“They are all fast asleep, our dear dead!” mumbles the wandering man, making another deep sigh. “The rich and poor, the wise and stupid, the kind and evil, all are asleep. All have the same price, and come to the same end.”
“Now we are walking along the alley, but one day we will lie beside ones like them,” says the guard.
“Yes, yes. We all will die sooner or later. Ooh. We all do bad things in this life, have bad thoughts.”
“We sin. My soul is filled with sins. I have enraged the Lord, and will be punished both in this world, and in the next.”
“Yes, and we all will die anyway.”
“Yes, truly, that’s true, you are right.”
“A wanderer has an easier end than we common folk,” the guard says.
“There are different wanderers, different pilgrims. There are those who do it for God’s sake, and those who do the devil’s business, walking late at night across the cemetery. Such a wanderer can hit you on your head with an axe and you could be dead in an instant.”
“Why are you saying this?”
“Just so … Here, it seems to me that here is the gate. Open it up, dear sir.”
The guard opens the gate by touch, takes the wanderer by his sleeve, and shows him the way out of the gate.
“This is the end of the cemetery. Now, you should walk along the whole length of the field, and then you will end up at the major highway. But there will be a ditch there, so watch out and do not fall in it. And when you are on the road, turn right and you will soon get to the mill.”
“Ooh.” The wanderer lets out another deep sigh and then is silent for a while. “But now I think that I do not have to go to the mill. Why should I go there at this hour? I would better stay with you right here, dear sir.”
“Why would you want to just stand around with me?”
“Just because … it is more interesting for me.”
“Hey, you are a funny man! I can see that you like jokes.”
“Yes, I like jokes,” said the passerby with a hoarse giggle. “And you, dear sir. You will remember the wanderer for a long time now.”
“Why should I remember you?”
“Well, I played a trick on you. I am neither a wanderer nor a pilgrim.”
“Who are you then?”
“I am a dead man who has just been raised from the grave. Do you remember the turner Gubarev who committed suicide recently? I am that man, back from the dead.”
“You just lied to me!”
The guard does not believe the man, but he feels a dark fear spread throughout his body as he rushes to try and relock the gate.
“Wait, where are you going?” the wanderer asks, holding the guard by the sleeve. “Where are you going? Do not leave me here all by myself.”
“Let me go!” shouts the guard, trying to free his arm.
“Stand still! If you want to live, be quiet, stand here until I tell you to move. I do not want to shed blood, otherwise you would have died right in front of me, a long time ago, you dog. Stand still!”
The guard’s knees begin to tremble. He closes his eyes and rests against the fence, filled with fear. He would like to shout out very loudly, but he knows that there is no one to hear him. The wanderer stands next to him, holding him by his sleeve. Another three minutes pass in silence.
“One guard has a fever, the second one is asleep and the third is off seeing to wanderers,” the man whispers. “What kind of guards are you? How do you earn your salary? No, brother, criminals have always been faster than guards. Wait, stand still, do not move!”
Another five minutes and then ten minutes pass in silence. Suddenly, the wind brings them the sound of someone whistling.
“Now you can go. Go home, and thank God that you are alive,” says the wanderer, finally releasing the guard’s arm.
He whistles back, running from the gate, and one could hear as he jumped across the ditch. The guard, still anticipating something bad and trembling from fear, closes the gate and turns into the big alley. As he does, he hears someone’s fast footsteps, and someone asks him in a whispering voice,
“Is it you, Tim? Where is Mike?”
He keeps on running along the big alley, and then notices a small flickering light in the darkness. The closer to the light, the more scared he becomes. “It seems to me that that light is coming from the inside of the church,” he thinks. “Why do I see a light there? Oh, God! It is true!”
For a minute or so, the guard stands in front of a smashed window and looks at the altar in horror. A little wax candle that the thieves forgot to extinguish is still flickering in the gusts of the wind, and throwing dark shadows on the items lying on the floor of the church—the garments of the priests, the fallen boxes, and the footprints around the altar.
After some time passes, the howling wind blows the warning chimes of the church bells across the cemetery.
MISFORTUNE
The director of the town bank, Peter Semenych, the accountant, his assistant, and two members of the board were sent to prison in the night. The day after the turmoil, the merchant Avdeyev, a member of the bank’s auditing committee, was sitting in his shop with his friends, saying:
“So it must be God’s will. There’s no way to escape your destiny. Today we eat caviar, and tomorrow—beware of that—it can be prison, poverty, or even death. Things happen. Take Peter Semenych, for example …”
He was talking, narrowing his tipsy eyes, while his friends went on drinking and eating caviar, and listened to him. Having described the disgrace and helplessness of Peter Semenych, who just a day before was powerful and generally respected, Avdeyev went on with a sigh:
“If you steal money, beware of the sting. Serves them right, the swindlers! They knew how to steal, filthy scum, now time for them to answer!”
“Look out, Ivan Danilych, that you don’t catch it, too!” one of his friends observed.
“What has it to do with me?”
“Well, they were stealing, and where was the auditing committee looking? You must have been signing the reports.”
“Yeah, it’s easily said,” Avdeyev grinned. “See, I signed them! They used to bring the reports to my shop, and so I signed them. As if I understood it! I’ll scribble my name on whatever I get. If you wrote I murdered someone, I’d sign that, too. I don’t have time to make it out; besides, I can’t see without my glasses.”
Having discussed the ruin of the bank and the destiny of Peter Semenych, Avdeyev and his friends went to an acquaintance whose wife celebrated her birthday with a party. At the birthday party everyone was discussing nothing but the bank ruin. Avdeyev was excited more than anyone else and assured everyone that he had had a presentiment long before that the bank would soon be ruined, and as long as two years ago he knew there were big problems at the bank. While they were eating the pie, he described a dozen illegal operations that were known to him.
“If you knew it, why didn’t you report on them?” an officer who was present at the party asked him.
“It wasn’t just me who knew it: the whole town knew it …” Avdeyev grinned. “Besides, I have no time to waste in courts, to hell with them!”
He had a rest after the pie, then had dinner, and had another rest, and then went to his church, where he was a warden; after the vespers he went back to the birthday party and played Preference till midnight. Everything seemed all right.
But when Avdeyev returned home after midnight, the lady cook, who opened the door for him, was pale and trembling so much that she could not utter a word. His wife, Elizabeth Trofimovna, a well-fed, flabby woman, was sitting on the couch in the drawing room, her gray hair hanging loose. She trembled with her entire body and, like a drunk, rolled her eyes senselessly. Her oldest son, Vassiliy, a schoolboy, as pale as she was and extremely agitated, was fussing around her with a glass of water.