‘No, that we ’aven’t.’
Yegorushka woke up and opened his eyes. The carriage had stopped. A long way ahead, to the right of the road, stretched a wagon train, around which men were scurrying. Piled high as they were with large bales of wool, all the wagons seemed very tall and bulging, the horses small and short-legged.
‘Well, we’re off to the Molokan’s,’ Kuzmichov said in a loud voice. ‘The Jew said Varlamov would be spending the night there, so it’s goodbye, lads. And good luck!’
‘Goodbye Ivan Kuzmichov,’ several voices answered.
‘Now listen, lads,’ Kuzmichov said briskly. ‘What about taking the boy with you? He doesn’t have to hang around with us. You can put him on one of your bales, Panteley, and let him ride with you for a bit. We’ll catch you up later. Come on, Yegor, there’s nothing to worry about!’
Yegorushka climbed down from the box-seat. Several pairs of hands caught hold of him and lifted him high up, and he found himself on something big, soft and rather damp from the dew. Now the sky seemed close to him and the earth far away.
‘Here’s your coat, laddie!’ Deniska shouted from somewhere far below.
Yegorushka’s coat and little bundle were thrown up and landed next to him. Disinclined to think about anything, he quickly placed the bundle under his head, covered himself with his coat, stretched his legs right out and laughed with pleasure, shrinking slightly from the dew. ‘Sleep, sleep, sleep!’ he thought.
‘And don’t you devils do him any harm!’ Deniska’s voice came from below.
‘Goodbye lads, and good luck,’ shouted Kuzmichov. ‘I’m relying on you!’
‘You don’t have to worry, Ivan Kuzmichov!’
Deniska struck the horses, the carriage creaked and moved off, no longer along the high road but somewhere to the side. For a minute or so all was quiet, as if the wagon had fallen asleep and all that could be heard was the clattering of the pail on the backboard gradually dying away in the distance. Then someone at the front of the train shouted, ‘Off we go, Kiryukha!’
The first wagon creaked, then the one after it, then a third. Yegorushka felt that the wagon in which he was lying was swaying as well as creaking. The train was on the move. Yegorushka took a firmer grip on the rope securing the bale, laughed once more with pleasure, adjusted the cake in his pocket and began to fall asleep the way he usually did in his bed at home…
When he awoke the sun was already rising. Screened by an ancient burial mound it was striving to spread its light all over the world, eagerly casting its rays everywhere and flooding the horizon with gold. Yegorushka felt that it was in the wrong place, for yesterday it had risen behind him and now it was very much further to the left. And the entire landscape was different from yesterday’s. The hills had vanished and wherever you looked a brown, cheerless plain stretched away endlessly. Here and there small barrows stood out and yesterday’s rooks were in flight. Far ahead were the white belfries and cottages of some village. As it was a Sunday the peasants were at home, baking and boiling – you could tell from the smoke issuing from every chimney and hanging over the whole village in a blue-grey, transparent mantle. Between the cottages and beyond the church a blue river was visible and beyond it the hazy distance. But nothing bore so little resemblance to yesterday’s sights as the high road. Instead of a road something exceptionally wide with a majestic sweep of heroic proportions stretched over the steppe. It was a grey strip, much-used and covered with dust, like all roads, but it was many metres wide. The sheer scale of it bewildered Yegorushka and conjured up thoughts of the world of legend. Who travelled along it? Who needed all that space? It was strange and puzzling. You might have thought that seven-league stepping giants like Ilya Muromets or Solovey the Robber9 still flourished in Russia and that knightly steeds had not become extinct. As Yegorushka gazed at the high road he imagined six lofty chariots riding abreast, like those he had seen in drawings in Bible story-books. These chariots were harnessed to teams of six wild, frenzied horses and their high wheels sent clouds of dust soaring to the sky. The horses were driven by men you might see in your dreams or who might take shape in thoughts of the fantastic. And how well all these figures would have harmonized with the steppe – had they existed!
On the right of the road, along its whole length, were telegraph poles carrying two wires. Growing ever smaller, they vanished from sight near the village, behind the cottages and foliage, and then reappeared in the lilac distance as very small thin pencil-like sticks thrust into the ground. Hawks, merlins and crows sat on the wires, indifferently surveying the moving wagons.
Yegorushka was lying on the very last wagon and had the entire train in sight. There were about twenty wagons in all, with one driver to every three. Near the last wagon, in which Yegorushka was lying, walked an old, grey-bearded man, as thin and stunted as Father Khristofor, but with a stern, thoughtful, sun-tanned face. In all probability this old man was neither stern nor thoughtful, but his red eyelids and long sharp nose gave his face that stern, cold expression typical of people given constantly to thinking serious, solitary thoughts. Like Father Khristofor he was wearing a broad-brimmed top hat – not the kind worn by gentlemen, but of brown felt and more like a truncated cone than a genuine topper. His feet were bare. Probably from a habit acquired during cold winters, when more than once he had had to stand and freeze by the wagons, he would keep slapping his thighs as he walked and stamping his feet. Noticing that Yegorushka was awake he looked at him.
‘Oh, so you’re awake, young fellow!’ he said, hunching his shoulders as if from frost. ‘Ain’t you Ivan Kuzmichov’s little boy?’
‘No, I’m his nephew.’
‘Kuzmichov’s? Well now, I’ve taken me boots off and here I be hopping along barefoot. They’re bad, me poor ole feet – the frost got to them – and it’s easier walking without any boots… Easier, me lad… Without boots, I mean… So, you’re his nephew then? He’s a good man, he’s all right. God grant him health. Yes, he’s all right… I mean Kuzmichov, like… He’s gone to see the Molokan. Oh, Lord have mercy on us!’
The old man talked as if it were bitterly cold, slowly and deliberately, without opening his mouth properly. And he mispronounced labial consonants, stuttering over them as if his lips were frozen. Not once did he smile when he looked at Yegorushka and he had a stern look.
Two wagons ahead walked a man in a long, reddish-brown coat, with a whip in one hand and wearing a cap and riding-boots with sagging tops. He was not old, probably about forty. When he turned around Yegorushka could see that he had a long red face with a thin goatee and a spongy swelling beneath his right eye. Besides that very ugly swelling there was one further sharply striking distinguishing feature about him. With his whip in his left hand he would wave his right as if he were conducting an invisible choir. Occasionally he would put the whip under his arm and then conduct with both arms as he hummed to himself.
The next carrier had a long, rectilinear figure, sharply sloping shoulders and a back as flat as a plank. He held himself erect as if he were marching or had swallowed a poker. His arms did not swing, but hung like straight sticks and he walked stiffly somehow, like a clockwork soldier, scarcely bending his knees and trying to take the longest possible strides. Whereas the old man or the owner of the swelling took two strides he managed to take only one and as a result seemed to be walking slower than everyone else and lagging behind. His face was bound with a piece of rag and on his head something resembling a monk’s cap was sticking up. He was dressed in a short Ukrainian coat covered in patches and baggy blue trousers over bast shoes.10
Yegorushka could not make out the men who were further ahead. He lay on his stomach, picked a hole in the bale and for want of anything else to do started twining threads of wool. The old man who was walking below turned out to be less stern and serious than one might have supposed from his expression. Once he started a conversation he did not stop.