Zhilin and Kostylin were taken to the shed, there they were given corn shucks, a pitcher of water, bread, two old cherkeskas, and some worn soldier’s boots. They must have pulled them off soldiers they had killed. For the night they removed the shackles and locked them in the shed.
III
ZHILIN AND HIS COMRADE LIVED like that for a whole month. The master kept laughing: “Yours, Ivan,1 is kood—mine, Abdul, is kood.” He fed them poorly—all he gave them was unleavened bread made from millet, baked like flat cakes, or else just unbaked dough.
Kostylin wrote home once more, kept waiting for the money to be sent, and moped. He sat in the shed for whole days and counted the days until the letter would come, or else slept. And Zhilin knew that his letter would not get there, but he did not write any more.
“Where could my mother get so much money to pay for me?” he thought. “She’s lived mostly on what I send her. If she scraped up five hundred roubles, it would be the ruin of her. God willing, I’ll get out of it myself.”
He kept looking out, figuring out how he could escape. He walked about the aoul whistling, or sat doing some handiwork, fashioning dolls out of clay or weaving baskets from twigs. Zhilin was good at all sorts of handiwork.
Once he made a doll with a nose, arms, legs, and a Tartar shirt, and put the doll on the roof.
The Tartar women went for water. The master’s daughter, Dina, saw the doll, called the women. They put their jugs down, looked, laughed. Zhilin took the doll down and gave it to them. They laughed but did not dare to take it. He left the doll, went into the shed, and watched what would happen.
Dina ran up, looked around, snatched the doll, and ran away.
The next day, at dawn, he saw Dina come out to the porch with the doll. She had dressed it in some scraps of red cloth and rocked it like a baby, singing something in her language. The old woman came out, scolded her, snatched the doll away, smashed it, and sent Dina somewhere to work.
Zhilin made another doll, still better, and gave it to Dina. Once Dina brought a little jug, set it down, squatted and looked at him, laughing and pointing to the jug.
“What’s she so glad for?” Zhilin thought. He took the jug and began to drink. He thought it was water, but it was milk. He drank the milk.
“Good,” he said.
How glad Dina was!
“Good, Ivan, good!” and she jumped up, clapped her hands, snatched up the pitcher, and ran away.
And after that she began to bring him milk every day on the sly. And then Tartars also made cheese cakes of goat’s milk and dried them on the rooftops—so she secretly brought him these cheese cakes. And then the master also once slaughtered a sheep, so she brought him a piece of mutton in her sleeve. She dropped the things and ran away.
Once there was a big thunderstorm, and the rain poured down in buckets for a whole hour. All the rivers became muddy; where there had been a ford, the water was now seven feet deep, overturning stones. Streams flowed everywhere, the hills resounded with their noise. Once the thunderstorm passed, streams ran everywhere through the village. Zhilin talked the master into giving him a penknife, carved a shaft, some little planks, put blades on a wheel, and to the two sides of the wheel attached dolls.
The girls brought him some rags, and he dressed the dolls: one was a man, the other a woman. He tied them on and set the wheel in the stream. The wheel turned, and the dolls jumped.
The whole village gathered: boys, girls, women; the men came, too, clucking their tongues:
“Ai, uruss! Ai, Ivan!”
Abdul had a broken Russian watch. He called Zhilin, showed it to him, clucked his tongue. Zhilin said:
“Here, I’ll fix it.”
He took it, dismantled it with the penknife, laid out the parts; put them together again, gave it back. The watch worked.
The master was delighted, brought him his old beshmet, all in tatters, and gave it to him. He had no choice but to take it—at least it was good for covering himself at night.
After that the rumor went around that Zhilin was a master craftsman. People started coming to him from far-off villages: one to have the lock of a musket or a pistol fixed, another a watch. The master brought him tools: pincers, and gimlets, and a file.
Once a Tartar fell ill. They came to Zhilin:
“Go, treat him.”
Zhilin knew nothing about treating ailments. He went, looked, thought: “Maybe he’ll just get well by himself.” He went to the shed, took some water, some sand, stirred it. In front of the Tartars, he whispered over the water and gave it to the sick man to drink. Luckily for him, the Tartar recovered. Zhilin began to understand their language a little. And those Tartars who got used to him would call out “Ivan! Ivan!” when they needed him, but some still looked askance at him, as at a beast.
The red Tartar did not like Zhilin. When he saw him, he frowned and turned away or swore at him. There was also an old man there. He did not live in the aoul, but came from the foot of the hill. Zhilin saw him only when he came to the mosque to pray to God. He was small, there was a white towel wrapped around his hat, his beard and mustaches—white as down—were trimmed, and his face was wrinkled and red as brick. His nose was hooked like a hawk’s beak, his eyes were gray, angry, and he had no teeth, only two fangs. He used to walk in his turban, propped on a crutch, looking about like a wolf. He would see Zhilin, snort, and turn away.
Once Zhilin went down the hill to see where the old man lived. He went along the path, saw a little garden with a stone wall, behind the wall—cherry trees, peach trees, and a hut with a flat roof. He went closer; he saw beehives plaited from straw standing there, and bees flying, buzzing. And the old man was on his knees doing something by a beehive. Zhilin stepped up on something in order to see and his shackles clanked. The old man turned around—shrieked, snatched the pistol from his belt, fired at Zhilin. Zhilin barely managed to huddle behind a rock.
The old man went to Zhilin’s master to complain. The master summoned Zhilin, laughed, and asked:
“Why did you go to see the old man?”
“I didn’t do anything bad,” said Zhilin. “I just wanted to see how he lived.”
The master translated. And the old man got angry, hissed, jabbered something, his fangs stuck out, he waved his arms at Zhilin.
Zhilin did not understand it all, but he understood that the old man was telling the master to kill the Russians and not keep them in the aoul. The old man left.
Zhilin asked the master who the old man was. The master said:
“He’s a big man! He was the foremost dzhigit, he killed a lot of Russians, he was rich. He had three wives and eight sons. They all lived in one village. The Russians came, destroyed the village, and killed seven of his sons. The one remaining son went over to the Russians. The old man also went over to the Russians. He lived with them for three months, found his son, killed him with his own hands, and escaped. After that he stopped making war and went to Mecca to pray to God. That’s why he has a turban. A man who has been to Mecca is called a hadji and wears a turban. He doesn’t like your people. He tells me to kill you; but I cannot kill you—I paid money for you; and besides, I’ve come to like you, Ivan; not only not kill, I wouldn’t even let you go if I hadn’t given my word.” He laughed and kept repeating in Russian: “Yours, Ivan, is kood—mine, Abdul, is kood!”
IV
ZHILIN LIVED like that for a month. By day he went about the aoul or did handiwork, and when night came and the aoul grew quiet, he dug in his shed. It was hard digging because of the stones, but he worked at the stones with the file and dug a hole under the wall big enough to get through. “I only need to know exactly where I am,” he thought, “and in what direction to go. But the Tartars won’t tell me.”
So he chose a time when the master was away. After dinner, he went to the hill outside the aoul—he wanted to look around from there. But as the master was leaving, he told his son to follow Zhilin and not let him out of his sight. The boy ran after Zhilin and shouted: