‘Wait a bit; give me time to turn round a little and I’ll pay it back,’ he had said at last.
But the old man had not been able to ‘turn round’. The harvest had been poor, and the cattle were not worth selling. Suddenly, like snow in June, the bailiff arrived at the village administration office, sent for Pantaleimon, and demanded in so many words:
‘Put down a hundred roubles.’
Pantaleimon asked permission to go home, promising to bring the money the very same day. But he made straight for Korshunov’s hut. On the square he met armless Alexei Shamil.
‘Still limping, Pantaleimon?’ Shamil greeted him.
‘Little by little.’
‘Going far?’
‘To Korshunov on business.’
‘Oh? You’ll find them merry. Their son Mitka has come back from the front, I hear.’
‘Is that so?’
‘So I’ve been told,’ Shamil replied, winking with his eye and cheek. Pulling out his pouch, he added: ‘Have a smoke, old boy. My paper, your tobacco.’
Pantaleimon lit a cigarette, and stood hesitating whether to go to see Korshunov or not. Finally he decided to go and limped on.
‘Mitka’s got a cross, too. He’s trying to catch up to your sons. We’ve got as many crosses in the village now as sparrows in the bushes,’ Shamil called after him.
Pantaleimon walked slowly to the end of the village, glanced through the window of Korshunov’s hut, and went to the wicket-gate. He was met by Miron himself. The old man’s freckled face was shining with joy.
‘Heard about our luck?’ Korshunov asked, linking his arm in Pantaleimon’s.
‘I’ve just been told about it by Alexei Shamil. But I’ve come on other business …’
‘Let it wait! Come into the house and meet the lad. We’ve been having a little to drink in our joy.’
‘You needn’t have told me,’ Pantaleimon smiled and dilated his nostrils. ‘I’ve smelt it already.’
Miron flung open the door and stood aside to let Pantaleimon pass in. He stepped across the threshold and at once fixed his gaze on Mitka, who was sitting behind the table.
‘Here he is, our soldier lad!’ grandad Grishaka exclaimed with tears in his eyes, falling on Mitka’s shoulder.
Pantaleimon took Mitka’s long hand in his and stepped back a pace, looking him over in astonishment.
‘Well, what are you staring at?’ Mitka asked hoarsely, with a smile on his face.
‘I can’t help looking, I’m so astonished. I saw you and Gregor off at the same time, and you were children. And now look at you! A cossack, and fit for the Ataman’s regiment at that.’
Lukinichna gazed at Mitka with eyes filled with tears, at the same time attempting to pour out vodka into a glass. Not watching what she was doing, she let it spill over the edge.
‘Hey, you scab! What are you doing, wasting good spirit!’ Miron bawled at her.
‘To your joy, and to you, Mitka, on your happy homecoming!’ Pantaleimon said, passing his eyes round the room. Without taking breath he sipped down the vodka. Slowly wiping his lips and whiskers with his palm, he fixed his eyes on the bottom of the glass, threw his head back, tossed an orphaned drop of vodka into his gaping mouth, and only then took a breath and bit at a pickled cucumber, blinking beatifically. Lukinichna poured him out a second glass, and the old man at once got ludicrously fuddled. Mitka watched him with a smile. The lad had certainly changed beyond recognition during his years of absence. In this healthy, black-whiskered cossack almost nothing remained of the fine, elegant Mitka who had gone off to do his service three years previously. He had grown considerably, his shoulders had broadened, he had filled out, and certainly weighed not less than thirteen stone. His face and voice were coarser, and he looked older than his years. Only the eyes were the same, just as disturbing and restless.
Mitka lived a thoughtless, birdlike existence; life today was good, and tomorrow would take care of itself. He was not too keen on soldiering, and despite his fearless heart he did not go out of his way to earn distinction, although when he was mentioned in despatches it was just as well for him. He had been twice court-martialled, once for raping a Russian-born Polish woman and once for stealing. During the three years of war he had received innumerable punishments, and on one occasion the field court-martial had all but sentenced him to be shot. But he had managed somehow to extricate himself, and although he was one of the worst characters in the regiment, the cossacks liked him for his gay, smiling morals and his bawdy songs, for his comradeship and straightforward nature, whilst the officers liked him for his brigand ardour. Smilingly Mitka trod the earth with light, wolfish feet: there was a good deal of the wolf breed in him. For Mitka life was simple and direct, stretching away like a furrow, and he walked along it the absolute master. Just as primitively simple and direct were his thoughts. If you were hungry you could and should steal even from your comrades; and Mitka stole when he was hungry. If your boots were worn out it was the simplest thing in the world to take a pair from a German prisoner. If you were punished you must make up somehow for your crime; and Mitka did make up for it, going out and bringing back half-strangled German outposts, and volunteering for the most dangerous enterprises. In 1915 he had been wounded and taken prisoner; but the same night, tearing his finger-nails to pieces, he had broken through the roof of the shed and fled, picking up some wagon harness for a keepsake as he went. And in such ways Mitka got away with a good deal.
‘So you’ve won the Cross?’ Pantaleimon said, smiling drunkenly.
‘Who hasn’t got a cross among the cossacks?’ Mitka frowned.
‘He’s proud,’ old Grishaka hurried to intervene. ‘He’s just like me. He can’t bow his back.’
‘They don’t give them crosses for that,’ Pantaleimon was about to reply angrily, but Miron drew him into the kitchen, sat down on a chest, and asked him:
‘How’s Natalia and the grandchildren? All alive and well? Praise God! You said you’d come on business, didn’t you? What is it? Speak up, or we’ll be drinking again and you’ll be too drunk to talk.’
‘Give me money! For the love of God! Help me, or I’ll be ruined by these … by this money matter,’ Pantaleimon implored with expansive, drunken abasement. Miron interrupted:
‘How much?’
‘A hundred roubles.’
Korshunov rummaged in the chest, pulled out a greasy kerchief, untied it, and counted out ten ten-rouble notes.
‘Thank you, Miron Gregorievitch. You’ve saved us from misery,’ Pantaleimon said.
‘No, don’t thank me. When it’s our own flesh and blood …’
Mitka spent five days at home. He passed his nights with Anikushka’s wife, having pity on the woman’s bitter need and even more on her, a helpless and simple grass-widow. The days he spent wandering among his kinsfolk and friends. Dressed in a single light overcoat, he swung down the streets with his cap pushed back on his head, vaunting his strength against the cold. One evening he looked in on the Melekhovs. He brought the scent of frost and the unforgettable, pungent smell of the soldier with him into the overheated kitchen, sat talking about the war, the village news, then narrowed his green eyes at Daria and rose to go. Daria flickered like the flame of a candle when the door banged behind him, and pressing her lips together, was about to put on her kerchief. But Ilinichna asked:
‘Where are you off to, Daria?’
‘I want to go outside.’
‘I’ll come with you.’
Pantaleimon sat without raising his head, as though he had not heard the question and reply. Daria went past him to the door, her eyelids drooping over the wolfish gleam in her eyes, her mother-in-law tottering heavily after her. Mitka was coughing and scrunching his feet at the gate. At the sound of the door-latch he turned to come back to the steps.
‘That you, Mitka? You haven’t lost your way in our yard?’ Ilinichna called spitefully. ‘Fasten the gate behind you or it will be banging all night in this wind.’
On the sixth day Miron drove his son to Millerovo station, and stood watching as the line of green boxes rattled away, then dug long at the platform with his whip, not raising his bleary eyes. Lukinichna wept for her son; old Grishaka coughed and blew his nose into his hand, then wiped his palm on his coat. And Anikushka’s grass-widow wept as she recalled Mitka’s great body, so feverish in caresses, and as she suffered with the clap she had caught from him.
Time entangled the days as the wind a horse’s mane. Just before Christmas a thaw unexpectedly set in, rain fell for days on end, the water raged down from the hills along the dry courses, the last year’s grass showed green on the bared headlands, the edges of the Don foamed, and the ice turned a cadaverous blue and swelled. An inexpressibly sweet scent was exuded by the bare black earth. The water bubbled in the wheel-tracks of the highroad. The clayey cliffs beyond the village yawned with fresh landslides and ruddy wounds. The southerly wind brought the heavy scent of rotten grass, and at noon-day dove-blue, tender shadows lurked on the horizon as in Springtime. In the village rippling pools stood on the top of the ashes heaped up against the fences. The earth melted around the ricks in the threshing-floors, and the cloying sweetness of damp straw pricked the noses of passers-by. In the daytime a tarry water ran off the straw, icicle-hung roofs and down the cornices; the magpies chattered incessantly on the fences, and the village bull wintering in Miron Korshunov’s yard bellowed, enraged by the premature languor of spring. He tore at the fence with his horns and kicked up the crumbling, watery snow.
The Don broke on the second day of Christmas. The ice floated off down the middle of the stream with a mighty grinding and groaning. Like sleepy, monstrous fish the floes were driven on to the banks. Beyond the Don, urged on by the agitating southern wind, the poplars fled in immobile, flexible flight.
But towards nightfall the hills began to roar; the ravens fluttered and squawked on the square, Christonia’s pig ran past the Melekhovs’ yard with a bunch of hay in its jaws, and Pantaleimon decided that the spring was nipped off again, a frost would set in on the morrow. During the night the wind veered round to the east, a light frost veneered the puddles with a crystal ice. By the morning the wind was blowing from Moscow, and the frost had set hard again. Winter reigned once more. Only fragments of floes floated down the middle of the Don in great white sheets, and the bared earth smoked frostily on the rise.
Shortly after Christmas the village secretary informed Pantaleimon at a meeting that he had seen Gregor in Kamenska, and that he had asked the official to inform his parents that he would soon be coming over to visit them.
Part Three
* * *
REVOLUTION
Chapter One
With his small, swarthy, hairy hands Sergei Mokhov felt all the pulses of life. Sometimes life played with him, sometimes it hung on him like a stone round the neck of a drowned man. He foresaw a great deal. During his lifetime Sergei Platonovitch had been in many troubles. Long since, when he was still running the elevator, he had had to buy grain from the cossacks at a few groschen the pood, and afterwards cart four thousand poods of wheat out of the village and pour it into the river. He remembered 1905, too. Mokhov had grown rich and had accumulated sixty thousand roubles, depositing them in the Volga-Kama bank, but he scented from afar that times of great commotion were coming. He awaited the dark days, and was not mistaken.
Already in February echoes of the city talk of Rasputin and the Tsar’s family were circulating through the villages of the Don. And in March Sergei Platonovitch announced the news of the overthrow of the Autocracy. The cossacks received the information with restrained anxiety and expectation. That day the old and young cossacks crowded around the closed doors of Mokhov’s shop. The new village ataman, a red-haired and cross-eyed cossack, was completely crushed by the news, and took almost no part in the animated discussions going on outside the shop, only occasionally exclaiming disconcertedly:
‘Well, things have come to a pretty pass! Now what shall we do?’
Seeing the crowd outside the shop, Mokhov decided to go out and talk with the old men. He put on his raccoon-fur coat and went down the front steps of his house, leaning on his stick with its modest silver initials.
‘Well, Mokhov, you’re an educated man, tell us ignorant ones what’s going to happen now,’ Matvei Kashulin asked, smiling anxiously.
At Mokhov’s bow the old men respectfully removed their caps, and stood back to let him pass into the middle of the group.
‘We shall live without the Tsar …’ Mokhov began tentatively.
All the old men started speaking at once. ‘But how, without the Tsar?’ ‘Our fathers and grandfathers lived under the Tsars. And now isn’t a Tsar necessary?’ ‘Take off the head, and the legs won’t go on living!’ ‘What government shall we have?’ ‘Out with it, Sergei Platonovitch! Speak up, what is there to be afraid of?’
‘Maybe he doesn’t know, himself,’ one remarked with a smile.
Sergei Platonovitch stared stupidly at his old gun-boots, and said, uttering the words with difficulty:
‘The State Duma will govern. We shall have a republic.’
He smiled forcedly and looked around the troubled faces of the old men. With his usual gesture he divided his beard into two, and spoke out, angry at no one knew whom:
‘Now you see what they’ve brought Russia to! They’ll make you equal to the peasants, deprive you of your privileges, and recall the old affronts into the bargain. Bad times are coming … It depends on whose hands the government falls into, otherwise we shall be brought to utter disaster.’
‘If we’re alive, we shall see!’ Bogatiriev shook his head, and eyed Mokhov distrustfully from under his bushy eyebrows. ‘You go your own way, Sergei Platonovitch, but maybe we shall be better off now?’
‘How will you be better off?’ Mokhov asked venomously.
‘The new government may put an end to the war. That may be, mayn’t it?’
Mokhov waved his hand and shuffled away to his house, thinking disconnectedly of his personal affairs, of the mill and the worsening trade, and remembering that Elizabieta was in Moscow and Vladimir was shortly to come home from Novo-Cherkass. The blunt prick of anxiety for his children did not disturb the restless disorder of his thoughts. Glancing back at the old men, he spat across the balustrade of the stairs, and went along the veranda to his room.
‘My God!’ he was thinking, ‘how everything changes! Right down to my old age I’ve remained a fool. I believed in the possibility of my life getting better, and in reality I am as lonely as a man on sentry-duty. I’ve got my money by shady means, but you can’t get it by clean … I’ve squeezed others, and now the revolution is coming, and tomorrow my own servants may turn me out of my house. Curse the lot of them! And my children? Vladimir’s a fool … And where’s the sense of it all? Nothing matters, perhaps …’
He slept badly that night, turning over and over, gripped by disconnected thoughts and sub-conscious desires. Next morning, hearing that Eugene Listnitsky had arrived home from the front, he resolved to drive to Yagodnoe to find out the real situation, and to relieve his mind of its bitter accumulation of anxious presentiments. So Yemelian harnessed the horse to the light sleigh and drove his master to Yagodnoe.
The sun was ripening like a yellow apricot above the village, clouds were smoking above and below it. The keen frosty air was saturated with a juicy, fruity scent. The ice on the road crumbled beneath the horse’s hoofs, the steam from the animal’s nostrils was carried away by the wind and settled in rime on its mane. Soothed by the swift motion and the cold, Mokhov dozed.
He arrived at Yagodnoe at midday. He was welcomed on the steps by the grey Borzoi bitch, who stood in his path, stretching her long legs and yawning, while the other dogs lying around the steps rose lazily after her.
Th
e dry, well-lighted ante-room smelt strongly of dogs and vinegar. An officer’s Caucasian fur cap, a cowl with a silver tassel, and a Caucasian cloak lay on top of a trunk. A plump, black-eyed woman came out of a side-room, gave Mokhov an attentive stare, and without changing the serious expression of her swarthily ruddy face, asked him:
‘You want Nikolai Alexievitch? I’ll tell him.’
Sergei Platonovitch had difficulty in recognizing Aksinia in this rather stout, handsome woman. But she had immediately recognized him, had squeezed her lips together, and held herself unnaturally erect. She entered the hall without knocking, and closed the door behind her. After a minute or two she came out again, followed by old Listnitsky. With a grave, welcoming smile he said condescendingly:
‘Ah, Mokhov the merchant! What brings you here? Come in.’ He stood aside, and with a wave of the hand invited his guest into the hall.
Sergei Platonovitch bowed with the respect he had long since learnt to adopt towards his social superiors, and went in. Eugene Listnitsky came forward to meet him, screwing up his eyes behind his pince-nez. Smiling and revealing the golden crowns of his teeth, he took Mokhov by the arm and led him to a chair. Old Listnitsky gave Aksinia instructions for tea to be brought in, then came and stood by Mokhov with his hand resting on the table, and asked:
‘How are things with you in the village? Have you heard … the good news?’
Mokhov looked up at the clean-shaven fold of flesh beneath the general’s chin, and sighed:
‘How could one help hearing?’
‘With what a fatal predetermination things have come to this pass!’ the old man said, his Adam’s apple quivering. ‘I foresaw this at the very beginning of the war. Well, the dynasty was doomed.’
‘We haven’t any real news of what has happened,’ Mokhov said agitatedly. He fidgeted in his chair and lit a cigarette, then went on: ‘We haven’t seen a newspaper for a week. And as I heard that Eugene Nikolaivitch had come home on leave, I decided to drive over and ask what has really happened and what we have to expect next.’
And Quiet Flows the Don Page 38