The host took hold of a big jug of home brew and filled and refilled tankards with thick, brown, oily-looking braga, and the braga was all froth the moment you took a pull at it.
“All right, first toast to the one who counts most! Agasha, come on in! To our George medalist! May he get through the war with glory and come back whole to his children, his wife, his parents, and all of us. Many are no longer with us—and we need heroes!”
There was a hollow clatter of earthenware as tankard met tankard. The braga was made from honey, not grain. Brewing it had kept Agasha busy for several days. You could drink yourself silly on it. It was strong all right!
Agasha didn’t sit down. She drained her tankard standing up while the men remained seated, and bowed to Arseni. As to an elder. Although they had joined in the same fun and games at one time. That was how much the war had changed things.
Oh, how it warmed the blood, that braga! Bursting with his own strength, replete with the honor shown him, Arseni didn’t know what to do with all those hands, all those heads … Ah, well, might find a use for them sometime.
The guest from town, who had sat down at the table without crossing himself, now turned gleaming spectacles on the Blagodarevs and paused between mouthfuls to ask, “How do you, gentlemen, feel about cooperation?”
Arseni kept silent. His young memory was so cluttered with -ations and -utions and -itions—cooperation, mobilization, revolutions, requisitions—it was like trying to force your way through a plantation of young fir trees.
His father, though, was an old hand. He rose to the challenge immediately.
“How d’you think we feel? When nails were two rubles a pood before the war, and now they’re forty? We can’t mend a plow or a harrow, we haven’t even got the wherewithal to shoe a horse. Or grease an axle. And you can’t get a harvester or a winnowing machine at any price.”
The visitor looked like a child never yet beaten or pulled by the ears and expecting nothing but kindness from life.
Agasha had been bustling around quietly, visiting the stove in the kitchen, revisiting the table, encouraging them to eat up as she came and went, but taking care not to interrupt this men’s talk. But when she heard the bit about prices she flew off the handle, and attacked the townsman as if it was all his fault.
“And what about sugar? A ruble and a half a pound—who ever heard of that before? An arshin of calico used to cost twelve kopecks, now it’s ninety! What gets us down is that townsfolk jack up prices whenever they feel like it, and hide the goods somewhere.” Agasha flared up quickly. One minute she was watching every twitch of her husband’s eyebrow, the next she was up in arms. Once she got started she’d tell a few home truths.
Pluzhnikov chuckled, and seemed to be enjoying it. He rested his black beard on the strong arch of his folded hands, and explained to Arseni in his booming voice: “Cooperation means an association. It can be a credit association, like ours. Or a savings and loan association.”
“A-a-ah … It’s like an artel, you mean?” Arseni still wasn’t sure. It was a lot to take in all at once. Never a good idea to hurry things.
The man from town showed his white teeth and spoke in still more honeyed and complacent tones, trying to soften the older Blagodarev’s stern gaze, but not forgetting the son.
“An artel, yes, but one embracing the whole district, the whole province, all Russia in fact.”
Grigori Naumovich put it more simply: “If we had right now one strong, unified cooperative system we would know where to buy cheaply, whether it was in Nizhny or in Moscow. And the profiteers would be out of business. And artels would exchange goods directly—ours, Ponzari, Panovy Kusty. An artel could make its deliveries to the War Ministry directly—and the requisitioning officer would also be out of a job. What’s more, an artel could register reserves in its own locality, which is something the plenipotentiaries will never manage.”
Elisei Nikiforovich reacted to the word “plenipotentiaries” with something like a groan. “This winter they took our cattle off us just at calving time. Cows were calving out on the roads. They were slaughtered. But there wasn’t enough salt, and the carcasses rotted when the thaw came.”
Who needed to be told all this? Who was he arguing with? He and Pluzhnikov weren’t differing about anything, and this empty-headed little pouter pigeon cutting his food into smaller and smaller pieces, eating, stowing it away—we aren’t having such a high old time of it in the towns, says he. Strip him of his glasses and his starched shirt, give him a haircut like ours, country style, and he still wouldn’t look like a peasant, just a weedy slip of a boy. Anyway, he’s not a town merchant, he doesn’t make things of his own in a factory, all he’s brought with him is his soft talk. So maybe he’s here to spy on what grain we’ve got?
There was nobody to argue with, but Elisei Nikiforovich, once launched, poured his heart out, eyeing the townie with a piercing, angry look that would have reached far beyond the walls of the parlor, challenging him to understand.
“Why do we have to give up our grain for nothing? Those jabberers in town are out of their minds. There’s a fixed price for everything the village lets the town have—why no fixed prices the other way? There’s a war on, you say, so let’s all behave like brothers. That’s all right. We muzhiks have got nothing against being brothers: take our grain, all of it if you like, without money, only give us your goods without money as well! Like we used to before—a pood of iron for two poods of grain, a scythe for a pood of grain—that’ll suit us fine! Prices can be firm or otherwise just as long as we don’t have to break our backs for nothing. The peasant will slog away as long as he can put one foot in front of the other. But this way he’s going to bust a gut for nothing!”
Arseni was no longer familiar with all these different prices, he had no idea what cost what, all that had slipped his memory: you paid for nothing in the army, and you paid for nothing on leave. He felt remote from all that the three of them, his father included, were saying. His body, and not just his head, was still back there in the trenches. They had still not come home. He was a guest blown in by the wind. He sat quietly, filled up his plate, and went on eating with never a word. The other men, though, were becoming heated.
Agasha came and went quietly over the smooth, snugly fitted board floor, never a heavy step, never a shuffle, brought in an egg-and-cabbage tart, hot from the oven, gave each of them a portion, carried out the empty plates, and hardly another word was heard from her.
Pluzhnikov meanwhile poured drinks—a quick glance, a quick tilt of the bottle—braga, cordials, liqueurs were all on hand. Elisei had the bit between his teeth now, expanding his chest, like a trotter rushing uphill.
“Handfuls of paper—what kind of money d’you call that? That’s not being rich! We’re rich when we’ve got grain in the barn, cattle in the stall, and our fields seeded. When spring comes around, will we have enough seed to sow with? And if—God forbid—they start calling up more men before spring, who’ll be doing the work?”
The townie was so hot under the collar that he stopped eating and drinking and sat twisting his fork like a bradawl in a piece of pie crust, eager to answer back.
Agasha, just as quietly as she had moved about the room, now placed a chair at the townie’s side of the table—he didn’t take up much room—next to her husband, on his right. And sat down demurely. She took little sips from a tumbler, and listened.
Pluzhnikov had not frowned at any of her comings and goings, or checked her with a gesture, and he showed no surprise when she sat by him: clever woman that she was, she had not fallen down on her job, so let her sit in on our men’s talk. A man’s wife is his crowning glory.
Arseni looked and learned.
Pluzhnikov, just back from Olonets province, and widowed earlier, had singled out Agasha when she was no more than eighteen, but already a handsome and competent woman. So that although he had married only a little earlier than Arseni, he was more than twenty years older than Agasha, and his
older daughter by his first wife had married before her. But as husband and wife sat side by side, more or less the same height, you could see from their whole demeanor, from the way they held themselves, that she was not a daughter to him, but all that a wife should be, his prop and, if need be, his replacement. Pluzhnikov was tough and a go-getter. Why shouldn’t he have a young wife? Take more than that to frighten him.
The townie, who perhaps wasn’t to blame for any of it, had by now twisted his bit of pie crust into a shapeless mess. He put down his fork.
“Tell me, though, Grigori Naumych, what you mean by saying you won’t give grain to Petersburg. And why Petersburg in particular?”
Agasha pushed the suckling pig and the horseradish closer to him.
Pluzhnikov poured him some liquor. And helped him out.
“That’s only a manner of speaking, of course—saying we won’t give grain. Right now the peasant is giving everything for the war, you know that yourself, Anatol Sergeich. Tambov province always used to market fifteen poods per desyatin, now it’s twenty-five, and the co-ops have helped quite a bit there. The cattle—they’ve taken thirty thousand head from our district. They took a pair out of every four, without stopping to think whether they were pedigree or dairy cattle. Our cattle, I’m talking about—they don’t touch the gentry’s pedigree herds at all.”
The townie wasn’t looking quite so aggrieved. “But that’s as it should be: they’re the best of their kind, the best breeds …”
“As it should be—maybe. But it says in the paper that in our district Count Orlov-Davydov—a member of your State Duma, remember …”
“Ours, Grigori Naumych,” the guest implored, “yours and mine equally …”
“… concealed two hundred and forty head of cattle. Now it’s come to light, and they’ve put the estate manager on trial. The count’s supposed not to have known. No, if it’s everything for the war, let it be from everybody. Why does it always have to be just from the peasant? They’ve gotten used to our patience.”
The town! Pluzhnikov went there often enough, he wasn’t long back from a trip—and there were still so many young men there, crowds of idlers! Hordes of directors of this and plenipotentiaries extraordinary for that, every one of them exempt from military service. Did they think the peasants were blind, couldn’t see what was going on? Gentry landowners had extra help sent to them, but when did we ever get any? Except maybe a few women on their own, with five children. And there was one fellow always in the tavern. And they’ve started paying crazy wages in the towns—a laborer pulls down five rubles a day, so our girls have started running off to the towns … Everybody wants it easier.
Elisei chimed in again. “Cattle, horses, harness, carts—we hand all of it over, and for less than it’s worth. And they make us supply transport free, just like the old days. No, they don’t spread it around fairly. They strip the village naked and haul everything to the towns.”
Pluzhnikov’s turn again. “That Duma of yours shouldn’t have split into left and right, they shouldn’t spend all their time picking on one another and voting each other down. Every deputy ought to be his own man from his own place, and whatever his own place tells him, whatever he can see with his own eyes needs to be done, that’s what he should say. If you divide up into parties and keep rooting for your own party all the time—that can only divide Russia and bamboozle people.”
Well, well! Wasn’t he an SR himself at one time? Seems you can’t go through life without shedding a few feathers.
Elisei had listened dutifully, but had something to add. “The Duma ought to be helping the Tsar. The Tsar’s there to put our lives in order.”
Pluzhnikov hadn’t finished. “We peasants will never get justice from a Duma like that. In fact, we’ll never get justice from the town at all.”
Zyablitsky was more and more dismayed. He looked utterly despondent. He couldn’t have been more dismayed if his wife had run away from him. He hung his head, propped it up with his hand so that his glasses would not fall off. Or perhaps he was a bit tipsy: our braga’s strong, and you never get a snootful in town nowadays!
“But what do you mean by justice?” he asked in a thin voice.
Pluzhnikov, big-boned, and not short of flesh either, went on drinking as though he hadn’t taken a single swig. His gaze was sober and steady. With his lustrous eyes and his pitch-black beard he could have been a Gypsy—many Tambov people have such looks.
“That’s just it: where does the peasant look for justice? I’ve thought about it a lot. Is the canton ours? No, it isn’t ours. The canton headman isn’t our chief, all he knows how to do is carry out orders from the constable, the inspector, and the superintendent. He and the canton administration are there to meet the endless demands from higher up. That’s what keeps all those clerks busy scribbling. For starvation wages, by the way. What drain do our canton and zemstvo dues go down? And when they rope us in for village meetings it isn’t for something vitally important to us, it’s for some business of their own, which we don’t always understand. We aren’t allowed to decide anything. We just stand there trying to keep our feet from going to sleep. Am I right, Elisei Nikiforych?”
The elder Blagodarev confirmed it, looking fierce.
Pluzhnikov could have been freshening his thoughts for the forthcoming congress of small landowners. “The zemstvo? How can it be our zemstvo when we only elect candidates, and the land captain graciously makes his own selection from them? Anyway, since the war started the zemstvos have had the same itch to give orders. What do they send us from the district zemstvo? Nothing but orders to deliver so many cattle, so many horses, so many carts. And now here you are, Anatol Sergeich—I’m not criticizing, you’re a good man and you sympathize with us, I know, but you’ve never in your life had anything to do with grain, and now they’ve sent you all looking for grain, counting up what stocks we’ve got, am I right?”
The townie couldn’t look him in the face. His glasses were about to slip off.
“A canton zemstvo, where we, not the gentry, get together and decide things for ourselves, like in credit associations, they won’t allow. Or if they do, they’ll twist it into something like the canton board, and we’ll be no freer.”
Elisei waved the word away. “Free? All our lives—no freedom.”
That little word “all” came like a heavy groan from deep inside him.
Pluzhnikov looked around the table expectantly. Agasha started—had she forgotten something?
No, his hand rested briefly, tenderly on hers.
Agasha blushed furiously, flattered by her husband’s open show of affection. But raised herself by a head, pretending that nothing happened.
“The commune?” Pluzhnikov shook his bull-like head. “They’ve been trying to make it work for fifty-odd years now, twisting it into all sorts of shapes, this way and that. But no. That’s not the cart that can get us a thousand versts from here. Thanks be, Stolypin released us. So—they murdered him straightaway. Who? What for? Take your pick. There was a whole bunch of them, all in it together. He improved our lives, and took the landlords’ cheap labor from them, so they killed him. Who d’you think killed the Tsar Liberator? The peasants could never have done it. But the landlords—there again, he’d taken their unpaid labor away, and they couldn’t swap serfs for hounds anymore. That’s the way it is—the town’s our enemy, and the landlord’s our enemy.”
“They wreck all the Tsar’s good wishes,” Elisei said sternly, weightily. “They don’t carry out orders.”
Pluzhnikov, relaxing, propped up his heavy head with both hands. “The village is losing heart. Our peasants are being killed in their thousands at the front. All these call-ups, requisitions, and fixed prices will be the death of us. The town organizes its congresses, conferences, committees, political parties—but there’s nothing like that in the village. Who’s ever going to do anything for us? Anatol Sergeich here and his friends? Don’t take it amiss, Anatol Sergeich, but you aren’t strong e
nough by a long shot to carry us with you.”
“So there we are, Grigori Naumovich, there we are, gentlemen.” Zyablitsky was coming back to life. He had mended his smile. He looked around at each of them in turn, including Arseni, and even Agasha, as though asking them to be his guests. “So you and I have agreed that cooperation can be a great help in our lives.”
Pluzhnikov demurred. “That’s not the point. We don’t say no to cooperation, why should we? In fact, after the war we will band together to buy expensive machines, we can’t avoid it, nobody can get by with a sickle and a flail anymore. After the war working hands will never be as free again as they were.”
But that was just what Elisei Blagodarev couldn’t get into his head. Why should everything change so completely after the war? We remember other wars—nothing changed then!
“Nothing changed after the Turkish war, of course. But after the Japanese—didn’t it just … in ten years the village was unrecognizable. Think how much extra land we bought, how much building we did. Remember how we used to dress.”
True enough.
“After this war there’ll be even bigger changes. Russia’s never fought a war like this in all its existence. I’m telling you the country will be as different as if it was getting over a deadly illness. We have to use our heads, and get ready for it.”
He looked hard at Arseni.
And this time Arseni didn’t feel superfluous. The drink had made his feet hot and his legs weak, but his hands felt as strong as ever. This is where I may prove useful, he thought. Must learn to listen and understand.
Pluzhnikov sat up straight on his chair and tugged at his shirt, pulling it close to his back under the braided belt. He was halfway between the two Blagodarevs in years, in his prime, as they say: he had lived long enough to acquire wisdom, but was not yet losing his strength.
“What does our class amount to—the peasants? How are we treated? The moment anybody rises in the world through education or as a reward for service he’s promoted to ‘personal honorary citizenship’ and no longer counts as a peasant. Anybody who gets on in life is lost to us. But anybody who’s deprived of his rights, any ex-convict, is lumped in with us. To turn us into a herd of cattle. And we’re subject to separate authorities. Subject to the landlords again, through the land captains.” Hands on hips, solid, a fighter, and intelligent. “That freedom you talk about—they’re supposed to have given it to us fifty years ago—so why don’t we just take it?”
November 1916 Page 96