“Pret-t-t-y!” the old man sitting opposite whispers to me, nodding his head at the pretty girl. “Mmm... pret-t-y... pity I don’t have any chloroform on me! One whiff and she’d be out! Then I could kiss her for all I’m worth!”
The man in the straw hat stirs uncomfortably, and in a loud voice curses his long legs.
“Scientists,” he mumbles. “Scientists... you can’t fight the nature of things... scientists! Ha! How come they haven’t come up with something so we can screw our legs on and off at will?”
“It’s got nothing to do with me.... Speak to the public prosecutor!” the inspector sitting next to me shouts.
In the far corner two high school boys, a noncommis-sioned officer, and a blue-eyed young man are huddled together playing a game of cards by the light of their cigarettes.
A tall lady is sitting haughtily to my right. She reeks of powder and patchouli.
“Oh how absolutely divine it is to be en route!” some goose is whispering into her ear, her voice sugary... nauseatingly sugary... frenchifying her g’s, ns, and n’s. “One’s rapprochement is never as quick and as charming as it is when one is en route. Oh, how I do love being en route!”
A kiss... another... what the hell is going on?
The pretty girl wakes up, looks around, and unconsciously rests her head against the man sitting next to her, the devotee of Justice... but the idiot is asleep.
The train stops. A halt. “The train will be stopping for two minutes!” a hoarse bass voice mutters outside the railroad car. Two minutes pass, two more.... Five minutes pass, ten, twenty, and the train is still standing. What the hell’s going on! I get off the train and make my way to the locomotive.
“Ivan Matevitch! Get a move on! Damn!” the chief conductor shouts from the locomotive.
The engine driver crawls out from under the locomotive, red, wet, a piece of soot sticking to his nose...
“Damn you! Damn you!” he shouts up at the chief conductor. “Get off my back! Are you blind? Can’t you see what’s going on? God! Aaah... I wish you’d all go to hell! This is supposed to be a locomotive? This is no locomotive, it’s a pile of junk! I’m not traveling any farther on this!”
“What’re we going to do?”
“You can do whatever you like! How about getting another locomotive—I refuse to travel on this one! Don’t you understand?”
The driver’s helpers run around the broken-down engine, banging, shouting... the station chief in a red cap tells his assis-tant Jewish jokes... it starts to rain... I head back to my railroad car... the stranger in the straw hat and the dark gray shirt rushes by... he’s carrying a suitcase. God... it’s my suitcase!
THE
TRIAL
THE HUT OF KUZMA Egorov, the shopkeeper. Hot and stifling. Damned mosquitoes and flies buzz near eyes and ears, a real nuisance. There’s a cloud of tobacco smoke, yet it doesn’t smell of tobacco but of salted fish. A heaviness hangs in the air, on everyone’s faces, in the buzzing of the mosquitoes.
There is a large table and on it scissors, a jar with a green-ish ointment, a saucer filled with walnut shells, paper bags, empty bottles. Seated around the table are Kuzma Egorov himself, Theophan Manafuilov the village priest, Ivanov the medical assistant, the village elder, Mikhailo the bass, Parfenti Ivanovitch the godfather, and Fortunatov, a policeman from town who is visiting Aunt Anise. At a respectful distance from the table stands Kuzma Egorov’s son, Seraphion, who is apprenticed to a barber in town and has come home for the holidays. Seraphion feels very uneasy, and with a trembling hand fidgets with his mustache. Kuzma Egorov’s hut also serves provisionally as a medical “station,” and out in the hall the ill have gathered: just now they brought in an old woman with a broken rib. She is lying there moaning, waiting for the medical assistant to finally grace her with his attention. Outside by the window a crowd has gathered to see Kuzma Egorov give his son a flogging.
“You keep saying that I’m lying,” Seraphion says to his father, “which is why I intend to keep things short. We are in the nineteenth century, Father. Words are meaningless, because theories, as you yourself surely know, simply can’t exist without some practical basis.”
“Shut up!” Kuzma Egorov sternly shouts. “Don’t change the subject; just give me the meat and potatoes. What have you done with my money?”
“Your money? But... surely, you yourself must be clever enough to see that I would never have touched your money. After all, you’re not hoarding it for me... I would never be tempted!”
“Be frank with us, Seraphion Kuzmitch!” the village priest exclaims. “Why do you think we are questioning you? We want to set you on the straight and narrow path to righteousness. Your father only wants what is good for you.... So he asked us over.... You must be frank with us.... Did you sin? Was it you who took the twenty-five rubles lying in your father’s chest of drawers, or wasn’t it?”
Seraphion spits into the corner and says nothing. “Answer!” Kuzma Egorov shouts, banging his fist on the table. “Was it you or wasn’t it?”
“Fine, have it your way, say it was me who took it! But there is no point in shouting, Father! No point in banging your fist till the table breaks into a thousand pieces! I have never taken your money, and if I did it was out of necessity... I am a living person, an animated noun, and I need money. I am not a rock!”
“Go earn yourself as much money as you need, then you won’t have to rob me blind. You’re not the only one in this family! There are six others!”
“I am fully aware of that, but due to the weakness of my health, as you know, I find it difficult to earn money. And how you can reproach me for nothing more than a piece of bread, you will have to answer to the Lord God himself...”
“Oh, weakness of health, is it? What’s so difficult about being a barber? All you have to do is cut a bit here and a bit there, and even that’s too much for you!”
“You call that a job? It’s not a job, it’s a feeble excuse for a job. With my education I can’t work in such circumstances!” “You aren’t reasoning correctly, Seraphion Kuzmitch!” the village priest says. “Your job is honorable, noble. After all, you
work in the biggest town in the province, and you shave and barber noble, highbrow people. Even generals need your ser-vices.”
“Ha! I can tell you a thing or two about generals.”
The medical assistant is slightly tipsy: “According to my medical opinion,” he says, “you are turpentine and nothing else!”
“We know your medicine!... Who, if I may ask, mistook the drunk carpenter for a corpse last year and almost dissected him? If he hadn’t woken up, you would have cut his stomach open. And who, may I ask, always mixes castor oil with hempseed oil?”
“That’s medicine for you!”
“And who sent Malanya to kingdom come? You administered laxatives and then constipators, and then laxatives again, and she finally broke down. It’s not people you should be treating but, pardon my frankness, dogs!”
“May Malanya rest in peace,” Kuzma Egorov says. “May she rest in peace. It wasn’t she who took the money, it’s not her we’re talking about... by the way, you didn’t give the money to that Alonya, did you?”
“Alonya! Shame on you to speak that woman’s name in front of a policeman and a man of the cloth!”
“So out with it! Did you take the money or didn’t you?” The village elder hobbles out from behind the table, lights
a match by striking it over his knee, and deferentially holds it up to the policeman’s pipe.
“Damn!” the policeman shouts. “You filled my nose with powder!”
Puffing on his pipe, he gets up from the table, walks up to Seraphion, and maliciously looking him in the eye, shouts in a shrill voice: “Who the hell are you? What is this? Why! Huh? What does all this mean? Why don’t you answer the question? Insubordination? Taking someone’s money like that! Shut up! Answer! Speak! Answer!”