They reached the church. Marya stopped at the porch, not daring to go in, or even sit down, although the bells for evening service would not ring until after eight. So she just kept standing there.
During the reading from the Gospels, the congregation suddenly moved to one side to make way for the squire and his family. Two girls in white frocks and broad-brimmed hats and a plump, pink-faced boy in a sailor suit came down the church. Olga was very moved when she saw them and was immediately convinced that these were respectable, well-educated, fine people. But Marya gave them a suspicious, dejected look, as though they were not human beings but monsters who would trample all over her if she did not get out of the way. And whenever the priest’s deep voice thundered out, she imagined she could hear that shout again – Ma-arya! – and she trembled all over.
III
The villagers heard about the newly arrived visitors and a large crowd was already waiting in the hut after the service. Among them were the Leonychevs, the Matveichevs and the Ilichovs, who wanted news of their relatives working in Moscow. All the boys from Zhukovo who could read or write were bundled off to Moscow to be waiters or bellboys (the lads from the village on the other side of the river just became bakers). This was a longstanding practice, going back to the days of serfdom when a certain peasant from Zhukovo called Luka Ivanych (now a legend) had worked as a barman in a Moscow club and only took on people who came from his own village. Once these villagers had made good, they in turn sent for their families and fixed them up with jobs in pubs and restaurants. Ever since then, the village of Zhukovo had always been called ‘Loutville’ or ‘Lackeyville’ by the locals. Nikolay had been sent to Moscow when he was eleven and he got a job through Ivan (one of the Matveichevs), who was then working as an usher at the Hermitage Garden Theatre.5 Rather didactically Nikolay told the Matveichevs, ‘Ivan was very good to me, so I must pray for him night and day. It was through him I became a good man.’
Ivan’s sister, a tall old lady, said tearfully, ‘Yes, my dear friend, we don’t hear anything from him these days.’
‘Last winter he was working at Aumont’s,6 but they say he’s out of town now, working in some suburban pleasure gardens. He’s aged terribly. Used to take home ten roubles a day in the summer season. But business is slack everywhere now, the old boy doesn’t know what to do with himself.’
The woman looked at Nikolay’s legs (he was wearing felt boots), at his pale face and sadly said, ‘You’re no breadwinner, Nikolay. How can you be, in your state!’
They all made a fuss of Sasha. She was already ten years old, but she was short for her age, very thin and no one would have thought she was more than seven, at the very most. This fair-haired girl with her big dark eyes and a red ribbon in her hair looked rather comical among the others, with their deeply tanned skin, crudely cut hair and their long faded smocks – she resembled a small animal that had been caught in a field and brought into the hut.
‘And she knows how to read!’ Olga said boastfully as she tenderly looked at her daughter. ‘Read something, dear!’ she said, taking a Bible from one corner. ‘You read a little bit and these good Christians will listen.’
The Bible was old and heavy, bound in leather and with well-thumbed pages; it smelt as though some monks had come into the hut. Sasha raised her eyebrows and began reading in a loud, singing voice, ‘And when they were departed, behold, the angel of the Lord… appeareth to Joseph in a dream, saying, “Arise, and take the young child and his mother.”’7
‘“The young child and his mother”,’ Olga repeated and became flushed with excitement.
‘“And flee into Egypt… and be thou there until I bring thee word…”’
At the word ‘until’, Olga broke down and wept. Marya looked at her and started sobbing, and Ivan’s sister followed suit. Then the old man had a fit of coughing and fussed around trying to find a present for his little granddaughter. But he could not find anything and finally gave it up as a bad job. After the reading, the neighbours went home, deeply touched and extremely pleased with Olga and Sasha.
When there was a holiday the family would stay at home all day. The old lady, called ‘Grannie’ by her husband, daughters-in-law and grandchildren, tried to do all the work herself. She would light the stove, put the samovar on, go to milk the cows and then complain she was worked to death. She kept worrying that someone might eat a little too much or that the old man and the daughters-in-law might have no work to do. One moment she would be thinking that she could hear the innkeeper’s geese straying into her kitchen garden from around the back, and she would dash out of the hut with a long stick and stand screaming for half an hour on end by her cabbages that were as withered and stunted as herself; and then she imagined a crow was stalking her chickens and she would rush at it, swearing for all she was worth. She would rant and rave from morning to night and very often her shouting was so loud that people stopped in the street.
She did not treat the old man with much affection and called him ‘lazy devil’ or ‘damned nuisance’. He was frivolous and unreliable and wouldn’t have done any work at all (most likely he would have sat over the stove all day long, talking) if his wife hadn’t continually prodded him. He would spend hours on end telling his son stories about his enemies and complaining about the daily insults he had apparently to suffer from his neighbours. It was very boring listening to him.
‘Oh yes,’ he would say, holding his sides. ‘Yes, a week after Exaltation of the Cross,8 I sold some hay at thirty copecks a third of a hundredweight, just what I wanted… Yes, very good business. But one morning, as I was carting the hay, keeping to myself, not interfering with anyone… it was my rotten luck that Antip Sedelnikov, the village elder, comes out of the pub and asks: “Where you taking that lot, you devil…?” and he gives me one on the ear.’
Kiryak had a terrible hangover and he felt very ashamed in front of his brother.
‘That’s what you get from drinking vodka,’ he muttered, shaking his splitting head. ‘Oh God! My own brother and sister-in-law! Please forgive me, for Christ’s sake. I’m so ashamed!’
For the holidays they bought some herring at the inn and made soup from the heads. At midday they sat down to tea and went on drinking until the sweat poured off them. They looked puffed out with all that liquid and after the tea they started on the soup, everyone drinking from the same pot. Grannie had what was left of the herring.
That evening a potter was firing clay on the side of the cliff. In the meadows down below, girls were singing and dancing in a ring. Someone was playing an accordion. Another kiln had been lit across the river and the girls there were singing as well and their songs were soft and melodious in the distance. At the inn and round about, some peasants were making a great noise with their discordant singing and they swore so much that Olga could only shudder and exclaim, ‘Oh, good heavens!’
She was astonished that the swearing never stopped for one minute and that the old men with one foot in the grave were the ones who swore loudest and longest. But the children and the young girls were obviously used to it from the cradle and it did not worry them at all.
Now it was past midnight and the fires in the pottery kilns on both sides of the river had gone out. But the festivities continued in the meadow below and at the inn. The old man and Kiryak, both drunk, joined arms and kept bumping into each other as they went up to the barn where Olga and Marya were lying.