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the foundation pit
THE BARREL ORGAN
STORIES
THE EPIFAN LOCKS
THE POTUDAN RIVER
HOMECOMING
LIGHT OF LIFE The deep places of our memory retain both dreams and reality so that after a while we are unable to distinguish that which had actually happened from that which we had dreamt, especially if long years have passed and the recalled experience goes back into childhood, into the distant radiance of primal life. In such a remembrance of childhood a long-vanished world is unchangingly and deathlessly present... In a certain field of the native land there grew a tree lit by the noonday sun of June; the light of the skies lay on the grass and the shadows of the tree leaves trembled silently from the movement of heat over the grassy, shining ground as if it were the visible breathing of sunlight. The ten-year-old boy Akim found it irksome and dull to sit under that tree, yet in his heart there lived quite independently a feeling of happy peace nourished by the warmth of the earth, the light of the sun, the blue sky over distant fields; by the image of all this perceptible but as y
THE COW A gray Circassian cow from the steppes lived alone in a shed; this shed, made of boards painted on the outside, stood in the railroad trackman's small courtyard. In the shed, next to the firewood, hay, millet straw and obsolescent household things, — a trunk without a lid, a burnt-out samovar pipe, rags, a chair without legs — was the shelter for the cow at night and for her life during the long winters. During the day and in the evening the boy Vasya Rubtsov, son of the owner, would visit her and pat the skin around her head. Today, also, he came. "Cow, cow," he would say, because the cow didn't have a name of her own and he called her as it was written in the school reader. "You know, you are a cow!... Don't be lonely, your son will get well, my father will bring him back soon." The cow had a bull-calf; the other day it had choked on something and from its mouth saliva and bile began to flow. Father was afraid that the calf would fall, and today had led it to the station to s
THE TAKYR One night long ago forty or more horsemen rode quietly alongside a stream in the Firyuze valley. The mountains of Kopet-Dag loomed dim and protective above the cool gorge that divides Persia from the plain where the free men of Turkmenistan live. For a thousand years men have traveled the old Persian highway, in triumph, or despair, or death. And on this night long ago fourteen people walked roped together alongside the mounted detachment. Among them were nine young women, and one little girl, who was not tied to the others and who kept falling behind from exhaustion. These people were so sick at heart that they were scarcely conscious of their own existence, and they walked without, as it were, so much as drawing breath. The forty horsemen, on the other hand, were happy, and they kept a jealous watch over their happiness so as to preserve it intact until they reached their homes, far away beyond the mountains in the dark desert. One of the mounted men, however, was dead; he
THE THIRD SON In a provincial town an old woman died. Her husband, a seventy-year-old retired worker, went to the telegraph office and sent off six identically worded telegrams to different parts of the country: "Mother dead come father." The elderly woman in the telegraph office took a long time to count the money, making mistakes, writing out the receipts and stamping them with shaky hands. The old man watched her kindly through the window in the wooden partition with his red-rimmed eyes, and wishing to dispel the grief in his heart thought vaguely about something else. The elderly clerk, it seemed to him, must also have a broken heart and a soul forever troubled — perhaps she was a widow or by a cruel stroke of fate a deserted wife. And now she was working slowly, confusing money, her memory and her attention failing; for even simple, easy work calls for a happy heart. After dispatching the telegrams the old man returned home. He sat down on a stool by the long table at the cold fee
FRO He had gone far away, for long, almost never to return. Speeding away the steam engine of the express train whistled a distant farewell in the open space; the people who had seen off the passenger left the platform and returned to their daily routine; a porter appeared with a mop to sweep the platform like the deck of a ship, which had been stranded on a shoal. "Step aside, miss!" said the porter to a pair of lonely stout legs. The woman stepped aside to the wall, towards the mailbox and read on it the times of the mail collection: they collected often, one could write letters every day. She touched the iron of the box with her finger — it was strong, no one's soul enclosed in a letter would be lost from it. Behind the station lay a new railway town; the shadows of tree leaves moved along the white walls of the houses, the summer evening sun clearly and sadly illuminated the landscape and the dwellings as if through a lucid emptiness, where there was no air for breathing. On the ev
THE CITY OF GRADOV My composition is boring and patient like the life from which it is composed. Iv. Sharonov, late 19th century writer 1. From the Tartar princes and murz,1 called Mordovian princes in the chronicles, came the Gradovite high nobility — all these princes Engalychev, Tenishev and Kugushev, who to this day are remembered by the Gradovite peasants. Gradov lies five hundred versts from Moscow, but the revolution came here on foot. The ancient patrimonial province of Gradov did not submit to the revolution for a long time: the Soviet authority was established in the regional town only in March of 1918 and in the outlying districts towards the end of fall. This is quite understandable; in few places of the Russian empire were there as many Black Hundreds2 as in Gradov. The town had three holy relics: St. Evfimy — the decrepit cave dweller, Petr — the misogynist, and Prokhor — the Byzantine; in addition, there were four mineral health springs and two recumbent old prophetesses
MAKAR THE DOUBTFUL Amidst the rest of the laboring masses there lived two citizens of the State: an ordinary peasant, Makar Ganushkin, and a more distinguished one. Comrade Lev Chumovoi, who was smarter by far than anyone else in the village and because of his intelligence he supervised the progress of the people forward in a straight line towards the communal weal. As a result the entire population of the village would say of Lev Chumovoi whenever he was passing by anywhere, "There goes our leader;see him walking. There'll be measures of some sort taken tomorrow — you just wait... A real smart head he has; it's only that his hands are hollow. He lives by his bare brain..." Makar, on the other hand, just as any other peasant, liked migrant jobs better than plowing and was concerned with spectacles rather than bread, because he had, according to Comrade Chumovoi, an empty head. Without obtaining Comrade Chumovoi's permission, Makar once organized a public spectacle — a merry-go-round pu
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