‘‘See what a perch! There are already five like that!’’
You could see how Dymov, Kiriukha, and Styopka, each time they pulled out the net, spent a long time digging in the silt, put something into the bucket, threw something out; occasionally they took something caught in the net, handed it to each other, examined it curiously, then also threw it out ...
‘‘What’d you have there?’’ the others shouted from the bank.
Styopka answered something, but it was hard to make out his words. Then he got out of the water and, holding the bucket with both hands, forgetting to let down his shirt, ran to the wagons.
‘‘Already full!’’ he shouted, breathing heavily. ‘‘Give me another!’’
Egorushka looked into the bucket; it was full; a young pike stuck its ugly snout from the water, and around it swarmed smaller fish and crayfish. Egorushka thrust his hand to the bottom and stirred up the water; the pike disappeared under the crayfish, and in its place a perch and a tench floated up. Vasya also looked in the bucket. His eyes became unctuous, and his face became tender, as before, when he saw the fox. He took something out of the bucket, put it in his mouth, and began to chew. A crunching was heard.
‘‘Brothers,’’ Styopka was astonished, ‘‘Vasya’s eating a live gudgeon! Pah!’’
‘‘It’s not a gudgeon, it’s a goby,’’ Vasya replied calmly, continuing to chew.
He took the fish’s tail from his mouth, looked at it tenderly, and put it back in his mouth. As he chewed and crunched with his teeth, it seemed to Egorushka that it was not a man he saw before him. Vasya’s swollen chin, his lackluster eyes, his extraordinarily keen sight, the fish tail in his mouth, and the tenderness with which he chewed the gudgeon made him look like an animal.
Egorushka got bored being around him. And the fishing was over. He strolled by the wagons, pondered, and, out of boredom, trudged off to the village.
A little later, he was standing in the church and listening as the choir sang, leaning his head against someone’s back, which smelled of hemp. The liturgy was coming to an end. Egorushka understood nothing about church singing and was indifferent to it. He listened for a while, yawned, and began examining napes and backs. In one nape, red-haired and wet from recent bathing, he recognized Emelyan. The hair on his neck was cut square and higher than usual; his temples were also cut higher than they should have been, and Emelyan’s red ears stuck out like two burdock leaves and seemed to feel they were not in the right place. Looking at his nape and neck, Egorushka thought for some reason that Emelyan was probably very unhappy. He remembered his conducting, his wheezing voice, his timid look while bathing, and felt an intense pity for him. He wanted to say something affectionate to him.
‘‘I’m here, too!’’ he said, tugging at his sleeve.
People who sing tenor or bass in a choir, especially those who happen to have conducted at least once in their life, are accustomed to looking sternly and unsociably at little boys. Nor do they drop this habit later, when they stop being singers. Turning to Egorushka, Emelyan looked at him from under his eyebrows and said:
‘‘Don’t misbehave in church!’’
After that Egorushka made his way to the front, closer to the iconostasis. 17 Here he saw interesting people. In front of everyone else, to the right side on a carpet, stood a gentleman and a lady. Behind each of them stood a chair. The gentleman was dressed in a freshly ironed two-piece tussore suit, stood motionless like a soldier at the salute, and held his blue, clean-shaven chin high. His standing collar, the blueness of his chin, his small bald spot, and his cane expressed a great deal of dignity. His neck was tense with an excess of dignity, and his chin stretched upwards with such force that his head seemed ready at any moment to tear free and fly upwards. But the lady, corpulent and elderly, in a white silk shawl, bent her head sideways and looked as if she had just done someone a favor and wanted to say: ‘‘Ah, don’t bother thanking me! I don’t like it . . .’’ Around the carpet, Ukrainian men stood in a dense wall.
Egorushka went up to the iconostasis and began to kiss the local icons. He prostrated unhurriedly before each icon, looked back at the people without getting up, then got up and kissed the icon. Touching the cold floor with his forehead gave him great pleasure. When the caretaker came out of the sanctuary with long tongs to extinguish the candles, Egorushka quickly rose from the ground and ran to him.
‘‘Have they already handed out the prosphoras?’’18 he asked.
‘‘All gone, all gone,’’ the sexton muttered sullenly. ‘‘You’ve no business here . . .’’
The liturgy was over. Egorushka unhurriedly left the church and started wandering around the square. He had seen not a few villages, squares, and muzhiks in his life, and all that now met his eye was quite uninteresting to him. Having nothing to do, so as to kill time with at least something, he went into a shop that had a strip of scarlet cotton hanging over the door. The shop consisted of two spacious, poorly lit halves: in one groceries and dry goods were sold, and in the other stood barrels of tar, and horse collars hung from the ceiling; from that one came a delicious smell of leather and tar. The floor of the shop had been sprinkled with water; it had probably been sprinkled by a great fantast and freethinker, because it was all covered with patterns and cabbalistic signs. Behind the counter, leaning his belly on a desk, stood a well-nourished shopkeeper with a broad face and a round beard, apparently a Russian. He was sipping tea through a lump of sugar, letting out a deep sigh after each sip. His face showed perfect indifference, but in each sigh you could hear: ‘‘Just wait, you’re going to get it from me!’’
‘‘Give me a kopeck’s worth of sunflower seeds!’’ Egorushka addressed him.
The shopkeeper raised his eyebrows, came from behind the counter, and poured a kopeck’s worth of sunflower seeds into Egorushka’s pocket, the measure being an empty pomade jar. Egorushka did not want to leave. For a long time he studied the boxes of gingerbreads, pondered and asked, pointing to some small Vyazma gingerbreads that had acquired a rusty film with old age:
‘‘How much are these gingerbreads?’’
‘‘Two for a kopeck.’’
Egorushka took from his pocket the gingerbread that the Jewess had give him the day before, and asked:
‘‘And how much do you sell this kind for?’’
The shopkeeper took the gingerbread in his hands, examined it on all sides, and raised one eyebrow:
‘‘This kind?’’ he asked.
Then he raised the other eyebrow, thought a moment, and replied:
‘‘Two for three kopecks . . .’’
Silence ensued.
‘‘Whose boy are you?’’ asked the shopkeeper, pouring himself some tea from a red copper kettle.
‘‘I’m Ivan Ivanych’s nephew.’’
‘‘There are all sorts of Ivan Ivanyches,’’ sighed the shopkeeper; he looked over Egorushka’s head at the door, paused, and asked: ‘‘Would you like a drop of tea?’’