Stories (48 page)

T
he village of Ukleyevo lay in a ravine, so that from the highway and the railroad station all you could see was the belfry and the smokestacks of the cotton mills. When passersby asked what village it was, they would be told:

“The one where the verger ate all the caviar at the funeral.”

Once, at the memorial dinner for the factory-owner Kostiukov, the old verger spotted black caviar among the hors d’oeuvres and greedily began to eat it; they pushed him, pulled him by the sleeve, but he was as if frozen with pleasure; he felt nothing and simply ate. He ate all the caviar, and there were about four pounds of it in the jar. And much time had passed since then, the verger was long dead, but the caviar was still remembered. Either the life there was so poor, or the people were unable to notice anything except this unimportant event that had happened ten years ago, but nothing else wa
s ever told about the village of Ukleyevo.

It was a place of ever-present fever, and there was swampy mud even in summer, especially under the fences, over which old pussywillows hung, casting broad shadows. There was always a smell of factory waste and the acetic acid used in the treatment of the cotton. The factories—three cotton mills and one tannery—were situated not in the village itself but on the outskirts and further away. They were small factories, and in all employed about four hundred
workers, not more. The water in the river often stank on account of the tannery; the waste contaminated the meadows, the peasants’ cattle suf
fered from anthrax, a
nd the factory was ordered closed. It was considered closed, but went on working secretly, with the knowledge of the district police officer and the district doctor, to each of whom the owner paid ten roubles a month. There were only two decent houses in the whole village, brick, with iron roofs: one housed the rural administration; in the other, a two-story house just opposite the church, lived Grigory Petrovich Tsybukin, a tradesman from Epifanyevo.

Grigory kept a grocery store, but that was only for appearances; in reality he traded in vodka, cattle, leather, grain, pigs, traded in whatever there was, and when, for instance, there was a demand abroad for magpie feathers for ladies’ hats, he made thirty kopecks a pair; he bought up woodlots for cutting, lent money on interest, was generally a shrewd old man.

He had two sons. The elder, Anisim, served with the police, in the criminal investigation department, and was rarely at home. The younger, Stepan, went into trading and helped his father, but no real help was expected of him, because he was of weak health and deaf; his wife Aksinya, a beautiful, shapely woman, who went about on Sundays in a hat and with a parasol, got up early, went to bed late, and, with her skirts held up and her keys jangling, raced about all day long, now to the barn, now to the cellar, now to the shop, and old Tsybukin watched her merrily, his eyes glowed, and
at such moments he regretted that it was not the elder son who had married her but the younger, the deaf one, who obviously had little understanding of feminine beauty.

The old man had always had an inclination for family life, and he loved his family more than anything in the world, especially his elder son, the detective, and his daughter-in-law. Aksinya had no sooner married the deaf son than she showed an extraordinary business sense and knew at once who could be given credit and who could not, kept the keys herself, not trusting them even to her husband, clicked on the abacus, looked horses in the teeth like a peasant, and was forever laughing or shouting; and, no matter what she did or said, the old man only went soft and murmured:

“Ah, what a daughter-in-law! What a beauty …”

He was a widower, but a year after his son’s wedding he could no longer stand it and got married himself. Twenty miles from
Ukleyevo a girl was found for him, Varvara Nikolaevna, from a good family, no longer young, but beautiful, imposing. As soon as she settled in the little upstairs room, everything brightened in the house, as if new glass had been put in the windows. The icon lamps were lit, the tables were covered with snow-white tablecloths, red-eyed flowers appeared on the windowsills and in the front garden, and at dinner they no longer ate from one bowl, but a plate was
set in front of each person. Varvara Nikolaevna smiled pleasantly and gently, and it seemed as if everything in the house were smiling. Beggars, wayfarers, and pilgrims began coming into the yard, something that had never happened before; the plaintive, sing-song voices of Ukleyevo peasant women and the guilty coughing of weak, wasted men dismissed from the factories for drunkenness, were heard under the windows. Varvara Nikolaevna helped out with money, bread, old clothes, and later, once she felt at home, also began pilfering from the shop. Once the deaf son saw her take two packets of tea, and that
puzzled him.

“Mother took two packets of tea,” he said later to his father. “Where should I write it down?”

The old man did not answer, but stood thinking, moving his eyebrows, and then went upstairs to his wife.

“Varvarushka, dearest,” he said tenderly, “if you ever need anything from the shop, take it. You’re welcome to take it, don’t think twice.”

And the next day the deaf son, running across the yard, called out to her:

“Mother, if you need anything—take it!”

In her giving of alms there was something new, something cheerful and light, as with the icon lamps and red flowers. When, on the eve of a fast or a major feast that lasted three days, they sold rotten corned beef to the peasants, which gave off such a strong stench that it was hard to stand near the barrel, and took scythes, hats, and their wives’ shawls as pledges from drunken men, when factory workers stupefied by bad vodka lay about in the mud, and sin, condensing, seemed to hang like murk in the air, then it came as something of a relief to think that there, in the house, was a quiet, neat w
oman who had nothing to do with corned beef or vodka; in those oppressive, murky days her alms worked like a safety valve on an engine.

The days were busy in Tsybukin’s house. The sun was not up yet,
and Aksinya was already snorting as she washed in the front hall, the samovar was boiling in the kitchen and humming, boding something ill. Old Grigory Petrovich, dressed in a long black frock coat and cotton trousers, with tall, shiny boots, so clean and small, walked through the rooms, tapping his heels like the dear father-in-law in the famous song. The shop was opened. When day came, a light droshky was drawn up to the porch and the old man dashingly climbed into it, pulling his big visored cap down to his ears, and
nobody looking at him would have said he was fifty-six years old. His wife and daughter-in-law would see him off, and at that time, when he was wearing a fine, clean frock coat and the droshky was harnessed to a huge black stallion worth three hundred roubles, the old man did not like to have peasants approach him with their petitions and complaints; he hated the peasants and scorned them, and if he saw some peasant waiting at the gate, he would shout wrathfully:

“No standing there! Move on!”

Or, if it was a beggar, he would shout:

“God will provide!”

He would drive off on business; his wife, in a dark dress with a black apron, would tidy the rooms or help in the kitchen. Aksinya tended the shop, and from the yard came the clink of bottles and money, Aksinya’s laughter and shouting, or the angry voices of customers she had offended; at the same time it could be noted that the secret sale of vodka was already going on in the shop. The deaf man also sat in the shop, or else walked around outside, hatless, his hands in his pockets, gazing distractedly now at the cottages, now up at the sky. Six times a day they had tea in the house; four times th
ey sat down to eat. In the evenings they counted the receipts and wrote them down, then slept soundly.

In Ukleyevo, all three cotton mills were connected by telephone with the quarters of the owners, the Khrymin Seniors, the Khrymin Juniors, and Kostiukov. A telephone was also installed in the local administrative office, but there it soon stopped working, because it got infested with bedbugs and cockroaches. The local headman was barely literate and began every word in official documents with a capital letter, but when the telephone broke down, he said:

“Yes, it’ll be hard for us now without a telephone.”

The Khrymin Seniors were constantly taking the Khrymin
Juniors to court, the Juniors also sometimes quarreled with each other and went to court, and then their factory would stop working for a month or two, until they made peace, and this entertained the populace of Ukleyevo, because there would be much talk and gossip on the occasion of each quarrel. On holidays Kostiukov and the Khrymin Juniors organized drives and raced around Ukleyevo, running down calves. Aksinya, her starched skirts rustling, all dressed up, would stroll outside near her shop; the Juniors would pick her up and drive away
with her as if by force. Then old Tsybukin would also drive out, to show off his new horse, and take Varvara with him.

In the evening, after the drives, when everyone was in bed, an expensive accordion would begin to play in the Juniors’ y
ard, and if the moon was out, these sounds would disturb and delight the heart, and Ukleyevo would no longer seem like a hole.

The elder son Anisim came home very rarely, only on major feasts, but to make up for it he often sent presents home with his fellow villagers and letters written in someone else’s hand, a very beautiful one, each time on a sheet of writing paper, with the look of a petition. The letters were full of expressions such as Anisim never used in conversation: “My gentle mama and papa, I am sending you a pound of chamomile tea for the satisfaction of your physical needs.”

At the bottom of each page “Anisim Tsybukin” was scrawled, as if with a broken pen, and below it, in the same beautiful hand: “Agent.”

The letters would be read aloud several times, and the old man, moved, flushed with excitement, would say:

“See, he didn’t want to live at home, he got into the learned line. So, let him! Each to his own place.”

Once just before Lent there was a heavy rain with hail; the old man and Varvara went to the window to look, and—lo and behold, Anisim was driving up in a sledge from the station. They were not expecting him at all. He came in uneasy and alarmed at something; and so he remained all the while afterwards; and his behavior was
somehow casual. He was in no hurry to leave, and it looked as if he had been dismissed from his job. Varvara was glad he had come; she kept glancing at him somehow slyly, sighing and shaking her head.

“How can it be, dear hearts?” she said. “Why, the lad’s nearly twenty-eight and he’s still going around a bachelor—oh, tush, tush …”

From the other room all that could be heard of her soft, even speech was: “Oh, tush, tush.” She began to whisper with the old man and Aksinya, and their faces, too, acquired a sly and mysterious expression, as with conspirators.

They decided to get Anisim married.

“Oh, tush, tush! … The younger brother’s been married a long time,” said Varvara, “and you go on without a mate, like a cock at the market. What sort of thing is that? You’ll get married, God willing, then go to work if you like, and the wife can stay home and help us. There’s no order in your life, lad, and I can see you’ve forgotten all order. Oh, tush, tush, there’s nothing but sin with you townsfolk.”

When the Tsybukins married, the most beautiful brides were chosen for them, since they were rich. For Anisim, too, a beautiful girl was found. He himself was of uninteresting, unremarkable appearance; along with his weak, sickly build and small stature, he had full, plump cheeks, as if he puffed them out; his eyes never blinked, and their gaze was sharp; he had a sparse red beard, and when he pondered, he kept putting it in his mouth and chewing it; besides, he drank often, and it showed in his face and gait. But when he was told that they had a very beautiful bride for him, he said:

“Well, and I’m not so lopsided myself. All of us Tsybukins are handsome, I must say.”

Just below the town was the village of Torguyevo. Half of it had recently been incorporated into the town, the other half remained a village. In the first half, in her own little house, lived a certain widow; she had a sister, completely poor, who did day labor, and this sister had a daughter, Lipa, a young girl who also did day labor. Lipa’s beauty was already being talked about in Torguyevo, only everybody was disheartened by her terrible poverty; they reasoned that some older man or widower
would marry her, overlooking her poverty, or would take her for himself “just so,” and her mother would be fed along with her. Varvara found out about Lipa from the matchmakers and paid a visit to Torguyevo.

Then a showing was arranged in the aunt’s house, quite properly, with food and wine, and Lipa wore a new pink dress specially made for the occasion, and a crimson ribbon shone like a flame in her hair. She was thin, frail, wan, with fine, tender features, darkened from working in the open air; a sad, timid smile never left her face, and her gaze was childlike—trusting and full of curiosity