The village. [Translation from the original Russian text by Isabel Hapgood] (25 page)

"If you only knew how many executions there are!" "Executions? That's all right. Haven't you heard what happened near Eletz? At the farm of the Bykoff brothers? Probably you remember—those fellows who can't pronounce their letters right? Well, those By-koffs were sitting, just as you and I are sitting together now, playing checkers one evening. Suddenly—what was it? There was a stamping on the porch and a shout of 'Open the door!' Well, brother, and before those Bykoffs had time to blink an eye, in rolls their labourer, a peasant after the pattern of Syery, and behind him two scalawags of some breed or other— hooligan adventurers, in a word. And all of them armed with crowbars. They brandished their crowbars and began to yell: 'Put up your hands, curse

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your mother's memory!' Of course, the Bykoffs were thoroughly scared—scared to death—and they leaped to their feet and shouted: 'What's the meaning of this?' And their nice little peasant yells, 'Put 'em oop, put 'em oop!' Here Tikhon Hitch smiled, became thoughtful, and stopped talking.

"Well, tell the rest of it," said Kuzma.

"There's nothing more to tell. They stuck up their hands, as a matter of course, and asked: 'What do you want?' 'Give us some ham! Where are your keys?' 'Damn you! As if you didn't know! There they are yonder, on the door lintel, hanging on the nail.' "

"And they said that with their hands raised?" interrupted Kuzma.

"Of course they had their hands raised. And those men are going to pay heavily for those upraised hands! They'll be hanged, naturally. They are already in jail, the dear creatures—"

"Are they going to hang them on account of the ham?"

"No! for the fun of it, Lord forgive me for my sin," retorted Tikhon Hitch, half angrily, half in jest. "For the love of God, do stop talking balderdash and trying to pretend you're a Balashkin! 'Tis time to drop that."

Kuzma pulled at his grey beard. His haggard, emaciated face, his mournful eyes, his left brow, which slanted upward, all were reflected in the mirror, and as he looked at himself he silently assented.

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"Talking balderdash? Truly it is time—I ought to have dropped that long ago. . . ."

Then Tikhon Hitch turned the conversation to business. Evidently he had been thinking things over a little while previously, during the story, merely because something far more important than executions had occurred to him—a bit of business.

"Here now, I've already told Deniska that he is to finish off that music as soon as possible," he began firmly, clearly, and sternly, sifting tea into the teapot from his fist. "And I beg you, brother, to take a hand in it also—in that music. It is awkward for me, you understand. And after it is over, you can move over here. Twill be comfortable, brother! Once we have made up our mind to change our entire investment, down to the last scrap, there's no sense in your stopping on there with nothing to do. It only doubles the expense. And once we have removed elsewhere, why, get into harness alongside me. Once we have shifted the burden from our shoulders, we'll go off to the town, God willing, to amass grain, and we'll get into real business. And then we'll never come back to this hole of a place again. We'll shake the dust of it from our feet, and it may go to hell for all I care. I don't propose to rot in it! Bear in mind," he said, contracting his brows in a frown, stretching out his arms, and clenching his fists, "you can't wrest things out of my grasp yet a while. 'Tis too early for me to take to lying on top of the oven! I'm still capable of ripping the horns off the devil himself!"

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Kuzma listened, staring almost in terror at his fixed, fairly crazed eyes, at his mouth set awry, at his words distinctly uttered in a rapacious sort of way—listened and held his peace. Later on he inquired: "Brother, tell me, for Christ's sake, what profit to you is there in this marriage? I don't understand; God is my witness, I don't understand it. I can't bear even the sight of that Deniska of yours. That's a new type— new Russia will be worse than all the old types. Don't you make any mistake, thinking he is bashful and sentimental and only pretends to be a fool: he's an extremely cynical beast. People are saying of me that I am living with the Bride—"

"Well, you don't know moderation in anything," interrupted Tikhon Hitch with a frown. "You're for ever hammering away at the same thing: 'an unhappy nation, an unhappy nation!' And now—you call them brutes!"

"Yes, I do hammer at that idea, and I shall go on hammering at it!" Kuzma broke in hotly. "But I've lost my wits completely! Nowadays I don't understand at all: whether it is an unhappy nation, or— Come now, listen to me. You know you hate that man yourself, that Deniska! You both hate each other! He never speaks of you except to call you a 'bloodsucker who has gnawed himself into the very vitals of the people,' and here you are calling him a bloodsucker! He is boasting insolently about the village that now he is the equal of the king!"

"Well, I know that," Tikhon Hitch again interrupted.

"But do you know what he is saying about the

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Bride?" went on Kuzma, not listening to him. "She's handsome—she has, you know, such a white, delicate complexion—but he, the stupid animal—do you know what he is saying about her? 'She's all enameled, the trollop!' And, by this vtime, you must understand one thing: he certainly will not live in the village. You couldn't keep that vagabond in the country now with a lasso. What sort of a farmer and what sort of a family man do you suppose he'll be? Yesterday, I heard, he was roaming about the village and singing in a lewd voice: 'She's beautiful as an angel from heaven, as sly as a damon from hell.' "

"I know it!" yelled Tikhon Hitch. "He won't live in the country—not for any consideration on earth, he won't! Well, and devil take him! And as for his being no sort of a farmer, you and I are nice farmers ourselves, ain't we? I remember how I was talking to you about business—in the eating-house, do you remember?—and all the while you were listening to that quail. Well, go on; what comes next?"

"What do you mean? What has the quail to do with it?" inquired Kuzma.

Tikhon Hitch began to drum on the table with his fingers and said sternly, uttering each word with great distinctness: "Bear in mind: if you grind water, you^Jl be left with just water as the result. My word is sacred to~ages of ages. Once I have said I'll do a thing— I'll do it. I won't set a candle before the holy picture/in atonement for my sin, but I'll do a good deed instead. Although I may give only a mite, the Lord will remember me for that mite."

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Kuzma sprang from his seat. "The Lord, the Lord!" he cried, in a falsetto tone. "What has the Lord to do with that affair of yours? What can the Lord mean to Deniska, to Akimka, to Menshoff, to Syery, to you, or to me?"

"Eh?" inquired Tikhon Hitch severely. "What Akimka is that you're talking about?"

"When I lay there dying," pursued Kuzma, paying no heed to him, "did I think very much about Him? I thought just one thing: 'I don't know anything about Him, and I don't know how to think'!" shouted Kuzma. "I'm an ignorant man!"

And glancing about him with roving, suffering eyes, as he buttoned and unbuttoned his coat, he strode across the room and halted directly in front of Tikhon Hitch.

"Remember this, brother," he said, his cheek-bones reddening. "Remember this: your life and mine are finished. And no candles on earth will save us. Do you hear? We are—Durnovka folk. We're neither candle for God nor oven-fork for the devil." And, unable to find words in his agitation, he fell silent.

But Tikhon Hitch had again thought of something, and suddenly assented: "Correct. 'Tis a good-for-nothing people! Just you consider—" And, animated, carried away by his new idea:

"Just you consider: they've been tilling the soil for a whole thousand years—what am I saying? for longer than that!—but how to till the soil properly not a soul of them understands! They don't know how to do their one and only business! They don't know the

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proper time to begin field work! Nor when to sow, nor when to reap! 'As the people always have done, so will we always do'—that's the whole story. Note that!" Contracting his brows, he shouted sternly, as Kuzma had recently shouted at him. " 'As the people always have done, so will we always do!' Net a single peasant woman knows how to bake bread—the top crust is burned as black as the devil and falls off, and underneath that crust—there's nothing but sour water!"

Kuzma was dumbfounded. His thoughts were reduced to a jumble. "He has lost his senses!" he said to himself, with uncomprehending eyes watching his brother, who was lighting the lamp.

But Tikhon Hitch, giving him no time to recover himself, continued wrathfully: "The people! Lewd, lazy, liars, and so shameless that not one of them believes another! Note this," he roared, not perceiving that the lighted wick was smoking and the soot billowing up almost to the ceiling. " Tis not us they refuse to trust, but one another! And they are all like that —every one of them!" he shouted in a tearful voice, as he jammed the chimney on the lamp with a crash.

The outdoor light was beginning to filter blue through the windows. New, fresh snow was fluttering down on the pools of water and the snowdrifts. Kuzma gazed at it and held his peace. The conversation had taken such an unexpected turn that even Kuzma's eagerness had vanished. Not knowing what to say, unable to bring himself to look at his brother's furious eyes, he began to roll himself a cigarette.

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"He has gone crazy!" he said to himself despairingly. "Well, so be it! It makes no difference! Nothing—nothing makes any difference. Enough!"

He began to smoke, and Tikhon Hitch also began to calm down. He seated himself and, staring at the lamp, muttered softly: "You were talking about 'Deniska.' Have you heard what Makar Ivanovitch, that pilgrim fellow, has been up to? He and that friend of his caught a peasant woman on the road and dragged her to the sentry-box at Kliutchiki, and kept her there for four days, visiting her in turn. Well, and now they are in jail—"

"Tikhon Hitch," said Kuzma amiably, "why do you talk nonsense? What's the object? You must be feeling ill. You keep jumping from one thing to another; now you assert one thing, a minute later you assert something different. Are you drinking too much, perhaps?"

Tikhon Hitch remained silent for a while. He merely waved his hand, and tears trembled in his eyes, which were riveted on the flame of the lamp.

"Are you drinking?" repeated Kuzma quietly.

"Yes, I am," quietly replied Tikhon Hitch. "And 'tis enough to make any one take to drink! Has it been easy for me to acquire this golden cage, think you? Do you imagine that it has been easy for me to live like a chained hound all my life, and with my old woman into the bargain? I have never shown any pity to any one, brother. Well, and has any one shown the least pity on me? Do you think I don't know how I am hated? Do you think they wouldn't

/

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have murdered me in some fashion if those peasants had once got the breeching under their tail in proper style? If they had had luck in that revolution? Wait a bit, wait— There'll be something doing; it's coming! We have cut their throats!"

"And they are to be hanged—on account of a little ham?" asked Kuzma.

"Well, as for the hanging," replied Tikhon Hitch in agonized tones, "why, I just said the first thing that came to my tongue—"

"But they certainly will hang them!"

"Well—and that's no affair of ours. They must answer for that to the Most High." And, frowning, he fell into thought and closed his eyes. "Ah!" he said contritely, with a profound sigh. "Ah, my dear brother! Soon, very soon, we also must appear before His throne for judgment! I read the Trebnik x of an evening, and I weep and I wail over that same book. I am greatly amazed; how was it possible to invent such sweet words? But here, wait a minute—"

And he rose hastily, drew from behind the mirror a thick book in ecclesiastical binding, with trembling hands donned his spectacles, and with tears in his voice began to read, hurriedly, as if he feared to be interrupted.

"'I weep and I wail when I think upon death, and

1 The Trebnik contains the Services for events in daily life: Baptism, Marriage, Confession, the Burial Rites, and so forth. What Tikhon Hitch" quotes and reads is from the magnificent Burial Service. See the Service Book of the Holy Orthodox-Catholic Apostolic Church.— trans.

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behold our beauty, fashioned after the image of God, lying in the tomb disfigured, dishonoured, bereft of form. . . .

" 'Of a truth, all things are vanity, and life is but a shadow and a dream. For in vain doth every one who is born of earth disquiet himself, as saith the Scriptures: when we have acquired the world, then do we take up our abode in the grave, where kings and beggars lie down together. . . .'

" 'Kings and beggars!' " repeated Tikhon Hitch with ecstatic melancholy, and shook his head. "Life is over, dear brother! I had, you understand, a dumb cook; I gave her, the stupid thing, a kerchief from foreign parts; and what does she do but take and wear it completely to rags, wrong side out! Do you understand? Out of stupidity and greed. She begrudged wearing it right side out on ordinary days—and when a feast-day came along nothing was left of it but rags. And that's exactly the way it is with me and with my life. Tis truly so!"

On returning to Durnovka Kuzma was conscious of only one feeling—a certain dull agony. And all the last days of his stay at Durnovka were passed in that dull agony.

\ XIII

DURING those days snow fell, and they were only waiting for that snow at Syery's farmstead, so that the road might be in order for the celebration of the wedding.

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On the twelfth of February, towards evening, in the gloom of the cold entrance lobby, a low-toned conversation was in progress. Beside the stove stood the Bride, a yellow kerchief besprinkled with black polka-dots pulled well down on her forehead, staring at her bark-shoes. By the door stood short-legged Deniska, hatless, in a heavy undercoat, with drooping shoulders. He, too, was gazing downward, at some women's high shoes with metal tips, which he was twisting about in his hands. The boots belonged to the Bride. Deniska had mended them, and had come to receive five kopeks for his work.