Forty Stories (26 page)

“I’d take the reins and give you a taste of them!” Varvara
muttered, moving away. “Torturing one of us women, you damned brutes!”

“Shut up, you jade!” Dyudya shouted at her.

“
Hee-hee-hee
!” Matvey Savvich went on. “Then one of the drivers came running up from his yard, I called out for my workman, and between us we were able to rescue Mashenka and carry her home. What a disgrace it was! That same evening I went to see how she was. She was lying in bed, wrapped up in bandages and compresses, with only her eyes and nose visible, looking up at the ceiling. ‘Well, good evening, Maria Semyonovna,’ I said, and got no answer. Vasya was sitting in the next room, holding his head in his hands and blubbering. ‘What a brute I am!’ he was saying. ‘I’ve ruined my life! Dear God, let me die!’ I sat for half an hour with Mashenka, and gave her some sound advice. I tried to put the fear of God in her. ‘Those who behave righteously,’ I said, ‘go to Paradise, but as for you—you will go to a Gehenna of fire, like all adultresses! Don’t resist your husband! Go down on your knees before him!’ But she said nary a word and did not blink an eyelid, and I might just as well have talked to a post. The next day Vasya fell ill with something like cholera, and during the evening I heard he was dead. Then they buried him. Mashenka did not go to the funeral—she did not want to let people see her shameless face and her bruises. But soon they were saying all over the place that Vasya had not died a natural death, but Mashenka had done away with him. The police soon heard about it. They dug up Vasya, slit him open, and found arsenic in his stomach. It was quite obvious he had been poisoned, so the police came and they took Mashenka away and the sweet innocent babe Kuzka, too. They put her in jail. The stupid woman had gone too far—God was punishing her! Eight months later she went on trial. She sat, I remember, on a low stool, wearing a gray gown with a white kerchief round her head, thin, pale, sharp-eyed, pitiable. Beside her there was a soldier holding a gun. She wouldn’t confess her guilt. There were some in the court
who said she had poisoned her husband, and there were others who argued he had poisoned himself from grief. I was one of the witnesses. When they questioned me, I told them the whole truth. ‘She’s guilty,’ I said. ‘It’s no use hiding it—she didn’t love her husband, and she was strong-willed.…’ The trial began in the morning, and the same evening she was sentenced to thirteen years’ penal servitude in Siberia. After the sentence Mashenka spent three months in the local jail. I used to go and see her, bringing her in simple humanity small gifts of tea and sugar. I remember how her whole body would start trembling as soon as she set eyes on me, and she would wring her hands and mutter: ‘Go away! Go away!’ She would clasp Kuzka to her, as though she were afraid I would take the boy away from her. ‘See,’ I would say, ‘what you have brought upon yourself! Ah, my poor dear ruined Mashenka, you wouldn’t listen to me when I was giving you advice, and so you must weep! Yes, you are guilty,’ I said, ‘and you have only yourself to blame!’ I was offering her sound advice, but she only kept on saying: ‘Go away! Go away!’ as she huddled against the wall with Kuzka in her arms, trembling all over. When they were taking her off to the provincial capital, I accompanied her to the railroad station and slipped a ruble into her bundle for my soul’s sake. She never reached Siberia. In the provincial capital she fell ill with a fever, and she died in the jail.”

“Live like a dog, die like a dog!” Dyudya said.

“Well, Kuzka was sent back home.… I thought it over and then decided I would bring him up. What else could I do? He was born of a jailbird, but he had a living, Christian soul. I was sorry for him. I’ll make a clerk out of him, and if I never have children of my own I’ll make a merchant of him. Wherever I go now I take him with me—let him learn to work!”

All the time that Matvey Savvich was talking, Kuzka was sitting on a stone by the gate, his face cupped in his hands, gazing up at the sky; and seen from a distance in the dark, he resembled a tree stump.

“Kuzka, go to bed!” Matvey Savvich yelled at him.

“Yes, it’s high time!” Dyudya said, getting up. He yawned noisily and then went on: “They think they’re clever, not listening to advice, and so they come to grief!”

The moon was now floating high over the courtyard, moving in one direction while the clouds moved in another, but soon the clouds drifted away and then the moon shone clear over the courtyard. Matvey Savvich said a prayer with his face turned toward the church, bade the others good night, and lay down on the ground near the cart. Kuzka also said a prayer, lay down in the cart, and covered himself with a short coat; and for comfort he dug a hole in the straw and curled up so that his elbows touched his knees. From the yard Dyudya could be seen lighting a candle in a downstairs room, and then he put on his spectacles and stood in a corner with a book. For a long time he continued to read and bow before the icon.

The travelers fell asleep. Afanasyevna and Sophia went up to the cart and gazed down at Kuzka.

“The poor orphan sleeps,” the old woman said. “He’s so thin and weak, nothing but bones! He has no mother and no one to look after him on the road.”

“My Grisha must be about two years older,” Sophia said. “Up there in the factory, without his mother, he lives like a slave. I dare say his master beats him. When I looked at this poor orphan just now, I thought of my own Grisha, and my heart’s blood turned to ice.”

There was silence between them for a few moments.

“I wonder whether he remembers his mother,” the old woman asked.

“How could he?”

From Sophia’s eyes large tears flowed.

“He’s all curled up like a kitten,” she said, sobbing and laughing with tenderness and sorrow. “Poor little orphan!”

Kuzka started and opened his eyes. He saw above him an ugly, wrinkled, tear-stained face, and beside it another face, old and
toothless, with a sharp chin and a humped nose, and high above them the unfathomable sky and the rushing clouds and the moon; and he screamed in terror. Sophia also screamed, echoes answered their screams, the heavy air trembled, a watchman tapped with his stick, and a dog barked. Matvey Savvich muttered in his sleep and turned over on the other side.

Late at night when Dyudya and the old woman and the watchman were all asleep, Sophia came out to the gate and sat down on a bench. The heat was stifling, and her head ached from crying. The street was wide and long; it stretched for nearly two miles to the right, and two miles to the left, and there was no end to it. The moon no longer shone over the courtyard, but from behind the church. One side of the street was flooded with moonlight, the other lay in deep darkness; and the long shadows of the poplars and the starling cotes stretched across the whole street, while the black and menacing shadows of the church spread far and wide, embracing Dyudya’s gate and half his house. No one was about; only silence. From time to time there came faint strains of music from the end of the street. It was Alyoshka playing on his concertina.

Something moved in the shadows near the walls of the church: impossible to tell whether it was a man or a cow, or only a big bird rustling in the trees. And then a figure emerged out of the shadows, paused, said something in a man’s voice, and disappeared down the church lane. A moment later another figure emerged about six feet away from the church gate, and this figure went straight from the church to the gate, and when it saw Sophia sitting on the bench, it stood still.

“Is that you, Varvara?” Sophia said.

“What if it is?”

It was Varvara. She stood perfectly still for a few moments, and then she went to the bench and sat down.

“Where have you been?” Sophia asked.

Varvara said nothing.

“You’ll get into trouble if you play around, you young bride!”
Sophia said. “Did you hear what happened to Mashenka, how she was kicked and beaten with the reins? Look out, or the same thing will happen to you!”

“I don’t care!” Varvara laughed into her handkerchief and whispered: “I’ve been having fun with the priest’s son.”

“You’re making it up!”

“I swear to God …”

“It’s a sin,” whispered Sophia.

“I don’t care! What should I be sorry for? If it’s a sin, then it’s a sin, and it’s better to be struck dead by lightning than to live as I am doing. I’m young and healthy. I’m saddled with a horrible, hunchbacked husband, and he’s worse than that damned Dyudya! Before I was married I never had enough to eat, I went barefoot, I had to get away from all that misery, and there was Alyoshka’s wealth tempting me, and so I became a slave, or a fish caught in a net, and I would sooner sleep with a serpent than with that scab-covered Alyoshka! And what about your life? It’s terrible to think about it! Your Fedor threw you out of the factory and sent you home to his father, and now he has taken another woman: they took your boy away and sold him into slavery. You work like a horse, and never hear a kind word! I’d rather spend my days an old maid and get half a ruble from the priest’s son, I’d rather beg for a pittance, I’d rather throw myself down a well.…”

“It’s a sin,” Sophia whispered again.

“I don’t care.”

From somewhere behind the church came the mournful song of three voices: two tenors and a bass. And again it was impossible to distinguish the words.

“They’re nightbirds all right,” Varvara said, laughing.

And she began to whisper about her nightly escapades with the priest’s son, and what he said to her, and what his friends were like, and how she carried on with the officials and merchants who came to the house. The mournful songs awoke in Sophia a longing for life and freedom, and she began to laugh.
For her, it was all sinful and terrible and sweet to hear about, and she envied Varvara and was sorry that she too had not been a sinner when she was young and beautiful.

From the church cemetery came the twelve strokes of the watchman’s rattle, announcing midnight.

“It’s time to sleep,” Sophia said, getting up. “Dyudya will catch us if we don’t!”

They both went quietly into the courtyard.

“I went away and never heard what happened to Mashenka afterwards,” Varvara said, making her bed beneath the window.

“He said she died in prison. She poisoned her husband.”

Varvara lay down beside Sophia, deep in thought, and then she said softly: “I could kill Alyoshka and never regret it.”

“God help you, you are talking nonsense!”

When Sophia was dropping asleep, Varvara pressed close to her and whispered in her ear: “Let’s kill Dyudya and Alyoshka!”

Sophia shuddered and said nothing, but her eyes were open wide and for a long time she gazed steadily at the sky.

“People might find out,” she murmured.

“No, they would never find out. Dyudya is old, and it’s time for him to die, and they’d say Alyoshka had croaked from drinking!”

“It’s terrible.… God would strike us dead.…”

“I don’t care.”

Neither of them slept; they went on thinking in silence.

“It’s cold,” Sophia said, and she was beginning to shiver all over. “It will soon be light. Are you sleeping?”

“No.… Don’t listen to me, my dear,” Varvara whispered. “I get so mad with those damned swine, and sometimes I don’t know what I am saying. Go to sleep—the dawn will be coming up soon.… Are you asleep?”

They were both quiet, and soon they grew calm and fell asleep.

Old Afanasyevna was the first to wake up. She woke Sophia, and they both went to the cowshed to milk the cows. Then the
hunchback Alyoshka walked in, hopelessly drunk, without his concertina, and with his knees and chest all covered with dust and straw—he must have fallen down on the road. Swaying from side to side, he went into the cowshed, and without undressing he rolled over on a sleigh and a moment later was snoring. And when the rising sun shone with a clear flame on the gold crosses of the church, and silvered the windows, and the shadows of the trees and the wellhead were strewn across the courtyard over the dew-wet grass, then Matvey Savvich rose and attended to business.

“Kuzka, get up!” he shouted. “Time to harness the horses! Get going!”

The morning uproar was about to begin. A young Jewess in a flounced brown dress led a horse to the yard for water. The pulley of the well creaked painfully, the bucket rattled. Still tired and sleepy, his clothes covered with dew, Kuzka sat up in the cart, and lazily slipping on his overcoat, he listened to the water splashing out of the bucket into the well, and all the time he was shivering from cold.

“Auntie!” shouted Matvey Savvich. “Tell that brat of mine to harness the horses!”

At the same moment Dyudya shouted from the window: “Sophia, make that Jewess pay a kopeck for watering the horses! They’re making a habit of it, the slobs!”

Up and down the street ran the bleating sheep; the peasant women were screeching at the shepherd, who played on his reed pipe, cracked his whip, and replied to them in his rough sleepy bass voice. Three sheep came running into the yard; not finding the gate, they butted the fence. Varvara was awakened by the noise, and taking up her bedding in her hands, she wandered into the house.

“You ought at least to drive the sheep out,” the old woman shouted after her. “Ladylike, eh?”

“What’s more, you needn’t think I’m going to work for a lot of Herods,” Varvara said as she entered the house.

The axles were greased and the horses harnessed. Dyudya emerged from the house with his accounts in his hands, sat down on the step, and began reckoning how much the travelers owed for oats, the night’s lodging, and watering the horses.

“Grandfather, you charged a lot for the oats,” Matvey Savvich said.

“If it’s too much, you don’t have to take it. We’re not forcing you!”

Just when the travelers were about to get into the cart and ride off, an accident occurred. Kuzka lost his cap.

“Where did you put it, you little swine?” Matvey Savvich roared at the boy. “Where is it?”

Kuzka’s face was contorted with terror; he searched all round the cart, and not finding it, he ran to the gate and then to the cowshed. The old woman and Sophia helped him look for it.