‘‘And why don’t you go for a swim?’’ Egorushka asked Vasya.
‘‘Just so . . . I don’t like it ...’’ Vasya replied.
‘‘Why’s your chin swollen?’’
‘‘It hurts ... I used to work at a match factory, young master ... The doctor told me that’s why my jore got swollen. The air there’s unhealthy. And besides me, another three boys got bulging jores, and one had it completely rotted away.’’
Styopka soon came back with a net. Dymov and Kiriukha turned purple and hoarse from staying so long in the water, but they eagerly started fishing. First they walked into a deep place by the rushes; the water there came up to Dymov’s neck and over the short Kiriukha’s head; the latter spluttered and blew bubbles, while Dymov, stumbling over the prickly roots, kept falling and getting tangled in the net; they both floundered and made noise, and their fishing was nothing but mischief.
‘‘It’s too deep,’’ Kiriukha said hoarsely. ‘‘You can’t catch anything!’’
‘‘Don’t pull, you devil!’’ shouted Dymov, trying to set the net in the proper position. ‘‘Hold it with your hands!’’
‘‘You won’t catch anything there!’’ Pantelei shouted to them from the bank. ‘‘You’re just frightening the fish, you fools! Head further to the left! It’s shallower there!’’
Once a bigger fish flashed over the net; everybody gasped, and Dymov brought his fist down on the place where it had disappeared, and his face showed vexation.
‘‘Eh!’’ Pantelei grunted and stamped his feet. ‘‘Missed a perch! Got away!’’
Heading to the left, Dymov and Kiriukha gradually came out to the shallows, and here the fishing became real. They wandered some three hundred paces from the wagons; they could be seen barely and silently moving their legs, trying to get to deeper places, closer to the rushes, dragging the net, beating their fists on the water, and rustling the rushes to frighten the fish and drive them into the net. From the rushes they waded to the other bank, dragged the net there, then, with a disappointed air, lifting their knees high, waded back to the rushes. They were talking about something, but what it was, nobody could hear. And the sun burned their backs, flies bit them, and their bodies went from purple to crimson. Styopka waded after them with a bucket in his hand, his shirt tucked up right under his armpits and the hem of it clamped in his teeth. After each successful catch, he held up the fish and, letting it shine in the sun, shouted:
‘‘See what a perch! There are already five like that!’’
You could see how Dymov, Kiriukha, and Styopka, each time they pulled out the net, spent a long time digging in the silt, put something into the bucket, threw something out; occasionally they took something caught in the net, handed it to each other, examined it curiously, then also threw it out ...
‘‘What’d you have there?’’ the others shouted from the bank.
Styopka answered something, but it was hard to make out his words. Then he got out of the water and, holding the bucket with both hands, forgetting to let down his shirt, ran to the wagons.
‘‘Already full!’’ he shouted, breathing heavily. ‘‘Give me another!’’
Egorushka looked into the bucket; it was full; a young pike stuck its ugly snout from the water, and around it swarmed smaller fish and crayfish. Egorushka thrust his hand to the bottom and stirred up the water; the pike disappeared under the crayfish, and in its place a perch and a tench floated up. Vasya also looked in the bucket. His eyes became unctuous, and his face became tender, as before, when he saw the fox. He took something out of the bucket, put it in his mouth, and began to chew. A crunching was heard.
‘‘Brothers,’’ Styopka was astonished, ‘‘Vasya’s eating a live gudgeon! Pah!’’
‘‘It’s not a gudgeon, it’s a goby,’’ Vasya replied calmly, continuing to chew.
He took the fish’s tail from his mouth, looked at it tenderly, and put it back in his mouth. As he chewed and crunched with his teeth, it seemed to Egorushka that it was not a man he saw before him. Vasya’s swollen chin, his lackluster eyes, his extraordinarily keen sight, the fish tail in his mouth, and the tenderness with which he chewed the gudgeon made him look like an animal.
Egorushka got bored being around him. And the fishing was over. He strolled by the wagons, pondered, and, out of boredom, trudged off to the village.
A little later, he was standing in the church and listening as the choir sang, leaning his head against someone’s back, which smelled of hemp. The liturgy was coming to an end. Egorushka understood nothing about church singing and was indifferent to it. He listened for a while, yawned, and began examining napes and backs. In one nape, red-haired and wet from recent bathing, he recognized Emelyan. The hair on his neck was cut square and higher than usual; his temples were also cut higher than they should have been, and Emelyan’s red ears stuck out like two burdock leaves and seemed to feel they were not in the right place. Looking at his nape and neck, Egorushka thought for some reason that Emelyan was probably very unhappy. He remembered his conducting, his wheezing voice, his timid look while bathing, and felt an intense pity for him. He wanted to say something affectionate to him.
‘‘I’m here, too!’’ he said, tugging at his sleeve.
People who sing tenor or bass in a choir, especially those who happen to have conducted at least once in their life, are accustomed to looking sternly and unsociably at little boys. Nor do they drop this habit later, when they stop being singers. Turning to Egorushka, Emelyan looked at him from under his eyebrows and said:
‘‘Don’t misbehave in church!’’
After that Egorushka made his way to the front, closer to the iconostasis. 17 Here he saw interesting people. In front of everyone else, to the right side on a carpet, stood a gentleman and a lady. Behind each of them stood a chair. The gentleman was dressed in a freshly ironed two-piece tussore suit, stood motionless like a soldier at the salute, and held his blue, clean-shaven chin high. His standing collar, the blueness of his chin, his small bald spot, and his cane expressed a great deal of dignity. His neck was tense with an excess of dignity, and his chin stretched upwards with such force that his head seemed ready at any moment to tear free and fly upwards. But the lady, corpulent and elderly, in a white silk shawl, bent her head sideways and looked as if she had just done someone a favor and wanted to say: ‘‘Ah, don’t bother thanking me! I don’t like it . . .’’ Around the carpet, Ukrainian men stood in a dense wall.
Egorushka went up to the iconostasis and began to kiss the local icons. He prostrated unhurriedly before each icon, looked back at the people without getting up, then got up and kissed the icon. Touching the cold floor with his forehead gave him great pleasure. When the caretaker came out of the sanctuary with long tongs to extinguish the candles, Egorushka quickly rose from the ground and ran to him.
‘‘Have they already handed out the prosphoras?’’18 he asked.
‘‘All gone, all gone,’’ the sexton muttered sullenly. ‘‘You’ve no business here . . .’’
The liturgy was over. Egorushka unhurriedly left the church and started wandering around the square. He had seen not a few villages, squares, and muzhiks in his life, and all that now met his eye was quite uninteresting to him. Having nothing to do, so as to kill time with at least something, he went into a shop that had a strip of scarlet cotton hanging over the door. The shop consisted of two spacious, poorly lit halves: in one groceries and dry goods were sold, and in the other stood barrels of tar, and horse collars hung from the ceiling; from that one came a delicious smell of leather and tar. The floor of the shop had been sprinkled with water; it had probably been sprinkled by a great fantast and freethinker, because it was all covered with patterns and cabbalistic signs. Behind the counter, leaning his belly on a desk, stood a well-nourished shopkeeper with a broad face and a round beard, apparently a Russian. He was sipping tea through a lump of sugar, letting out a deep sigh after each sip. His face showed perfect indifference, but in each sigh yo
u could hear: ‘‘Just wait, you’re going to get it from me!’’
‘‘Give me a kopeck’s worth of sunflower seeds!’’ Egorushka addressed him.
The shopkeeper raised his eyebrows, came from behind the counter, and poured a kopeck’s worth of sunflower seeds into Egorushka’s pocket, the measure being an empty pomade jar. Egorushka did not want to leave. For a long time he studied the boxes of gingerbreads, pondered and asked, pointing to some small Vyazma gingerbreads that had acquired a rusty film with old age:
‘‘How much are these gingerbreads?’’
‘‘Two for a kopeck.’’
Egorushka took from his pocket the gingerbread that the Jewess had give him the day before, and asked:
‘‘And how much do you sell this kind for?’’
The shopkeeper took the gingerbread in his hands, examined it on all sides, and raised one eyebrow:
‘‘This kind?’’ he asked.
Then he raised the other eyebrow, thought a moment, and replied:
‘‘Two for three kopecks . . .’’
Silence ensued.
‘‘Whose boy are you?’’ asked the shopkeeper, pouring himself some tea from a red copper kettle.
‘‘I’m Ivan Ivanych’s nephew.’’
‘‘There are all sorts of Ivan Ivanyches,’’ sighed the shopkeeper; he looked over Egorushka’s head at the door, paused, and asked: ‘‘Would you like a drop of tea?’’
‘‘Maybe . . .’’ Egorushka accepted with some reluctance, though he had a great longing for his morning tea.
The shopkeeper poured a glass and gave it to him with a nibbled-over piece of sugar. Egorushka sat down on a folding chair and began to drink. He also wanted to ask how much a pound of sugared almonds cost, and had just started the conversation when a customer came in, and the owner, setting his glass aside, got involved in business. He led the customer to the half that smelled of tar and talked for a long time with him about something. The customer, apparently a very stubborn man and with a mind of his own, wagged his head all the time as a sign of disagreement and kept backing towards the door. The shopkeeper convinced him of something and began pouring oats for him into a big sack.
‘‘You call that oats?’’ the customer said mournfully. ‘‘That’s not oats, it’s chaff, it’d make a chicken grin ... No, I’ll go to Bondarenko!’’
When Egorushka went back to the river, a small fire was smoking on the bank. It was the wagoners cooking their dinner. Styopka stood amidst the smoke and stirred a cauldron with a big nicked spoon. A little to one side, their eyes red from the smoke, Kiriukha and Vasya sat cleaning the fish. Before them lay the silt- and weed-covered net, on which fish glistened and crayfish crawled.
Emelyan, recently come back from church, sat next to Pantelei, waved his hand, and sang barely audibly in a hoarse little voice: ‘‘We praise Thee . . .’’ Dymov wandered about by the horses.
When they finished cleaning the fish, Kiriukha and Vasya put them and the live crayfish in the bucket, rinsed them, and poured them all from the bucket into the boiling water.
‘‘Shall I put in some lard?’’ asked Styopka, skimming the froth with his spoon.
‘‘Why? The fish’ll give off their own juice,’’ replied Kiriukha.
Before removing the cauldron from the fire, Styopka poured three handfuls of millet and a spoonful of salt into the broth; in conclusion, he tried it, smacked his lips, licked the spoon, and grunted with self-satisfaction—this meant that the kasha19 was ready.
Everybody except Pantelei sat down around the cauldron and went to work with their spoons.
‘‘You! Give the boy a spoon!’’ Pantelei observed sternly. ‘‘I s’pose he must be hungry, too!’’
‘‘Ours is peasant fare . . .’’ sighed Kiriukha.
‘‘And peasant fare may be all to your health, if you’ve got a liking for it.’’
They gave Egorushka a spoon. He started to eat, not sitting down, but standing just by the cauldron and looking into it as if into a hole. The kasha smelled of a fishy dampness, and fish scales kept turning up among the millet; the crayfish could not be picked up with a spoon, and the eaters took them straight from the cauldron with their hands; Vasya was especially unconstrained in this respect, wetting not only his hands but his sleeves in the kasha. But all the same the kasha seemed very tasty to Egorushka and reminded him of the crayfish soup his mother cooked at home on fast days. Pantelei sat to one side and chewed bread.
‘‘Why don’t you eat, grandpa?’’ Emelyan asked.
‘‘I don’t eat crayfish . . . Dash ’em!’’ the old man said and turned away squeamishly.
While they ate, a general conversation went on. From this conversation Egorushka understood that all his new acquaintances, despite their differences in age and character, had one thing in common, which made them resemble one another: they were all people with a beautiful past and a very bad present; all of them to a man spoke with rapture about their past, while they greeted the present almost with scorn. The Russian man likes to remember, but does not like to live; Egorushka still did not know that, and, before the kasha was eaten, he was already deeply convinced that the people sitting around the cauldron had been insulted and offended by fate. Pantelei told how, in the old days, when there were no railroads, he went with wagon trains to Moscow and Nizhny and made so much that he didn’t know what to do with the money. And what merchants there were in those days, what fish, how cheap everything was! Now the roads had become shorter, the merchants stingier, the people poorer, bread more expensive, everything had become petty and narrow in the extreme. Emelyan told how he used to work in the church choir at the Lugansk factory, had a remarkable voice, and read music very well, but now he had turned into a peasant and ate on the charity of his brother, who sent him out with his horses and took half his earnings for it. Vasya had once worked in a match factory; Kiriukha had served as a coachman for some good people and had been considered the best troika driver in the whole region. Dymov, the son of a well-to-do peasant, had lived for his pleasure, caroused, and known no grief, but as soon as he turned twenty, his strict, stern father, wishing to get him used to work and fearing he would be spoiled at home, began sending him off as a wagoner, like a poor peasant, a hired hand. Styopka alone said nothing, but you could see by his beardless face that before he used to live much better than now.
Remembering his father, Dymov stopped eating and frowned. He looked at his comrades from under his eyebrows and rested his gaze on Egorushka.
‘‘You, heathen, take your hat off !’’ he said rudely. ‘‘You don’t eat with your hat on! Some master you are!’’
Egorushka took off his hat and did not say a word, but he no longer tasted the kasha and did not hear how Pantelei and Vasya interceded for him. Anger against the prankster stirred heavily in his breast, and he decided at all costs to do him some bad turn.
After dinner they all plodded to the wagons and collapsed in the shade.
‘‘Will we go soon, grandpa?’’ Egorushka asked Pantelei.
‘‘When God grants, then we’ll go ... We can’t go now, it’s hot ... Oh, Lord, as Thou wilt, Holy Mother ... Lie down, lad!’’
Soon, snoring came from under the wagons. Egorushka was about to go to the village again, then thought a little, yawned, and lay down beside the old man.
VI
THE WAGON TRAIN stood by the river all day and set off at sundown.
Again Egorushka lay on a bale, the wagon softly creaked and rocked, Pantelei walked down below, stamped his feet, slapped his thighs, and muttered; in the air the steppe music trilled as the day before.
Egorushka lay on his back, his hands behind his head, and looked up into the sky. He saw how the evening glow lit up, how it then went out; guardian angels, covering the horizon with their golden wings, settled down for the night; the day had passed untroubled, quiet, untroubled night came, and they could peacefully stay at home in the heavens ... Egorushka saw how the sky gradually darkened and
dusk descended on the earth, how the stars lit up one after another.
When you look for a long time into the deep sky, without taking your eyes away, your thoughts and soul merge for some reason in an awareness of loneliness. You begin to feel yourself irremediably alone, and all that you once considered close and dear becomes infinitely distant and devoid of value. The stars that have gazed down from the sky for thousands of years, the incomprehensible sky itself and the dusk, indifferent to the short life of man, once you remain face-to-face with them and try to perceive their meaning, oppress your soul with their silence; you start thinking about the loneliness that awaits each of us in the grave, and the essence of life seems desperate, terrible ...
Egorushka thought of his grandmother, who now slept in the cemetery under the cherry trees; he remembered how she lay in the coffin with copper coins on her eyes, how she was then covered with the lid and lowered into the grave; the dull thud of the lumps of earth against the lid also came back to him ... He imagined his grandmother in the narrow and dark coffin, abandoned by everyone and helpless. His imagination pictured his grandmother suddenly waking up and unable to understand where she was, knocking on the lid, calling for help, and, in the end, faint with terror, dying again. He imagined his mother, Father Khristofor, Countess Dranitsky, Solomon dead. But however hard he tried to imagine himself in the dark grave, far from home, abandoned, helpless, and dead, he did not succeed, he could not allow the possibility of death for himself personally, and he felt he would never die ...
And Pantelei, for whom it was already time to die, walked below and took a roll call of his thoughts.
‘‘It’s all right ... nice masters . . .’’ he muttered. ‘‘They took the lad to study, but how he’s doing there, nobody hears ... In Slavyanoserbsk, I say, there’s no such institution as gives bigger learning . . . None, that’s for sure ... And he’s a good lad, he’s all right ... He’ll grow up and help his father. You’re small now, Egory, but when you’re big, you’ll feed your father and mother. That’s set up by God ... Honor your father and mother ... I had children, too, but they got burned up ... My wife got burned up and my children ... That’s for sure, on the eve of the Baptism,20 the cottage caught fire ... Me, I wasn’t home, I’d gone to Orel. To Orel ... Marya jumped outside, then remembered the children were asleep in the cottage, ran back in, and got burned up with the children ... Yes ... The next day they found nothing but bones.’’
The Complete Short Novels Page 9