And quiet flows the Don; a novel

by Sholokhov, Mikhail Aleksandrovich, 1905-

  "Early tomorrow morning?"

  Grigory turned sideways in his 'seat, and dragged his frozen lips apart with difficulty. His tongue, stiff with cold, seemed to swell and stick to the back of his teeth.

  "Yes," he managed to reply.

  "Got all your money?"

  "Yes."

  "Don't worry about your wife, she'll be all right with us. Be a good soldier,- your grandfather was a fine Cossack, And mind," List-

  nitsky's voice grew muffled as he hid his face from the wind in the collar of his coat, "and mind you conduct yourself in a manner worthy of ,your grandfather and father. Your father received the first prize for trick riding at the Imperial Review, didn't he?"

  "Yes."

  "Well then!" the old man ended with a stern note in his voice, as though admonishing Gri-gory, and buried his face once more in his fur coat.

  At the yard Grigory handed over the horse to Sashka, and turned to go to the servants' quarters,

  "Your father's arrived," Sashka shouted after him.

  Grigory found Pantelei sitting at the table, eating meat jelly. "Tight!" Grigory decided, glancing at his father's flushed face.

  "So you're back, soldier?"

  "I'm frozen," Grigory answered, clapping his hands together. Turning to Aksinya, he added: "Untie my hood, my fingers are too stiff."

  "You must have had the wind against you," his father grunted, chewing steadily.

  This time his father was in a kindlier mood, and ordered Aksinya about as if he were in his own home. "Don't be so stingy with the bread, cut some more," he told her.

  When he had finished he rose from the table and went towards the door to have a smoke in the yard. As he passed the cradle he rocked it once or twice, pretending that the action was accidental, and asked: "A Cossack?"

  "A girl," Aksinya replied for Grigory; and catching the expression of dissatisfaction that passed over the old man's face, she hurriedly added: "She's the image of Grisha!"

  Pantelei attentively examined the dark little head sticking out of the clothes, and declared, not without a touch of pride: "She's of our blood. . . ! Well, I never!"

  "How did you come. Father?" Grigory asked.

  "With the mare and Pyotr's horse." "You need only have used one, and we could have harnessed mine for the journey to Man-kovo."

  "Let him go light. He's not a bad horse, you know."

  They were both troubled by the same thought, but they talked of various trivial matters. Aksinya took no part in the conversation, and sat on the bed. Her full breasts swelled tightly under her blouse. She had grown noticeably stouter since the birth of the child, and had a new, confidently happy air.

  It was late when they went to bed. As she

  nestled close at Grigory's side, Aksinya moistened his shirt with her tears and the overabundant milk seeping from her breasts.

  "I shall pine away. What shall I do without you?"

  "You'll be all right," Grigory murmured.

  "The long nights . . . the child awake. . .. Just think, Grisha! Four years!"

  "In the old days service lasted twenty-five years, they say."

  "What do I care about the old days?"

  "Come now, enough of that!"

  "Curse your army service, I say."

  "I shall come home on furlough."

  "On furlough!" Aksinya moaned, sobbing and wiping her nose on her shift. "A lot of water will go down the Don before then."

  "Not so much whimpering! You're like rain in autumn, always drizzling."

  "You should be in my shoes."

  Grigory fell asleep a little before dawn. Aksinya got up and fed the child, then lay down again. Leaning on her elbows she gazed un-blinkingly into Grigory's face, and took a long farewell of him. She recalled the night when she had tried to persuade him to go away with her to the Kuban; it had been the same as now, except that there had been a moon flooding the yard outside the window with its white

  light. The same, and Grigory was still the same, yet not the same. Behind them both lay a long track trodden out by the passing days.

  He turned over, muttered something about Olshansky village, and then was silent. Aksi-nya tried to sleep, but her thoughts drove all sleep away, like wind scattering a haycock. Until daybreak she lay thinking over his disconnected phrase, seeking its meaning. Pantelei awoke as soon as daylight began to foam on the frosty windows.

  "Grigory, get up, it's getting light."

  Kneeling on the bed, Aksinya pulled on her skirt and with a sigh started looking for the matches.

  By the time they had breakfasted and packed, dawn had fully come. The black stakes of the fence were clearly outlined and the stable roof loomed darkly against the misty lilac of the sky. Pantelei went to harness his horses while Grigory tore himself away from Aksinya's desperately passionate kisses and went to say good-bye to Sashka and the other servants.

  Wrapping the child up warmly, Aksinya took her out with her to take a last farewell. Grigory lightly touched his daughter's damp little forehead with his lips, and went to his horse.

  "Come in the sledge," his father called, as he touched up his horses.

  "No, I'll ride my horse."

  With deliberate slowness Grigory fastened the saddle-girths, mounted his horse, and gathered the reins in his hand. Aksinya touched the stirrup with her hand and kept repeating:

  "Grisha, wait. . .. There's something I wanted to say.. . ." And puckering her brow, trembling and bewildered, she tried to remember what it was.

  "Well, good-bye. . . . Look after the child. . .. I must be off; see how far Father's got already."

  "Wait, dearest!" With her left hand Aksinya seized the icy iron stirrup; her right arm pressed the baby to her breast; and she had no free hand with which to wipe away the tears streaming from her wide staring eyes.

  Venyamin came to the steps of the house.

  "Grigory, the master wants you!"

  Grigory cursed, waved his whip, and dashed out of the yard. Aksinya ran after him, stumbling in the drifted snow.

  He overtook his father at the top of the hill. With an effort of will, he turned and looked back. Aksinya was standing at the gate, the child still pressed to her breast, the ends of her crimson shawl fluttering in the wind.

  He rode his horse alongside his father's sledge. After a few moments the old man turned his back to his horses and asked:

  "So you're not thinking of living with your wife?"

  "That old story again? We've had that out already. .. ."

  "So you're not."

  "No, I'm not!"

  "You haven't heard that she laid hands on herself?"

  "Yes, I've heard. I happened to meet a man from the village."

  "And in the sight of God?"

  "Why, Father, after all ... it's no use crying over spilt milk."

  "Don't use that devil's talk to me. What I'm saying to you, I'm saying for your own good," Pantelei flared up.

  "I've a child back there. What's the use of talking? You can't push the other on to me now. . . ."

  "Are you sure you're not rearing another man's child?"

  Grigory turned pale; his father had touched a sore spot. Ever since the child was born he had tormentedly nursed the suspicion in his mind, while concealing it from Aksinya and from himself. At night, when Aksinya was

  asleep, he had more than once gone to the cradle and stared down at the child, seeking his own features in its swarthily rosy face, and had turned back to bed as uncertain as before. Stepan was dark-chestnut, almost as dark as he, and how was he to know whose blood flowed in the child's veins? At times he thought the child resembled him, at other times she was painfully like Stepan. Grigory had no feeling for her, except perhaps hostility as he recalled the moments he had lived through when he had driven Aksinya back from the steppes in the throes of childbirth. Once when Aksinya was busy in the kitchen, he had had to change the child's wet napkin. As he did so he had felt a sharp, burning emotion. He had bent stealthily over the cradle and pr
essed the baby's pink stiff toe between his teeth.

  His father probed mercilessly at the wound, and Grigory, his palm resting on the saddlebow, numbly replied:

  "Whoever it belongs to, I won't leave the child."

  Pantelei waved his whip at the horses without turning round:

  "Natalya's spoilt her good looks. She carries her head on one side like a paralytic. It seems she cut a tendon." He lapsed into silence.

  The runners creaked as they cut through the snow; the hoofs of Grigory's horse clicked as they knocked together.

  "And how is she now?" Grigory asked, studiously picking a burr out of his horse's mane.

  "She got over it somehow or other. She was laid up seven months. On Trinity Sunday she was all but gone. Father Pankraty came to say prayers. And then she began to pick up. She'd tried to stab herself with a scythe but her hand shook and she just missed her heart. It would have been the end of her otherwise. . . ."

  "Quicker down the hill!" Grigory said, standing in his stirrups and using his whip; the horse leaped forward, sending a shower of snow from its hoofs over the sledge, and broke into a trot.

  "We're taking Natalya in," Pantelei shouted, coming up with him. "The woman doesn't want to live with her own folk. I saw her the other day and told her to come to us."

  Grigory made no reply. They drove as far as the first village without exchanging a word, and his father made no further reference to the subject.

  That day they covered seventy versts. They arrived at Mankovo the following evening as

  dusk was falling, and spent the night in the quarters allotted to the Vyeshenskaya recruits.

  Next morning the district ataman took the Vyeshenskaya recruits before the medical commission. Grigory fell in with the other lads from his own village. In the morning Mitka Korshunov, riding a tall bay horse equipped v;ith a new and gaily-ornamented saddle and harness, had passed Grigory standing at the door of his quarters, but had gone by without a word of greeting.

  The men undressed in turn in the cold room of the local civil administration. Military clerks bustled around, and the adjutant to the provincial ataman hurried past in short patent-leather boots. From an inner room came the sound of the doctors' orders, and snatches of talk.

  "Sixty-nine."

  "Pavel Ivanovich, pass me an indelible pencil," croaked a drink-sodden voice near the door,

  "Chest measurement. ..."

  "Yes, obviously hereditary.. .."

  "Put down syphilis."

  "Take your hand away. You're not a girl."

  "Fine physique."

  ". . . Infects the whole village. Special measures must be taken. I have already reported the matter to His Excellency."

  "Pavel Ivanovich, look at this fellow's physique."

  "Oho!"

  Grigory got undressed beside a tall red-haired lad from another village. A clerk came out and, straightening his shoulders so that his tunic creased at the back, curtly called Grigory and the other lad into the examination room.

  "Hurry up!" gasped the red-head, blushing and pulling off a sock.

  Grigory went in, his back all goose-flesh with the cold. His swarthy body was the colour of oak. He felt embarrassed as he glanced down at his hairy legs. In the corner a square-limbed lad was standing naked on the scales. Someone, evidently the doctor's assistant, flicked the weights to and fro, called out a figure and told him to get down.

  The humiliating procedure of the medical examination irritated Grigory. A grey-haired doctor in a white coat sounded him with the aid of a stethoscope. A younger doctor turned up his eyelids and looked at his tongue. Behind him a third in horn-rimmed spectacles bustled about, rubbing his hands.

  "On the scales!" an officer ordered.

  Grigory stepped on to the cold platform,

  "Five poods ... six and a half pounds."

  "Wha-a-at! He's not particulcirly tall, either," the grey-haired doctor exclaimed, turning Grigory round by the arm.

  "Astonishing!" the younger man coughed.

  "How much?" an officer sitting at the table asked in surprise.

  "Five poods, six and a half pounds," the grey-haired doctor replied.

  "How about the Lifeguards for him?" the district military commissary asked, bending a black sleek head towards his neighbour at the table.

  "He has the face of a brigand. . . . Very savage-looking. . . ."

  "Hey, turn round! What's that on your back?" an officer wearing colonel's epaulettes shouted, impatiently tapping his finger on the table. The grey-haired doctor mumbled something and Grigory, trying to restrain the trembling of his body, turned his back to the table and replied:

  "I caught cold in the spring. It's a boil." By the end of the examination the officers at the table had decided that Grigory would have to be drafted into an ordinary regiment.

  "The Twelfth Regiment, Melekhov. D'yoii hear?" he was told. And as he went towards the door he heard a shocked whispering:

  "It's impossible. Just imagine it, if the emperor saw a face like that? His eyes alone... /'

  "He's a cross-breed. From the East, no doubt."

  "And his body isn't clean. Those boils. .. ."

  Other men from his village who were waiting their turn crowded round Grigory:

  "How did it go, Grisha?"

  "What regiment?"

  "The Lifeguards, eh?"

  "How much did you go on the scales?"

  Hopping on one foot while he pushed his legs into his trousers, Grigory snapped: "Oh, go to hell! What regiment? The Twelfth."

  "Korshunov, Dmitry; Kargin, Ivan," shouted the clerk, poking his head round the door.

  Buttoning up his coat as he went, Grigory ran down the steps.

  The warm wind breathed of thaw; the road was bare of snow in places, and steaming. Clucking hens fluttered across the street, geese were splashing in a puddle; their feet looked orange-pink in the water, like frost-nipped autumn leaves.

  The examination of the horses took place the following day. They were all drawn up on the

  square in a long line against the church wall. Officers bustled to and fro; a veterinary surgeon and his assistant passed down the long line of animals. The Vyeshenskaya ataman went running from the scales to the table in the middle of the square, where the results of the examination were being recorded. A military police officer went by, deep in conversation with a young captain.

  When his turn came, Grigory led his horse to the scales. The surgeon and his assistant measured every part of the animal's body, then weighed it. Before it could be led from the platform the surgeon had deftly taken it by the upper lip, looked at its teeth, felt its chest muscles and, running his strong fingers over its body, like a spider, reached its legs. He felt the knee joints, tapped the tendons, squeezed the bone above the fetlocks. When he had finished his examination he passed on, his white apron flapping in the wind and scattering the scent of carbolic acid.

  Grigory's horse was rejected. Sashka's hopes had proved unjustified, and the experienced surgeon had been shrewd enough to discover the secret blemish of which the old man had spoken. Grigory at once held an agitated consultation with his father, and before half an hour had elapsed he led Pyotr's horse on to

  the scales. The surgeon passed it almost without examination,

  Grigory led the horse a little way off, found a comparatively dry spot, and spread out his saddle-cloth on the ground. His father held his horse, talking to another old man who was also seeing off his son. Past them strode a tall, grey-haired general in a light-grey cloak and a silver astrakhan cap, followed by a group of officers.

  "That's the provincial ataman," Pantelei whispered, nudging Grigory from behind.

  "Looks like a general,"

  "Major-General Makeyev. He's a strict devil!"

  A crowd of officers from various regiments and batteries followed in the wake of the ataman. An artillery major, broad in the hips and shoulders, was talking loudly to a tall handsome Guards officer of the Ataman's Regiment:
<
br />   ",,. What the devil! Such an amazing contrast, you know! An Estonian village, the majority of the people blonde, and this girl such a contrast! And she wasn't the only one! We had all sorts of guesses about it, and then we learned that twenty years ago. .,," The officers walked past the spot where Grigory was arranging his equipment on his saddle-cloth and the wind brought him the final words amid

  a burst of laughter from the officers: "...Apparently a squadron of your Guards used to be stationed in the village."

  A clerk ran past buttoning his jacket with trembling ink-stained fingers and the district assistant chief of police bellowed after him:

  "I told you three copies. Confound you!"

  Grigory stared curiously at the unfamiliar faces of the officers and officials. An adjutant fixed a bored gaze on him, and turned away as he met Grigory's attentive eyes. An old captain went by almost at a run, looking agitated by something and biting his upper lip with his yellow teeth. Grigory noticed a vein beating over the captain's ginger eyebrow.

  On his new saddle-cloth Grigory had set out his saddle, with its green pommel and saddle-bags at back and front; two army coats, two pairs of trousers, a tunic, two pairs of top-boots, a pound and a half of biscuit, a tin of corned beef, groats, and other food in the regulation quantities. In the open saddle-bags were four horseshoes, shoe-nails wrapped in a greasy rag, a soldier's hussif with a couple of needles and thread, and towels.

  He gave a last glance over his accoutrements, and squatted down to rub some mud off the ends of the packstrings with his sleeve. From the end of the square the army com-

  mission slowly passed along the rows of Cossacks drawn up behind their saddle-cloths. The officers and the ataman examined the equipment closely, holding up the edges of their light-coloured greatcoats as they stooped to rummage in the saddle-bags, turned out the contents of the hussifs, and weighed the bags of biscuits in their hands,

  "Look at that tall one over there, lads," said a young Cossack standing next to Grigory, pointing towards the provincial chief of military police, "scratching like a dog after a polecat."