The Cossacks (14 page)

Uncle Eroshka looked down at his feet in their wet rawhide shoes and shook his head, as if amazed at the cornet’s learning and way with words. “Egg-gyptian Ninnrod!” he muttered. “The things he comes up with!”

“We are about to go hunting, as a matter of fact,” Olenin said.

“I see that, sir, I see that indeed!” the cornet said. “But there is a trifling little matter.”

“How may I help you?”

“As you are a nobleman,” the cornet began, “and as I can also see myself as having the denomination of officer, for which reason we can always by degrees involve one another in discussion, like all men of noble rank—” Here the cornet stopped for a moment and smiled at Olenin and the old man. “But should you entertain the desire, with my consent, as my wife is a foolish woman in our social rank and could not at the present time fully comprehend your words of yesterday’s date—Therefore my lodgings could go to the regimental adjutant for six rubles without the stable—as I, having noble connections myself, could always ablate it from myself free of charge. But, since it meets with your approval, I, having the denomination of officer, can come to an agreement with you on all matters personally like an inhabitant of
these lands and not leave it to the womenfolk, as is custom with us, but I can observe the conditions on all matters—”

“The clarity with which he speaks!” the old man muttered.

The cornet continued talking for quite a while in a similar vein, and Olenin finally gathered, not without some difficulty, that the cornet was hoping to rent the lodgings to him for six silver rubles a month. Olenin readily accepted and offered the cornet a glass of tea. The cornet declined.

“According to our foolish customs,” he said, “we consider it a sin to drink from a worldly glass. I, however, as an educated man, look down on this custom, but my wife, due to her human weakness—”

“So, would you like a glass of tea?”

“If you will permit me, I shall bring my own glass, my particular glass, you could say,” the cornet replied. He went out on the porch and shouted across the yard: “A glass!”

A few moments later the door of the room opened and a young, sun-browned arm in a pink sleeve appeared. The cornet walked to the door, took the glass, and whispered something to his daughter outside. Olenin poured some tea into the cornet’s “particular” glass, and then into Eroshka’s “worldly” glass.

“However, I do not wish to detain you,” the cornet said, scalding his lips but downing the whole glass of tea. “I myself am a devotee of fishing, I am here only on a short leave, a recreation from my duties, one could say. I, too, have a wish to experience luck and see if Fate will not throw my way the gifts of the river Terek. I hope that you will visit me sometime to drink the wine paternal to these regions, as is the custom in our village.”

The cornet shook hands with Olenin, said good-bye, and left. As Olenin was preparing his hunting gear, he heard the cornet’s commanding, matter-of-fact voice giving orders to his household. A few minutes later, Olenin saw him walk past the window in a tattered jacket, his trousers rolled up to the knees, a fishing net slung over his shoulder.

“He’s a cheat!” Uncle Eroshka said, drinking down the tea in his worldly glass. “Are you really going to pay him six rubles? Has anyone ever heard such a thing? The best house in all the village can be had for two rubles! What a devil! Why, I’d give you mine for three!”

“No, I’m staying here,” Olenin said.

“Six rubles! A waste of money!” the old man replied. “Ivan! Some Chikhir!”

At about eight o’clock, after breakfast and a vodka for the road, Olenin and the old man went out into the street. At the village gate they came across an oxcart. Maryanka, wearing a jacket over her smock and in heavy boots, a white kerchief covering her face, was leading with one hand a pair of oxen by a rope tied to their horns, while in her other hand she held a long switch.

“Sweetheart!” the old man called out, moving as if to embrace her.

Maryanka waved her switch at him and looked at the two men cheerfully.

Olenin felt increasingly animated. “Off we go, off we go!” he said, flinging his rifle onto his shoulder, feeling the girl’s eyes on him.

“Git! Git!” Maryanka’s voice rang out behind them, calling out to the oxen, the wheels of the cart creaking loudly.

As the two men walked along the road that led through the pastures behind the village, Eroshka went on talking. He could not forget the cornet and kept cursing him.

“But why are you so angry with him?” Olenin asked.

“He’s a skinflint! I don’t like that!” the old man said. “After all, when he drops dead he can’t take it with him! What’s he hoarding up all his money for? He’s already built two houses and snatched away another orchard from his brother! And when it comes to writing things for people, you should see what a dog he is! They come from other villages asking him to write documents for them. And whatever way he decides to write things down, that’s what you get! No doubt about it! But what is he hoarding up all that money for? He’s got only one brat of a boy and that girl. Once he marries her off, that’ll be that!”

“Maybe he’s saving up for her dowry,” Olenin said.

“What dowry! She’s a splendid girl—they’ll take her as she is! But he’s such a devil that he’ll only give her to a rich man. He wants to get his hands on a nice fat sum of bride-money. There’s a Cossack called Luka, a nephew of mine and a neighbor. He’s the brave young fellow who just killed a Chechen. He’s been wooing her for a long time now, but the cornet won’t give her to him. There’s always an excuse: now he’s
saying the girl is too young! But I know what the cornet wants, he wants them to keep kowtowing to him. The shame of it all! And yet in the end they will marry her off to Lukashka because he’s the best Cossack in the village, a warrior, he killed a Chechen fighter, and he’ll get a medal!”

“But let me tell you something,” Olenin said. “Yesterday, when I was out walking in the yard, I saw the cornet’s daughter kissing some Cossack.”

“Nonsense!”

“By God, I did!”

“That girl’s a devil,” Eroshka said, reconsidering. “What Cossack was she kissing?”

“I couldn’t see.”

“What color sheepskin was his hat, was it white?”

“Yes.”

“And a red coat? More or less your build?”

“No, a little taller than me.”

“That’s him!” Eroshka said, laughing out loud. “That’s him, that’s my boy Marka—Lukashka, I mean, I’m only joking when I call him Marka. I love the boy! He’s just like me when I was his age! It’s no good trying to keep an eye on those girls. My own sweet little soul used to sleep with her mother and her sister-in-law, but I still managed to crawl in. She’d be upstairs, and her mother was a real devil of a witch! She hated me with a passion. I used to go there with my best friend, Girchik. I’d climb up to the window on his shoulders, push it open, and grope around. She’d be sleeping on the bench. Once I woke her, and you should have seen how she jumped up! She didn’t recognize me. Who goes there? But I couldn’t answer, her mother had begun to stir in her sleep. I took my hat off and stuffed it into her mouth. Then she knew right away it was me, because of the tear in my hat, and so she climbed out the window with me. Back then I lacked for nothing. Clotted cream, grapes—she’d bring out everything,” Eroshka added, in his practical way. “And she wasn’t the only one. That was life then!”

“And what about now?”

“Now we’ll follow the dogs, we’ll wait for a pheasant to settle in a tree, and then you can shoot it.”

“Why don’t you give Maryanka a try yourself?”

“You watch the dogs. Tonight I’ll show you,” the old man said, pointing at Lyam, his favorite.

They fell silent. They walked another hundred paces, talking, and suddenly the old man stopped and pointed at a branch lying across the path. “What do you think that is?” he asked. “You think it’s just a branch? Well it isn’t! It’s lying wrong.”

“What do you mean it’s lying wrong?”

The old man smiled.

“You don’t know anything! Listen! When a branch is lying like that, then don’t step over it. Either walk around it or throw it off the path like this and say, ‘To the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.’ Then you can walk on and know that God’s blessing is with you, and that nothing bad will happen. That’s what the old men taught me.”

“What nonsense!” Olenin said. “I’d rather you told me more about Maryanka. So is she seeing Lukashka?”

“Shh, quiet now,” the old man whispered, again avoiding Olenin’s question. “Just listen. We’ll go into the forest now.”

And the old man, treading silently in his rawhide shoes, walked ahead on the narrow path leading into the wild, overgrown forest. From time to time he looked back at Olenin with a frown. Olenin was rustling and stamping about in his big boots, his rifle getting tangled in the branches of the trees growing along the path.

“Not so loud, soldier!” the old man whispered at him angrily.

There was a feeling in the air that the sun had risen. The fog was beginning to lift but still covered the treetops. The forest seemed incredibly high. With every step the two men took, the surroundings changed. What seemed to be a tree turned out to be a bush, and what seemed to be reeds turned out to be trees.

The fog lifted enough to reveal the wet tops of the reeds. Here and there the fog turned to dew that dampened the road and the weeds by the fences. Smoke poured from all the chimneys. The Cossacks were heading out of the village, some to work, some to the river, some to the checkpoints. Olenin and Uncle Eroshka walked beside one another
over the damp, overgrown weeds of the path. The dogs, their tails wagging and looking up at their masters, ran alongside. Clouds of mosquitoes buzzed through the air after the hunters, covering their backs, eyes, and hands. There was a smell of grass and forest dampness.

It was quiet. Sounds from the village that had been audible before no longer reached the hunters. Only the dogs rustled through the bushes, and from time to time a bird called. Olenin knew that the forest was dangerous, that Chechen warriors were hiding in the underbrush. But he also knew that a rifle was powerful protection for a man on foot in the forest. It was not that Olenin really felt afraid, but he thought someone else in his position might feel afraid. He looked intently into the misty undergrowth, listening to the faint, sparse sounds, and touching his rifle he experienced a pleasant feeling that was new to him. Uncle Eroshka, walking ahead, stopped at every puddle where there were animal tracks, pointing them out to Olenin after carefully examining them.

The path along which they were walking had been made by carts but had long since been covered by grass. The forest of elms and plane trees on both sides was so thick and overgrown that nothing could be seen. Wild vines entwined almost every tree from bottom to top, and the ground was covered by thick, dark brambles. Every small clearing was dense with blackberry bushes and reeds with swaying gray tops. Large animal tracks and grooved pheasant prints led from the path into the thicket. The vitality of the forest, never penetrated by cattle, amazed Olenin at every step: He had never seen anything like it. The forest, the danger, the old man with his mysterious whispering, Maryanka with her lithe, strong frame, and the mountains, all seemed to him like a dream.

“A pheasant has settled,” the old man whispered, looking around and pulling his hat over his face. “Cover your face—a pheasant!” He waved angrily at Olenin and crept forward, practically on all fours. “A pheasant hates a man’s face!”

Olenin was still behind him when the old man stopped and began examining a tree. The pheasant squawked from the tree at the dog, which was barking at it, and Olenin saw the bird. But at that instant a shot, as from a cannon, rang out from Eroshka’s sturdy rifle, and the
bird, fluttering up, shed feathers and fell to the ground. Olenin, as he walked over to the old man, flushed out another pheasant. He drew his rifle from its sling, aimed, and fired. The bird whirled into the air and then fell like a stone, catching in the branches and tumbling into the bushes.

“Good man!” Eroshka called with a guffaw, as he himself would have been hard put to hit the bird in flight.

They gathered up the pheasants and walked on. Olenin, excited by the commotion and the praise, kept talking to the old man.

“Stop! We’ll go this way!” Eroshka interrupted him. “Yesterday I saw deer tracks here.”

They headed about three hundred paces into the thicket, then made their way into a clearing that was partly flooded and overgrown with reeds. Olenin kept falling behind. Uncle Eroshka, some twenty paces ahead, bent down, nodded his head, and quickly waved him over. Olenin saw that the old man was pointing at a human footprint.

“You see that?”

“Yes. So what?” Olenin said, trying to speak as calmly as possible. “A man’s footprint, isn’t it?” Cooper’s
Pathfinder
*
and Chechen warriors flashed through his mind. He noticed the furtiveness with which the old man now trod and decided not to ask any questions, uncertain whether it was the hunt or impending danger that led to Eroshka’s caution.

“It’s my own footprint,” the old man said simply and pointed to the grass, beneath which an animal’s tracks were barely visible.

The old man walked on. Olenin was now managing to keep up with him. They moved forward some twenty paces to lower ground, until they came to some bushes under a large pear tree, the earth beneath it black and covered with fresh animal dung. The place was overgrown with wild vines and looked like a dark, cool arbor.

“The stag was here this morning,” the old man said with a sigh. “You see, its lair is still damp and fresh.”

Suddenly there was a loud rustling and crashing in the underbrush not more than ten paces away. Both men were startled and reached for
their rifles but could see nothing. They only heard more branches breaking. The even, quick thud of hooves sounded for an instant; the loud rustle turned into a gallop that became fainter and fainter in the silent forest. It was as if something clutched at Olenin’s heart. He peered in vain into the green underbrush, and finally turned and looked at the old man. Uncle Eroshka stood motionless, pressing his rifle to his chest. His hat was cocked backward, his eyes shone with an unusual sparkle, and his open mouth, in which his yellow, decayed teeth flashed maliciously, seemed to have frozen.