Forty Stories (24 page)

Gusev was not listening: he was gazing out of the porthole. A boat, bathed in a blazing and brilliant sunlight, was swaying on a transparent and delicate turquoise-colored sea. In it naked Chinamen were holding up cages with canaries, and saying: “It sings! It sings!”

Another boat came knocking against the first; a steam pinnace darted by. There came still another boat: in it was a fat Chinaman eating rice with little sticks. The sea rolled languidly, and there were white seagulls hovering lazily in the air.

“I should like to give that fat fellow a punch in the neck,” Gusev meditated, gazing at the fat Chinaman and yawning.

Then he became drowsy, and it seemed to him that all nature was falling asleep. Time flew by. Imperceptibly the daylight faded away, and imperceptibly there came the shadows of evening.… The ship was no longer standing still, but moving again.

Two days passed. Pavel Ivanich was lying down, no longer sitting up. His eyes were closed, and his nose seemed to have grown sharper.

“Pavel Ivanich,” Gusev called to him. “Hey, Pavel Ivanich.”

Pavel Ivanich opened his eyes and moved his lips.

“Are you feeling ill?”

“No,” Pavel Ivanich replied, gasping. “No, on the contrary.… I’m better.… As you see, I can lie down.… I’m a bit easier.”

“Well, thank God, Pavel Ivanich.”

“When I compare myself with you, I’m sorry for you poor fellows.… My lungs are healthy—what I’ve got is a stomach cough. I can stand hell, and that goes for the Red Sea. Also, I take a critical attitude toward my illness and the medicines I take. While you … you are in the dark.… It’s hard for you, very, very hard!”

The ship was no longer rolling, the sea was calm, and the air was as hot and suffocating as a bathhouse: it was hard not only to speak but to listen. Gusev threw his hands round his knees, laid his head on them, and thought of home. My God, what a relief it was to think of cold weather and snow in this suffocating heat! You’re riding in a sleigh, and suddenly the horses take fright at something and bolt.… Careless of roads, ditches and gullies, they tear like mad through the village, and over the pool by the potteries, and then across the fields. Comes the full-throated cry of the factory workers and all the others in the path of the horses: “Stop them!” Why stop them? Let the raw, cold winds beat about your face and bite your hands; let the lumps of snow flung up by the horses’ hoofs fall on your fur cap, your collar, your neck, and your chest; let the runners scream on the snow and let the shafts and traces be smashed to smithereens, devil take them all! How wonderful it is when the sleigh overturns and you are sent flying headlong into a snowdrift, face to the snow, and when you rise you are white all over, no fur cap, no gloves, your belt undone, and icicles clinging to your mustache.… People laugh, and the dogs bark.

Pavel Ivanich half opened an eye, gazed at Gusev, and said softly: “Did your commanding officer go stealing?”

“Who knows, Pavel Ivanich? We never heard about it.”

A long time passed in silence. Gusev meditated, murmured something in his fever, and kept on drinking water. It was hard for him to talk and hard for him to listen, and he was afraid of being talked at. An hour passed, then another, then a third. Evening came down, and then it was night, and he did not notice it. He sat there dreaming of the cold.

There was the sound of someone coming into the sick bay, voices were heard, but five minutes passed, and then there was only silence.

“May he enter the kingdom of Heaven and receive eternal
peace,” the soldier with the arm in the sling was saying. “He was a restless man.”

“Eh, what’s that?” Gusev asked. “Who is this?”

“He’s dead. They’ve just taken him up on deck.”

“Oh, well,” murmured Gusev, yawning. “May he enter the Kingdom of Heaven.”

“What do you think?” the soldier with the sling said after a short silence. “Will he be received into the Kingdom of Heaven or not?”

“Who do you mean?”

“Pavel Ivanich.”

“Yes, he will. He suffered so long. And there’s another thing—he belonged to an ecclesiastical family, and those priests have many relatives. So they’ll pray and he’ll enter the Kingdom.”

The soldier with the sling sat down on the hammock near Gusev and said in an undertone: “You, too, Gusev, you’re not long for this world. You’ll never reach Russia.”

“Did the doctor or the orderly tell you?” Gusev asked.

“They didn’t tell me, but it’s obvious. You know at once when a man is close to death. You don’t eat, you don’t drink, you’re so thin you’re frightening. It’s consumption all right! I’m not saying this to upset you, but because maybe you’d like to receive the sacrament and extreme unction. And too, if you’ve got any money you’d better give it to the senior officer.”

“I haven’t written home,” Gusev sighed. “I’ll die, and they’ll never hear about it.”

“They’ll hear,” the sick sailor said in a deep voice. “When you die, they’ll write it down in the ship’s log, and in Odessa they’ll send a copy to the military authority, and he’ll send it to the parish or somewhere.…”

Such conversations made Gusev uneasy, and he began to be tormented with vague yearnings. He drank water—that wasn’t it; he dragged himself to the small circular window and breathed
the hot moist air—that wasn’t it; he tried to think of home and the cold—it wasn’t that either.… At last it occurred to him that if he remained another minute in the sick bay, he would suffocate to death.

“The air’s suffocating, brother,” he said. “I’m going up on deck. Take me topsides, for Christ’s sake.”

“All right,” agreed the soldier with the sling. “You can’t do it alone. I’ll carry you. Put your arms round my neck.”

Gusev threw his arms round the soldier’s neck, and with his healthy arm the soldier supported him, and in this way he was carried on deck where the discharged soldiers and sailors lay sleeping side by side, so many of them that it was difficult to pass.

“Get down now,” the soldier with the sling said softly. “Follow me quietly, and hold on to my shirt.”

It was dark, there were no lights on deck, nor on the masts, nor anywhere in the sea around. On the prow the seaman on watch was standing perfectly still like a statue, and it seemed as though he, too, were asleep. The ship appeared to be abandoned to its own devices, going wherever it desired to go.

“They’ll throw Pavel Ivanich into the sea soon,” said the soldier with a sling. “In a sack and then into the water.”

“Yes, that’s the regulation.”

“It’s better to lie in the earth at home. That way your mother comes to the grave and weeps over you.”

“That’s true.”

There was a smell of dung and hay. There were oxen standing with drooping heads at the ship’s rail—one, two, three, eight of them altogether! There was a little pony, too. Gusev stretched forth his hand to caress it, but it shook its head, revealed its teeth, and tried to bite his sleeve.

“You bloody brute,” Gusev said angrily.

The two of them, Gusev and the soldier, made their way quietly to the ship’s prow, then they stood at the rail and silently gazed out to sea. The deep sky lay over them, the clear stars,
stillness and peace, and it was exactly as it was in the village at home—while below them lurked darkness and chaos. Great waves were booming; no one knew why. Every wave, whichever one you looked at, was trying to climb over the rest, hurling itself on its neighbor, crushing it down; and then there would come a third wave with a glint of light on its white mane, as ferocious and hideous as all the others, with a full-throated roar.

The sea is senseless and pitiless. If the ship had been smaller, and not made of thick iron plates, the waves would have crushed it without the slightest remorse and devoured all the people, making no distinction between saints and sinners. The ship itself possessed the same cruel expression, devoid of any meaning. This beaked monster pressed forward, cutting a pathway through a million waves, fearing neither darkness nor winds, neither space nor solitude—all these were as nothing, and if the ocean had been populated, the monster would have crushed its inhabitants, making no distinction between saints and sinners.

“Where are we now?” asked Gusev.

“I don’t know. I suppose we are far out to sea.”

“You can’t see land?”

“None at all! They say we’ll see it in a week.”

The two soldiers stared at the white foam gleaming with phosphorescence and were silent, lost in thought. Gusev was the first to break the silence.

“There’s nothing to be afraid of,” he said. “Only it’s strange, like when you sit down in a dark forest, but if—supposing they lowered a boat on the water this moment and an officer ordered me to go to a place fifty miles away across the sea to catch fish, I’d go! Or supposing a Christian fell into the water this very moment, I’d jump in after him! I wouldn’t try to save a German or a Chinese, but I’d jump in after a Christian!”

“Are you afraid of dying?”

“Yes, I’m afraid. I’m full of sorrow for the farm. My brother at home, you know, there’s nothing sober about him—he’s a
drunkard, beats his wife for no reason at all, and doesn’t honor his parents. Without me everything will go to ruin, and soon, I don’t wonder, my father and my old mother will be begging in the streets. But my legs won’t hold me up, brother, and it’s suffocating here. Let’s go to sleep!”

Gusev returned to the sick bay and lay in his hammock. Once again he was tormented with vague yearnings, and could not understand what he wanted. There was a weight on his chest, a throbbing in his head, his mouth was so dry it was difficult for him to move his tongue. He dozed off, talked wildly in his sleep, and toward morning, worn out with nightmares, coughing, and the suffocating heat, he fell into a heavy sleep. He dreamed they were just taking the bread out of the oven in the barracks, and he climbed into the oven and took a steam bath in it, lashing himself with a bunch of birch twigs. He slept for two days, and on the third day at noon two sailors came down and carried him out of the sick bay.

They sewed him up in a sailcloth and to make him heavier they put in two iron fire bars. Sewn up in the sailcloth, he looked like a carrot or a horse-radish: broad at the head and narrow at the feet.… Before sunset they brought him on deck and laid him on a plank. One end of the plank lay on the ship’s rail, the other on a box placed on a stool. Around him stood the ship’s company and the discharged soldiers, their heads bared.

“Blessed be the name of God,” the priest began, “as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be!”

“Amen!” three sailors chanted.

The ship’s company and the discharged soldiers crossed themselves and looked out to sea. Strange that a man should be sewn up in a sailcloth and then tossed into the waves. Was it possible that such a thing could happen to anyone?

The priest scattered earth over Gusev and bowed low. They sang “Eternal Memory.”

The seaman on watch tilted the end of the plank. At first Gusev slid down slowly, then he rushed head foremost into the sea, turning a somersault in the air, then splashing. The foam enclosed him, and for a brief moment he seemed to be wrapped in lace, but this moment passed and he disappeared under the waves.

He plunged rapidly to the bottom. Did he reach it? The sea, they say, is three miles deep at this point. Falling sixty or seventy feet, he started to fall more slowly, swaying rhythmically, as though hesitating, at the mercy of the currents, sliding sideways more quickly than he sank down.

Then he fell among a shoal of pilot fish. When they saw the dark body they were astounded and rooted to the spot, and they suddenly turned tail and fled. In less than a minute they came hurrying back to him, quick as a shot, and they began zigzagging round him in the water.

Then still another dark body appeared. This was a shark. It swam below Gusev with dignity and reserve, seeming not to notice him; and when he, descending, fell against the back of the shark, then the shark turned belly upwards, basking in the warm transparent water and lazily opening its jaws with their two rows of teeth. The pilot fish were in ecstasy; they stopped to see what would happen next. After playing around with the body for a while, the shark calmly laid its jaws on it, tapped it with its teeth, and ripped open the sailcloth along the whole length of the body from head to foot; one of the fire bars fell out, frightened the pilot fish, struck the shark in the ribs, and sank rapidly to the bottom.

Meanwhile in the heavens clouds came and massed themselves against the sunset, and one cloud resembled a triumphal arch, another a lion, a third a pair of scissors.… There came a great beam of green light transpiercing the clouds and stretching to the center of the sky, and a little while later a violetcolored
beam lay beside it, and then there was a golden beam, and then a rose-colored beam. The heavens turned lilac, very soft. Gazing up at the enchanted heavens, magnificent in their splendor, the sea fumed darkly at first, but soon assumed the sweet, joyous, passionate colors for which there are scarcely any names in the tongue of man.

December 1890

IN the village of Raibuzh, just opposite the church, there is a two-story house with stone foundations and an iron roof. The owner of the house, Philip Ivanov Kamin, and his family live in the lower story. Kamin’s nickname is Dyudya. On the upper floor, where it is very hot in summer and very cold in winter, there are lodgings for officials, merchants, and country gentlemen passing through the town. Dyudya rents out some parcels of land, runs a tavern along the main road, trades in tar, honey, cattle, and magpies, and has amassed some eight thousand rubles, which he keeps in the town bank.

Fedor, his elder son, is a foreman mechanic in a factory, and as the peasants say, he has climbed so high that no one can follow after him. Fedor’s wife, Sophia, is a plain sickly woman who lives at home with her father-in-law, weeps continually, and every Sunday drives over to the hospital for treatment. The second son, Alyoshka, is a hunchback and lives at home with his father. He has only lately married Varvara, a girl from a poor family, young, pretty, healthy, fond of dressing up. When officials and merchants stay at the house, they always demand that Varvara bring in the samovar and make up their beds.