She found Piotra, who had drunk more vodka than was good for him, lying in a cart, groaning. She seized him like a kite a lamb. ‘You’ve over-eaten yourself, you image! Get up and run for the priest!’ she raged.
‘Clear off! Who are you ordering about?’ Piotra protested.
With tears in her eyes Daria thrust two fingers into his mouth, gripped his tongue, and helped him to ease himself. Then she poured a pitcher of cold well-water over him, wiped him as dry as she could and took him to the priest.
Less than an hour later Gregor was standing at Natalia’s side in the church, clutching a wax candle in his hand, his eyes wandering over the wall of whispering people around him, and mentally repeating the importunate words: ‘I’m done now. I’m done now!’ Behind him Piotra coughed. Somewhere in the crowd he saw Dunia’s eyes twinkling; he thought he recognized other faces. He caught the dissonant chorus of voices and the droning responses of the deacon. He was fettered with apathy. He walked round the lectern, treading on the down-at-heel shoes of Father Vissarion; he halted when Piotra gave a gentle tug at his frock-coat. He stared at the flickering little tongues of candle-flame, and struggled with the sleepy torpor which had taken possession of him.
‘Exchange rings!’ he heard Father Vissarion say.
They obeyed. ‘Will it be over soon?’ Gregor mutely asked, as he caught Piotra’s gaze. And the corners of Piotra’s lips twitched, stifling a smile. ‘Soon now.’ Then Gregor kissed his wife’s moist, insipid lips, the church began to smell foully of extinguished candles, and the crowd pressed towards the door.
Holding Natalia’s large, rough hand in his, Gregor went out into the porch. Someone clapped his hat on his head. A warm breeze from the east brought the scent of wormwood to his nostrils. The cool of evening came from the steppe. Lightning flickered beyond the Don, rain was coming; outside the white church fence, above the hum of voices he heard the inviting and tender tinkle of the bells on the restive horses.
The Korshunovs did not arrive at the Melekhovs’ hut until after the bridegroom and bride had gone to the church. Pantaleimon went several times to the gate to see whether they were coming, but the grey road, lined with a growth of prickly thorns, was completely deserted. He turned his eyes towards the Don. The forest was turning a golden yellow. The ripened reeds bent wearily over the Donside marshes. Blending with the dusk, an early autumnal, drowsy, azure haze enwrapped the village. He gazed at the Don, the chalky ridge of hills, the forest lurking in a lilac haze beyond the river, and the steppe. At the turn beyond the cross-roads the fine outline of the wayside shrine was silhouetted against the sky.
Pantaleimon’s ears caught the hardly audible sound of wheels and the yapping of dogs. Two wagonettes turned out of the square into the street. In the first sat Miron with his wife at his side; opposite them was grandad Grishaka in a new uniform, wearing his Cross of St George and his medals. Mitka drove, sitting carelessly on the box, and not troubling to show the foaming horses his whip.
Pantaleimon threw open the gate, and the two wagonettes drove into the yard. Ilinichna sailed down from the porch, the hem of her dress trailing in the dust.
‘Of your kindness, dear friends! Do our poor hut the honour of entering.’ She bent her corpulent waist in a bow.
His head on one side, Pantaleimon flung open his arms and welcomed them: ‘We humbly invite you to come in!’
He called for the horses to be unharnessed and went towards the newcomers. After exchanging greetings they followed their host and hostess into the best room, where a crowd of already half-intoxicated guests was sitting around the table. Soon after their arrival the newly married couple returned from the church. As they entered Pantaleimon poured out a glass of vodka, tears standing in his eyes.
‘Well, Miron Gregorievitch, here’s to our children! May their life be filled with good, as ours has been. May they live happily, and enjoy the best of health.’
They poured grandfather Grishaka out a large glass of vodka, and succeeded in sending half of it into his mouth and half behind the stiff collar of his uniform. Glasses were clinked together. The company drank and drank. The hubbub was like the noise of a market. A distant relation of the Korshunovs, Koloveidin, who was sitting at the end of the table, raised his glass and roared:
‘It’s bitter!’
‘Bitter! Bitter!’ the guests seated around the table clamoured after him.
‘Oh, bitter!’ came the response from the crowded kitchen.
Scowling, Gregor kissed his wife’s insipid lips and sent a venomous glance around the room. A crimson fever of faces. Coarse, drunkenly muddy glances and smiles. Mouths chewing greedily, slobbering on to the embroidered tablecloth. A howl of voices.
Koloveidin opened wide his gap-toothed mouth, and raised his glass:
‘It’s bitter!’
‘Bitter!’ the cry was taken up once more.
Gregor stared hatefully into Koloveidin’s mouth, and noticed the livid tongue between his teeth as he cried the word: ‘Bitter!’
‘Kiss, little chicks!’ Piotra spluttered.
In the kitchen Daria, flushed and intoxicated, began a song. It was taken up by the others and passed into the best room. The voices blended, but above all the rest rose Christonia’s rumble, shaking the window-panes.
The song ended, eating was resumed.
‘Try this mutton!’
‘Take your hand away, my husband’s looking.’
‘Bitter! Bitter!’
In the kitchen the groaning floor shook, heels clattered, and a glass fell to the floor: its jangle was lost in the general hubbub. Across the heads of those sitting at the table Gregor glanced into the kitchen. The women were dancing now, to the accompaniment of shouts and whistles. They shook their ample bottoms (there was not a thin one there, for each was wearing five or six skirts), waved lace handkerchiefs, and worked their elbows in the dance.
The music of the three-tiered accordion sounded imperatively. The player began the tune of the Cossack dance. A shout went up:
‘A circle! Form a circle!’
‘Squeeze up a bit!’ Piotra demanded, pushing the women aside.
Gregor roused himself and winked at Natalia:
‘Piotra’s going to dance the “Cossack”! You watch him!’
‘Who with?’ she asked.
‘Don’t you see? With your mother.’
Maria Lukinichna set her arms akimbo, her handkerchief in her left hand. Piotra went up to her with mincing steps, dropped to his haunches and rose again, and returned backwards to his place. Lukinichna picked up her skirt as though about to trip across a damp meadow, picked out the tempo with her toe, and danced amid a howl of approbation, kicking out her legs like a man.
The accordion player accelerated the tempo. But Piotra kept pace with the music, dancing with incredibly small steps, then with a shout dropped to a squatting position and danced around, smacking the palms of his hands against the legs of his boots, biting the ends of his moustache in the corner of his mouth. He swung his knees in and out at great speed; his forelock tossed on his head.
Gregor’s view was blocked by the crowd at the door. He heard only the shouts of the drunken guests and the continual rattle of the iron-shod heels, like the crackle of a burning pine-board.
Then Miron danced with Ilinichna; they stepped out seriously and with their accustomed businesslike air. Pantaleimon stood on a stool watching them, dangling his lame leg and clicking his tongue. Instead of his legs his lips and ear-ring danced.
Others not so expert tried to dance the Cossack and other difficult dances. But the crowd shouted at them:
‘Don’t spoil it!’
‘Smaller steps! Oh, you …!’
‘His legs are light enough, but his bottom gets in his way.’
‘Oh, get on with it!’
Long ere this grandfather Grishaka was completely drunk. He embraced the bony back of his neighbour on the bench, and buzzed like a gnat in his ear:
‘What year did you
first see service?’
His neighbour, an old man stunted like an ancient oak, replied:
‘1839, my son!’
‘When?’ Grishaka stuck out his ear.
‘1839, I told you.’
‘What’s your name? What regiment did you serve in?’
‘Maxim Bogatiriev. I was a corporal in Baklanov’s regiment.’
‘Are you of Melekhov’s family?’
‘What?’
‘Your family, I asked?’
‘Aha! I’m the bridegroom’s grandfather on his mother’s side.’
‘In Baklanov’s regiment, did you say?’
The old man gazed at Grishaka with faded eyes, and nodded.
‘So you must have been through the Caucasian campaign?’
‘I served under Baklanov himself and helped in the Caucasian conquest. We had some rare cossacks in our regiment. They were as tall as the guards, but stooped a little, long-armed and broad-shouldered. That’s the men we had, my son! His excellency the dead general was good enough to give me the cat for stealing a carpet …’
‘And I was in the Turkish campaign. Ah? Yes, I was there.’ Grishaka threw out his sunken chest jingling with medals.
‘… We took a village at dawn, and at mid-day the bugler sounded the alarm,’ the old man continued without heeding Grishaka.
‘We were fighting around Rossitz and our regiment, the twelfth Don Cossack, was engaged with the janissaries,’ Grishaka told him.
‘As I was in a hut the bugler sounded the alarm …’
‘Yes,’ Grishaka went on, beginning to get annoyed and angrily waving his hand. ‘The Turkish janissaries wear white sacks on their heads. Ah? White sacks on their heads.’
‘… The bugler sounded the alarm, and I said to my comrade: “We’ll have to retreat, Timofei, but first we’ll have that carpet off the wall.”’
‘I have been decorated with two Georges, awarded for heroism under fire. I took a Turkish major alive.’ Grandfather Grishaka began to weep and bang his withered fist on his neighbour’s spine. But the latter, dipping a piece of chicken in the cherry jelly, lifelessly stared at the soiled tablecloth and mumbled:
‘And listen what sin the unclean Spirit led me into, my son! I’d never before taken anything that wasn’t mine, but now I happened to see that carpet, and I thought, “that would make a good horsecloth.”’
‘I’ve seen those parts myself. I’ve been in lands across the sea as well,’ Grishaka tried to look his neighbour in the eyes, but the deep sockets were overgrown with a shaggy bush of eyebrows and beard. So he resorted to craft. He wanted to win his neighbour’s attention for the climax of his story, and he plunged into the middle of it without any preliminaries: ‘And the captain gives the order: “In troop columns at the gallop! Forward!”’
But the old Baklanov regiment cossack threw back his head like a charger at the sound of the trumpet, and dropping his fist on the table, whispered:
‘Lances at the ready; draw sabres, Baklanov’s men!’ His voice suddenly grew stronger, his faded eyes glittered and burned. ‘Baklanov’s boys!’ he roared, opening wide his toothless yellow jaws. ‘Into attack – forward!’
And he gazed at Grishaka with a youthful and intelligent look, and let the tears trickling over his beard fall unwiped.
Grishaka also grew excited:
‘He gave us this command, and waved his sword. We galloped forward, and the janissaries were drawn up like this,’ he drew an irregular square on the tablecloth with his finger, ‘and firing at us. Three times we charged them. Each time they beat us back. Whenever we tried, their cavalry came out of a little wood on their flank. Our troop commander gave the order and we turned and went at them. We smashed them. Rode them down. What cavalry in the world can stand up against cossacks? They fled into the wood, I see their officer just in front of me, riding on a bay. A good-looking officer, black-whiskered. He looks back at me and draws his pistol. He shot, but he missed me. I spurred my horse and caught up with him. I was going to cut him down, but then I thought better of it. After all, he was a man too. I seized him round the waist with my right arm, and he flew out of the saddle. He bit my arm, but I took him all the same …’
Grishaka glanced triumphantly at his neighbour, but the old man’s head had fallen on to his chest, and he was snoring comfortably.
Chapter Seven
Sergei Platonovitch Mokhov could trace his ancestry a long way back.
During the reign of Peter the First a State barge was travelling down the Don to Azov with a cargo of biscuit and gunpowder. The cossacks of the little robber town of Chigonak, nestling on the bank of the upper Don, fell on the barge by night, destroyed the sleepy guards, pillaged the biscuit and gunpowder and sank the vessel.
The Tsar ordered out soldiers from Voronezh, and they burnt down the town of Chigonak, ruthlessly put the guilty cossacks to the sword, and hanged forty of them on a floating gallows, which, as a warning to the unruly villages, was sent sailing down the Don.
Some ten years later the spot where the hearths of the Chigonak huts had smoked began again to be inhabited. At the same time, on the Tsar’s instructions a secret agent, a Russian peasant named Mokhov, came to live there. He traded in knife-hafts, tobacco, flints, and the other odds and ends necessary to the cossacks’ everyday life. He bought up and resold stolen goods, and once or twice a year journeyed to Vornezh, ostensibly to replenish his stocks, but in reality to report to the authorities on the state of the district.
From this Russian peasant Nikitka Mokhov descended the merchant family of Mokhovs. They took deep root in the cossack earth; they multiplied and grew into the district like a sturdy field bush, reverently preserving the half-rotten credentials given to their ancestor by the governor of Voronezh. The credentials might have been preserved until this day but for a great fire which occurred during the lifetime of Sergei Mokhov’s grandfather. This Mokhov had already ruined himself once by card-playing, but was getting on to his feet again when the fire engulfed everything. After burying his paralytic father, Sergei Platonovitch had to begin afresh, starting by buying bristles and feathers. For five years he lived miserably, swindling and squeezing the cossacks of the district out of every kopek, then he suddenly jumped from ‘cattle-dealer Seriozhka’ to ‘Sergei Platonovitch’, opened a little haberdashery shop, married the daughter of a half-demented priest, received no small dowry with her and set up as a linen draper. Sergei Platonovitch began to trade in textiles at just the right moment. On the instruction of the army authorities, about this time the cossacks were migrating in entire villages from the left bank of the Don, where the ground was unproductive and sandy, to the right bank. And instead of having to journey thirty miles or more for goods they found Sergei Mokhov’s shop, packed with attractive commodities, right on the spot. Sergei extended his business widely, like a three-tiered accordion, and traded in everything requisite to simple village life. He even began to supply agricultural machinery. Evidently his trading yielded the quick-witted Sergei considerable profit, for within three years he had opened a grain elevator, and two years after the death of his first wife he began the construction of a steam flourmill.
He squeezed Tatarsk and the neighbouring villages tightly in his swarthy fist. There was not a hut free from debt to Sergei Mokhov. Nine hands were employed at the mill, seven in the shop, and four watchmen: altogether twenty mouths dependent on the merchant’s pleasure for their daily bread. He had two children by his first wife: the girl Elizabieta and the sluggish, scrofulous Vladimir. His second wife Anna was childless. All her belated mother-love and accumulated spleen were poured out on the children. Her nervous temperament had a bad influence on them, and their father paid them no more attention than he gave his stable-hand or cook. His business activities occupied all his time. The children grew up uncontrolled. His insensitive wife made no attempt to penetrate into the secrets of the child mind, and the brother and sister were alien to each other, different in character and unlike their parents.
Vladimir was sullen, sluggish, with a sly look and an unchildish seriousness. Liza, who lived in the society of the maid and the cook (the latter a dissolute, much too experienced woman), early saw the seamy side of life. The women aroused an unhealthy curiosity in her, and whilst still an angular and bashful adolescent she had grown as wild as a spurge.
The impatient years slipped by. The old grew older and the young grew green of leaf.
Vladimir Mokhov, a slender, sickly yellow lad now in the fifth class of the high school, was walking through the mill yard. He had recently returned home for the summer vacation, and, as usual, he had gone along to look at the mill and jostle among the crowd. It ministered to his vanity to hear the respectful murmur of the cossack carters:
‘The master’s heir …’
Carefully picking his way among the wagons and the heaps of dung, Vladimir reached the gate. Then he remembered he had not been to see the power plant, and turned back.
Close to the red oil-tank, at the entrance to the machine room, Timofei the mill-hand, Valet the scalesman, and Timofei’s assistant David were kneading a great ring of clay with bare feet, their trousers turned above their knees.
‘Ah! Here’s the master!’ the scalesman jokingly greeted him.
‘Good afternoon. What is it you’re doing?’
‘We’re mixing clay,’ David said with an unpleasant smile, with difficulty drawing his feet out of the clinging mass. ‘Your father is careful of the roubles, and won’t hire women to do it. Your father’s stingy,’ he added.
Vladimir flushed. He suddenly felt an invincible dislike for the ever-smiling David and his contemptuous tone.
‘What do you mean, “stingy”?’
‘He’s terribly mean,’ David explained with a smile.
The others laughed approvingly. Vladimir felt all the smart of the insult. He stared coldly at David.
‘So you’re … dissatisfied?’ he asked.
‘Come into this mess and mix it for yourself, and then you’ll know. What fool would be satisfied? It would do your father good to do some of this. It would give him a pain in the belly,’ David replied. He trod heavily around the ring of clay, kneading it with his feet, and now smiling gaily. Foretasting a sweet revenge, Vladimir turned over a fitting reply in his mind.
And Quiet Flows the Don Page 10