by Iliazd
The captain’s emergence was met with shouts and threats. “Don’t dare touch her,” the peasants growled, shaking their fists. How’s this, these scum dare make threats? The sons of bitches should be shot, and the cunt with them. But Arcady had been taken unawares. He, spoiled by the peasants’ servility and cowardice, bound by the epoch of confidence, and certain that they would never, as he said, dare, did not have on hand a sufficient number of soldiers to disperse the unusual congregation. And was it worth it? Was it creditable that they would fight furiously for such a one? It could end badly! And then, on account of this whore, the administration would not praise him for the war…In short, rejecting immediate action, he put on a smile and, leaning over the railing, asked what was the matter
In response, the marble sculpture came to life and, emerging from the respectfully parting crowd, approached the village hall. “So beautiful, truly, if she were not pregnant, I’d be ready to change my tastes for her sake,” Arcady muttered. And with great haste and polite antics he ran down the stairs, ready for anything they might ask of him and inviting her to enter. But Ivlita only came near the captain, said something to him, swayed, and once more entered the crowd. Rooted to the spot with his mouth hanging open, Arcady, daring neither to turn back nor to cry out, gazed at the beauty, who, passing the similarly dazed peasants, slowly rounded the cemetery and was hidden beyond the cypresses
When, with the coming of night, Laurence returned to the beyonsensical hamlet, he found Ivlita not in mourning, but wearing a pink dress in the latest fashion, broad and pleated, so that her belly was not very noticeable—a Sunday outfit—with a high hairdo and weighed down with the jewels Laurence had brought from the city, beautiful as a fairy tale and cheerful. The table was meticulously set and decorated with paper flowers, laden with dish after dish (Laurence’s eyes caught fire at the sight of this abundance after so many months in the cave), and in the middle of the table lay a bottomless silver horn, seemingly the very same one. Laurence was embarrassed and asked what had provoked all this
“Simply an idle caprice.” Ivlita wants a befitting celebration of their reconciliation and return to the little village
Of course, Ivlita was right, Laurence agreed. It went without saying, this bourgeois existence sure was the real, well-ordered life, and everything else was vanity, folly, and fidgeting. To be happy, nothing more was required than a sated mind and deep sleep. “Well then, wonderful,” Laurence concluded, becoming surprisingly mushy and kinder. “We’ll start life on a new footing.” And, sinking into an armchair, he asked for some wine
Ivlita took the silver horn from the table, filled it with fragrant brandy and brought it to him. Laurence hesitated. He was too worn out and overworked to stand up to such a quantity. But the memory of their first encounter lashed against his vanity. Laurence accepted the horn and emptied it, without stopping for breath
Laurence had never drunk such strong brandy. Right away, everything became unstable, started wheeling about, and his breathing broke off. How weak he was. His legs were taken from him, and he saw stars, shifting, changing, jets of hot water were spurting, and then, it seemed, cold, and after that everything receded from him to an uncertain depth, at the bottom of which Ivlita was bathing, winged and rapidly approaching. Laurence felt Ivlita near him, stroking his head, unbuttoning his collar, taking off his bandolier, securing the pistol from his bosom. What for? Gathering his strength, Laurence opened his eyes and looked at her questioningly and warily. But it was too late
Lifting the silver horn, Ivlita leaned over and, calling out, “Enter,” struck Laurence on the head with such force that the young man rolled out of the armchair without even a groan
And the room was already filled to bursting. Captain Arcady, smiling and self-satisfied, soldiers, police, a few villagers. Dropping the horn, Ivlita turned away and withdrew into a corner. Not even looking when they dragged Laurence, bloody and firmly bound, into the yard. She remained standing like that until everyone left, last of all Captain Arcady, who had been pacing for a long time around the deserted dining room, hoping that Ivlita would suddenly turn back, would say something, and deliberating whether to break the silence. Losing his patience, he dashed out into the yard and walked around for the entire night, despite the unbearable cold, refusing to spend the night with anyone
As day was dawning, Laurence began coming to his senses. The captain, fearing an attack of rage, ordered the ropes to be pulled more tightly. But his precautionary measures were superfluous. Laurence didn’t move a muscle. His gaze slid across the representatives of authority and settled on the house from which he had been dragged. Laurence never tore his gaze from this house until he was bound to a stretcher and carried away. Laurence wept
Before his departure, Arcady drew from his pocket a bundle of money, was about to send a soldier with it, but then became emboldened and, entering Ivlita’s house, cast the money down on the table
Ivlita was sitting opposite the window, hanging her sun-petted head and crooning something, rocking an empty cradle
The young man, in crossing his horizonless prison cell and after resting near the wall, had only to resolve on four more steps, and he felt: in the sole of one of his shoes there was some kind of surplus that caused him pain at every step. But, preoccupied with his anger and bitterness, he didn’t even wonder why
The narrow loophole of the ancient fortress (turned into a prison) that served as a window for his cell was not sufficient to light up the stone receptacle, but that made the brightness outside all the more blinding and objects in the outside world stood out all the more. Reaching into a crack, Laurence contrived to lift himself up and have a look, and the snow-covered mountains, the mountains of his fatherland that erased the horizon to the north-northeast, were just as near and obtrusive as if Laurence were looking at them from his native village. But now their sight did not instill joy, nor did it leave him indifferent. They oppressed him, with no respite, and Laurence, ostensibly self-contained, walled off from the world, but in reality, one who had not escaped that same old familiar, boring world, one chained to the mountains, surmised that in prison his last hope for redemption had been lost. At last he understood how small and intolerably cramped was the castle prepared for him
And Laurence decided he would make no attempt to get out and therefore would never leave from this time forth. Court and executioner were of no account. Life had been traversed, and death was already present in light puffy clouds. Redemptive death would lead him away into a dungeon without sleep, sun, and air
The young man played mechanically with the shackles that weighed down his legs and it seemed to him that it wasn’t the first time he had reckoned up the links. But when was that? And, stepping back from one day to another in which, once he had reviewed a life that had not touched him at all, had indifferently passed by Ivlita’s infidelity, Basilisk’s perfidy, the mercenary Galaction, and the traitor Luke, always searching for the origin of these chains, Laurence finally recalled them ornamenting the spine and entwining the neck of Brother Mocius that evening. When the monk was flying from the precipice, the iron was disentangled and left shining on the riverbank. Wasn’t Laurence, crouched down, worrying the chains just so, demanding from them the story of the man who had worn them voluntarily
It wasn’t worth digging out: memories were just memories, for Laurence was still alive, but his mind was already dead. The penitential chains provoked neither revulsion nor fear; after all, he, too, had donned them of his own free will. They clanked, and that was all
Laurence tried standing up and again felt pain in the sole of his foot. He decided to take off his shoe. The sole was hard, thick, hiding something. Laurence tore the shoe apart, split the sole, and noticed there was a saw sewn into it
What could this mean? And no matter how much his mind had deserted him, Laurence still guessed the saw had been sewn in on purpose, someone had slipped him the shoes while he was being admitted to the prison so he could save himself, some unk
nown admirers were trying to help him, and betrayed by all, he was, nevertheless, not alone. And new might surged from somewhere, new resolve and hope. And hadn’t he, all his life, sawn just like this through trunks and boards in his native village, hadn’t the fine steel always destroyed chestnuts and pines, as it did now government iron? The work was done. A break until tomorrow. To run as soon as possible to freedom
The prison walls ceased not just to be formidable, but even sound. It turned out the frame around the loophole had been carefully loosened by someone and it didn’t take much effort to push the stones out. Soon, the opening was so wide he could stick not just his head through, but also his shoulders
Down below, beneath the fortress, ran the river that, making its way from the paradisiacal valley and the village with the sawmill, became muddier and stouter. But no matter how troubled its waters suffering shortness of breath, the bottom was visible, and on the bottom some drowned man lay prone, surrounded by fish
“Can it really be Brother Mocius, yet again?” Laurence flared up. “If so, the monk is positively starting to meddle too much. Well, it doesn’t matter, I spared him in the cathedral, today I’ll get rid of him once and for all.” And Laurence, crimson with rage, applied himself and, pushing more stones out, flew headlong with them into the river
When he had disappeared beneath the water, the swimmer opened his eyes. Fish were hurtling past in schools and looked especially huge through the emerald water, changing color and position every second, meeting together, circling, chasing one another, tumbling, and vanishing. In an eddy of sand and silt, turning now into trees, now into beasts’ muzzles, now to ice and fog, they hurtled by. Sometimes a crayfish claw would butt in, threatening the swimmer
Several times, drowned people who had not lost their human image slid above Laurence. But whether Brother Mocius was among them, there was no chance of saying. Fighting the current, and not wanting to rise to the surface, Laurence dove deeper and deeper, suffocating, groping around and frightening hosts of fish
And the desire to pursue the monk unexpectedly disappeared, the search lost all meaning, and Laurence realized that not just his mind, but all of him was dying, there was no need to search when in death was everything, nothing to avenge when death is life without offense. And he sensed that, deceased, he was floating upward, escorted by fish, to the surface of another world and the unbearable lightness of eternal appeasement. But the fish drew back, the wind burst into his lungs, and the still unfinished day broke over his eyes. A shot, it seems. That means they’ve noticed the flight. Need to escape. Good thing the wooded bank across from the castle is close and reaching it won’t be any trouble
First thing is shaking the guards from the trail and changing this prison garb for something passable. But, once he crawled onto the bank, the young man noticed that dusk was near. Let them follow. But which way should he get going? What kind of welcome was waiting in the first village?
Laurence’s deliberations were interrupted by the sudden appearance of an unfamiliar villager who stepped out of the bushes. Laurence was ready to pounce on the stranger, but then he, waving his arms, cried out: “Don’t be afraid, I’m one of yours, I have everything ready for you to change clothes.” The villager untied a package. There really was clothing in it. In a minute, Laurence was transformed. Taking his hand, the villager hurriedly led him into the thicket, and after they’d passed through, took off running along the edge of the forest
Laurence had not yet had time to ask who his savior was and what this story in the spirit of what Basilisk meant when they reached some structures standing not far from the bank that resembled an inn and stables
His conductor entered one of the houses with the bandit and, saying nothing to his landsmen who were in the room, invited Laurence to sit at a table, wonderfully set, and fortify himself
“Hurry up,” said the stranger. “The horse is ready, but the gendarmes won’t be on foot, either, and you’d best keep them at a respectable distance. What can you do?” he added, as if justifying himself. “Everyone has to work. We’ve organized a concern to arrange escapes from the fortress. Sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn’t. Yours came off quite well. But when you’re home, don’t be stingy settling accounts with our emissary. The police, naturally, suspect some enterprising dispensation, but for now, they don’t have enough evidence, and we give them the fattest bribes we can, so they don’t keep us from earning our milk money. Well, get flying. Here’s a weapon, just in case. And as for the way…”
And the stranger furnished the necessary information in brief
When Laurence had left, his hosts gathered peacefully together and, watching some mutton turn on a spit, waited for the gendarmes until midnight. But there was no pursuit
Laurence, when, toward morning, he had covered half the way separating him from the mountains, ran into a crowd of peasants (whether they were participants in the enterprise or simply fans, he couldn’t tell) who warned him it wasn’t safe to show his face in the nearest settlement and showed him a detour. He got a fresh horse from them and continued his flight
Why, for the third time, was he fighting his way back to the village where he had been betrayed and abandoned by everyone? What magnet drew him, despite all the prisons and his own resolutions, into the mountains, not permitting him to die in a foreign land? And although the question answered itself, Laurence pored over it for a long time, assuring himself that he was mistaken—altogether, as he said, not for that reason. But to the extent that his native ground came closer, he resisted less, and was obliged at last to admit that, no matter how hard he tried to think about something else, he was being pulled toward Ivlita
He was dying, so be it, but she must die with him. And no matter how distasteful it was for Laurence to note that he was moved by desire for revenge on a woman, and although he considered himself guilty for entering into her confidence and silly for plunging into so many affairs on account of a moll—and not just himself, the surrounding world and way of life were also to blame—the desire to settle accounts, to kill her, got the upper hand over all other considerations. And why the hell, he added, bestow meaning on seaweed, on his memories of Brother Mocius, and exaggerate Ivlita’s role? A whore, that’s all there was to it; a whore like all the others. But she’d get what she deserved, and the past would be wiped out with her
And to reinforce the threat, Laurence reached for his pistol. But he had only to touch his gun and Ivlita rose up before him, soaring aloft over the road and stretching her arms out toward him, in her superhuman glory, in her beauty, for the sake of which you could accept any humiliation, suffer every kind of want. And the young man bowed his head and let his arms fall to his sides. Letting go of the bridle, not noticing that the horse was going along at a walk, he was ready to weep in self pity
Such lack of will? Was he a bandit, or not? Honor, dignity—did these words still mean anything, or had they been hollowed out for all time? And had the name of Laurence really lost its shock music? So fainthearted before a whore? Laurence jerked the gun up and shot. But Ivlita melted away
No matter, he would find her there, in the hamlet. And the bandit gave his horse free rein to gallop, annoyed at wasting a bullet. As he approached his native village, he drank in the surroundings and once more acquired powers that would have no end
The sun had already spurned the hills, but the colors of sunset, splayed across the humid sky, two-thirds in cloud cover, and whirling in the air with the dead leaves, made the landscape soothing to the point of irritation. The shepherds’ whistles and the bleating of goats descending from the pastures and intersecting, here and there, the road, channeling toward the villages, and the scent of fermenting corn spoke of an end to long and pointless tumult. From the forest that clothed the slopes of the nearby mountains, implacable, spotted with evergreens scattered among legions of beeches, the fogs flowed in streams, and the wind, evenly and lovingly, used them to cover the trees that had begun shivering. To keep his hor
se from slowing its pace, he had to spur and whip it every minute, but it insisted on its own way, as though considering it unseemly to gallop in the midst of this autumnal calm
The village with the sawmill was as familiar and ordinary as if Arcady, who had left the evening before, had never been quartered there. Despite the late hour, the whine of saws reached him from the mill: overtime before the winter break. The cattle, reluctantly yielding the path to the rider, the sound of little bells, the cackling of hens. In front of the taverns and the village hall a multitude of people, hurrying to talk their fill before the snows. They’re beating tambourines and dancing
Spattering mud, dismounting and jumping back into the saddle at a gallop, peppering the air with bullets, Laurence hurtled past the gaping mouths of his fellow villagers. He was already far away when the people began exclaiming in response and the musicians, who had pulled up short, began playing a welcome; he didn’t see the tavern keepers dragging skins onto the street and filling every jug gratis, and he didn’t take part in the drinking celebration, the first since their liberation from the soldiers, with which the peasants rewarded themselves in plenty for what they had lived through. But the accordion’s notes slid along behind the rider for a long time, and now and then, scaring them off, a lone clarinetist overstrained his instrument