“Now it should be all right,” said Sergei, parting from Katerina Lvovna and accepting her last stockings.
The happy Katerina Lvovna returned to her cot and fell fast asleep.
She did not hear how, after she came back, Sonetka went out to the corridor and quietly returned just before morning.
This happened only a two days’ march from Kazan.
XV
A cold, gray day with gusty wind and rain mixed with snow drearily met the party as they stepped through the gates of the stuffy transit prison. Katerina Lvovna started out quite briskly, but she had only just taken her place in line when she turned green and began to shake. Everything became dark in her eyes; all her joints ached and went limp. Before Katerina Lvovna stood Sonetka in those all too familiar dark blue stockings with bright clocks.
Katerina Lvovna moved on more dead than alive; only her eyes looked terribly at Sergei and did not blink.
At the first halt, she calmly went up to Sergei, whispered “Scoundrel,” and unexpectedly spat right in his eyes.
Sergei was about to fall upon her; but he was held back.
“Just you wait!” he said and wiped his face.
“Nice, though, how bravely she treats you,” the prisoners mocked Sergei, and Sonetka dissolved in especially merry laughter.
This little intrigue Sonetka had yielded to was perfectly suited to her taste.
“Well, you won’t get away with that,” Sergei threatened Katerina Lvovna.
Worn out by the bad weather and the march, her heart broken, Katerina Lvovna slept uneasily that night on her cot in the next transit prison, and did not hear how two men entered the women’s barrack.
When they came in, Sonetka got up from her cot, silently pointed to Katerina Lvovna, lay down again, and wrapped herself in her coat.
At the same moment, Katerina Lvovna’s coat flew up over her head, and the thick end of a double-twisted rope let loose with all a man’s strength on her back, covered only by a coarse shirt.
Katerina Lvovna screamed, but her voice could not be heard under the coat that covered her head. She thrashed, but also without success: a stalwart convict sat on her shoulders and held her arms fast.
“Fifty,” a voice, which it was not hard for anyone to recognize as Sergei’s, finally counted off, and the night visitors disappeared through the door.
Katerina Lvovna uncovered her head and jumped up: there was no one there; only not far away someone giggled gleefully under a coat. Katerina Lvovna recognized Sonetka’s laughter.
This offense was beyond all measure; also beyond all measure was the feeling of spite that boiled up at that moment in Katerina Lvovna’s soul. Oblivious, she rushed forward and fell oblivious onto the breast of Fiona, who took her in her arms.
On that full breast, where so recently Katerina Lvovna’s unfaithful lover had enjoyed the sweetness of debauchery, she was now weeping out her unbearable grief, and she clung to her soft and stupid rival like a child to its mother. They were equal now: both were equal in value and both were abandoned.
They were equal—Fiona, subject to the first opportunity, and Katerina Lvovna, acting out the drama of love!
Katerina Lvovna, however, was by now offended by nothing. Having wept out her tears, she turned to stone, and with a wooden calm prepared to go to the roll call.
The drum beats: ratta-tat-tat; chained and unchained prisoners pour out into the yard—Sergei, Fiona, Sonetka, Katerina Lvovna, an Old Believer6 fettered with a Jew, a Pole on the same chain with a Tartar.
They all bunched together, then pulled themselves into some sort of order and set off.
A most cheerless picture: a handful of people, torn away from the world and deprived of any shadow of hope for a better future, sinking into the cold black mud of the dirt road. Everything around them is horribly ugly: the endless mud, the gray sky, the leafless, wet broom, and in its splayed branches a ruffled crow. The wind now moans, now rages, now howls and roars.
In these hellish, soul-rending sounds, which complete the whole horror of the picture, one hears the advice of the biblical Job’s wife: “Curse the day you were born and die.”7
Whoever does not want to listen to these words, whoever is not attracted but frightened by the thought of death even in this dismal situation, must try to stifle these howling voices with something still more hideous. The simple man understands this perfectly welclass="underline" he then unleashes all his animal simplicity, begins to be stupid, to jeer at himself, at people, at feeling. Not very tender to begin with, he becomes doubly malicious.
“What, then, merchant’s wife? Is your honor in good health?” Sergei impudently asked Katerina Lvovna, as soon as the party went over a wet hillock and lost sight of the village where they had spent the night.
With these words, he turned at once to Sonetka, covered her with the skirts of his coat, and sang in a high falsetto:
A blond head flashes in the dark outside the window.
So you’re not asleep, my tormentress, you’re not asleep, sweet cheat.
I’ll cover you with my coat skirts, so that none can see.8
With these words, Sergei embraced Sonetka and kissed her loudly in front of the whole party …
Katerina Lvovna saw and did not see it alclass="underline" she walked on like an utterly lifeless person. They started nudging her and pointing to Sergei’s outrageous behavior with Sonetka. She became an object of mockery.
“Let her be,” Fiona defended her, when somebody in the party tried to laugh at the stumbling Katerina Lvovna. “Don’t you devils see that the woman’s quite ill?”
“Must have got her feet wet,” a young prisoner cracked.
“She’s of merchant stock, you know: a pampered upbringing,” Sergei responded.
“Of course, if she at least had warm stockings, it would be better,” he went on.
It was as if Katerina Lvovna woke up.
“Vile serpent!” she said, unable to restrain herself. “Keep jeering, scoundrel, keep jeering!”
“No, merchant’s wife, I’m not jeering at you at all, but Sonetka here has some very nice stockings for sale, so I thought our merchant’s wife might buy them.”
Many laughed. Katerina Lvovna strode on like a wound-up automaton.
The weather was turning stormy. From the gray clouds that covered the sky, snow began to fall in wet flakes, which melted after barely touching the ground and made the mud still deeper. Finally a dark, leaden strip appears; its other side cannot be seen. This strip is the Volga. Over the Volga a rather stiff wind is blowing, driving the slowly rising, dark, gape-jawed waves back and forth.
The party of drenched and chilled prisoners slowly came to the crossing and stopped, waiting for the ferry.
The wet, dark ferry came; the crew began loading the prisoners.
“They say somebody has vodka on this ferry,” one prisoner observed, when the ferry, under the downpour of wet snowflakes, cast off and rocked on the big waves of the storm-tossed river.
“Yes, right now a little nip wouldn’t do any harm,” Sergei responded, and, persecuting Katerina Lvovna for Sonetka’s amusement, he said: “Merchant’s wife, for old friendship’s sake, treat me to a little vodka. Don’t be stingy. Remember, my sweet, our former love, and what a good time you and I had, my joy, sitting together of a long autumn evening, sending your relations off to their eternal rest without priests or deacons.”
Katerina Lvovna was trembling all over with cold. But, besides the cold that pierced her to the bone under her soaked dress, something else was going on in Katerina Lvovna’s whole being. Her head burned as if on fire; the pupils of her eyes were dilated, alive with a sharp, roving glitter, and peered fixedly into the rolling waves.
“And I’d like a little vodka, too: the cold’s unbearable,” Sonetka’s voice rang out.