Then Kubarikha began to sing differently, to herself and in a low voice, thinking she was completely alone. Taking care not to step into the swamp, Yuri Andreevich slowly made his way in the darkness down the footpath that skirted the boggy clearing in front of the rowan tree, then stopped as if rooted to the spot. Kubarikha was singing some old Russian song. Yuri Andreevich did not know it. Might it be her own improvisation?
A Russian song is like water in a mill pond. It seems stopped up and unmoving. But in its depths it constantly flows through the sluice gates, and the calm of its surface is deceptive.
By all possible means, by repetitions, by parallelisms, it holds back the course of the gradually developing content. At a certain limit, it suddenly opens itself all at once and astounds us. Restraining itself, mastering itself, an anguished force expresses itself in this way. It is a mad attempt to stop time with words.
Kubarikha was half singing, half speaking:
A little hare was running over the white world,
Over the white world, aye, over the white snow.
He ran, little flop-ears, past a rowan tree,
He ran, little flop-ears, and complained to the rowan.
Me, I’m a hare, and my heart’s all timid,
My heart’s all timid, it’s so easily frightened.
I’m a hare and I’m scared of the wild beast’s track,
Of the wild beast’s track, of the hungry wolf’s belly.
Have pity on me, rowan bush,
Rowan bush, beautiful rowan tree.
Don’t give your beauty to the wicked enemy,
To the wicked enemy, to the wicked raven.
Strew your red berries in handfuls to the wind,
To the wind, over the white world, over the white snow,
Roll them, scatter them to the place I was born in,
To the last house there by the village gate,
To the last window there, aye, in the last room,
Where my little recluse has hidden away,
My dearest one, my longed-for one.
Speak into the ear of the one I long for
A hot word, an ardent word for me.
I languish in chains, a soldier-warrior,
I lose heart, a soldier, in this foreign land.
But I’ll escape yet from this bitter bondage,
Escape to my berry, to my beautiful one.3
7
The army wife Kubarikha was putting a spell on a sick cow belonging to Pamphil’s wife, Agafya Fotievna, known as Palykha or, in simple speech, Fatevna. The cow had been taken from the herd and put in the bushes, tied to a tree by the horns. The cow’s owner sat by its front legs on a stump, and by the hind legs, on a milking stool, sat the sorceress.
The rest of the countless herd was crowded into a small clearing. The dark forest stood around it in a wall of triangular firs, tall as the hills, which seemed to sit on the ground on the fat behinds of their broadly spread lower branches.
In Siberia they raised a certain prize-winning Swiss breed. Almost all of the same colors, black with white spots, the cows were no less exhausted than the people by the privations, the long marches, the unbearable crowding. Squeezed together side by side, they were going crazy from the crush. In their stupefaction, they forgot their sex and, bellowing, climbed onto one another like bulls, straining to drag up the heavy weight of their udders. The heifers they covered up, raising their tails, tore away from underneath them and, breaking down bushes and branches, ran towards the thicket, where old shepherds and herdsboys rushed shouting after them.
And, as if locked into the tight circle outlined by the treetops in the winter sky, the snowy black and white clouds over the forest clearing crowded just as stormily and chaotically, rearing and piling up on each other.
The curious, standing in a bunch further off, annoyed the wisewoman. She looked them up and down with an unkindly glance. But it was beneath her dignity to admit that they were hampering her. Her artistic vanity stopped her. And she made it look as if she did not notice them. The doctor observed her from the back rows, hidden from her.
It was the first time he had taken a good look at her. She was wearing her inevitable British forage cap and gray-green interventionist greatcoat with the lapels casually turned back. However, with the haughty features of suppressed passion, which gave a youthful blackness to the eyes and eyebrows of this no-longer-young woman, the extent of her indifference to what she was or was not wearing was clearly written on her face.
But the appearance of Pamphil’s wife astonished Yuri Andreevich. He barely recognized her. She had aged terribly in a few days. Her bulging eyes were ready to pop from their sockets. On her neck, stretched like a shaft, a swollen vein throbbed. That was what her secret fears had done to her.
“She gives no milk, my dear,” said Agafya. “I thought she was in between, but no, it’s long since time for milk, but she’s still milkless.”
“In between, hah! Look, there’s an anthrax sore on her teat. I’ll give you some herbal ointment to rub in. And, needless to say, I’ll whisper in her ear.”
“I’ve got another trouble—my husband.”
“I can put a charm on him to stop him playing around. It can be done. He’ll stick to you, there’ll be no tearing him off. Tell me your third trouble.”
“He doesn’t play around. It’d be good if he did. The trouble’s just the opposite, that he clings to me and the children with all his might, his soul pines for us. I know what he thinks. He thinks they’ll separate the camps, and we’ll be sent the other way. Basalygo’s men will lay hands on us, and he won’t be there to protect us. They’ll torture us and laugh at our torments. I know his thoughts. He may do something to himself.”
“I’ll think on it. We’ll quench your grief. Tell me your third trouble.”
“There is no third. It’s just the cow and my husband.”
“You’re poor in troubles, mother! See how merciful God is to you. Couldn’t find your like with a candle in daylight. Two sorrows on your poor little head, and one of them’s a pitying husband. What’ll you give for the cow? And I’ll start reciting.”
“What do you want?”
“A loaf of bread and your husband.”
People burst out laughing around them.
“Are you making fun of me?”
“Well, if that’s too much, I’ll knock off the bread. We’ll settle on the husband alone.”
The laughter around them increased tenfold.
“What’s the name? Not the husband’s, the cow’s.”
“Beauty.”
“Half the herd here is called Beauty. Well, all right. God bless us.”
And she began to recite a spell on the cow. At first her sorcery really had to do with cattle. Then she got carried away and gave Agafya a whole lesson in magic and its use. Yuri Andreevich listened spellbound to this delirious tissue, as he had once listened to the flowery babble of the driver Vakkh, when they came from European Russia to Siberia.
The army wife was saying:
“Auntie Morgesya, come be our guest. Not tomorrow but today, take the sickness away. Frumpkin, mumpkin, away with the lumpkin. Beauty, don’t flinch, you’ll tip over the bench. Forget your bad dream and give us a stream. Witchery, twitchery, stir your kettles, scrape off the scab and throw it in the nettles. Sharp as a sword is the wisewoman’s word.
“You’ve got to know everything, Agafyushka, biddings, forbiddings, spells for avoiding, spells for defending. You look now and think it’s the forest. But it’s the unclean powers coming to meet the angelic host, just like ours with Basalygo’s.