“He won’t hear anything—he’s hard of hearing. And if he does hear, he won’t make sense of it—he’s a bit off.”
“Hey, Fyodor Nefyodych!” the old man urged the mare on, addressing her with a masculine name for no apparent reason, knowing perfectly well, and better than his passengers, that she was a mare. “What anathematic heat! Like the Hebrew youths in the Persian furnace! Hup, you unpastured devil. I’m talking to you, Mazeppa!”8
He would unexpectedly strike up snatches of popular songs composed in the local factories in former times.
Farewell to the central office,
Farewell to the pit yard and boss,
I’m sick to death of the master’s bread,
I’ve drunk my fill of stagnant water.
A swan goes swimming by the shore,
Paddling the water with his feet.
It isn’t wine that makes me tipsy,
Vanya’s been taken for a soldier.
But me, Masha, I’m a bright one,
But me, Masha, I’m no fool.
I’ll go off to Selyaba town,
Get hired by the Sentetyurikha.
“Hey, little sod, you’ve forgotten God! Look, people, at this carrion of a beast! You give her the whip, she gives you the slip. Hup, Fedya-Nefedya, where’ll that get ya? This here forest’s called the taiga, there’s no end to it. There’s a force of peasant folk in it, ho, ho! There’s the Forest Brotherhood in it. Hey, Fedya-Nefedya, stopped again, you devil, you goblin!”
Suddenly he turned around and, looking point-blank at Antonina Alexandrovna, said:
“What notion’s got into you, young’un, think I don’t sense where you come from? You’re a simple one, ma’am, I must say. Let the earth swallow me up, but I recognize you! That I do! Couldn’t believe my blinkers, a live Grigov!” (The old man called eyes “blinkers” and Krüger “Grigov.”) “You wouldn’t happen to be his granddaughter? Ain’t I got an eye for Grigov? I spent my whole life around him, broke my teeth on him. In all kinds of handiwork, all the jobs. As a pit-prop man, a winch man, a stable man. Hup, shake a leg! She’s stopped again, the cripple! Angels in China-land, I’m talking to you, ain’t I?
“Here you’re asking what Vakkh is he, that blacksmith maybe? You’re real simple, ma’am, such a big-eyed lady, but a fool. Your Vakkh, he was Postanogov by name. Postanogov Iron Belly, it’s fifty years he’s been in the ground, between the boards. And us now, on the contrary, we’re Mekhonoshin. Same name, namesakes, but the last name’s different—Efim, but not him.”
The old man gradually told his passengers in his own words what they already knew about the Mikulitsyns from Samdevyatov. He called him Mikulich and her Mikulichna. The manager’s present wife he called the second-wed, and of “the little first, the deceased one,” he said that she was a honey-woman, a white cherub. When he got on to the partisan leader Liberius and learned that his fame had not yet reached Moscow, that seemed incredible to him:
“You haven’t heard? Haven’t heard of Comrade Forester? Angels in China-land, what’s Moscow got ears for?”
Evening was beginning to fall. The travelers’ own shadows, growing ever longer, raced ahead of them. Their way lay across a wide empty expanse. Here and there, sticking up high, grew woody stalks of goosefoot, thistles, loosestrife, in solitary stands, with clusters of flowers at their tips. Lit from below, from the ground, by the rays of the sunset, their outlines rose up ghostly, like motionless mounted sentinels posted thinly across the field.
Far ahead, at the end, the plain came up against the transverse ridge of a rising height. It stood across the road like a wall, at the foot of which a ravine or river could be surmised. As if the sky there were surrounded by a fence, with the country road leading to its gates.
At the top of the rise appeared the elongated form of a white, one-story house.
“See the lookout on the knob?” Vakkh asked. “That’s your Mikulich and Mikulichna. And under them there’s a split, a ravine, it’s called Shutma.”
Two gunshots, one after the other, rang out from that direction, generating multiple fragmented echoes.
“What’s that? Can it be partisans, grandpa? Shooting at us?”
“Christ be with you. What partizhans? It’s Stepanych scarifying wolves in Shutma.”
9
The first meeting of the new arrivals with the hosts took place in the yard of the director’s little house. A painful scene, at first silent, then confusedly noisy and incoherent, was played out.
Elena Proklovna was returning to the yard from her evening walk in the forest. The sun’s evening rays stretched behind her from tree to tree across the whole forest, almost the same color as her golden hair. Elena Proklovna was dressed in light summer clothes. She was red-cheeked and was wiping her face, flushed from walking, with a handkerchief. Her open neck was crossed in front by an elastic band, which held the hanging straw hat thrown behind her back.
Her husband was coming home from the opposite direction with a gun, climbing up from the ravine and intending to see at once to the cleaning of the sooty barrels, in view of the defects he had noticed in the discharge.
Suddenly, out of the blue, over the stones of the paved driveway, Vakkh drove up dashingly and loudly with his surprise.
Very soon, having climbed out of the cart with all the rest, Alexander Alexandrovich, falteringly, taking off his hat, then putting it on again, gave the first explanations.
The genuine, unaffected stupefaction of the nonplussed hosts and the unfeigned, sincere embarrassment of the wretched guests, burning with shame, lasted for several moments. The situation was clear without explanations, not only to the participants, Vakkh, Nyusha, and Shurochka. The oppressive feeling communicated itself to the mare and the colt, to the golden rays of the sun, and to the mosquitoes circling around Elena Proklovna and settling on her face and neck.
“I don’t understand,” Averky Stepanovich finally broke the silence. “I don’t understand, don’t understand a thing and never will. What have we got here, the south, the Whites, the land of plenty? Why did your choice fall precisely on us? Why have you come here, here, why on earth to us?”
“I wonder if you’ve thought of what a responsibility it is for Averky Stepanovich?”
“Lenochka, don’t interrupt. Yes, precisely. She’s perfectly right. Have you thought of what a burden it is for me?”
“For God’s sake. You haven’t understood us. What are we talking about? About a very small thing, a nothing. There’s no encroachment on you, on your peace. A corner in some empty, dilapidated building. A spot of land nobody needs, gone to waste, for a vegetable garden. And a load of firewood from the forest when nobody’s looking. Is that so much to ask, is it some sort of infringement?”
“Yes, but the world is wide. What have we to do with it? Why is this honor bestowed precisely on us and not on somebody else?”
“We knew about you and hoped you had heard about us. That we’re no strangers to you and will not be coming to strangers ourselves.”
“Ah, so it’s a matter of Krüger, of you being his relatives? How can you open your mouth and acknowledge such things in our time?”
Averky Stepanovich was a man with regular features, wore his hair thrown back, stepped broadly on his whole foot, and in summer belted his Russian shirt with a tasseled strip of braid. In older times such men went and became river pirates; in modern times they constituted the type of the eternal student, the lesson-giving dreamer.
Averky Stepanovich gave his youth to the liberation movement, the revolution, and only feared that he would not live to see it or that, once it broke out, its moderation would not satisfy his radical and bloody lust. And then it came, overturning all his boldest suppositions, and he, a born and steadfast lover of the workers, who had been among the first to found a factory workers’ committee at the “Mighty Sviatogor” and set up workers’ control in it, was left with nothing for his trouble, excluded, in an empty village, deserted by the workers, who here mostly followed the Mensheviks. And now this absurdity, these uninvited last remnants of the Krügers, seemed to him a mockery of fate, a purposely mean trick, and they made the cup of his patience run over.