The village. [Translation from the original Russian text by Isabel Hapgood] (17 page)

All this was uttered in a careless sort of way, passed over lightly, with intervening pauses, but accompanied by such a malignant smile and such tor-

1 2.70 gallons.— trans.

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turing of his consonants that Kuzma began to look more attentively at the man whom he had thus casually encountered. In appearance he resembled a fool. His hair was straight, cut in a round crop, and long. His face was small, insignificant, of ancient Russian type, like the holy pictures of the Suzdal school. His boots were huge, his body lean and somehow wooden. His eyes, beneath large, sleepy lids, were like those of a hawk, with a golden ring around the iris. When he lowered his lids he was a lisping idiot; when he raised them one felt a certain fear of him.

"Do you live in the garden?" asked Kuzma.

"Yes. Where else should I live?"

"And what's your name?"

"My name? Akim. And who are you?"

"I wanted to lease the garden."

"There, now—that is an idea!" And Akim, wagging his head scoffingly, went on his way.

The wind blew with ever increasing vehemence, scattering showers of rain from the brilliantly green trees; beyond the park, in some low-lying region, the thunder rumbled dully, pale blue flashes of aurora borealis lighted up the avenue, and nightingales were singing everywhere about. It was utterly incomprehensible how they were able so sedulously, in such complete disregard of surrounding conditions, to warble, trill, and scatter their notes broadcast so sweetly and vigorously beneath that heavy sky, veiled in leaden clouds, amid the trees bending in the wind, as they perched in the dense, wet bushes. But still more incomprehensible was it how the watchmen managed to pass the

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night in such a gale, how they could sleep on damp straw beneath the sloping roof of the rotten hut.

There were three watchmen. And all of them were sick men. One, young, emaciated, sympathetic, formerly a baker by trade, but dismissed the preceding autumn for taking part in a strike, was now a beggar. He had not as yet lost the peasant look, and he complained of fever. The second, also a beggar, but already middle-aged, had tuberculosis, although he declared that there was nothing the matter with him except that he felt "cold between his shoulders." Akim was afflicted with night-blindness—he could not see well in the half-light of twilight. When Kuzma approached, the baker, pale and amiable of manner, was squatting on his heels near the hut. With the sleeves of a woman's wadded dressing gown tucked up on his thin, weak arms, he was engaged in washing millet in a wooden bowl. Consumptive Mitrofan, a man of medium size, broad and dark complexioned, who resembled a native of Dahomey, garbed entirely in wet rags and leg-wrappers which were worn out and stiff as an old horse's hoof, was standing beside the baker and, with hunched-up shoulders, staring at the latter's work with brilliant brown eyes, strained wide open but devoid of all expression. Akim had brought a bucket of water and was making a fire in a little clay oven-niche opposite the hut; he was blowing the fire into life. He entered the hut, selected the driest tufts of straw he could find, and again approached the fire, which was now fragrantly smoking beneath the iron kettle, muttering to himself the while,

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breathing with a whistling sound, smiling in a mockingly mysterious way at the bantering of his comrades, and occasionally bringing them up short with a venomous and clever remark. Kuzma shut his eyes and listened now to the conversation, now to the nightingales, as he sat on a wet bench beside the hut, besprinkled with icy spatterings of rain whenever the damp wind rushed through the avenue beneath the gloomy sky, which quivered with pale flashes of lightning, while the thunder rumbled. He felt a pain in his stomach, from hunger and tobacco. It seemed as if the porridge would never be cooked, and he could not banish from his mind the thought that perhaps he himself would be obliged to live just such a wild beast's life as that of these watchmen, and that ahead of him lay nothing but old age, sickness, loneliness, and poverty. His body ached, and the gusts of wind, the faraway monotonous grumbling of the thunder, the nightingales, and the leisurely, carelessly malicious lisping of Akim and his squeaking voice, all irritated him.

"You ought to buy yourself at least a belt, Akim-ushka," said the baker with affected simplicity, as he lighted a cigarette. He kept casting glances at Kuzma, by way of inviting him to listen to Akim.

"Just you wait," replied Akim in an absent-minded, scoffing tone, as he poured the fluid porridge from the boiling kettle into a cup. "When we've lived here with the proprietor through the summer, I'll buy you boots with a squeak in them."

" 'With a skvvvveak'! Well, I'm not asking you to do anything of the sort."

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"You're wearing leg-wrappers now." And Akim began anxiously to take a test sip of the porridge from the spoon.

The baker was disconcerted, and heaved a sigh: "Why should the likes of us wear boots?"

"Oh, stop that," said Kuzma. "You had better tell me whether you have this porridge day in and day out, for ever and ever, as I think you do."

"Well, and what would you like—fish, and ham?" inquired Akim, without turning round, as he licked the spoon. "That really wouldn't be so bad: a dram of vodka, about three pounds of sturgeon, a knuckle of ham, a little glass of fruit cordial. But this isn't porridge: it's called thin gruel. The porridge is for the appetizer snack."

"But do you make cabbage soup, or any other sort of soup?"

"We have had that, brother—cabbage soup; and what soup it was! If you were to spill it on the dog his hair would peel ofT!"

"Well, you might make a little soup."

"But where would we get the potatoes? You can't buy any from a peasant, any more than from the devil, brother! You couldn't wheedle even snow out of a peasant in the middle of winter."

Kuzma shook his head.

"Probably 'tis your illness that makes you so bitter! You ought to get a little treatment—"

Akim, without replying, squatted down on his heels in front of the fire. The fire had already died down; only a little heap of thin coals glowed red under the

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kettle; the garden grew darker and darker, and the blue aurora had already begun faintly to illuminate their faces, as the gusts of wind inflated Akim's shirt. Mitrofan was sitting beside Kuzma, leaning on his stick; the baker sat on a stump under a linden tree. On hearing Kuzma's last words, he grew serious.

"This is the way I look at it," he said submissively and sadly: "that nothing can be otherwise than as the Lord decrees. If the Lord does not grant health, then all the doctors cannot help. Akim, yonder, speaks the truth: no one can die before his death-hour comes."

"Doctors!" interposed Akim, staring at the coals and pronouncing the word in a specially vicious way— "doktogga!" "Doctors, brother, have an eye on their pockets. I'd let out his guts for him, for such a doctor, so I would!"

"Not all of them are thinking of their pockets," said Kuzma.

"I haven't seen all of them."

"Well, then, don't chatter nonsense about what you haven't seen," said Mitrofan severely, and turned to the baker: "Yes, and you're a nice one, too: making yourself out a hopeless beggar! Perchance, if you didn't wallow round on the ground, dog-fashion, you wouldn't have that acute pain."

"Why, you see, I—" the baker began.

But at this point Akim's scoffing composure deserted him of a sudden. And, rolling his stupid hawklike eyes, he abruptly leaped to his feet and began to yell, with the irascibility of an idiot: "What? So

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I'm chattering nonsense, am I? Have you been in the hospital? Have you? And I have been there! I spent seven days there—and did he give me any white-bread rolls, that doctor of yours? Did he?"

"Yes, you're a fool," interposed Mitrofan: "white rolls are not given to every sick person: it depends on their disease."

"Ah! It depends on their disease! Well, let him go burst with his disease, devil take him!" shouted Akim.

And, casting furious glances about him, he flung his spoon into the "thin gruel" and strode off into the hut.

X

THERE, breathing with his whistling breath, he lighted the lamp, and the hut assumed a cosy air. Then he fished out spoons from some niche close under the roof, threw them on the table, and shouted: "Bring on that porridge, can't you?" The baker rose and stepped over to the kettle. "Pray be our guest," he said, as he passed Kuzma. But Kuzma found it unpleasant to eat with Akim. He asked for a bit of bread, salted it heavily, and, chewing it with delight, returned to his seat on the bench. It had become completely dark. The pale blue light illuminated the trees more and more extensively, swiftly, and clearly, as if blown into life by the wind, and at each flash of the aurora the foliage, in its death-like

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green, became for a moment as distinctly visible as in the daytime; then everything was again inundated by blackness as of the tomb. The nightingales had ceased their song—only one, directly above the hut, continued to warble sweetly and powerfully. In the hut, around the lamp, a peaceably ironical conversation was flowing on once more. "They did not even ask who I am, whence I come," said Kuzma to himself. "What a people, may the devil take it." And he shouted, jestingly, into the hut: "Akim! You haven't even asked who I am, and whence I come."

"And why should I want to know?" replied Akim indifferently.

"Well, I'm going to ask him about something else," said the baker's voice—"how much land he expects to receive from the Duma. What think you, Akim-ushka? Hey?"

"I'm no clever one at interpreting writing," said Akim. "You can see it better from the dung-heap."

And the baker must have been disconcerted once more: silence ensued, for a minute.

"He is referring to us, the likes of himself," remarked Mitrofan. "I happened to mention that in Rostoff the poor folks—the proletariat, that is to say —save themselves in winter time in the manure—"

"They go outside the town," cut in Akim cheerfully, "and—into the manure with them! They burrow in exactly like the pigs—and there's no harm done."

"Fool!" Mitrofan snapped him up, and so sternly that Kuzma turned round. "What are you gobbling about? You stupid fool, you rickety bandy-legs!

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When poverty overtakes you, you'll burrow too."

Akim, dropping his spoon, gazed sleepily at him and, with the same sudden irascibility which he had recently exhibited, opened wide his empty hawk-like eyes and yelled furiously: "A—ah! Poverty! Did you want to work at so much the hour?"

"Of course!" angrily shouted Mitrofan, inflating his Dahomey-like nostrils and staring point-blank at Akim with blazing eyes. "Twenty hours for twenty kopeks?"

"A—ah! But you wanted a ruble an hour? You're a greedy one, devil take you!"

But the wrangle subsided as quickly as it had flared up. A minute later Mitrofan was talking quietly and scalding himself with the porridge: "As if he weren't greedy himself! Why, he, that blind devil, would strangle himself in the sanctuary for the sake of a kopek. If you'll believe it, he sold his wife for fifteen kopeks! God is my witness that I am not jesting. Off yonder in our village of Lipetzk there's a little old man, Pankoff by name, who also used to work as gardener—well, and now he has retired and is very fond of that sort of affair."

"Why, doesn't Akim come from over Lipetzk way?" interrupted Kuzma.

"From Studenko, from the village," said Akim indifferently, exactly as if they were not discussing him at all.

"Right, right," Mitrofan confirmed his statement.

"A peasant from the roots up. He lives with his brother, controls the land and the farmyard in com-

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mon with him, but nevertheless somewhat in the position of a fool; and, of course, his wife has already run away from him. But we learned the reason why she ran away, from the man himself: he made a bargain with Pankoff, for fifteen kopeks, to admit him of a night, instead of himself, into the chamber—and he did it."

Akim remained silent, tapping the table with his spoon and staring at the lamp. He had already eaten his fill, wiped his mouth, and was now engaged in thinking over something.

"Jabbering is not working, young man," he said at last. "And what if I did admit him: my wife is withering, isn't she?" And as he listened to hear what they would say to that, he bared his teeth in a grin, elevated his eyebrows, and his tiny face, which was like a Suzdal holy picture, assumed a joyously sad expression and became covered with large wooden wrinkles. "I'd like to get that fellow with a gun!" he said with a specially strong squeak and twisting of his consonants. "Wouldn't he go head over heels!"

"Of whom are you speaking?" inquired Kuzma.

"Why, that nightingale—"

Kuzma set his teeth and, after reflection, said: "Well, you are a putrid peasant. A wild beast."

"Well, and who cares for what you think?" retorted Akim. And, giving vent to a hiccough, he rose to his feet. "Well, what's the use of burning the lamp for nothing?"

Mitrofan began to roll a cigarette. The baker gathered up the spoons. Crawling from under the

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table, he turned his back on the lamp and, hurriedly crossing himself thrice, with a flourish he bent low to the holy picture, in the direction of the dark corner of the hut, shook back his straight hair, which resembled bast, and, raising his face, murmured a prayer. His large shadow fell upon some chests made of boards and broke across them, while he himself seemed to Kuzma even smaller than a short time previously. Kuzma remembered how he had once been called for conscription. Five hundred men had been summoned, only one hundred and twenty being wanted. He had drawn Number 492: yet he had almost been obliged to undress, so many of those naked youths—they resembled sparrows, with arms as thin as whiplashes and huge, solid bellies—had been rejected. Akim hastily crossed himself once more, and once more made a flourishing reverence—and Kuzma gazed at him with a feeling akin to hatred. There was Akim praying— but just try asking him whether he believed in God! His hawk eyes would leap out of their sockets! Evidently he had the idea that no one in all the world believed as he did. He was convinced to the very bottom of his soul that, in order to please God and avoid the condemnation of men, it was necessary to comply in the strictest possible manner with even the smallest fraction of what was appointed in regard to the Church, fasts, feasts, good deeds; that for the salvation of his soul—not out of good feeling, naturally! —those acts must be fulfilled punctually; candles must be placed before the holy pictures, he must eat fish, and oil instead of butter; and on feast-days he