‘The dogs! The dogs! Drive them off!’ old Listnitsky cried as he dropped from his saddle.
Gregor managed with difficulty to drive away the dogs, then glanced towards his master. Standing a little way off was Stepan Astakhov. His face working strangely, he was turning the iron bar over and over in his hands.
‘Where are you from, my man?’ Listnitsky turned to Stepan.
‘From Tatarsk,’ Stepan answered after a momentary hesitation, and he took a step in Gregor’s direction.
‘What’s your name?’ Listnitsky asked.
‘Astakhov.’
‘When are you going home, my lad?’
‘Tonight.’
‘Bring us that carcass,’ Listnitsky pointed to the wolf with his foot. ‘I’ll pay whatever it costs.’ He wiped the sweat from his purple face with his scarf, turned away, and slipped the flask off his back.
Gregor went to his stallion. As he set foot in the stirrup he glanced back. Trembling uncontrollably, Stepan was coming towards him, pressing his great, heavy hands against his chest. He walked up to the horse and seized the stirrup, pressing himself right against the stallion’s side.
‘You’re looking well, Gregor!’ Stepan said.
‘Praise be!’
‘What are your thoughts about it? Ah?’
‘What is it I’m to think about?’
‘You’ve carried off another man’s wife … and you’re having your will of her?’
‘Let go of the stirrup.’
‘Don’t be afraid! I won’t beat you.’
‘I’m not afraid. Stop that talk!’ Gregor flushed and raised his voice.
‘I shan’t fight you today; I don’t want to … But mark my words, Grishka; sooner or later I shall kill you.’
‘“We shall see,” said the blind man!’
‘Mark my words well. You’ve brought shame on me. You’ve castrated my life as if I was a pig. You see there …’ he stretched out his hands palms upward. ‘I’m ploughing, and the Lord knows what for. Do I need it for myself? I could shift around a bit and get through the winter that way. It’s only the dreariness of it all that gets me down. You’ve brought terrible shame on me, Gregor.’
‘Don’t complain to me. I shan’t understand. The full man doesn’t understand the hungry.’
‘That’s true,’ Stepan agreed, staring up into Gregor’s face. And suddenly he broke into a simple, boyish smile which wrinkled the corners of his eyes into tiny furrows. ‘I’m sorry only for one thing, lad, very sorry … You remember how the year before last we boxed together at Shrovetide?’
‘No, I don’t.’
‘Why, it was when the single men fought the married, do you remember? And how I chased after you? You were thinner then, a green rush as against me. I spared you that time, but if I’d hit you as you were running away, I’d have split you in two. You ran quickly, all springy-like; if I’d struck you hard on the side you would not have been alive in the world today.’
‘Don’t grieve over it, we may yet come up against each other.’
Stepan rubbed his forehead with his hand as though trying to recall something. Still holding the stirrup with his left hand, he walked alongside the stallion. Gregor watched his every movement. He noticed Stepan’s drooping flaxen moustaches, the heavy scrub of his long unshaven chin. His dirty face, marked with whiter runnels of sweat, was sad, and strangely unfamiliar. As he looked Gregor felt that he might well be gazing from a hill-top at the distant steppe veiled in a rainy mist. A grey weariness and emptiness ashened Stepan’s features. He dropped behind without a word of farewell. Gregor touched up his horse into a canter.
‘Wait a bit. And how is … how is Aksinia?’
Knocking a lump of earth off his boot with the whip, Gregor replied:
‘Oh, she’s all right.’
He halted the stallion and glanced back. Stepan was standing with his feet planted wide apart, chewing a piece of twig between his teeth. For a moment Gregor had a feeling of immeasurable pity for him, but jealousy rose uppermost. Turning in his saddle, he shouted:
‘She doesn’t yearn for you, don’t worry!’
‘Is that so?’
Gregor brought the whip down between his horse’s ears and rode away without replying.
The night before Easter Sunday the sky was overcast with masses of black cloud, and rain began to fall. A raw darkness enveloped Tatarsk. At dusk the ice of the Don began to crack with a protracted, rolling groan, and crushed by a mass of broken ice the first floe emerged from the water. The ice broke suddenly over a length of three miles, and drifted downstream. The floes crashed against one another and against the banks, to the sound of the church bell ringing measuredly for the service. At the first bend, where the Don sweeps to the left, the ice was dammed up. The roar and scraping of the moving floes reached the village. The lads had gathered in the church enclosure. Through the open doors came the muffled tones of the service, light streamed gaily through the windows, whilst outside in the darkness the lads surreptitiously tickled and kissed the girls, and whispered dirty stories to one another.
From the Don came a flowing whisper, rustle and crunch, as though a strongly built, gaily dressed woman as tall as a poplar were passing by, her great, invisible skirts rustling.
At midnight, Mitka Korshunov, riding a horse bareback, clattered through the Egyptian darkness up to the church. He tied the reins to the horse’s mane, and with a smack of the hand on her flanks sent her back home. He listened to the sound of the hoofs for a moment, then, adjusting his belt, he went into the church. At the porch he removed his cap, bent his head devoutly, and thrusting aside the women, pressed up to the altar. The cossacks were crowded in a black mass on the left; on the right was an azure throng of women. Mitka found his father in the front row, and seizing him by the elbow, whispered into his ear:
‘Father, come outside for a moment.’
As he pressed out of the church through the dense curtain of mingled odours, Mitka’s nostrils quivered. He was overwhelmed by the vapour of burning wax, the stench of women’s sweaty bodies, the deathly odour of long-lying clothes brought out only at Christmas and Easter time, the smell of damp leather, naphthaline and other, indistinguishable scents.
In the porch Mitka put his mouth close to his father’s ear and said:
‘Natalia is dying.’
On Easter Friday the women gathered in the hut of Korshunov’s neighbour, Pelagea Maidannikov, for a talk. Her husband Gavrila had written from Lodz that he was trying to get furlough for Easter. Pelagea had white-washed the walls and tidied up the hut as early as the Monday before Easter, and from Thursday onward she waited expectantly, running to the gate and standing at the fence, straight-haired and gaunt, the signs of her pregnancy showing in her face. Shading her eyes with her palm she stared down the road. Perhaps he was coming? She was pregnant, but lawfully so. Gavrila had returned from his regiment the previous year, bringing his wife a present of Polish chintz. He had spent four nights with his wife, and on the fifth day had got drunk, cursed in Polish and German, and with tears in his eyes had sat singing an old cossack song about Poland. His friends and brothers had sat with him, singing and drinking vodka before dinner. After dinner he had said good-bye to his family and had ridden off. And from that day Pelagea had begun to watch the hem of her skirt.
She explained to Natalia Korshunov how she came to be pregnant. ‘A day or two before Gavrila arrived, I had a dream,’ she said. ‘I was going through the meadow, and I saw our old cow in front of me, the one we sold last August. She was walking along, and milk was dripping from her teats. Lord, I thought, however did I come to milk her so badly? Next day old woman Drozhdikha came for some hops, and I told her my dream. And she told me to break a piece of wax off a candle, roll it into a ball, and to take and bury it in some cow-dung, for misfortune was watching at the window. I ran to do as she said, but I couldn’t find the candle. I had had one, I knew, but the children had taken it or else the cockroaches had eaten it. Then
Gavrila arrived, and the misfortune with him. Before that I had gone for three years without trouble, and now look at me!’ She thrust her fingers into her belly.
Pelagea fretted whilst waiting for her husband. She was bored with her own company, and so on the Friday she invited her women neighbours to come and spend the evening with her. Natalia came with an unfinished stocking, for when spring came grandad Grishaka felt the cold all the more. She was unnaturally full of high spirits, and laughed more than necessary at the others’ jokes, trying to hide her yearning for her husband from them. Pelagea was sitting on the stove with her bare, violet-veined legs dangling, and bantering the young and shrewish Frossia.
‘How was it you beat your husband, Frossia?’ she asked.
‘Don’t you know how? On the back, on the head, and wherever I could lay my hands on him.’
‘I didn’t mean that, but why you did it.’
‘I had to,’ Frossia answered unwillingly.
‘If you were to catch your husband with another woman would you keep your tongue quiet?’ a gaunt woman asked deliberately.
‘Tell us all about it, Frossinia.’
‘There’s nothing to tell …’
‘Don’t be afraid, we’re all friends here.’
Spitting out a sunflower-seed husk into her hand, Frossia smiled:
‘Well, I’d noticed his goings-on for a long time, and then someone told me he was at the mill with a loose woman from across the Don. I went out and found them by the …’
‘Any news of your husband, Natalia?’ another woman interrupted, turning to Natalia.
‘He’s at Yagodnoe,’ she replied in a whisper.
‘Do you think to live with him or not?’
‘She might think to, but he doesn’t,’ their hostess intervened. Natalia felt the hot blood surging to her face. She bent her head over her stocking and glanced from beneath her eyelids at the women. Realizing that she could not hide her flush of shame from them, she deliberately, yet so clumsily that everybody noticed it, sent the ball of wool rolling from her knees, and then bent down and fumbled with her fingers over the cold floor.
‘Spit on him, woman! He would only be a yoke to you,’ one woman advised her with unconcealed pity in her voice.
Natalia’s artificial animation died away like a spark in the wind. The women’s conversation turned to the latest scandal, to tittle-tattle and gossip. Natalia knitted in silence. She forced herself to sit on until the party broke up, and then went home, turning over an unformulated decision in her mind. Shame for her uncertain situation (for she still would not believe that Gregor had gone for ever, and was ready to forgive him and take him back) drove her on to a further step. She resolved to send a letter secretly to him, in order to learn whether he had gone altogether or whether he was changing his mind. When she reached home she found Grishaka sitting in his little room reading an old, leather-bound, grease-stained copy of the Gospels. Her father was in the kitchen mending a fishing-net. Her mother had put the children to bed and was asleep on the stove. Natalia took off her jacket and wandered aimlessly from room to room. She stopped for a moment in her grandfather’s room, staring listlessly at the pile of devotional books under the ikons.
‘Grandad, have you any paper?’ she asked him.
‘What sort of paper?’ Grishaka asked, puckering his forehead into frowns.
‘Paper to write on.’
The old man fumbled in a psalter, and drew out a crumpled sheet of paper that smelt strongly of incense.
‘And a pencil?’
‘Ask your father. Go away, my dear, and don’t bother me.’
She obtained a stump of pencil from her father, and sat down at the table, laboriously formulating her long-pondered thoughts, and evoking a numb, gnawing pain in her heart.
Gregor Pantalievitch,
Tell me, will you, how I am to live, and whether my life is quite lost or not. You left home and you didn’t say a single word to me. I haven’t done you any wrong, and I waited for you to untie my hands, and to say that you have gone for good, but you’ve gone away and are as silent as the grave.
I thought you had gone off in the heat of the moment, and waited for you to come back, but I don’t want to part you. Better one should be trodden into the ground than two. Have pity at last and write. Then I shall know what to think, but now I stand in the middle of the road.
Don’t be angry with me, Grishka, for the love of Christ.
Natalia.
Next morning she promised Getka vodka and persuaded him to ride with the letter to Yagodnoe. Moody with expectation of his promised drink, Getka led a horse into the yard, and without informing Miron Gregorievitch rode off to Yagodnoe.
He returned in the afternoon. He brought with him a piece of blue sugar-bag paper, and as he drew it out of his pocket he winked at Natalia.
‘The road was terrible. I got such a shaking that it upset my kidneys,’ he informed her.
Natalia read the letter, and her face turned grey. The four words scribbled on the paper entered her heart like sharp teeth rending a weave.
‘Live alone. Gregor Melekhov.’
Hurriedly, as though not trusting her own strength, Natalia went into the house and lay down on her bed. Her mother was lighting the stove for the night, in order to have the place tidy early on Easter Sunday morning and to get the Easter curd cake ready in time.
‘Natalia, come and give me a hand,’ she called to her daughter.
‘I’ve got a headache, mamma; I’ll lie a little longer.’
Her mother put her head in at the door. ‘A fine time to fall sick,’ she remarked.
Natalia licked her cold lips with her dry tongue and made no reply.
She lay until evening, her head covered with a warm woollen shawl, a light tremor shaking her huddled body. Miron Gregorievitch and Grishaka were about to go off to church when she got up and went into the kitchen. Beads of perspiration shone on the strands of her smoothly combed hair, her eyes were dim with an unhealthy, oily film.
As Miron Gregorievitch buttoned up the long row of buttons on his trousers he glanced at his daughter:
‘You’ve fallen ill suddenly, daughter. Come along with us to the service.’
‘You go; I’ll come along later,’ she replied.
The men went out. Lukinichna and Natalia were left in the kitchen. Natalia went listlessly backward and forward from the chest to the bed, looked with unseeing eyes through the heap of clothing in the chest, painfully thinking of something, her lips whispering. Lukinichna thought she could not make up her mind which clothes to wear, and with motherly kindness she suggested:
‘Wear my blue skirt, my dear. It will just fit you. Shall I get it for you?’
‘No, I’ll go in this!’ Natalia carefully drew out her green skirt, and suddenly remembered that she had been wearing it when Gregor first visited her as her future bridegroom, when he had shamed her with a flying kiss. Shaking with sobs, she fell breast forward against the raised lid of the chest.
‘Natalia, what’s the matter?’ her mother clapped her hands.
Natalia choked down her desire to scream, and mastering herself, laughed with a grating, wooden laugh.
‘I’m all unwell today.’
‘Oh, Natalia, I’ve noticed …’
‘Well, and what have you noticed, mamma?’ she cried with unexpected irritation, crumpling the green skirt in her fingers.
‘You’re not well at all; you need a husband.’
‘Enough of that talk; I’ve had one!’
She went to her room, and quickly returned to the kitchen, dressed, girlishly slender, her face an azure pallor, a mournful flush in her cheeks.
‘You go on, I’m not ready yet,’ her mother said.
Pushing a handkerchief into her sleeve, Natalia went out. The wind brought the rumble of the floating ice and the scent of the damp thaw to her nostrils. Holding up her skirt in her left hand, picking her way across the pearly blue puddles, she reached the church. On the wa
y she attempted to recover her former comparatively tranquil state of mind, thinking of the holiday, of everything vaguely and in snatches. But her thoughts turned straight back to the scrap of blue sugar-bag paper hidden at her breast, to Gregor and the happy woman who was now condescendingly laughing at her, perhaps even pitying her.
As she entered the church enclosure some lads barred her way. She passed round them, and heard the whisper:
‘Whose is she? Did you see?’
‘It was Natalia Korshunov.’
‘She’s ruptured, they say. That’s why her husband left her.’
‘That’s not true. She got playing about with her father-in-law, lame Pantaleimon.’
‘Ah, so that’s it! And that’s why Gregor ran away from home?’
Stumbling over the uneven stones, followed by a shameful, filthy whisper, she reached the church porch. The girls standing in the porch giggled as she turned and made her way to the farther gate. Swaying drunkenly, she ran home. At the yard gate she took breath and then entered, stumbling over the hem of her skirt, biting her lips till the blood came. Through the lilac darkness the open doorway of the shed yawned blackly. With evil determination she gathered her last strength, ran to the door and hastily stepped across the threshold. The shed was dry and cold, smelling of leather harness and long-lying straw. Gropingly, without thought or feeling, in a sombre yearning which scratched at her shamed and despairing soul, she made her way to a corner. There she picked up a scythe by the handle, removed the blade (her movements were deliberately assured and precise), and throwing back her head, with all the force and joyous resolution that possessed her she slashed her throat with its point. She fell as though struck down before the burning, savage pain, and feeling, mournfully realizing that she had not completely carried out her intention, she struggled on to all-fours, then on to her knees. Hurriedly (she was terrified by the blood pouring over her chest) with trembling fingers she tore off the buttons of her jacket, and with one hand she drew aside her taut, unyielding breast, with the other she guided the point of the scythe over the floor. She crawled on her knees to the earthen wall, thrust the blunt end of the scythe blade into it, and throwing her arms above her head, pressed her chest firmly forward, forward … She clearly heard and felt the resisting, cabbage-like scrunch of the rending flesh; a rising wave of intense pain flowed over her breast to her throat, and pressed with ringing needles into her ears …
And Quiet Flows the Don Page 18