The village. [Translation from the original Russian text by Isabel Hapgood] (12 page)

He drank, grew intoxicated, set his jaws more and more tightly, stared more intently than ever at the wick of the lamp, burning with an even flame. Think of it! You couldn't go to see your own brother— the pigs prevented, like the swine they were! And if they would let him, there would still be small cause for joy. Kuzma would read him a lecture, the Bride would stand with lips pressed tight and drooping eyelashes. Why, those lowered eyelids alone were enough to make a man take to his heels!

His heart sank within him, ached; a pleasing mist clouded his brain. Where had he heard that song?—

"My tiresome evening's come; I know not what to do. My friend belov'd is come, He fondles me, loves me true."

Ah, yes, it was in Lebedyan, at the posting station. The young girls, lace-makers, were sitting on a winter

1 Polu, meaning "half," reduces the name to absurdity: something like "the Half-carp."—

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evening and singing. There they sat, weaving their lace and never raising their eyelashes; they sang in deep, ringing voices:

"He kisses me, embraces me, Then takes his leave of me. . . ."

His brain was clouded. Now it seemed as if everything lay ahead of him—joy, liberty, freedom from care—then his heart began to ache painfully, hopelessly. Now he said: "If I only had a bit of money in my pocket, I could buy anything—even an aunt— at the market!" Again he cast a vicious glance at the lamp, and muttered, alluding to his brother: "Teacher! Preacher! Pitiful Philaret! 1 Ragged devil!"

He drank the rest of the mountain-ash-berry cordial and smoked until the room grew dark. With uncertain steps he went out, across the shaking uneven floor, clad only in his roundabout, into the dark ante-room. He was sensible of the piercing coldness of the air, the smell of straw, the odour of dogs, and he perceived two greenish lights blinking on the threshold. "Buyan!" he shouted. And he kicked Buyan over the head with all his might.

Then he listened to the watchman's mallet, keeping time to it with his feet. He spat on the steps of the porch, mentally accompanying the action with:

"Come straight to me, Look straight at me."

1 Referring to a famous Philaret, Metropolitan of Moscow.

—TRANS.

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And as he set off in the direction of the highway he shouted: "Blow on a squirrel's tail—it will be all the more downy for it!"

A deathlike silence lay over the earth, which showed softly black in the starlight. The highway shone faintly white as it faded out in the gloom. Far away, as if emanating from beneath the surface of the earth, a rumbling sound became audible and grew louder from moment to moment. And suddenly the orchestra came to the surface with its droning: in the distance, cutting across the highway, its chain of windows lighted by electricity, gleaming whitely, trailing smoke-wreaths as a flying witch trails her tresses, redly illuminated from below, the express train dashed past.

"It's passing Durnovka!" said Tikhon Hitch, with a hiccough. "Passing the Grey Man! Akh, the robbers, curse them—"

The drowsy cook entered the living-room, which was dimly lighted by the burned-out lamp and stank of tobacco. She was bringing in a greasy little kettle of sour cabbage soup, which she held in rags black with dirt and soot. Tikhon Hitch cast a sidelong glance at her and said: "Get out of here, this very minute."

The cook wheeled round, pushed open the door with her foot, and disappeared. Then he picked up Gat-zuk's calendar, dipped a rusty pen into the rusty ink, and began, with set teeth and leaden eyes staring fixedly, to write endlessly on the calendar, up and down and across:

"Gatzuk, Gatzuk, Gatzuk, Gatzuk . . ."

PART TWO

AEMOST all his life long Kuzma had dreamed of writing, of obtaining an education. Verses did not count. He had dallied with verses as a mere child. He longed to narrate how he had come to naught; to depict, with unprecedented ruthlessness, his poverty and that dreadful factor in his commonplace life which had crippled him, made of him a barren fig-tree.

When he reviewed his life in his own mind he both condemned and acquitted himself. Yes, he was an indigent petty townsman who, almost up to the age of fifteen, had been able to read only by spelling out every word. But his history was the history of all self-taught Russians. He had been born in a country which had more than a hundred million illiterate inhabitants. He had grown up in the Black Suburb, where down to the present day men fight to the death with their fists. In his childhood he had seen dirt and drunkenness, laziness and boredom. His childhood had furnished only one poetical impression: there had been the dark cemetery grove, and the pasture on the hill behind the Suburb, and beyond that— space, the hot mirage of the steppe, a white cottage beneath a poplar-tree in the far distance. But

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he had been taught to look upon even this cottage with scorn: Little Russians dwelt there, and, of course, they were so stupid that in reply to the question, "Little Russians, where are your kettles?" 1 they said: "Do you need to be told that they are under the wagons?" He and Tikhon had been taught the alphabet and figures by a neighbour named Byelkin, whose trade was to make rubber overshoes in moulds; but he had taught them because he never had any work —for what demand was there in the Suburb for overshoes?—and because it was always agreeable to pull some one's hair, and because a man cannot sit for ever on the earth wall alongside his hut absolutely idle, with his frowsy head bent and exposed to the sun, doing nothing but spit in the dust between his bare feet.

In Matorin's shop the brothers had speedily attained to writing and reading, and Kuzma had begun to be attracted by the little books which the accordeon-player, old Balashkin, the eccentric free-thinker of the bazaar, gave him. But what chance for reading was there in the shop? Matorin very often shouted: "I'll box your ears for those books of yours, you abominable little devil!"

That was an old story; but Kuzma wished to recall, also, the morals of the bazaar. In the bazaar he had picked up much that was opprobrious. There he and his brother had been taught to sneer at the

1 The insulting nickname "khokhly" is used. The question mentioned is in the form of a rhyme, intentionally offensive. The reply is also rhymed.— trans.

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poverty of their mother, at her having taken to drink, abandoned as she was by her adolescent sons. There they once played the following prank: Every day, on his way from the library, the son of the tailor Vitebsky passed the door of the shop—a Jew aged sixteen, with a pallid greyish face; a terribly lean, big-eared fellow who wore spectacles and industriously read as he walked, his book held close up to his eyes. So they threw some bricks and rubbish on the sidewalk—and the Jew ("that learned man!") stumbled so successfully that he bruised his knees, elbows, and teeth to the point of bleeding. Then Kuzma started to write. He began a story about a merchant who, driving by night in a fearful thunderstorm through the Murom forests, came upon an encampment of bandits and got his throat cut. Kuzma fervently set forth his remarks and thoughts on the brink of death, his grief over his iniquitous life, "so prematurely cut short." But the bazaar mercilessly threw cold water on it.

"Well, you are a queer one, Lord forgive us!" it pronounced, merrily and insolently, through Tikhon's mouth. "'Prematurely'! That pot-bellied devil ought to have been done for long before! Well, and how did you know what he was thinking about? They cut his throat, didn't they?"

Then Kuzma wrote, in the style of KoltzofT, a ballad about an extremely ancient knight who bequeathed to his son a faithful steed. "He carried me in my youth!*' exclaimed the hero in the ballad. But Tikhon merely shook his head over that.

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"Really!" said he, "how old was that horse? Akh, Kuzma! Kuzma! You'd better compose something practical—well, about the war, for example."

And Kuzma, catering to the taste of the marketplace, began with great zeal to write about what the bazaar was discussing at the moment—the Russo-Turkish war: about how—

"In the year of seventy-seven The Turk set out to fight; He advanced with his hordes And tried to capture Russia"

and how those hordes

In uncouth nightcaps

Crept stealthily to the Tsar-Cannon. 1

Later on it pained him to realize how much stupidity and ignorance this doggerel contained, the servile quality of its language, and its Russian scorn for foreign headgear. With pain he recalled much else. For example, Zadonsk. One day there he was overcome by a passionate longing for repentance, a terror lest his mother, who had died, practically, of starvation, had bitterly reported in heaven her sorrowful life; and he set forth on foot to the abode of a holy man. Once there, he did nothing whatever except to read to assembled admirers, with malicious joy, a "sheet" which had made a special impression on him: how a certain village scribe had taken it into his head to

x That is, to the heart of the Kremlin, in Moscow.— trans.

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reject the authorities and the Church, and God had waxed so wroth that "this aristocrat was laid low on his bed of death," his malady such that "he devoured more than a pig, and shrieked that that was not enough, and withered away until he was unrecognizable." And Kuzma's entire youth was spent in just such affairs! He thought and professed one thing— and said and did something entirely different. Aspiring to write and reckoning up the sum-total of his life, Kuzma shook his head mournfully: "A genuine Russian trait, sir! The sowing was half peas, half thistles."

It seemed as if he had been merry in his youth, kind, tender, quick to understand, eager to learn. But was it really so? He was not Tikhon, of course. But why had he, equally with Tikhon, assimilated so promptly the savagery of those who surrounded him? Why had he, kind and tender as he was, so mercilessly neglected his mother? Why had the bazaar so long reigned supreme over his heart, which was toiling so ardently over books? Why, why was he—a barren fig-tree ?

Tikhon had been in the habit of keeping most of his earnings in one common money-box: they had decided to set up in business for themselves. Kuzma surrendered his money with a full, hearty confidence which Tikhon never possessed. But his mother, his mother! He groaned as he recalled how, poverty-stricken as she was, she had bestowed her blessing on him, had given him her sole treasure, a relic of her better days, which had been preserved at the bottom of

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her chest—a small silver-mounted holy picture. And the fact that he had groaned was good, also; but all the same his money had gone to Tikhon.

II

ABANDONING the shop counter, and having sold off what their mother had left, they had begun to trade—had gone out among the Little Russians, and to Voronezh. They were frequently in their native town, and Kuzma kept up his friendship with Balashkin as of yore, and read avidly the books which Balashkin gave him or recommended to him. This was not at all like Tikhon. Tikhon, when there was nothing to do, was fond of reading, also; a year might pass without his taking a book in his hand, but if he did begin one, he read swiftly to the very last line and, once he had finished that, instantly severed all connection with the book; on one occasion he had read through an entire volume of the "Contemporary" in one night, had not understood much, had pronounced what he had read extremely interesting—and then had forgotten the "Contemporary" for ever. Neither did Kuzma understand much of what he read—even in the writings of Byelinsky, Gogol, and Pushkin. But his comprehension increased, not by days but by hours: he was able to grasp the gist of the matter and rivet it in his heart to a positively amazing degree. Why, then, when he comprehended the

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words of Dobroliuboff, did he disfigure his speech in the bazaar and say "khvakt" instead of "fact"? Why, when conversing with Balashkin about Schiller, did he passionately long to borrow his "ekordeon"? Waxing enthusiastic over TurgeniefT's "Smoke," he maintained nevertheless that "he who is intelligent but not educated, has much knowledge even without education." On visiting the grave of Koltzoff, in rapture he wrote upon the gravestone an illiterate epitaph: "Binith this munament is intered the boady of citazen alesei vasilevitch KaltzofT campoaser and poet of Voronezh riworded by the munarch's greciousnes a lemingles man enlitend by natur."

Balashkin explained the meaning of things to him and impressed on Kuzma's soul a profound stamp of himself. Old, gigantic, lean, garbed summer and winter alike in a peasant overcoat which had turned green with age and a winter-weight peaked cap, huge-faced, clean-shaven, and wry-mouthed, Balashkin was almost terrifying with his malicious speeches, his deep, senile bass voice, the prickly, silvery bristles on his grey cheeks and lips, and his green left eye, bulging, flashing, and squinting in the direction in which his mouth was drawn awry. And he fairly took to barking one day at Kuzma's remark about "enlightenment without education." That eye of his blazed as he hurled aside his cigarette, which he had filled with the cheap tobacco on top of a tin which had contained pilchards. "Jaw of an ass! What's that you're jabbering? Have you ever considered what our 'enlight-

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enment without education' signifies? The death of Zhadovskaya—that's its devilish symbol!"

"But what about the death of Zhadovskaya?" inquired Kuzma.

And Balashkin yelled in a rage: "You have forgotten? The poetess, a wealthy woman, a noblewoman —but she drowned herself. You have forgotten?" And again he seized his cigarette and began to roar dully: "Merciful God! They killed Pushkin, they killed LermontofT, they drowned Pisareff. They strangled Rylyeeff, they condemned Polezhaeff to the ranks as a soldier, they walled up Shevtchenko as a prisoner for ten years, they dragged Dostoevsky out to be shot, Gogol went mad—and how about KoltzofT, Nikitin, RyeshetnikofT? Okh, and is there any other such country in the world, any other such nation? thrice accursed may they be!"