

“You remember this, Mitka!” Tikhon Ilyich had cried helplessly at last and, feeling that his head was spinning round, he hurled himself through the crowd towards his cabriolet. “Just you remember it!”

But no one had been scared by his threats – and a concerted cackling, roaring and whistling had sped in his wake… And then he had skirted around the estate, stopping in terror, listening. He had driven out onto the road, onto the crossroads, and stood with his face to the sunset, to the station, ready to strike the horse at any moment. It was very quiet, warm, damp and dark. The earth, rising towards the horizon, where a weak, reddish light was still smouldering, was as black as the abyss.

“Stand s-still, you stinker!” Tikhon Ilyich whispered through his teeth to the shifting horse. “Sti-ill!”

And from the distance there came voices and cries. And standing out from among all the voices was that of Red Vanka, who had already been sent to the Donetsk mines twice. And then above the manor house there suddenly rose a dark and fiery column: the peasants had set fire to a cabin in the garden – and a pistol forgotten in the cabin by the orchard’s tenant, who had already fled back to town, had started shooting from the fire of its own accord…

It was learnt subsequently that there truly had been a miracle: on one and the same day, the peasants throughout almost the entire district had revolted. And the hotels in town were for a long time overcrowded with landowners seeking protection from the authorities. But it was with great shame that Tikhon Ilyich remembered subsequently that he had sought it too: with shame, because the entire revolt ended with the peasants making a hullabaloo throughout the district, burning and destroying a few manor houses, and then falling quiet. The harness-maker soon began appearing in the store at Vorgol again as if nothing had happened, and he took his hat off deferentially on the threshold as if not noticing that Tikhon Ilyich’s face had darkened at his appearance. Rumours still circulated, however, that the men of Durnovka meant to kill Tikhon Ilyich. And he was rather scared of being out late on the road from Durnovka, and he felt in his pocket for the bulldog which made a tiresome bulge in the pocket of his wide-legged trousers, and made an oath to himself to burn Durnovka to ashes one fine night… to poison the water in the Durnovka ponds… Then the rumours ceased as well. But Tikhon Ilyich began thinking hard about getting rid of Durnovka. “It’s not the money your granny has, it’s the money that’s in your pocket!”

That year, Tikhon Ilyich turned fifty. But the dream of becoming a father did not abandon him. And that was the cause of his encounter with Rodka.

Two years before, Rodka, a lanky, sullen fellow from Ulyanovka, had gone to work for Yakov’s widower brother, Fedot; he had married, buried Fedot, who had died from over-drinking at the wedding, and had been enlisted as a soldier. And the young bride, shapely, with very white, fine skin, with a delicate flush, with eternally lowered eyelashes, had begun working at the manor house as a charwoman. And those eyelashes had got Tikhon Ilyich terribly excited. The Durnovka peasant women wear “horns” on their heads: no sooner are they married, than their plaits are laid on their crowns and covered with a headscarf to form something weird, bovine. They wear old, dark-purple, married women’s skirts with braid, a white pinafore like a sarafan and bast shoes. But even in that costume Bride – that nickname stayed with her – was still good-looking. And one evening, in the dark threshing barn, where Bride was finishing the raking of the ears of grain by herself, Tikhon Ilyich, after glancing around, quickly went up to her and quickly said:

“You’ll go about in ankle boots and silk shawls… I’ll spare no expense!”

But Bride was silent, as if dead.

“Do you hear me?” cried Tikhon Ilyich in a whisper.

But it was as if Bride had turned to stone, with her head bent, tossing with the rake.

And so he failed to achieve anything. When suddenly Rodka appeared, sooner than expected, one-eyed. This was soon after the revolt of the Durnovka men, and Tikhon Ilyich immediately hired Rodka, along with his wife, to work at the Durnovka manor house, alluding to the fact that “you can’t manage without a soldier now”. Just before Ilya’s Day* Rodka went off to town for new brooms and spades, while Bride was washing the floors in the house. Stepping over the puddles, Tikhon Ilyich entered the room, glanced at Bride bending down, at her white calves, splashed with dirty water, at the whole of her body, grown fuller in marriage… And suddenly he clicked the key in the lock and, somehow controlling his strength and desire particularly well, he stepped towards Bride. She straightened up quickly, lifted her excited, flushed face and, holding a wet rag in her hand, cried strangely:

“I’ll give you a good whacking, my lad!”

There was the smell of hot slops, a hot body, sweat… And grabbing Bride’s hand, squeezing it brutally, giving the rag a shake and knocking it free, Tikhon Ilyich caught Bride by the waist with his right arm, pressed her up against him – and in such a way that her bones cracked – and carried her into the next room, where there was a bed. And throwing her head back and widening her eyes, Bride struggled and resisted no longer…

After that it became a torment to see his own wife, to see Rodka, to know that Rodka slept with Bride and beat her savagely – day and night. And soon it became horrifying too. Inscrutable are the paths by which a jealous man reaches the truth. But Rodka reached it. Thin, one-eyed, long-armed and strong as an ape, with a small, close-cropped black head which he always kept bowed, gazing from beneath his brow with his deep-sunken, shining eye, he became terrible. As a soldier he had picked up Ukrainian words and stresses. And if Bride dared to answer back to his curt, harsh speeches, he would calmly take a leather strap, go up to her with an evil grin and ask calmly through his teeth, putting the stress on the “ing”:

“Waddya sayíng?”

And he would give her such a flogging that her eyes would grow dim.

Tikhon Ilyich once stumbled upon this retribution and, unable to contain himself, cried:

“What are you doing, you swine?”

But Rodka sat down calmly on a bench and only glanced at him:

“Waddya sayíng?” he asked.

And Tikhon Ilyich hurried to slam the door…

Wild ideas now began occurring to him: to arrange things, for example, so that Rodka would be crushed somewhere by a roof or some earth… But a month passed, then another – and hope, that very hope which had intoxicated him with these ideas, deceived him cruelly: Bride had not become pregnant! Whatever was the point in continuing to play with fire after that? He needed to get rid of Rodka, throw him out, and as quickly as possible.

But who was to replace him?

Chance came to his aid. Tikhon Ilyich unexpectedly made up with his brother and persuaded him to take on the running of Durnovka.

He found out from an acquaintance in town that Kuzma had worked for a long time as a clerk for the landowner Kasatkin and, most amazing of all, had become “an author”. Yes, he had apparently had a whole book of his poetry printed, and on the back it said: “available from the author”.

“So-o!” drawled Tikhon Ilyich on hearing this. “That Kuzma’s quite something! And what – is that what they’ve printed, may I ask: the work of Kuzma Krasov?”

“As is right and proper,” replied the acquaintance, who was of the firm belief, however – as were many in the town – that Kuzma “filched” his poetry from books and journals.

Without stirring from the spot, there and then, at a table in Dayev’s tavern Tikhon Ilyich wrote a firm and brief note to his brother: it was time for old men to be reconciled, to repent. And the reconciliation took place there too. And the next day a talk about business as well.

It was morning, the tavern was still empty. The sun was shining through the dusty windows and illuminating the tables covered with dampish red tablecloths, the dark floor, just scrubbed with grain husks and smelling of the stables, and waiters in white shirts and white trousers. A canary in a cage, as if not a real, but a clockwork one, was singing all kinds of tunes. Tikhon Ilyich sat down at a table with a nervous and serious face, and, as soon as he had ordered tea for two, the long-familiar voice rang out above his ear:

“Well, hello again.”

Kuzma was shorter than him, more bony, wirier. He had a large, thin face with slightly prominent cheekbones, frowning grey brows, small greenish eyes. He began in a less than straightforward way:

“First of all I shall set out for you, Tikhon Ilyich,” he began, as soon as Tikhon Ilyich had poured him some tea, “I shall set out for you who I am, so that you know…” he grinned, “who you’re getting involved with…”

And he had a manner of rapping out the syllables, raising his eyebrows, undoing and doing up the top button of his jacket during conversation. And after doing himself up, he continued:

“You see, I’m an anarchist…”

Tikhon Ilyich raised his eyebrows.

“Never fear. I’m not involved in politics. But you can’t stop anyone thinking. And there’s no harm in it for you at all. I’ll run things metic­ulously, but, I’m telling you straight – I won’t go fleecing anyone.”

“Well, the times have changed too,” sighed Tikhon Ilyich.

“The times are just the same. You can still fleece people. But no, it’s not fitting. I shall manage things, and I’ll devote my free time to self-development… to reading, that is.”

“Oh, you bear it in mind: too much reading and your pocket’ll be bleeding!” said Tikhon Ilyich, tossing his head and twitching the corner of his lip. “And I reckon it’s not for us.”

“Well I don’t think so,” objected Kuzma. “I, brother – how can I explain it to you? – I’m a strange Russian type!”

“I’m a Russian myself too, bear it in mind,” interjected Tikhon Ilyich.

“But different. I don’t mean to say that I’m better than you, but – different. I can see that you’re proud to be Russian, while I, brother, am far from being a Slavophile! It doesn’t do to chatter a lot, but one thing I will say: for God’s sake don’t boast about being Russian. We’re a savage people!”

Frowning, Tikhon Ilyich drummed his fingers on the table.

“That, I reckon, is true,” he said. “A savage people. Wild.”

“Well, that’s exactly it. I can say I’ve roamed the world quite a bit – well, and? – absolutely nowhere have I seen more miserable and lazy types. And if one of them isn’t lazy” – Kuzma gave his brother a sidelong look – “well, nothing good’s ever come of him. He grubs around, builds himself a nest bit by bit, but what’s the good of it?”

“What do you mean – what’s the good of it?” asked Tikhon Ilyich.

“What I say. Building it, the nest, has to be done with purpose as well. I’ll build it, like, and then I’ll live like a decent person. With this and this.”

And Kuzma tapped his finger on his chest and forehead.

“We’ve clearly got no time for that, brother,” said Tikhon Ilyich. “‘Come live in the village, eat grey cabbage soup, wear rotten bast shoes!’”*

“Bast shoes!” Kuzma responded caustically. “We’re wearing them, brother, for the second thousand years, may they be thrice accursed. And who’s to blame? The Tatars, you see, crushed us! We’re a young people, you see! But there too, you know, in Europe, I reckon there’s been quite a bit of crushing going on as well – all sorts of Mongols. And the Germans are probably no older… Well, but that’s a different conversation!”

“True!” said Tikhon Ilyich. “Better, let’s talk about business.”

Kuzma, however, went on with what he was saying:

“I don’t go to church…”

“You’re a schismatic, then?” asked Tikhon Ilyich, and thought: “I’ve had it! I clearly need to get rid of Durnovka!”

“A sort of schismatic,” grinned Kuzma. “But do you go? If it weren’t for terror and a bit of need, you’d have completely forgotten the way.”

“Well, I’m not the first and I won’t be the last,” retorted Tikhon Ilyich, frowning. “We’re all sinners. But you know, it’s said: one last breath and all’s forgiven.”

Kuzma shook his head.

“You’re saying the usual thing!” he said sternly. “But just you stop and think: how can it be? Lived and lived like a swine all his life, one breath – and everything’s gone as if by magic! Is there sense in that, or not?”

The conversation was becoming difficult. “That’s true as well,” thought Tikhon Ilyich, gazing at the table with gleaming eyes. But, as always, he wanted to avoid thoughts and conversation about God and about life, and he said the first thing that came to his tongue:

“I’d be glad to go to heaven, but my sins won’t let me.”

“There you are, there you are!” Kuzma chimed in, tapping a fingernail on the table. “The thing we love best of all, our most ruinous feature: saying one thing, and doing another! A Russian tune, brother: living like a swine is bad, but I do and will live like a swine all the same! Well, talk your business then…”

The canary had grown quiet. People were gathering in the inn. Audible now from the market was the amazingly distinct and resonant warbling of a quail somewhere in a store. And while the conversation about business was going on, Kuzma kept listening to it closely, and at times he would comment in a low voice: “Canny!” And on reaching an agreement, he slapped his palm on the table and said energetically:

“Well then, so be it – no going back!” and, dipping his hand into the side pocket of his jacket, he took out a whole pile of papers, large and small, found among them a little book in a marble-grey cover, and put it down in front of his brother.

“Here you are!” he said. “I yield to your request and my own weak­ness. It’s a wretched little book, the verse is ill-thought-out and old… But there’s nothing can be done. Here, take it and put it away.”

And again Tikhon Ilyich got excited that his brother was an author, that printed on this marble-grey cover was: Poems by K.I. Krasov. He turned the book over in his hands and said timorously:

“Or perhaps you might read something… Eh? Do be so kind and read out three or four poems!”

And lowering his head, putting on a pince-nez, holding the book out a long way away from him and gazing at it sternly through the lenses, Kuzma started to read what the self-taught usually read: imitations of Koltsov and Nikitin,* complaints against fate and need, challenges to a sinking storm cloud. But pink spots stood out on his thin cheekbones and at times his voice trembled. Tikhon Ilyich’s eyes gleamed too. Whether the poetry was good or bad was unimportant – important was the fact that it had been composed by his own brother, a poor man, an ordinary man, who smelt of cheap tobacco and old boots…

“Well we, Kuzma Ilyich,” he said, when Kuzma had fallen silent and, taking off the pince-nez, had cast his eyes down, “well we have just the one song…”

And he twitched his lip unpleasantly, bitterly:

“We have just the one song: what costs what?”

Having installed his brother at Durnovka, however, he set about that song even more willingly than ever. Before passing Durnovka into his brother’s hands, he found fault with Rodka over some new tugs that were eaten by the dogs, and dismissed him. Rodka grinned insolently in reply and went calmly to his hut to gather his belongings. Bride seemed to hear out the dismissal calmly too – after breaking with Tikhon Ilyich, she had again adopted a manner of remaining impassively silent, of not looking him in the eye. But half an hour later, when they were already set to go, Rodka came with her to beg forgiveness. Bride stood on the threshold, pale, her eyelids swollen with tears, silent; Rodka bowed his head, crumpled his cap and tried to cry as well, pulling repellent faces, while Tikhon Ilyich sat and contorted his eyebrows, clicking on the abacus. He was merciful only in one respect – he did not make a deduction for the tugs.

Now he was firm. While ridding himself of Rodka and handing business over to his brother, he felt cheerful, fine. “He’s unreliable, my brother, a shallow man, it would seem, but he’ll do for the moment!” And on returning to Vorgol, he was tirelessly busy for the whole of October. And, as if in harmony with his mood, for the whole of October the weather was wonderful. But suddenly it broke, and was followed by a storm, torrential rains, and in Durnovka something entirely unexpected happened.

Rodka was working on the railway line in October, while Bride stayed at home with nothing to do, just occasionally earning fifteen or twenty kopeks in the orchard on the estate. She behaved strangely: at home she was silent and cried, but in the orchard she was abruptly cheerful, she laughed loudly, and sang songs with Donka Nanny-goat, a very silly and pretty lass who looked like an Egyptian. Nanny-goat lived with the man from town who was renting the orchard, and Bride, who had made friends with her for some reason, threw provocative looks at his brother, an impudent boy, and as she threw them, she hinted in her songs that she was pining for someone. Whether there was anything between them is unknown, only it all ended in great misfortune: leaving for town on the eve of the Virgin of Kazan’s Day,* the townsmen organized “a little party” in their cabin – they invited Nanny-goat and Bride, played two squeeze boxes all night, gave the girls a pawing and tea and vodka to drink, and at dawn, when they were already harnessing the cart, suddenly, with loud laughter, they tumbled the drunken Bride to the ground, tied her arms together, lifted her skirts, gathered them into a plait above her head and twisted a rope around them. Nanny-goat ran away, in terror took refuge in the tall, wet weeds, and when she peeped out of them – after the cart with the townsmen had rolled swiftly away out of the orchard – she saw that Bride, bare below the waist, was hanging from a tree. It was a mournful, misty dawn, a light rain was whispering through the orchard, Nanny-goat cried floods of tears and her teeth chattered as she untied Bride, and she swore on the lives of her father and mother that she, Nanny-goat, would be struck by a thunderbolt before they found out in the village what had happened in the orchard… But not even a week had gone by before rumours of Bride’s disgrace began spreading through Durnovka.

It was, of course, impossible to verify those rumours: “no one had seen anything, well, and it wouldn’t take much to make Nanny-goat lie.” The gossip provoked by the rumours did not cease, however, and everyone awaited with great impatience the arrival of Rodka and his punishment of his wife. An agitated Tikhon Ilyich – knocked out of his stride again! – awaited this punishment too, having learnt of the episode in the orchard from his workmen: after all, the episode might end in murder! But it ended in such a way that it is still uncertain what would have shocked Durnovka more – a murder or an end such as that: the night before St Michael’s Day,* Rodka, who had come home “to change his shirt”, died “because of his stomach”! This became known in Vorgol late in the evening, but Tikhon Ilyich immediately ordered a horse to be harnessed, and in the darkness, in the rain, he rushed off to see his brother. And in the heat of the moment, having drunk a bottle of fruit liqueur over tea, in passionate expressions and with darting eyes, he confessed to him:

“It’s my fault, brother, it’s my fault!”

After hearing him out, Kuzma was silent for a long time, for a long time he walked around the room, playing with his fingers, wringing them and cracking the joints. Finally, out of the blue he said:

“Just you think now: is there any people crueller than ours? In town, a petty thief who’s grabbed the cheapest flat cake from a tray is chased by folk from the entire row of refreshment stalls, and when they catch him they make him eat soap. The whole town runs to see a fire or a fight, and how sorry they are that the fire or the fight is soon over! Don’t shake your head, don’t, they are sorry! And how people enjoy it when someone’s beating his wife to death, or beating a boy black and blue, or making fun of him! Now that really is the jolliest thing that can be.”

“Bear it in mind,” Tikhon Ilyich interrupted him hotly, “there’ve always been a lot of sneering people everywhere.”

“Right. And haven’t you yourself had that… well, what’s his name? That simpleton?”

“Motya Duckhead, do you mean?” asked Tikhon Ilyich.

“Yes, that’s it, that’s it… Haven’t you had him brought to your place for amusement?”

And Tikhon Ilyich grinned: he had. Motya had even been delivered to him once by rail – in a sugar barrel. He knew the railway officials – well, and he’d been delivered. And they’d written on the barrel: “With care. Complete idiot.”

“And for amusement they teach these simpletons to masturbate!” Kuzma continued bitterly. “They daub tar on poor unmarried women’s gates! They set dogs on beggars! They knock doves off roofs with stones for fun! But to eat those doves is a great sin, don’t you know. The Holy Ghost Himself, don’t you know, takes the form of a dove!”

The samovar had grown cold long before, the candle had guttered, the smoke in the room was a dull blue, the entire slop basin was full of stinking, sodden cigarette butts. The ventilator – a tin pipe in the top corner of a window – was open, and something inside it would at times begin to shriek, spin round and moan ever so drearily – “like in the parish council,” thought Tikhon Ilyich. But there was so much cigarette smoke that even ten ventilators would not have helped. And the rain was making a noise on the roof, and Kuzma was going from corner to corner like a pendulum and saying:

“Ye-es, we’re nice ones, indeed we are! Indescribable goodness! If you read some history, your hair’ll stand on end: brother against brother, in-law against in-law, son against father, treachery and killing, killing and treachery… the old Russian epics are nothing but pleasure too: ‘ripped his white breast open’, ‘spilt his guts out onto the ground’… Ilya, well he ‘stepped on the left foot’ of his own daughter and ‘pulled on the right foot’… And the songs? It’s all the same, all the same: the stepmother’s ‘evil and grasping’, a bride’s father-in-law’s ‘fierce and carping’, ‘he sits on the stove bench like a dog on a rope’, the mother-in-law, again, is ‘fierce’, ‘she sits on the stove like a bitch on a chain’, sisters-in-law are sure to be ‘little bitches and telltales’, the brothers-in-law are ‘vicious scoffers’, the husband is ‘either a fool or a drunkard’, his father, the father-in-law, bids him ‘beat his wife hard, give her a good thrashing’, while for that same father the nice little daughter-in-law has ‘washed the floor, and poured it into his soup, scrubbed the doorstep, and put it into his pie’, and she addresses her dear husband with words such as these: ‘get up, you hateful man, awake; here, take the slops and wash yourself; here, take your puttees and wipe yourself; here, take a bit of rope and hang yourself’… And our funny sayings, Tikhon Ilyich! Can anything filthier and smuttier be invented? And the proverbs! ‘For one beaten man you get two unbeaten’… ‘Simplicity is worse than thievery’…”

“So according to you, is it better to live like a beggar?” asked Tikhon Ilyich mockingly.

And Kuzma picked up joyfully on his words:

“There now, there! There’s none in all the world more destitute than us, but at the same time there’s none more sneering about that same destitution. How do you wound a man really viciously? With poverty! ‘Damn it! You’ve got no grub…’ Here’s an example for you: Deniska… you know the one… Grey’s son… the cobbler… he says to me the other day—”

“Hang on,” Tikhon Ilyich interrupted, “and how’s Grey himself?”

“Deniska says: ‘he’s dying of hunger’.”

“The man’s a stinker!” said Tikhon Ilyich with conviction. “Don’t you sing me any songs about him.”

“I’m not going to,” replied Kuzma angrily. “Better, listen about Deniska. Here’s what he tells me: ‘In a hungry year we used to go out, the apprentices, to the Chornaya Sloboda, and there were these prostitoots there, loads of them. And hungry, the greedy cows, really hungry! Give her half a pound of bread for all her work, and she’d pig down the lot of it underneath you… What a laugh it was!…’ After all that!” cried Kuzma sternly, stopping. “‘What a laugh it was!’”

“Just hang on, for Christ’s sake,” Tikhon Ilyich interrupted again, “let me say a word about that other business!”

Kuzma stopped.

“Well, go on,” he said. “Only what is there to say? What are you to do? Nothing! Give her some money – and that’s all there is to it. Just think of it, after all: nothing for heating, nothing to eat, no money for the funeral! And then take her on again. To cook for me…”

Tikhon Ilyich left for home at first light on a cold, misty morning, while there was still the smell of wet threshing floors and smoke, the cockerels were still singing sleepily in the village, hidden by the mist, the dogs were asleep by the porch, and so was the old, straw-coloured turkey, which had clambered up onto a bough of a half-bare apple tree, coloured with dead autumn leaves, beside the house. In the fields, nothing was visible two paces away in the dense, grey haze that was driven on by the wind. Tikhon Ilyich was not sleepy, but he did feel exhausted and, as always, drove his horse hard – a big bay mare with its tail tied up, which, sodden, seemed thinner, more dandified, blacker. He turned away from the wind, raised the right side of the cold, damp collar of his chuika, which was silvery from the tiniest beads of rain that completely covered it, and he gazed through the cold little drops hanging on his eyelashes at the way the sticky black earth gathered ever more thickly on his speeding wheel, at the way there hung unceasingly before him a whole fountain of high-pounding clods of mud, which was already clinging everywhere onto his boots and knees, and he looked sidelong at the working haunch of the horse, at its flattened ears, indistinct in the mist… And when he at last flew up to the house, his face speckled with mud, the first thing that struck him was Yakov’s horse at the tethering post. Quickly winding the reins around the front of the cabriolet, he leapt down from it, ran up to the open door of the store – and stopped in fright.

“Windba-ag!” Nastasya Petrovna was saying behind the counter, evidently imitating him, Tikhon Ilyich, but in a sick, affectionate voice, and bending ever lower towards the chest of money, rummaging in the jangling copper, but unable to find in the darkness the coin to give as change. “Windbag! Where is it cheaper nowadays?”

And without finding the coin, she unbent herself, looked at Yakov standing in front of her in a hat and armyak,* but barefooted, at his crooked beard of indeterminate colour, and added:

“Did she maybe poison him?”

And Yakov muttered hastily:

“That’s no business of ours, Petrovna… The devil knows… Our business is to keep out of it… To keep out of it, for instance…”

And Tikhon Ilyich’s hands were trembling all day at the memory of that muttering. They all think she poisoned him, all of them!

Fortunately, the mystery remained just that, a mystery: Rodka was buried, Bride keened so sincerely as she accompanied the coffin, it was even unseemly – after all, the keening wasn’t supposed to be an expression of feelings, but the execution of a rite – and little by little Tikhon Ilyich’s alarm subsided.

Besides, he was up to his neck in work, yet had no helping hands. Nastasya Petrovna was of little help. Tikhon Ilyich only hired seasonal workers as farm labour until the autumn feast days. And they had already left. There remained only the annual workers – the cook, the old watchman nicknamed Seedcake, and the lad Oska, “an absolute imbecile”. And the amount of care demanded by the livestock alone! There were twenty sheep overwintering. Sitting in the sty there were six black boars, eternally sullen and discontented about something. In the farmyard stood three cows, a steer and a red calf. In the backyard there were eleven horses, and in the stalls the grey stallion, bad-tempered, heavy, full-maned, deep-chested – a lout, but four hundred roubles’ worth: its father had had a pedigree and cost fifteen hundred. And it all demanded eyes and yet more eyes.

Nastasya Petrovna had long been planning to go and stay with acquaintances in town. And she did finally make her mind up and leave. After seeing her off, Tikhon Ilyich wandered aimlessly into the fields. Walking along the highway with a gun over his shoulders was the head of the post office in Ulyanovka, Sakharov, well-known for such a ferocious attitude to the peasants that they said: “When you give him a letter, your hands and legs are shaking!” Tikhon Ilyich went over to the side of the road to him. Raising an eyebrow, he glanced at him and thought:

“Stupid old man. Look at him, splashing his boots through the mud.”

And he called out amicably:

“Good hunting, was it, Anton Markych?”

The postman stopped. Tikhon Ilyich went over and said hello.

“Come on now, what hunting!” was the gloomy reply of the postman, huge, stooping, with thick grey hair sticking out of his ears and nostrils, big, arching eyebrows and deeply sunken eyes. “I’ve just been out for a stroll for the good of my haemorrhoids,” he said, making a particular effort with the pronunciation of the last word.

“Well bear it in mind,” responded Tikhon Ilyich with unexpected fervour, reaching out a hand with the fingers spread wide, “bear it in mind: our homelands are completely empty now! Nothing left, not even the name, sir, be it bird or beast!”

“The woods have been cut down everywhere,” said the postman.

“And how, sir! How they’ve been cut down, sir! Down to the ground!” Tikhon Ilyich chimed in.

And added unexpectedly:

“Shedding, sir! Everything’s shedding, sir!”

Why that word escaped his lips, Tikhon Ilyich himself was unaware, but he felt that it had not been said without reason all the same. “Everything’s shedding,” he thought, “yes, like the livestock after a long and difficult winter…” And after saying goodbye to the postman, he stood for a long time on the highway, looking around discontented­ly. It was beginning to drizzle again, there was an unpleasant, damp wind. Above the undulating fields – winter fields, ploughed fields, stubble fields, brown copses – it was getting dark. The gloomy sky was descending ever lower towards the earth. The rain-flooded roads gleamed like tin. People were waiting for the post train to Moscow at the station, and from there came the smell of the samovar, arousing a melancholy desire for comfort, a warm, clean room, a family or a departure for somewhere…

It poured with rain again in the night, and the darkness was black as pitch. Tikhon Ilyich slept badly, ground his teeth agonizingly. He felt shivery – he’d probably caught a cold, standing on the highway in the evening – the chuika with which he had covered himself was slipping off onto the floor, and then he dreamt of what had haunted him ever since childhood, when his back had grown cold in the night: twilight, some narrow side streets, a running crowd, firemen galloping on heavy carts, on bad-tempered black carthorses… Once he awoke, lit a match, glanced at the alarm clock – it showed three – picked up the chuika and, falling asleep again, began to feel alarmed: they’d rob the store, steal the horses…

Sometimes it seemed to him that he was at the inn in Dankov, that the rain in the night was making a noise on the roof over the gates, and the bell above them was continually jerking, ringing – thieves had come, they had brought his stallion into this impenetrable darkness, and if they found out he was here, they would kill him… And sometimes his consciousness of reality would return. Yet reality was alarming too. The old man was walking about with his rattle outside the windows, yet one moment he would seem to be some­where far, far away, and the next Buyan would be tearing at somebody frenziedly, running off into the fields and barking wildly, but then suddenly turning up outside the windows again, waking him up by standing on the spot and yelping persistently. At that point Tikhon Ilyich would mean to go out and see what was the matter, whether everything was all right. But as soon as it came to making up his mind and getting up, the heavy, slanting rain would begin rattling thicker and faster against the dark little windows, driven by the wind from the dark, boundless fields, and sleep seemed dearer than father and mother…

Finally the door banged, there was a waft of damp cold – and Seedcake the watchman, making a rustling noise, dragged a truss of straw into the hall. Tikhon Ilyich opened his eyes: there was a turbid, watery dawn, the little windows were misted over.

“Heat the place up, brother, heat it up,” said Tikhon Ilyich in a voice husky from sleep. “And we’ll go and feed the animals, then you can go and get some sleep.”

The old man, grown thinner in the course of the night and completely blue with the cold, damp and tiredness, glanced at him with his sunken, dead eyes. In a wet hat, in a wet chekmen* and tattered bast shoes, soaked with water and mud, he started growling something in a muffled voice, kneeling down with difficulty in front of the stove, filling it with cold, strong-smelling haulm and lighting a sulphur spill.

“What, has the cow chewed your tongue off?” cried Tikhon Ilyich huskily, climbing down from his bed. “What are you muttering under your breath about?”

“After roaming around the entire night, now it’s feed the animals,” the old man mumbled, without raising his head, as though to himself.

Tikhon Ilyich looked askance at him:

“I saw the way you were roaming around!”

He put on his poddyovka and, overcoming the slight tremor in his stomach, he went out onto the well-trampled little porch, into the icy freshness of the pale, inclement morning. There were leaden puddles everywhere, all the walls were dark with rain…

“Bloody workmen!” he thought bad-temperedly.

It was barely drizzling, “but it’ll probably be pouring down again by lunchtime,” he thought. And he glanced with surprise at shaggy Buyan, who had hurtled towards him from around a corner: eyes shining, tongue fresh and red as fire, hot breath simply ablaze with the smell of dog… And this after a whole night of running around and barking!

He took Buyan by the collar and, splashing through the mud, he went round and examined all the locks. Then he put him on a chain by the granary, returned to the lobby and glanced into the large kitchen, into the hut. There was an unpleasant, warm stench in the hut; the cook was asleep on a bare bench with her apron over her face, her rump sticking out, and her legs bent up towards her stomach in their big, old, felt boots, their soles thick with dirt from the earthen floor; Oska lay on the plank bed in a knee-length sheepskin coat and bast shoes with his head buried in a greasy, heavy pillow.

“It’s like stealing from a baby!” thought Tikhon Ilyich with disgust. “Look at her, debauchery all night long, and with morning coming – she’s out on the bench!”

And after casting an eye over the black walls, the tiny little windows, the tub of slops and the huge, broad-shouldered stove, he cried out loudly and sternly:

“Hey! Gentlemen boyars! Time’s up!”

While the cook was lighting the stove, boiling potatoes for the boars and blowing the samovar into life, Oska, hatless and stumbling from sleepiness, lugged chaff to the horses and cows. Tikhon Ilyich opened up the creaking gates of the farmyard himself and was the first into its warm and muddy cosiness, enclosed by awnings, loose boxes and pigsties. The farmyard was strewn with dung above ankle height. Dung, urine, rain – it had all blended to form a thick, brown slush. The horses, already darkening with their velvety winter coats, wandered about under the awnings. The sheep had bunched together into one corner in a dirty grey mass. The old brown gelding was drowsing alone beside the empty manger, all smeared with viscous matter. From the bleak, inclement sky above the square of the yard it drizzled and drizzled. The boars moaned painfully, insistently, and rumbled in the pigsty.

“Dismal!” thought Tikhon Ilyich, and immediately barked ferociously at the old man dragging a truss of haulm:

“Why on earth are you dragging it through the dirt, you old blath­erer?”

The old man threw the haulm onto the ground, gave him a look and suddenly said calmly:

“You’re a blatherer yourself.”

Tikhon Ilyich looked around quickly to see if the boy had come out, and, satisfied that he had, he quickly and also seemingly calmly went up to the old man, gave him one in the teeth, enough to make him shake his head, then grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and flung him with all his strength towards the gates.

“Out!” he cried, choking and turning white as chalk. “And never let me set eyes on you round here again, you scum!”

The old man flew out of the gates – and five minutes later, with a sack over his shoulders and with a stick in his hand, he was already striding home along the highway. With shaking hands, Tikhon Ilyich watered the stallion, poured some fresh oats out for it – those of the day before it had only dug over and slobbered on – and with broad strides, sinking in the slush and the dung, he went off to the hut.

“Ready, is it?” he cried, opening the door a little.

“What’s the hurry!” snapped the cook.

The hut was clouded with the warm, flavourless steam from the potatoes, which was pouring out of a cast-iron pot. The cook and the boy were together pounding them furiously with pestles, sprinkling them with flour, and Tikhon Ilyich could not hear the reply above the banging. Slamming the door, he went to have tea.

In the small hall he kicked the dirty, heavy mat lying by the doorstep and headed into the corner, where a copper water dispenser was fixed above a tin basin on a stool, and on a shelf lay a little soiled cake of coconut soap. Making a clatter with the water dispenser, he squinted, shifted his eyebrows, flared his nostrils, unable to stop his angry, darting glance, and with particular clarity said:

“Hmm! No, what about those workmen, sir! They’ve got right out of hand nowadays! You say one word to him, and he answers you back with ten! Say ten to him, and he answers you back with a hundred! No, you’re talking rubbish! I reckon it’s not the summer coming, and I reckon there’s a lot of you about, you devils. It’s the winter, brother, and you’ll be wanting to eat – and you’ll be here, you son of a bitch, you’ll be
he-ere, bowing do-own!”

The hand towel had been hanging beside the water dispenser since St Michael’s Day. It was so dirty that, glancing at it, Tikhon Ilyich clenched his jaws.

“Oh!” he said, closing his eyes and shaking his head. “Oh, Mother, Queen of Heaven!”

Two doors led from the hall. One, to the left, into the guest room, long, in semi-darkness, with little windows facing the farmyard; in it stood two large divans, hard as rock, upholstered in black oilcloth, and full of bedbugs, both live and squashed, dried-up ones, while on the pier there hung a portrait of a general with dashing, beaverish sideburns; the portrait was fringed with smaller portraits of heroes of the Russo-Turkish War, and at the bottom was the inscription: “Long will our children and our Slavic brothers remember the glorious deeds, when our father, the bold warrior, beat Suleiman Pasha, defeated the infidel enemy and with his children crossed places so steep that only the mists and the lords of the feathered world flew there.” The other door led into the room of the master and mistress. There, on the right, beside the door, shone the glass panes of a cabinet, and on the left was the whiteness of a stove and stove bench; the stove had cracked at some point, and the crack had been filled, over the white, with clay – and the result had been the outlines of something resembling a twisted, thin man, of whom Tikhon Ilyich was well and truly sick. Behind the stove there towered a double bed; fixed up above the bed was a rug of dull-green and brick-red wool with the image of a tiger, whiskered and with protruding feline ears. Opposite the door, by the wall, stood a chest of drawers, covered with a knitted tablecloth, and on it was Nastasya Petrovna’s wedding casket…

“You’re wanted in the store!” cried the cook, opening the door a little.

The far distance was hidden in a watery mist, it was beginning to look like dusk again, there was drizzling rain, but the wind had turned and was blowing from the north – and the air had freshened. More cheerful and resonant than in all recent days was the cry of a departing goods train at the station.

With a nod of his wet Manchurian fur hat, a harelipped peasant standing by the porch holding a wet, skewbald horse said: “Hello, Ilyich.”

“Hello,” Tikhon Ilyich tossed out, looking askance at the strong, white tooth shining from behind the peasant’s split lip. “What do you want?”

And after hurriedly serving him with salt and paraffin, he hurriedly returned to his living quarters.

“They don’t give me time to cross myself, the dogs!” he muttered as he went.

The samovar standing on the table beside the pier was seething and gurgling, and the little mirror hanging above the table had a coating of white steam. Moisture cloaked the windows and the oleograph nailed below the mirror – a giant in a yellow kaftan and red morocco boots with the Russian banner in his hands, from behind which looked the towers and cupolas of the Moscow Kremlin. Photographs in tortoiseshell frames surrounded this picture. In the place of honour hung a portrait of a renowned priest in a moiré cassock, with a straggly little beard, slightly swollen cheeks and piercing little eyes. And after glancing at it, Tikhon Ilyich crossed himself devoutly before the icon in the corner. Then he took the smoke-blackened teapot from the samovar and poured a glass of tea, which smelt strongly of steamed birch twigs.

“They don’t give me time to cross myself,” he thought, with a frown of suffering. “They’ve done for me, curse them!”

He seemed to need to remember something, to grasp something or simply to lie down and have a proper sleep. He wanted warmth, peace, clarity, firmness of thought. He got up, went over to the cabinet, making its panes of glass and the crockery tinkle, and took from a shelf a bottle of rowan-berry vodka and a stocky little glass, on which was written: “even the monks take it”…

“Or perhaps I shouldn’t?” he said out loud.

But he poured some out and drank it, poured again and drank again. And having a thick pretzel to eat with the drink, he sat down at the table.

He gulped hot tea greedily from a saucer and sucked on a lump of sugar, holding it on his tongue. While gulping down the tea, he threw an absent-minded and suspicious sidelong glance at the pier, at the peasant in the yellow kaftan, at the photographs in the tortoiseshell frames, and even at the priest in the moiré cassock.

“We pigs have got no time for lerigion!” he thought, and, as if justifying himself to somebody, added rudely: “Come live in the village, eat sour cabbage soup!”

Looking sidelong at the priest, he felt that everything was dubious… even, it seemed, his usual reverence towards this priest… dubious and not thought through. If you gave it a bit of thought… But here he hastened to transfer his gaze to the Moscow Kremlin.

“It’s a distgrace to admit it!” he muttered. “But I’ve never been to Moscow!”

No, he never had. And why? The boars forbade it! First the trading didn’t let him, then the inn, then the tavern. And now it was the stallion and the boars that didn’t let him. Moscow – that was nothing! He’d spent ten years meaning in vain to go to the little birch wood that was over the highway. He was forever hoping to snatch a free evening somehow, take a rug with him, the samovar, and sit on the grass in the cool, in the greenery – and he never had snatched one… The days slip by like water through your fingers, and before you’d had time to realize it – you’d hit fifty, and it’d soon be the end of everything, yet was it really so long ago he was running around with no trousers on? It seemed like yesterday!

The faces watched motionless from the tortoiseshell frames. There on the ground (but amidst dense rye) lie two people – Tikhon Ilyich himself and a young merchant, Rostovtsev – holding glasses in their hands, exactly half full of dark beer… What a friendship was to be struck up between Rostovtsev and Tikhon Ilyich! How he remembered that grey day at Shrovetide when they had been photographed! But what year had it been? Where had Rostovtsev disappeared to? You couldn’t be certain now whether he had even been alive or not… And there, standing up straight to attention and turned to stone, are three townsmen, their hair combed flat with a straight parting, in embroidered kosovorotkas, long frock coats, shiny boots – Buchnev, Vystavkin and Bogomolov. In front of his chest, Vystavkin, the one in the middle, is holding bread and salt on a wooden platter, covered with a towel embroidered with cockerels, Buchnev and Bogomolov are each holding an icon. These were photographed on the dusty, windy day when the elevator was blessed – when the Bishop and the Governor had come, when Tikhon Ilyich had felt so proud of the fact that he had been among the members of the public who had greeted the authorities. But what remained of that day in his memory? Only the fact that they had waited about five hours beside the elevator, that a cloud of white dust had flown on the wind, that the Governor, a tall and clean corpse of a man in white trousers with gold stripes, in a gold-embroidered tunic and cocked hat, had walked towards the deputation extraordinarily slowly… that it had been really frightening when he had started speaking, accepting the bread and salt, and that everyone had been struck by the extraordinary thinness and whiteness of his hands and by their skin, the most delicate and shiny, like the skin stripped from a snake, and by the shining rings, some with cloudy stones, on his wiry, slender fingers with long, transparent nails… That Governor was no longer alive now, and Vystavkin was no longer alive either… And in five or ten years they would be saying the same of Tikhon Ilyich as well:

“The late Tikhon Ilyich…”

The room was warmer and cosier thanks to the stove’s heating up, the little mirror had cleared, but outside the windows nothing was to be seen, the panes were white with matt steam, meaning that outside it was getting fresher. Ever more audibly came the tedious groaning of the hungry boars – and suddenly that groaning turned into a friendly and powerful roar: the boars had doubtless heard the voices of the cook and Oska, as they lugged a heavy tub of mash towards them. And without finishing his thoughts about death, Tikhon Ilyich threw his cigarette into the slop basin, pulled on his poddyovka and hastened to the farmyard. Taking broad and deep strides through the squelching dung, he himself opened the pigsty – and for a long time he kept his greedy and mournful eyes fixed on the boars, who had rushed to the trough into which the steaming mash had been poured.

The thought about death was interrupted by another: deceased he might be, but perhaps this deceased man would be cited as an example. Who was he? An orphan, a beggar, who hadn’t eaten a piece of bread for two days at a time as a child… And now?

“Your life story ought to be described,” Kuzma had said in mockery one day.

But there was really nothing to mock. It meant he had his head on his shoulders, if a beggarly little boy who could barely read had become not Tishka, but Tikhon Ilyich.*

Suddenly the cook, who was also gazing intently at the boars as they jostled one another and dropped their front legs into the trough, gave a hiccup and said:

“Oh Lord! I hope there’ll be no misfortune today! I had this dream last night – it was as if we’d had livestock driven into the yard, all sorts of sheep, cows, pigs… And they were all black, all black!”

And again something began gnawing at his heart. Yes, that there livestock! The livestock alone was enough to make you hang yourself. Not three hours had passed – again pick up the keys, again lug fodder to the whole of the yard. In the shared loose box there are the three milk cows, in separate ones – the red calf and the bull, Bismarck: they had to be given hay now. The horses and sheep are supposed to have haulm at lunchtime, and the stallion – the Devil himself couldn’t imagine what! The stallion poked his head through the barred upper part of the door, raised its top lip, bared its pink gums and white teeth, distorted its nostrils… And Tikhon Ilyich, with a fury that was unexpected even for him, suddenly shouted at it:

“Stop it, you cursed animal, may you be struck down!”

Again he got his feet wet and got cold – it was sleeting – and again he drank some rowan-berry vodka. He ate some potatoes with sunflower oil and gherkins, cabbage soup with mushrooms, millet porridge… His face flushed red, his head grew heavy.

Without undressing – only using his feet to pull off his dirty boots – he lay down on the bed. But he was troubled by the fact that he would soon have to get up again: the horses, cows and sheep need to be given oat straw towards evening, the stallion too… or no, better mix it up with hay, and then give it a good sprinkling of water and salt… Only you’re sure to oversleep, aren’t you, if you give yourself free rein. And Tikhon Ilyich reached out towards the chest of drawers, picked up the alarm clock and started winding it. And the alarm clock came to life, began ticking – and the room seemed to become more peaceful to the sound of its rhythmic, measured tick. His thoughts became blurred…

But no sooner had they become blurred than all of a sudden some coarse and loud church singing rang out. Opening his eyes in fright, Tikhon Ilyich could at first make out only one thing: two peasants were yelling through their noses, and there was cold and the smell of wet chekmens coming from the hall. Then he gave a start, sat up and looked to see who they were: one was a blind man, pockmarked, with a small nose, a long upper lip and a large, round skull, while the other was Makar Ivanovich himself!

Makar Ivanovich had once been simply Makarka – that was what everyone had called him: “Makarka the Wanderer” – and one day he had dropped into Tikhon Ilyich’s tavern. He had been plodding along the highway to somewhere or other – in bast shoes, a skullcap and a greasy cassock – and in he had dropped. In his hands had been a tall staff coated with verdigris, with a cross at the top end and a sharp metal point at the bottom, over his shoulders were a satchel and a soldier’s water bottle; his hair was long and yellow; his face was wide, the colour of putty, his nostrils were like two gun muzzles, his nose was broken into the shape of a wooden saddle frame, and his eyes, as is often the case with such noses, were light and sharply shining. Shameless, quick on the uptake, greedily smoking cigarette after cigarette and letting the smoke out through his nostrils, speaking rudely and curtly in a tone that completely ruled out disagreement, he had very much taken Tikhon Ilyich’s fancy, and precisely for that tone – for the fact that it was clear at once: “a double-dyed son of a bitch”.

And Tikhon Ilyich had taken him on – as his assistant. Got rid of his vagrant’s clothing and taken him on. But Makarka had proved to be such a thief that he had been obliged to give him a cruel beating and throw him out. A year later, though, Makarka had become famous throughout the district for his prophecies, which were ominous to such a degree that people began to fear his visits like fire. He would go up to somebody’s window and dolefully strike up “Repose with the saints”, or he would proffer a little bit of incense or a pinch of dust, and then someone in the house would be bound to die.

And now, in his former clothing and with the staff in his hand, Makarka was standing by the threshold singing. The blind man would join in, rolling his milky eyes up towards his forehead, and from the incongruity of his features Tikhon Ilyich immediately had him down as a runaway convict, a terrible and merciless beast. But even more terrible was what these vagrants were singing. The blind man, gloomily shifting his raised eyebrows, would break out boldly in a loathsome nasal tenor. Makarka, his immobile eyes flashing sharply, droned in a ferocious bass. The result was something immoderately loud, crudely harmonious, Old Churchly, powerful and menacing:

Mother Earth will burst into tears, burst out in sobs!

the blind man poured out.

Burst in-to tears, burst out in sobs!

Makarka sang the second part with conviction.

Before the Saviour, before the icon,

the blind man wailed.

Sinners they must then repent!

Makarka threatened, opening his insolent nostrils wide. And mingling his bass with the blind man’s tenor, he articulated firmly:

They shall not escape the judgement of God!

They shall not escape the fire eternal!

And suddenly he broke off – in concert with the blind man – wheezed, and simply, in his normal, insolent tone, ordered:

“Give us a little glass to get warm, merchant.”

And without waiting for a reply, he stepped over the threshold, came up to the bed and shoved some sort of picture into Tikhon Ilyich’s hand.

It was an ordinary cutting from an illustrated journal, but, having glanced at it, Tikhon Ilyich felt a sudden coldness in the pit of his stomach. Beneath the picture, which depicted trees bending in a storm, a white zigzag over clouds and a falling man, was the inscription: “Jean-Paul Richter, killed by lightning”.*

And Tikhon Ilyich was taken aback.

But he slowly tore the picture into tiny shreds at once. Then he climbed off the bed and, pulling on his boots, said:

“Go and frighten someone stupider than me. I know you well, brother! Have what’s due to you, and may God go with you.”

Then he went into the store, brought two pounds of pretzels and a couple of salted herrings out to Makarka, who was standing with the blind man beside the porch, and repeated even more sternly:

“May the Lord go with you!”

“What about some tobacco?” asked Makarka insolently.

“I’ve only got a bit for myself,” snapped Tikhon Ilyich. “Don’t think you can argue with me, brother!”

And, after a pause, he added:

“Hanging’s too good for you, Makarka, for your tricks!”

Makarka looked at the blind man standing upright and steady with his eyebrows raised high, and asked him:

“Man of God, what do you think? Hanging or shooting?”

“Shooting’s more reliable,” replied the blind man seriously. “There’s a derect connection at least.”

Dusk was falling, ridges of unbroken cloud were turning blue, growing cold, breathing winter. The mud was hardening. Having sent Makarka on his way, Tikhon Ilyich stamped his frozen feet on the porch for a while and went into his room. There, without taking his things off, he sat down on a chair by the window, lit a cigarette and fell into thought. He remembered the summer, the revolt, Bride, his brother, his wife… and the fact that he had still not paid the monies due for the seasonal work. It was his way to drag out payments. Lads and lasses who came to him to do day labour stood at his door for days on end in the autumn, they complained of the most extreme need, became irritable and were sometimes rude. But he was unbending. He would shout, calling upon God as his witness, that he had “in all the house but two kopeks – search it, if you like!”, he would turn out his pockets and his purse, spit in feigned rage, as if stunned by the mistrust, “the brazenness” of the petitioners… And now this seemed to him not to be a good way. He was mercilessly strict and cold with his wife, uncommonly aloof with her. And suddenly this too stunned him: my God, I mean, he didn’t even have any conception what sort of person she was! How had she lived, what had she thought, what had she felt all these long years she had lived with him in incessant worry?

He threw the cigarette away and lit another… Oh, he’s a clever one, that rogue Makarka! And since he’s such a clever one, can’t he foretell what’s in store for whom and when? For him, Tikhon Ilyich, there was bound to be something nasty in store. He was no longer young, after all! How many of his contemporaries had already passed on! And there was no salvation from death and old age. Children wouldn’t have saved him either. He wouldn’t have known his children either, and he’d have been a stranger to his children, as he was to all his nearest and dearest – both living and dead. People on earth are like the stars in the sky; but life is so short, people grow up, reach manhood and die so quickly, they know each other so little and forget all they’ve lived through so quickly, that you’ll go mad if you think about it properly! Just now he’d said of himself:

“My life ought to be described…”

But what was there to describe? Nothing. Nothing, or nothing worthwhile. After all, he himself remembered almost nothing of that life. He’d completely forgotten his childhood, for example: just from time to time some summer’s day would come to him, some episode, some contemporary… He’d singed someone’s cat one day – and been thrashed. He’d been given a little whip and a tin whistle – and been made indescribably happy. His drunken father had called him over to him once – affectionately, with sadness in his voice:

“Come to me, Tisha, come, my dear!”

And had unexpectedly grabbed him by the hair…

If the small-time trader Ilya Mironov had been alive now, Tikhon Ilyich would have fed the old man out of charity and wouldn’t have known him, would scarcely have noticed him. After all, it had been like that with his mother; ask him now: do you remember your mother? – and he’d reply: I remember some bent old woman… she dried dung, stoked the stove, drank in secret, grumbled… And nothing more. He had worked for Matorin for almost ten years, but those ten years had merged into a day or two as well: a light April rain is starting to fall and putting spots on the iron sheeting which they are flinging, with a crashing and a ringing, onto a cart beside the neighbouring store… a grey, frosty midday, pigeons are descending onto the snow in a noisy flock beside the store of the other neighbour, who trades in flour, groats and bran for livestock – they are flocking, cooing, with their wings a-tremble – while he and his brother are using an oxtail to whip a top, humming by the doorstep… Matorin was young then, strong, purple in the face, with a clean-shaven chin and ginger side whiskers, cut back halfway. Now he had grown poor, and with his old man’s gait, in his sun-bleached chuika and deep cap, he rushed up and down from store to store, from acquaintance to acquaintance, played draughts, sat in Dayev’s tavern having a drop to drink, getting tipsy and repeatedly saying:

“We’re little people: we have a drink, a bite to eat, we settle up – and home!”

And on meeting Tikhon Ilyich, he does not recognize him and smiles pitifully:

“Can it be you, Tisha?”

And at their first meeting this autumn, Tikhon Ilyich had failed to recognize his own brother: “Is that really the Kuzma I roamed around with for so many years, over fields, through villages, down country roads?”

“You’ve aged, brother!”

“I have, a bit.”

“And pretty early!”

“That’s what being Russian means. It comes upon us quickly!”

Lighting a third cigarette, Tikhon Ilyich gazed doggedly and en­quiringly out of the window.

“Is it the same in other countries too?”

No, it can’t be. Some of his acquaintances had been abroad – the merchant Rukavishnikov, for example – and had talked about it… And you don’t need Rukavishnikov to grasp it. Just take Russian Germans or Jews: they all conduct themselves in a businesslike, tidy way, they all know each other, they’re all friends – and not only when they’re getting drunk – they all help each other; if they move away from one another they correspond, they pass pictures of fathers, mothers, acquaintances from family to family; they teach their children, love them, go for walks with them, talk as if with equals – and so the child will have something to remember. Whereas with us Russians, everyone is everyone else’s enemy, we’re envious scandal-mongers, we visit each other once a year, we tear around like madmen when somebody drops in unexpectedly, we rush to tidy our rooms… And that’s not all! We begrudge the guest a spoonful of jam! The guest won’t have one extra glass without your begging him…

Someone’s troika went past the window. Tikhon Ilyich examined it carefully. Lean horses, but evidently fast. The tarantass in good repair. Whose could it be? Nobody in the neighbourhood had such a troika. The neighbourhood gentry were such a poor lot, they went without bread for three days at a time, they’d sold the last rizas from their icons, they had no money to replace broken window panes or mend the roof; they stopped up the windows with pillows and put trays and buckets on the floor when it rained – it poured through the ceilings like through sieves… Then Deniska the cobbler walked by. Where was he going? And what with? Not with a suitcase? Oh what a fool, forgive me, Lord, my trespass!

Tikhon Ilyich shoved his feet mechanically into galoshes and went out onto the porch. Having gone out and taken a deep breath of the fresh air of the bluish, pre-winter dusk, he stopped again and sat down on the bench… Yes, now there was a family too – Grey and his son! Mentally, Tikhon Ilyich made the journey through the mud which Deniska had completed with a suitcase in his hand. He saw Durnovka, his estate, the gully, the huts, the dusk, his brother’s light and lights in the homesteads… Kuzma was sitting and reading, no doubt. Bride was standing in the cold, dark hall, beside the barely warm stove, warming her hands and back, waiting for the word “dinner!” to be said and, pursing her aged, dried lips, thinking… Of what? Of Rodka? It was lies, all that about her having poisoned him, lies! But if she did poison him… Good Lord! If she did poison him – what must she feel? What a gravestone lying on her open soul!

Mentally, he glanced at Durnovka from the porch of his Durnovka home, at the black huts along the hillside beyond the gully, at the threshing barns and willows in the backyards… On the horizon beyond the fields to the left is the railway trackman’s hut. A train passes by it in the dusk – a speeding row of fiery eyes. And then eyes light up in the huts. It grows darker, becomes cosier – and an unpleasant feeling stirs every time you glance at the huts of Bride and Grey, standing almost in the middle of Durnovka, three homesteads away from one another: there is no light in either the one or the other. Grey’s little children are going blind, like moles, they go wild with joy and amazement when, on some happy evening, the hut can be lit up…

“No, it’s a sin!” said Tikhon Ilyich firmly, and he rose from his seat. “No, it’s unchristian! I must help, at least a little,” he said, heading towards the station.

It was getting frosty, the smell of the samovar coming from the station was more fragrant. The lights there shone clearer, the bells on the troika jingled resonantly. A really nice little troika! Whereas it was a shame to look at the wretched horses of the peasant carriers, their tiny little carts on crooked wheels, falling to pieces and plastered with mud! The station door squealed and banged dully beyond the garden at the front. Skirting round it, Tikhon Ilyich climbed up onto the high stone porch, on which a two-bucket copper samovar was gurgling, its grille reddening like fiery teeth, and he bumped into just the person he wanted to – Deniska.

With his head lowered, deep in thought, Deniska was standing on the porch and holding in his right hand a cheap little grey suitcase, generously dotted with tin nail heads and tied up with a rope. Deniska was wearing a poddyovka, old and evidently very heavy, with drooping shoulders and a very low waist, a new cap and worn-out boots. He hadn’t come out well height-wise, his legs were very short compared with his trunk. Now, with the low waist and worn-down boots, his legs seemed even shorter.

“Denis?” Tikhon Ilyich called. “What are you here for, you ruffian?”

Deniska, who was never surprised at anything, calmly raised his long-lashed eyes, dark and languid and sadly smiling, and pulled his cap off his hair. His hair was mousy-coloured and immoderately thick, his face sallow and as though oiled, but the eyes were beautiful.

“Hello, Tikhon Ilyich,” he replied in a melodious little urban tenor, and, as always, as though shyly. “I’m going to… what’s it… to Tula.”

“And why’s that, may I ask?”

“P’raps some job might come of it…”

Tikhon Ilyich examined him. In his hand there’s the suitcase, poking out of a pocket of the poddyovka are some green and red booklets rolled into a tube. The poddyovka…

“You’re no Tula dandy!”

Deniska examined himself as well.

“The poddyovka?” he asked modestly. “Well, I’ll get some money in Tula and I’ll buy myself a venderka. I seemed to do all right in the summer! Sold newspapers.”

Tikhon Ilyich nodded at the suitcase:

“And what sort of a thing is that?

Deniska lowered his lashes:

“I bought myself a shootcase.”

“Well you certainly can’t go wearing a vengerka* without a suitcase!” said Tikhon Ilyich mockingly. “And what’s that in your pocket?”

“Just various rubbish…”

“Show me.”

Deniska put the suitcase down on the porch and pulled the booklets out of his pocket. Tikhon Ilyich took them and looked through them carefully. A songbook, Marusya; The Profligate Wife; An Innocent Girl in Chains of Violence; Congratulatory Verse for Parents, Educators and Benefactors; The Role…

Here Tikhon Ilyich hesitated, but Deniska, who had been following him, was quick to prompt modestly:

“The Role of the Protaleriat in Russia.”

Tikhon Ilyich shook his head.

“That’s something new! Nothing to eat, but you’re buying suitcases and books. And what books! I suppose it’s not for nothing they call you a trouble-maker. They say you’re always slandering the Tsar? Watch out, brother!”

“I didn’t go buying an estate, did I?” replied Deniska with a sad smile. “And I’ve never mentioned the Tsar. They lie about me as if I was dead. But I never even had it in my thoughts. Some sort of lunatic, am I?”

The pulley on the door began squealing, and the station watchman appeared – a grey-haired retired soldier, so short of breath he whistled and wheezed – and the buffet-keeper – fat, with bloated little eyes and greasy hair.

“Stand aside now, gentlemen merchants, allow us to take the sam­ovar…”

Deniska stood aside and again took hold of the handle of the suitcase.

“I suppose you nicked it somewhere?” asked Tikhon Ilyich, nodding towards the suitcase and thinking of the business which had brought him to the station.

Deniska remained silent with his head bent.

“And it’s empty, isn’t it?”

Deniska burst out laughing:

“It is…”

“Have you been turned out of your job?”

“I left myself.”

Tikhon Ilyich sighed.

“The living image of your father!” he said. “He was always like that as well: they’d give it him in the neck, and he’d say ‘I left myself’.”

“Strike me blind if I’m lying.”

“Well, all right, all right… Have you been at home?”

“Two weeks.”

“Is your father without work again?”

“He is without work noo.”

“Noo!” Tikhon Ilyich mimicked him. “Country bumpkin! But a revolootionary too. Want to be a wolf, but with a dog’s tail.”

“And I reckon you’re from that same stock,” thought Deniska with a little grin, keeping his head down.

“And so Grey’s just sitting there smoking?”

“He’s a worthless fellow,” said Deniska with conviction.

Tikhon Ilyich tapped him on the head with his knuckles.

“You might at least not display your foolishness! Who ever talks like that about his father?”

“The dog may be old, but I can’t call him Dad,” Deniska answered calmly. “If you’re a father, provide food. And did he ever give me much to eat?”

But Tikhon Ilyich had stopped listening. He was choosing a con­ven­ient moment to begin talking business. And not listening, he inter­rupted:

“What a windbag you are… And have you got the money for the ticket to Tula?”

“What do I need that, a ticket, for?” replied Deniska. “When I get in the carriage, I’ll be straight under a seat, God bless me. I’ve only got to get to Uzlovaya.”

“And where are you going to read through your booklets? You won’t get a lot read under a seat.”

Deniska had a think.

“That’s it!” he said. “Not under the seat all the time. I’ll slip into the toilet, and you can read till daybreak if you want.”

Tikhon Ilyich shifted his brows.

“Well, look here,” he began. “Look here: it’s time you changed the tune. You’re not a kid, you idiot. Be off with you, back to Durnovka – it’s time you got down to some work. Because it makes me sick, you know, looking at you lot. At my place… the courtyard counsellors live better. So be it, then, I’ll help… to begin with. Well, to buy bits of goods, or tools… And at least you’ll be feeding yourself and giving your father a little…”

“What is it he’s leading up to?” thought Deniska.

And Tikhon Ilyich made up his mind and concluded:

“And it’s time you got married too.”

“So-o!” thought Deniska, and unhurriedly began rolling a cigarette.

“Well,” he responded, calmly and a little sadly, without raising his lashes. “I wouldn’t think of being stubborn. Marriage is a possibility. It’s worse going to prestitutes.”

“Well, that’s just it,” Tikhon Ilyich chimed in. “Only bear it in mind, brother – you have to get married sensibly. It’s a good thing to breed them, children, that is, with some capital.”

Deniska burst into loud laughter.

“What are you cackling about?”

“What do you think? Breed them! Like chickens or pigs?”

“They want food no less than chickens and pigs.”

“And married to who?” Deniska asked with a sad grin.

“Who to? To… whoever you like.”

“It’s to that Bride, is it?”

Tikhon Ilyich blushed deeply.

“Idiot! And what’s wrong with Bride? She’s a meek woman, hard-working…”

Deniska was silent for a while, picking at a tin nail head on the suitcase with his fingernail. Then he pretended to be stupid.

“There’s lots of them brides,” he drawled. “I don’t know which one you’re nattering about… Is it the one you used to live with?”

But Tikhon Ilyich had already recovered himself.

“Whether I did or not is nothing to do with you, you swine,” he replied, and so quickly and convincingly that Deniska mumbled submissively:

“No, it’d only be an honour for me… I was just saying… by the way…”

“Well then, don’t talk rubbish to no end. I’ll give you a start in life. Got it? I’ll provide a dowry… Got it?”

Deniska fell deep into thought.

“When I get back from Tula…” he began.

“The cockerel’s found a pearl! What the devil do you need Tula for?”

“I’ve got so hungry at home…”

Tikhon Ilyich threw open his chuika, thrust his hand into a pocket of his poddyovka, and all but resolved upon giving Deniska a twenty-kopek piece. But he had a sudden thought – it’s stupid chucking money about, and this pushy kid’ll be giving himself airs, thinking, like, I’m being bribed – and he pretended he was searching for something.

“Oh dear, forgotten my cigarettes! Let me roll one.”

Deniska handed him his tobacco pouch. The lantern over the porch had already been lit, and by its dim light Tikhon Ilyich read out loud what was boldly embroidered in white thread on the pouch:

“A prezent for him I ador to show I do ador this pouch a gift for ever more.”

“Neat!” he said, after reading it.

Deniska cast his eyes down shyly.

“So you already have a sweetheart, then?”

“There’s no shortage of bitches knocking about!” Deniska replied carelessly. “But I’m not refusing to get married. I’ll be back after Christmas-tide, and Lord bless me…”

A cart began rumbling from beyond the garden, and it drove up to the porch with a clatter; it was all bespattered with mud, with a little peasant perched on its edge and the Ulyanovka deacon, Govorov, in the straw in the middle.

“Has it gone?” the deacon cried in alarm, throwing a foot in a new galosh out of the straw.

Every hair of his gingery-red, shaggy head curled ungovernably, his hat had slipped to the back of his head, and his face was all aglow from the wind and agitation.

“The train?” asked Tikhon Ilyich. “No, sir, it’s not pulled out yet, sir.”

“Aha! Well, thank God!” the deacon exclaimed joyfully, and all the same, leaping out of the cart, he hurled himself headlong towards the doors.

“Well, so be it then,” said Tikhon Ilyich. “Till after Christmas, then.”

Inside the station it smelt of wet sheepskin jackets, the samovar, cheap tobacco and paraffin. The air was so smoky that it grated on the throat and the lamps barely gave any light in the smoke, the semi-darkness, the damp and the cold. Doors squealed and slammed, and peasants with knouts in their hands jostled and made a racket – these were cab-drivers from Ulyanovka who sometimes waited a week at a time for a fare. Walking among them with his eyebrows raised was a Jewish corn merchant in a bowler hat and hooded overcoat and with an umbrella on his shoulder. Beside the ticket office some peasants were dragging their master’s suitcases and baskets with oilcloth sewn round them onto the scales, and shouting at them was the telegraphist and acting assistant station manager – a short-legged young fellow with a large head and a curly yellow quiff, fluffed up from under his cap on the left temple in Cossack style – and sitting shivering violently on the dirty floor was a pointer, spotted like a frog and with mournful eyes.

Pushing his way through the peasants, Tikhon Ilyich went up to the buffet counter and had a chat with the tender. Then he set off to go back home. Deniska was still standing on the porch.

“What I wanted to ask you, Tikhon Ilyich,” he said, even more shyly than ever.

“What is it now?” Tikhon Ilyich asked angrily. “Money? I shan’t give you any.”

“No, what money! To read my letter.”

“Letter? Who to?”

“To you. I wanted to give it you before, but couldn’t pluck up the courage.”

“And what about?”

“Well… I’ve described how I’ve been living…”

Tikhon Ilyich took the scrap of paper from Deniska’s hands, shoved it into his pocket and strode off home across the springy, hardened mud.

Now he was in a manly mood. He wanted some work to do, and he thought with pleasure that the livestock would need feeding again. It was a pity – he’d got heated, thrown Seedcake out, and now he’d have to go without a night’s sleep himself. There was no relying on Oska. He was probably already asleep. Or else he was sitting with the cook and bad-mouthing the master… And after passing by the lighted windows of the hut, Tikhon Ilyich stole into the lobby and pressed his ear up against the door. Laughter came from the other side of the door, then Oska’s voice:

“Or else here’s another thing that happened. There was a peasant living in the village – ever so, ever so poor, there was none poorer in all the world. And this peasant rode out once, my brothers, ploughing. And a spotted dog trailed after him. The peasant’s ploughing, and the dog’s belting around the field and keeps on trying to dig something up. It dug and dug, and then simply how-owled! What’s going on, then? The peasant rushes over to it, looks into the pit, and there it is – an iron pot…”

“An iron po-ot?” asked the cook.

“Just you listen. An iron pot it may have been, but in that pot there was gold! Huge amounts… Well, and the peasant got rich…”

“Oh, the gasbags!” thought Tikhon Ilyich, but he began listening avidly to what would happen to the peasant next.

“The peasant got rich, built himself a house, like some mer­chant…”

“No worse than our Tightlegs,” interjected the cook.

Tikhon Ilyich grinned: he knew they’d been calling him Tightlegs for a long time now… There’s none without a nickname!

But Oska continued:

“A bit richer even… Yes… But the dog’s gone and died. What should he do? He’s really sorry about the dog, it’s got to be properly buried…”

An explosion of chuckling rang out. The narrator himself started to chuckle, and so did someone else too – with an old man’s cough.

“Can that be Seedcake?” Tikhon Ilyich jerked up. “Well, thank God. I told the idiot, didn’t I: you-ou’ll be back!”

“The peasant went to the priest,” Oska continued, “went to the priest, and he goes: ‘Father, the dog’s died – it’s got to be buried—’”

Again the cook could not contain herself and cried joyfully:

“Oh, you’ll be the death of me!”

“Let me finish, now!” Oska cried too, and again went back to his narrative tone, imitating now the priest, now the peasant:

“So he goes: ‘Father, the dog’s got to be buried.’ And the priest just starts stamping his feet: ‘What do you mean, buried? Bury the dog in the graveyard? I’ll leave you to rot in jail, I’ll have you put in irons!’ – ‘But Father, that isn’t just an ordinary dog, you know: as it was dying, it left you five hundred roubles!’ The priest just leaps up from his seat: ‘Idiot! Do you think I’m scolding you about it getting buried? I’m scolding you about where it gets buried! It’s got to be buried inside the church fence!’”

Tikhon Ilyich coughed loudly and opened the door. At the table, beside a smoking lamp, the broken glass of which was stuck together on one side with a blackened bit of paper, there sat the cook with her head bent down and her whole face curtained with wet hair. She was combing her hair with a wooden comb and examining the comb against the light through her hair. Oska, with a cigarette in his teeth, was leaning back chuckling with his bast shoes dangling. Beside the stove, in semi-darkness, was a little red light – a pipe. When Tikhon Ilyich jerked the door and appeared on the threshold, the chuckling was immediately broken off, and the man smoking the pipe meekly rose from his seat, took the pipe out of his mouth and shoved it into his pocket… Yes, it was Seedcake! But as if nothing at all had happened in the morning, Tikhon Ilyich cried cheerfully and amicably:

“Lads! Time to feed the animals…”

They wandered around the farmyard with a lantern, lighting up the hardened dung, the scattered straw, the mangers and the posts, throwing huge shadows and waking the chickens on their perches beneath the awnings. The chickens flew off, dropped down, and, leaning forward, ran in any direction, falling asleep as they ran. The large, purple eyes of the horses, which turned their heads to the light, gleamed and looked strange and magnificent. Steam came from their breathing – as though they were all smoking. And whenever Tikhon Ilyich lowered the lantern and glanced upwards, with joy he would see, in the deep, clear sky above the square of the yard, the bright, multicoloured stars. The north wind could be heard rustling drily over the roofs and blowing frosty freshness into the cracks… Thank the Lord, it’s winter!

Finishing his chores and ordering the samovar, Tikhon Ilyich went with the lantern into the cold, fragrant store and chose one of the better pickled herrings: “It’s no bad thing to have something a bit salty before tea!” – and he ate it with his tea, drank several glasses of bitter-sweet, yellow-red rowan-berry vodka, poured a cup of tea, found Deniska’s letter in his pocket and started deciphering the scribbles.

“Denya got forty roobles of munny then gathered his things…”

“Forty!” thought Tikhon Ilyich. “Oh, the ragamuffin!”

“Denya went to Tula stashun and rite there he was robbed they took it all to the last kopek there was noware to go and Angwish took him…”

It was difficult and dull deciphering this rubbish, but the evening was long, and he had nothing to do… The samovar was seething restlessly, the lamp shone with a calm light – and in the peace and quiet of the evening there was sadness. The rattle was going rhythmically outside the windows, putting out a ringing dance tune in the frosty air…

“Then I got mizrable how am I to go home my father’s really scary…”

“What an idiot, forgive me, Lord!” thought Tikhon Ilyich. “Grey – scary?”

“I’ll go into the thick forest and pick a big fir and take a rope from the shoogar loaf to assine myself to the life itternal in new trowsers but with noshoos…”

“With no shoes, is that?” said Tikhon Ilyich, moving the paper away from his tired eyes. “Now that’s true all right…”

Tossing the letter into the slop bucket, he put his elbows onto the table and gazed at the lamp… We’re a strange people! What a motley soul! One moment a man’s an absolute dog, the next he’s mournful, grieving, self-indulgent, crying over himself… there you have the likes of Deniska or him himself, Tikhon Ilyich… The window panes were misted over, the rattle was uttering something nice in a distinct and lively, wintry way… Oh dear, if only he had children! If only he had – well, a mistress, perhaps, instead of that dumpy old woman who got on your nerves just with her stories about the Princess and some devout nun Polikarpia, who’s called Polly-Copier in town! But it was too late, too late.

Undoing the embroidered collar of his shirt, with a bitter smile Tikhon Ilyich fingered his neck, the hollows down the neck behind the ears… Those hollows were the first sign of old age – the head getting horselike! And the rest wasn’t bad either. He bent his head and thrust his fingers into his beard… And his beard was grey, dry and tangled. No, that’s enough, that’s enough, Tikhon Ilyich!

He drank, got tipsy, and squeezed his jaws ever tighter as he stared ever harder, screwing up his eyes, at the wick of the lamp, burning with an even flame… Just think: he can’t go and visit his own brother – the boars won’t let him, the swine! And even if they did let him, there’d be no great joy either. Kuzma would lecture him, Bride would stand with her lips pursed and her lashes lowered… Those lowered eyes alone were enough to make you run away!

His heart ached, there was a fog in his head… Where was it he’d heard that song?

On came my boring evening,

And started to depress me,

In came my darling lover,

And started to caress me…

Ah yes, it was in Lebedyan, at the inn. The lace-makers sit singing on a winter’s evening… They sit there plaiting and, without raising their lashes, they give out in ringing, chesty voices:

With kisses and embraces,

He bids a fond farewell…

There was a fog in his head – one moment everything would seem to be ahead of him still – joy, and freedom, and light-heartedness – and then his heart would again begin aching hopelessly. One moment he would say:

“While there’s money in your pocket, there’s a woman who’ll do business!”

Then he would gaze bad-temperedly at the lamp and, having his brother in mind, mutter:

“A teacher! A preacher! Philaret the Murkyful!* The bloody ragamuffin!”

He finished off the rowan-berry vodka, smoked so much it grew dark… Stepping unsteadily over the uneven floor, he went out into the dark lobby in just his jacket, sensed the powerful freshness of the air, the smell of the straw, the smell of the dogs, and he saw two greenish lights flashing on the doorstep…

“Buyan!” he called.

And with all his might he struck Buyan on the head with his boot.

A deathly quiet reigned over the earth, which was softly black in the starry light. Multicoloured patterns of stars were gleaming. The highway was faintly white, vanishing in the twilight. In the distance, a growing rumbling could be heard, muffled, as if from beneath the earth. And suddenly it burst out onto the surface and started droning all around: with its gleaming white chain of windows lit up by electricity, like a flying witch, scattering braids of smoke, illumined with scarlet light from below, an express was rushing along in the distance, cutting across the highway…

“It’s going past Durnovka!” said Tikhon Ilyich, hiccupping. “Past Grey! Ah, the thieves, the devils…”

The sleepy cook came into his room, dimly lit by the dying lamp and stinking of tobacco, and brought in a greasy little cast-iron pot of cabbage soup she had picked up with old cloths, black with grease and soot. Tikhon Ilyich looked at her askance and said:

“Get out of here this minute.”

The cook turned, kicked the door open and disappeared.

Then he picked up Gattsuk’s calendar,* dipped a rusty pen into the rusty ink and, clenching his teeth and gazing sleepily with leaden eyes, began writing endlessly in all directions across the calendar:

“Gattsuk Gattsuk Gattsuk Gattsuk…”