“What good did it do?” I asked. “It didn’t make them lend you the money, did it?”
“What do you mean it didn’t?” the muzhik shouted out proudly. “They gave me all right. ‘Here,’ they said, ‘take the money, and for Christ’s sake get lost.’ Oh, they hated my guts an’ my big mouth, but they gave … And now they cut me off relief … But I won’t let’em get away with it, oh, no. What gall that chief clerk has tellin’ me, ‘You so-’n-so, you think you have it comin’ more than anybody else?’ Who is anybody else? Them? Stuffin’ the’selves with our money … it makes me mad. Pavlitch, please do me the favor an’ write up that appeal for me, please …”
“What good will come of it?” I asked. “The writing is the least hard, but what’s the use?”
“What do you mean, ‘What’s the use?’ I’ve got a cettificat, don’t I? So help me, Sam, I’m not tryin’ to pull the wool over your eyes, believe me. I’m a sick man, can’t bend down, have trouble breathin’ … I hurt all over …” Uncle Pyotr groaned.
There was a moment of silence. I looked at my wife who watched the samovar, and thought that Uncle Pyotr might want his cup of tea. I wanted to ask him when the muzhik resumed in a crackling voice:
“… and yet I’m forced to work … It’s beyond me but I’ve got to do it; I cart wood from the grove to the station—nine quarters a fathom they pay. After you turn around you’ve got left enough for a smoke, oats’ expensive, six quarters a measure, hay about four, and a man has got to live, too … An’ how full can you stack your cart? Not even half, one-fourth maybe, three-eighth the most. You start a li’l after midnight an’ by the time you’re finished it’s dawn … An’ twenty verst back to town, all hilly road, the nag’s just so-so. You come back by noon an’ by the time you’re unloaded, had some tea, it’s nighttime. You go home, unhitch, have some chow an’ lie down. Before you know it the rooster’s at ye ’gain; time to get up. What kind of life is it, Pavlitch? Will there ever be an end to it?”
“I don’t know, friend,” I said.
“After the war, you think, maybe?”
“Maybe,” I said. “Anyway, what kind of better times do you expect?”
“In gen’ral, maybe … I can’t really say. Now look at me, what do I look like? An animal almost. Look what I wear, the same things over’n over for years. An’ for years nothin’ but potaters’n potaters. You want to know what I know? Nothin’ … maybe how to pull a cart no poorer than m’nag. I can’t read, can’t count … A li’l note, an’ I’ve to run to folks to read it for me, all my life have ’bin waitin’ for somethin’. What?” Uncle Pyotr broke off and began blinking his eyes. For a while as he stared at the fireplace, I began to feel uncomfortable. My wife poured him a bowl of tea, and offered some cookies.
“Here, have a bite,” she invited him. “Stop feelin’ sorry for yerself. We don’t live much better.”
“My heart’s breakin’ for my only son,” he sniffled, accepting the tea and the cookies from her.
“Are you the only one?”
“Raised’im an’ raised’im; married’im an’ thought he’d take care of me at old age …” Uncle Pyotr choked on his sorrow. He took a gulp, put the tea aside and … began to cry.
My heart ached for him. I watched the tears running down his weatherbeaten, sallow cheeks and wished I could help. “Come on, get a hold of yerself,” my wife asked. “You’re a grown muzhik, not a boy.”
“It ain’t easy, dear,” Uncle Pyotr sniffled. “You should come to us an’ see how we live. My old woman, never a dry eye, and the young one never stops sobbin’ … day’n night. ‘Where is he, my man?’ she asks. My boy, he was with the Nineteenth Siberian Riflers, he was … Haven’t heard from him in months, who knows is he live or dead? The priest says ‘A martyr’s wreath shines upon his head, he deserves the kingdom of heaven.’ It’s easy for him to talk. Don’t the others, those Hermans an’ Ossians get killed too, I ask? ‘Where’ll they go, not to heaven? Aren’t all people the chil’ren of God?’ The priest says, ‘We’re the true Christians, we war for the truth, not them.’ I argue, ‘I’m tellin’ ye, your grace, they, too, think they war for the truth.’ The priest’s gettin’ mad. ‘You stupid pig,’ he shouts, ‘you’ve an evil tongue. I ought to sew it to your teeth so that you stop waggin’ it. You thresh your tongue but your head’s empty.’ I agreed. ‘You’re right,’ I said, ‘I suffer on account of my big mouth.’ “
“It’s obvious,” I agreed. “Look at me, don’t I suffer for what I’ve said or wrote?”
“You can talk, sittin’ here, sippin’ tea,” the muzhik snarled. “They hadn’t took anybody from you. But me, what am I going to do all by myself?”
“Maybe the Lord will put an end to this war,” my wife said. “I bet your li’l grandson’s cute.”
“He’s over two,” Uncle Pyotr smiled. “A happy li’l fella, rings like a li’l bell from mornin’ to night … never stops askin’ questions,” Uncle Pyotr paused. “It’s her own fault, my stupid daughter-’n-law,” he frowned. “She learned’im to speak ’bout his father too much. ‘He’ll come home soon,’ she’d tell him, ‘an’ bring you lots o’ presents.’ Now the li’l boy don’t give it any rest. ‘Mommie,’ he asks, ‘how soon’ll Daddy be home with ‘sents?’ She lissens then sobs ’n sobs. Big as a barrel she is, an’ yellow-like, always angry. My old woman ’n me, we look at her, hear her sob an’ we too can’t help cryin’ … Sometime late at night all three of us … can’t stop. An’ the wind howls outside, this don’t help, an’ we cry, an …”
Uncle Pyotr choked, and … cried out again.
It was too much for me to watch him. I went outside, into the cold evening and heaved a sigh. Myriads of stars glistened like distant, little embers on the ink-blue sky, and the ground was bathed by a milky-pale light falling from the crescent of the moon hanging on the east. It was so quiet! The distant sky, the stars, the forest, and the fields—everything was so quiet that I could almost palp it. It touched me, and when it did it made me very, very sad …
1926
Two Deaths
by Alexander Serafimovitch
Alexander Serafimovitch, 1863-1949, son of a Cossack Officer, joined the revolutionary movement and was arrested and exiled. He wrote expressive and vivid stories of the lower middle class. In his novel The Iron Torrent, 1924, he depicted the civil war in a series of pseudo-impressionistic flashes.
It was a threatening November sky that hung low over the wet, cold roofs, and death from the White Cadet snipers lurking between the chimneys waited to snuff out some careless Red Guard on the square below.
The girl came into headquarters of the Moscow Soviet, grey-eyed, a kerchief tied around her head, and said, “How can I be of any help to the revolution? I’d like to keep you informed about the Cadets’ moves. I’m not good at nursing, and besides you’ve probably got too many nurses anyway. I can’t fight either, never held a weapon in my hands. But if you give me a pass, I’ll get some information for you.”
The comrade in the greasy leather jacket, with the Mauser behind his belt, fixed on her his sunken face consumed by sleepless nights and fever. “If you sell us out, we’ll shoot you,” he issued a stern warning. “You understand? And if they find out, they’ll shoot you there. It may them or us.”
“I know,” the girl said calmly.
“Have you taken all that into account?”
“You just give me the pass good for all posts,” she adjusted the kerchief on her head. “Also, make it that I’m an officer’s daughter.”
She was asked into another room and a sentry was placed at the door. Some time later a hail of shots rang outside: a White Cadet armored car had raided the square, done some damage, and disappeared.
“Who the hell knows,” said the comrade with the sunken, consumptive face. “I had some documents made up for her; let’er have’m. Sure she may let us down, but what the hell can she tell about us? All right, but if we catch’er lying—that’ll be the end of her.”
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The girl was handed the forged documents. She took off toward the Arbat Square and the Alexandrov Military School. The Red Army men let her by. On Znamenka she stashed away the Red pass and soon enough she was surrounded by Cadets who led her off to the school guardhouse.
“I’d like to work as a nurse,” she told them. “My father was killed in the German war during General Samsonov’s retreat and my two brothers are fighting the Reds in Cossack regiments on the Don. I live in Moscow now with my kid sister.”
“That’s splendid,” she was told. “We’re glad to have you. In our difficult struggle for a Great Russia we are thankful for the help of any well-meaning patriot. You say, you’re an officer’s daughter? Would you like some tea?”
They took her to the refectory and brought her some tea. “Stepanov,” the officer in charge told one Cadet. “Dress up like a worker and get over to the Red side. Here’s a girl’s address in Pokrovka. Find out all you can about her.”
Stepanov put on a coat that had been stripped off a shot workman. He also put on his pants, torn boots and hat, and when dusk set in he took off for Pokrovka.
“Yah, we have one with that name livin’ in number two,” he was told there. “With a kid sister. Dirty, capitalist brood!”
“Where’s she now?” Stepanov wanted to know.
“She’s gone since mornin’. Like’s not they took’er away: what d’ya expect, a staff-captain’s daughter she was? Why do you want her?”
“Just that I is from the same village a servant o’hers was. Wanted to say hello. Goodbye.”
Late that evening the Cadets gave the grey-eyed girl their friendliest attention. There was pie and chocolate. Somebody played the piano; with a chivalrous genuflection, one Cadet handed her a bouquet of flowers. “We’ll scatter the feathers out of those uncouth savages,” they laughed. “We gave them hell today, and tomorrow night we’ll strike at the Smolensk Market and crush them.”
In the morning they took the girl to the field hospital to teach her to make bandages. On the way, at the white wall she saw the body of a workman in a pink cotton print shirt lying in the mud. Over his left eye there was a darkened bullet hole.
“A spy,” the Cadet explained curtly without looking at the dead man. “He was caught and shot.”
The girl worked the whole day in the hospital. She was gentle and did her work skillfully; the wounded men had nothing but gratitude for this thick-browed nurse.
The next day toward evening she requested a pass home. “Are you mad?” they said. “There’re Red patrols on every block. You’ll leave our zone and those savages will seize you and shoot you on the spot.”
“I’ll show them my documents; I’m a peaceful girl,” she reasoned. “I’ve got to go; my little kid sister is there all by herself. God knows what might happen to her.”
“Yah, too bad you have a little kid sister. All right, I’ll have two Cadets to see you safely though,” the officer in charge said.
“No, no,” she fantically waved her hands. “Let me go by myself, I can do it. I’m not afraid.”
“Wa-a-all,” the officer gave her a questioning look. “Are you sure you can make it by yourself?”
“I’m sure,” she said. She stepped out into the dark night—no lights, no sounds, no clues. She thought of the dead workman in the pink cotton print shirt and shuddered.
From the school she groped her way through the Arbat Square. In the misty dark she could see only herself and apart from herself—nothing.
She wasn’t afraid; only that everything inside was tight, tight …
Memories of her childhood came to her mind—how she used to clamber on her father’s bed when he was gone to work, pull down the guitar hanging against a little carpet on the wall and sit down with it on the floor. She’d strum it while turning up the pegs, more and more, higher and higher, and listen to the pings getting sharper and sharper—to the point of becoming unbearable. Ping! The sound stabbed her heart in a thin, thin shudder. Was it going to burst? Ants began running down her back, little beads sprang up on her forehead … What a spine-tingling, weird sensation! Delight in a form never before experienced!
The girl walked in the darkness, seeing herself but dimly, feeling no fear, just that the pitch of those pings grew and grew …
She reached out … there was the wall of a house. Horror suddenly came and spread in an enervating languor throughout her body, and the beads—as then in childhood—turned into perspiration. The wall of a house! She ought to have reached by now the Boulevard gridirons! Was she lost? Irrepressible strain broke out in a fine chattering of teeth. A voice seemed to be whispering into her ear: “Don’t you see, this is the beginning of the end? You only think you’ve wandered off, but this is the begin …”
“No,” she shouted to herself. “I’ll find the way.” With a superhuman effort she began to disentangle the web of confusion. Znamenka was to the right, so the Boulevard must be to the left. Apparently she was somewhere in between. She reached out—there was a post. A telegraph post? Her heart felt like a hammer as she dropped to her knees and groped on the ground. Her fingers touched the cool, humid iron—that was the Boulevard gridiron! At once the weight lifted. She rose calmly but then … a shiver overtook her. Everything around seemed to be reeling in the fog—becoming clear, then hazy; vanishing then reappearing. Everything seemed to quiver: the buildings, the walls, and the trees. Everything seemed to have the color of blood. The bloody-red trolley antennas moved; the bloody-red rails stirred. Even the fog, muddy-red, seemed to quiver. And the low-hanging clouds seemed to be ablaze—their redness the shade of blood.
The girl walked toward that silent blaze, toward the Nikitin Gate. How strange, she thought, why hasn’t anybody halted me yet? Could they be lurking in those pitch-dark gates, behind those corners, not letting me out of their sight? Yet, she kept walking in clear view of everybody as if she were ablaze herself, in surroundings that were all ablaze.
She was calm. In one hand she squeezed the pass the Whites gave her, in the other the Reds’. Whoever will halt me will see the right pass, she told herself. There was nobody around, nobody but the silent, somberly-red blaze. What a weird spectacle at the Nikitin Gate! The raging flames were tearing furiously into the low-hanging crimson clouds, and the clouds and the crimson columns of smoke had become one billowing cauldron. A huge building was aglow with a dazzlingly incandescent light, and the insanely quivering clouds were streaming toward it in a mad rush. The empty window sockets burned with a frenzy and it was only the black skeleton of the house, the black beams, rails, and walls, that seemed to stand unconcernedly still.
Sparks rose toward the clouds like the tail of a fire bird, crackling incessantly, filling everything around with an eerie crepitation.
The girl turned around. The city was immersed in darkness. The city with all its buildings, belfries and squares; the city with all its theatres and public houses—all of it had disappeared. In its place there was an incomprehensible mass of darkness.
In the darkness there was an incomprehensible silence; and in the silence there lurked a mysterious force, a nameless force ready to break out. But the silence hovered and hovered … It brought a nameless terror.
The heat was becoming unbearably intense. The girl started cutting across. A squat figure detached itself from the first dark corner. “Halt! Who are ya?”
She stopped. She could see no face, just the glimmer of the blaze on a naked bayonet. She forgot which pass was in which hand. The second of hesitation drew on. The barrel of the rifle rose to the level of her chest.
Why did she do it? She had wanted to reach out her right arm but in spite of herself she stretched her left. Her hand was trembling as she unclenched it—was that the right pass?
The man put his rifle aside and began smoothing the paper. His chilled fingers moved with awkward slowness. The girl shivered; it was a fine, sharp shiver she had never experienced before. A crackling sheaf of sparks shot up behind her, casting a tremulou
s light on the man’s knobby palm. It was the Cadets’ pass—lying upside down.
“Fie on you,” she exclaimed boldly. “Can’t you read?”
“Here, take it,” he said in reply.
She crumpled the accursed paper.
“Where you goin’? he shouted at her back.
“To the Soviet,” she said, turning around.
“Take the alleys; they may conk’ya off,” he advised.
They were glad to see her at the Soviet. Her information was invaluable. The man in the leather jacket who had the consumptive face gave her a warm smile. “You’re quite a gal,” he said. “Just take good care of yerself.”
The next day toward dusk, when the shooting had begun to die down, she took off again for the Arbat. The carts with wounded men didn’t stop coming. The White Cadets had suffered heavy losses in their attack on the Smolensk Market and had to pull back.
Treasury of Russian Short Stories 1900-1966 Page 6