The Portable Twentieth-Century Russian Reader

Strange peculiarity of an event, it leads you indifferent past what has been awarded the name terrible and, on the contrary, you look for depths and secrets behind a trivial event. I was walking down the street and stopped when I saw a crowd assembling around some carts. “What is going on here?” I asked a man who happened to be walking by. “Look,” answered he, laughing. Indeed, in the gravelike silence an old black horse was stomping his hoof with a measured beat against the pavement. Other horses were listening, their heads inclined in a deep bow, taciturn and immobile. In the pounding of the hoof one heard thought, fate descried, a command, and the other horses, miserably hanging their heads, gave ear. The crowd was collecting quickly until the driver arrived from somewhere, yanked the reins of the horse, and drove off.

The vicissitudes of a vagrant life are redeemed by magical events. Among these I number my meetings with Nikolai. If you met him you would probably pay no attention. Only his slightly swarthy forehead and chin would betray him. And his eyes, which, with an excess of honesty, expressed nothing at all, might have told you that you had to do with an apathetic hunter who found people tiresome.

His disposition seemed even poor. Drunk, he would become rude and insolent with his acquaintances, would insistently demand money of them but—strange thing-would feel a flood of tenderness toward children: Wasn’t it because they had not yet turned into people? I’ve known this same trait in other people, too. He would gather round him a crowd of children and spend all the money in his pocket on the wretched candies, cookies, and cakes adorning the shelves of the shopkeepers. Whether or not he meant to say, “Look, people, treat others as I am treating them,” still, since such tenderness was hardly his normal occupation, his silent sermon had a greater impact on me than the sermon of some teacher with a loud and universal fame.

But who in any case is going to decipher the soul of a solitary gray hunter, a stern chaser of wild boars and wild geese? I recall in this connection the harsh sentence passed on the whole of life by a certain defunct Tatar, who left behind a deathbed note with the brief but arresting message: “I spit on the entire world.”

To the Tatars he seemed an apostate and traitor, and to the Russian authorities a dangerous firebrand. I confess that I have more than once wished to add my signature to that note dictated by apathy and despair. But this silent exhibition of freedom from the iron laws of life and its stern truth, this hazel tree gathering wild flowers at its feet, these are nevertheless symptoms of a profound trait; they conceal a simple and stern thought preserved by his, in the face of all odds, honest eyes.

In a certain old album, many years old, amongst the faded old men bending with age, with a decoration on their chest, amongst the finicky old women with a gold chain in their hand and eternally reading an open book, you might also happen upon the modest yellow likeness of a man with hardly remarkable facial features, with a straight beard, and with a double-barreled shotgun on his lap; his hair was divided by a simple part.

If you ask who this faded photograph is, you will be briefly informed that it is Nikolai. But detailed explanations will most probably be avoided. A slight cloud passing over the face of your informant will indicate that he was not treated as a complete outsider.

I knew this hunter. One might treat people in general as varying interpretations of one and the same white head with white curls. Then the contemplation of forehead and eye in various interpretations will present you with an endless variety, as a struggle of light and shadow on one and the same stone head, replicated in old men and children, in businessmen and dreamers, an infinite number of times.

Much has been told of his feats as a hunter. When he was asked to bring in some game he would ask, with his distinguished taciturnity, “How many?” And disappear. God knows by what stratagems, but he would reappear carrying what had been ordered. Wild boars knew him as a silent and terrible enemy.

Cherni—that place where rushes grow at the edges of the shallow sea—he had learnt by heart. Who knows, if only it were possible to penetrate into the soul of the winged tribe peopling the mouth of the Volga, how the image of that terrible hunter had been imprinted upon it? When they filled with their moan those desert shores, could one not hear in their sobbing the news that the bark of Avian Death had come ashore? Did he not seem to them, with the shotgun over his shoulder and the gray cap on his head, a terrifying creature with otherworldly powers?

The terrible merciless deity would also appear among the desolate sands: The white or black flock would bruit abroad with lengthy shrieks the death of their comrades. One small corner of this soul, however, knew pity: He always spared nests and the young, who knew only the sound of his retreating steps.

He was secretive and taciturn, more frequently reticent; and those only to whom he had disclosed the bare periphery of his soul might have surmised that he condemned life and harbored “the contempt of a savage” for the whole of human fate. One might, however, understand this state of the soul best of all by saying that the soul of “nature” was obliged thus to condemn innovation, if that soul had to pass via this hunter’s life from the world of the “perishing” to the world of those coming to replace it, gleaming with valedictory eye at the snowstorms of ducks, at unpeopled wastelands, at the world of blood spilt by red geese across the surface of the sea, if it had to pass over to the land of white stone piles driven into the streambed, the fine lacework of iron bridges, of anthill cities, a strong but ungracious twilight world!

He was simple, straightforward, even crudely stern. He was a good nurse, tending his sick comrades; and this tenderness toward the weak and readiness to be their shield might have been the envy of a medieval cuirassier in a plumed helmet.

He set off for the hunt as follows: He would get into his skiff, where two dogs that he had raised from puppies awaited him, fasten the sail to the grommet, and set off downriver, using sometimes the towrope and sometimes the oars. I should add that on the Volga there is a tricky wind that will fly offshore in moments of utter quietness and capsize any careless fisherman who can’t manage to strike his sail.

At the campsite the boat was turned over to make a shelter, iron rods were driven into the ground, and by the fire the hunter began his twenty-four-hour days before leaving for the feast. The intelligent, taciturn dogs were fed in the boat, which had absorbed the smells of all the game known to the Volga region; black cormorants and the big leg of a boar lay here beside partridges and bustards.

His wish was to die far from the company of men, concerning whom his disenchantment was immense. He wandered about among men while denying them. Cruel by profession, he settled among the hunted nonpeople, to whom he appeared as a cruel prince, the bearer of death; but he was on their side in the fight between people and nonpeople. Thus Melnikov, the scourge of the Old Believers, could still write In Mountains and Forests.

There were people whom he might call his friends; but the more his soul emerged from its “shell,” the more powerfully he upset the balance between himself and them to his own advantage; he would become arrogant, and the friendship a temporary ceasefire between two belligerents. The rupture might arise from the most trivial of causes, and his gaze would say, “No, you are not one of us,” and he would become dour and distant.

Only to a few was it clear that this man did not in fact belong to humankind at all. With his meditative eyes, his taciturn mouth, he had already been, for two or three decades, the chief priest in the temple of Murder and Death. Between the city and the wilderness there exist the same axes, the same difference, as between devil and demon. Intelligence takes its origin at that point where one is capable of choosing between evil and good. The hunter had made this choice on the side of the demon, the great unpeopled void. He stated emphatically that he did not wish to be buried in a cemetery; why did he not want a quiet cross? was he a stubborn heathen? and what did he learn from that book which he alone had read and the ashes of which no one now would ever read?

Once the local newspaper printed a report that the boat and body of an unknown man had been found in the region known to the local inhabitants as “Horses Gate.” The report added that a double-barreled shotgun lay beside the body. Since this was the year of the Black Death and the ground squirrels, those pretty denizens of the steppe, were dying by the thousands, forcing the nomads to strike their tents and flee in terror, and since the hunter was already a week overdue and nowhere to be seen, people who knew him sent out a search party full of alarmed expectation and grim foreboding. When the party returned, they confirmed that the hunter was dead. Their story, heard from some fishermen, ran as follows.

When they’d already passed several nights in a fishing camp that they had set up on a deserted island, a strange black dog would appear every evening, station herself near the hut, and set up a forlorn howl. Beating and shouting had no effect on her. They drove her off, though not without a presentiment as to what these visits from a strange black dog on a uninhabited island might portend. But she never failed to reappear the following night, howling gruesomely and poisoning the fishermen’s sleep.

Finally a kindhearted watchman went out to her: She gave a yelp of pleasure and led him to the overturned boat: Nearby, his gun in his hand, lay the remains of a man totally picked clean by the birds, there being flesh left only in his boots. A cloud of birds were wheeling above him. A second dog, half dead, lay at his feet.