He sat down under it and began to recall. On the far bank, where there was now a water meadow, a big birch grove had once stood, and back then that bare hill visible on the horizon had been covered by the blue mass of an age-old pine forest. Wooden barges had navigated the river. And now everything was level and smooth, and only one birch tree stood on the far shore, young and shapely as a squire’s daughter, and there were only ducks and geese on the river, and it did not look as if there had ever been barges here. It even seemed as if the geese had grown fewer compared with former times. Yakov closed his eyes, and huge flocks of white geese rushed towards each other in his imagination.
He was puzzled how it had turned out that in the last forty or fifty years of his life he had never gone to the river, or, if he had, that he had paid no attention to it. It was a big river, not some trifling thing; fishing could be organized on it, and the fish could be sold to merchants, officials, and the barman at the train station, and the money could be put in the bank; you could go by boat from farmstead to farmstead and play the fiddle, and people of all ranks would pay you for it; you could try towing barges again—it was better than making coffins; finally, you could raise geese, kill them, and send them to Moscow in the winter; most likely you would get as much as ten roubles a year for the down alone. But he had missed it, he had done none of it. What losses! Ah, what losses! And if he had done all of it together—caught the fish, and played the fiddle, and towed the barges, and slaughtered the geese—what capital it would have produced! But none of it had happened even in dreams, his life had gone by without benefit, without any enjoyment, had gone for nought, for a pinch of snuff; there was nothing left ahead, and looking back there was nothing but losses, and such terrible losses it made you shudder. And why could man not live so that there would not be all this waste and loss? Why, you might ask, had the birch grove and the pine forest been cut down? Why was the common left unused? Why did people always do exactly what they should not do? Why had Yakov spent his whole life abusing people, growling at them, threatening them with his fists, and offending his wife, and, you might ask, what need had there been to frighten and insult the Jew earlier that day? Generally, why did people interfere with each other’s lives? It made for such losses! Such terrible losses! If there were no hatred and malice, people would be of enormous benefit to each other.
That evening and night he imagined the baby, the pussywillow, the fish, the slaughtered geese, and Marfa, looking in profile like a thirsty bird, and Rothschild’s pale, pitiful face, and some sort of mugs getting at him from all sides and muttering about losses. He tossed and turned and got out of bed five times to play his fiddle.
In the morning he forced himself to get up and go to the clinic. The same Maxim Nikolaich told him to put cold compresses on his head, gave him some powders, and, by his tone and the look on his face, Yakov understood that things were bad and no powder would help. Going home afterwards, he reflected that death would only be a benefit: no need to eat or drink, or pay taxes, or offend people, and since a man lies in the grave not one year but hundreds and thousands of years, if you added it up, the benefit was enormous. Life was to a man’s loss, but death was to his benefit. This reflection was, of course, correct, but all the same it was bitter and offensive: why was the world ordered so strangely that life, which is given man only once, goes by without any benefit?
He was not sorry to die, but when he saw his fiddle at home, his heart was wrung and he did feel sorry. He could not take the fiddle with him to the grave, and it would now be orphaned, and the same thing would happen to it as to the birch grove and the pine forest. Everything in this world perished and would go on perishing! Yakov went out of the cottage and sat on the step, clutching the fiddle to his breast. Thinking about this perishing life of loss, he began to play, himself not knowing what, but it came out plaintive and moving, and tears flowed down his cheeks. And the harder he thought, the sadder the fiddle sang.
The latch creaked once or twice, and Rothschild appeared in the gateway. He bravely crossed half the yard, but seeing Yakov he suddenly stopped, became all shrunken, and, probably out of fear, began to make signs with his hands as if he wanted to show what time it was with his fingers.
“Come on, it’s all right,” Yakov said gently and beckoned to him. “Come on!”
Looking mistrustful and afraid, Rothschild began to approach and stopped six feet away from him.
“But you kindly don’t beat me!” he said, cowering. “Moisei Ilyich is sending me again. ‘Don’t be afraid,’ he says, ‘go to Yakov again and tell him I say it’s impossible to do without him. There’s a wedding Wednesday …’ Ye-e-es! Mister Shapovalov is marrying his daughter to a good mensch. And, oi, what a rich wedding it’s going to be!” the Jew added and squinted one eye.
“Can’t do it …” said Yakov, breathing heavily. “I’ve taken sick, brother.”
And he started playing again, and tears poured from his eyes on to the fiddle. Rothschild listened attentively, standing sideways to him, his arms crossed on his chest. The frightened, puzzled look on his face gradually changed to a mournful and suffering one, he rolled up his eyes as if experiencing some painful ecstasy and said: “Weh-h-h! …” And tears flowed slowly down his cheeks and dripped onto the green frock coat.
And afterwards Yakov lay all day and grieved. When the priest, confessing him that evening, asked if he had any particular sins on his mind, he strained his fading memory, again recalled Marfa’s unhappy face and the desperate cry of the Jew bitten by a dog, and said barely audibly:
“Give the fiddle to Rothschild.”
“Very well,” said the priest.
And now everybody in town asks: where did Rothschild get such a good fiddle? Did he buy it, or steal it, or maybe take it in pawn? He has long abandoned his flute and now only plays the fiddle. The same plaintive sounds pour from under his bow as in former times from his flute, but when he tries to repeat what Yakov had played as he sat on the step, what comes out is so dreary and mournful that his listeners weep, and he himself finally rolls up his eyes and says: “Weh-h-h! …” And this new song is liked so much in town that merchants and officials constantly send for Rothschild and make him play it dozens of times.
FEBRUARY 1894
THE STUDENT
At first the weather was fine, still. Blackbirds called, and in the nearby swamp something alive hooted plaintively, as if blowing into an empty bottle. A woodcock chirred by, and a shot rang out boomingly and merrily in the spring air. But when the forest grew dark, an unwelcome east wind blew up, cold and piercing, and everything fell silent. Needles of ice reached over the puddles, and the forest became inhospitable, forsaken, desolate. It felt like winter.
Ivan Velikopolsky, a seminary student, son of a verger, was coming home from fowling along a path that went all the way across a water meadow. His fingers were numb, and his face was burned by the wind. It seemed to him that this sudden onset of cold violated the order and harmony of everything, that nature herself felt dismayed, and therefore the evening darkness fell more quickly than it should. It was deserted around him and somehow especially gloomy. Only by the widows’ gardens near the river was there a light burning; but far around and where the village lay, some two miles off, everything was completely drowned in the cold evening darkness. The student remembered that, when he left the house, his mother was sitting on the floor in the front hall, barefoot, polishing the samovar, and his father was lying on the stove and coughing; because it was Good Friday there was no cooking in the house,1 and he was painfully hungry. And now, hunching up from the cold, the student thought how exactly the same wind had blown in the time of Rurik, and of Ioann the Terrible, and of Peter,2 and in their time there had been the same savage poverty and hunger; the same leaky thatched roofs, ignorance and anguish, the same surrounding emptiness and darkness, the sense of oppression—all these horrors had been, and were, and would be, and when another thousand years had passed, life would be no better. And he did not want to go home.