The Blizzard (16 page)

He floundered about in the drift, looking for his hat, but, on hearing the horses’ frightened snorts, he hurried to them and checked under the hood. The horses whickered, looking for help from their master.

“Now, now…” Pulling off his mittens, he began petting them gently. “It’s all right, all right … Not hurt, are ye?”

None of the horses appeared to be injured. The collars and the strong straps had held them.

“Y’er all right, all right … Coulda been worse…” He stroked their backs, which were damp and steaming from running.

Holding his knee, the doctor moaned. He had whacked it hard against the sled.

Once the horses were calm, Crouper went looking for his hat. Fortunately, the moon was bright and still free of clouds. Crouper soon found the hat, shook the snow off, and stuck it on his head. Then he went over to the doctor. The doctor was sitting in the snow, moaning, shaking his uncovered head, and cursing. Crouper picked up the doctor’s hat and put it on him.

“Ain’t broke nothing, did ye?” Crouper asked.

“Damn…” The doctor felt his knee. “I don’t think so. Damn … It hurts…”

Crouper grabbed him under the arms. Cautiously, the doctor tried to stand but immediately moaned and fell back in the snow:

‘Wait a minute…”

Crouper squatted nearby and only then realized that he’d broken his lower front tooth against the rudder.

“Ay, darn it…” He touched the broken tooth in his mouth, shook his head, and grinned: “How d’ye like that!”

The doctor scooped up snow and held it to his knee:

“Just a minute…”

Holding the snow, he turned unseeing eyes on Crouper:

“What was it?”

“Cain’t say, yur ’onor…” Crouper touched his tooth. “We’ll take a look.”

“Why didn’t you hold the horses back?”

“You was the one floggin’ ’em on!”

“I was flogging!” The doctor shook his head indignantly. “I flogged, but you were steering, you damned idiot … Damn … Hmmm … Ouch!”

He winced, leaning over his knee, his fat lips puffing.

“I thought: it’s just a little bump, we’ll skip right over.”

“We sure skipped over it!” the doctor laughed bitterly. “I almost broke my neck…”

“And the bump is smooth,” said Crouper, standing up and walking over to the sled.

He walked around to the front, looked closely, and froze. He crossed himself:

“God a’mighty. Yur ’onor, take a look at what we runned into.”

“Wait, you fool…,” the doctor moaned.

“Lord a’mighty, tarnation! Yur ’onor!”

“Shut up, you fool.”

“It’s a … Ain’t no one’ll believe it…”

“Ow…” The doctor rubbed his knee. “Give me your hand.”

“Lordy, why such a misfortune, what did I do…?” Crouper sat down and anxiously slapped his mittens on his felt boots.

“I said, give me a hand!”

Crouper returned to the doctor and helped him stand:

“God must be mad at me, yur ’onor. Looky what’s come ’bout.”

He appeared totally lost, and the smile on his birdlike mouth was pitiful, like a beggar’s.

The doctor finally managed to stand and straighten up. Leaning on Crouper, he stepped on the hurt leg. He moaned. He stood a bit, panting. He took another step:

“Ow, damn it…”

He stood, frowning. Then he hit Crouper upside the head.

“Where have you taken me, you idiot?!”

Crouper didn’t even flinch.

“Where’ve you taken me?!” the doctor screamed into his hat.

A strong, pleasant smell of alcohol came from the doctor.

“Yur ’onor, there’s a … over there…” Crouper shook his head. “Prob’ly better ye don’t look.”

“You idiot!” The doctor put on his pince-nez, took a step, frowning, glanced at the listing sled, and threw up his hands. “What kind of bastard are you?!”

Crouper said nothing.

“Bastard!”

The doctor’s voice thundered through the snow-covered fir trees.

Crouper stepped away toward the tip of the sled and stood there, sniffling.

“Were you just born an idiot or what?” Limping, the doctor hobbled over to him, stopped, and looked.

And froze, his eyebrows raised.

Right in front of the sled, something was sticking out from under the snow. At first the doctor thought it was the twisted stump of an old tree. But when he looked closer, he could make out the head of a dead giant. The sled’s right runner had run straight into his left nostril.

The doctor couldn’t believe his eyes; he blinked and moved closer: the hill they’d flown up was nothing other than the corpse of one of the
big ones
, covered in snow.

Forgetting all about the pain in his knee, Platon Ilich approached the sled and leaned over. The huge, frozen head had tangled hair, a wrinkled brow, and thick eyebrows; the force of the blow had knocked some of the snow off of it. The runner had disappeared into the nostril of the fleshy nose. The snowflakes on the giant’s eyebrows, eyelashes, and hair shimmered silver in the moonlight. One dead eye was full of snow; the other, half closed, stared threateningly at the night sky.

“Oh my God in heaven,” muttered the doctor.

“Well, that’s the thing of it…,” Crouper said with a doomed nod.

The doctor squatted next to the head and brushed the snow off the covered eye. It, too, was half closed. The mouth was hidden in a snowy beard, and the tip of the sled hung above it. Attached to the giant’s protruding ear was a heavy copper earring in the form and size of a sixty-pound weight. It sparkled in the snow.

The doctor touched the earring cautiously. He touched the enormous, frozen nose with its rough, greasy, pimply skin. He turned around. Crouper stood there, and from the sorrowful expression on his face one might have thought that the sled had driven into the nostril of his long-lost brother.

The doctor began laughing and fell back into the snow. His laughter rang out amid the firs. The horses replied with uneasy whinnies from inside the sled. This elicited a new fit of laughter from the doctor. He writhed on his back in the snow, laughing, his pince-nez sparkling and his fleshy mouth open wide.

Crouper stood still, like a wet jackdaw. Then he began to cluck his tongue. He smiled and shook his absurdly large hat.

“You’re a real master, Kozma!” The doctor wiped the tears of laughter from his eyes.

“Well now, how on earth?… No one’d believe it, if’n we told ’em, yur ’onor.”

“They certainly wouldn’t!” exclaimed the doctor, shaking his hat.

He stood up and brushed off the snow. Limping, he stepped back and looked:

“That lug must be about six meters tall … Had to go and kick the bucket here…”

Crouper noticed a large, round object under the snow next to the giant’s corpse. He pushed the object with his foot, knocking the snow off. A basket of woven twigs appeared. Crouper brushed off the snow with his mitten: glass sparkled. He cleaned the snow off the object. It turned out to be a large, three-bucket, green glass bottle set in a basket holder.

“So that’s it, yur ’onor…” Crouper cleared the snow from the enormous bottleneck, and sniffed it. “Vodka!”

He kicked the crust of ice on the bottle, knocked it off, and turned it over. Not a drop came out.

“Drunk up the whole thing, he did,” Crouper concluded reproachfully.

“He drank it,” the doctor agreed, “and gave up the ghost right on the road. There you have it, good old Russian stupidity.”

“Coulda least leaned up against a tree,” said Crouper, scratching his rear end. He realized he’d said something silly: this giant could only have leaned against a hundred-year-old fir, not one of the young saplings all around.

“Get drunk and collapse on the road … Utter idiocy! Russian stupidity!” The red-faced doctor smiled wryly; he took out his cigarette case and lit up the last
papirosa
.

“The worst part is—it’s the same runner crashed again, yur ’onor.” Crouper sniffed and scratched himself. “If only it hadn’t of…”

“What?” The doctor didn’t follow. He puffed on his cigarette.

“It’s the same runner what cracked back apiece.”

“You’re kidding! The same one? Damn it! So what are you standing around for?! Pull it out of that lout!”

“Just a minute, yur ’onor…”

Crouper looked in at the horses, leaned hard against the sled, and clucked:

“C’mon, c’mon, c’mon!”

Snorting, the horses began to step backward. But the sled didn’t budge. Crouper realized what the problem was; he looked under the sled and clucked sorrowfully:

“We’re just hanging in air, yur ’onor. The drive belt ain’t even touchin’ the snow.”

“Come on, then…” Reeking of alcohol and having forgotten about his knee, the doctor clenched the cigarette in his teeth and put his shoulder to the sled. “Come on, nooowww!”

Crouper leaned in, too. The sled shook, but the giant’s head didn’t release the runner.

“Stuck…,” Crouper exhaled.

“Right in the nose!” the doctor exclaimed, and laughed again.

“Have to chop it off.” Crouper reached into the coachman’s seat for the axe.

“The runner?!” The doctor raised an indignant eyebrow.

“The nose.”

“Chop away, my man, chop away.” The doctor took one last drag and tossed his cigarette butt aside.

The moon shone brightly. The fir trees stood around like part of a
living
Christmas card.

The doctor unfastened his coat; he was hot. Crouper approached the head, holding the axe in hand. He eyed the head and began to chop at the nostril that the runner had entered. Panting heavily, the doctor leaned his elbow against the sled and watched Crouper’s work.

Pieces of frozen flesh flew out from under the axe. Then came a dull thud as the axe struck bone.

“Just don’t chop up the runner,” the doctor commanded.

“A’course not…,” Crouper muttered.

As he hacked away at the enormous frozen nose, Kozma remembered the first time he’d ever seen one of the big people. He was ten at the time. He wasn’t living in Dolbeshino but in his father’s home in the prosperous village of Pokrovskoye. That summer the autumn fair was moved from Dolgoye to Pokrovskoye. The local merchants decided to cut down Rotten Grove and build stands for the fair. The ancient oak grove had been in Pokrovskoye since the olden days, when there was a landowner’s estate house, which had been burned down during the Red Troubles. The oaks in the grove were enormous, dried out, and some of them were decaying and rotting. Boys played war or werewolves in the huge hollows of these oaks. And now they’d decided to cut the grove down. The merchants of Pokrovskoye had hired three giants for this: Avdot, Borka, and Viakhir. On a warm summer evening, they entered Pokrovskoye, each carrying a knapsack, a saw, and a cleaver on his shoulders. Like the frozen creature on the road, these giants were five to six meters tall. Boys greeted them with hoots and whistles. But the big ones treated the little boys like sparrows and paid them no mind. They set up in the old threshing barn of the merchant Baksheev, and in the morning began clearing the oaks. Little Kozma was both frightened and excited as he watched them work: when the big ones went about their task, everything cracked and collapsed. They not only toppled all the oaks, sawed them into logs, and chopped them into pieces, but also pulled the huge oak stumps out by the roots and split them into firewood. In the evenings, they drank about three buckets of milk apiece and ate mashed potatoes with lard; they sat on oak stumps and sang in rough, thundering voices. Kozma remembered one song, which lop-eared, red-faced Avdot had sung in a slow, deep, scary voice:

You carried me, Mátushka,

In your womb,

You wailed, Kasátushka,

Over my tomb.

Then Avdot and Viakhir fought over money. Viakhir beat Avdot, who got mad and left Pokrovskoye without waiting until the work was finished. As the womenfolk told it, he spit blood all along the road from Pokrovskoye to Borovki. Since Avdot left, the Pokrovskoye merchants paid the giants a third less. So they had their revenge the last night and took a dump in merchant Baksheev’s well. It took him three days to clean his well after that; they hauled out buckets and buckets of giant shit …

Crouper had trouble chopping through the nose cartilage. The runner that had caught in the nostril was visible now. Crouper and the doctor rocked the sled, but the runner wouldn’t come loose.

“The runner pierced the maxillary sinus and got stuck there,” said the doctor, examining the situation. “Chop right here, from the top!”

Crouper tore off his mittens, spit on his hands, and began to chop at the frontal bone. The bone proved hard and thick. Crouper rested twice as he chopped deeper into it. Pieces of white bone flew out from under the axe, sparkling in the moonlight.

“When you fell trees, chips will fly,” said the doctor, remembering his great-grandfather’s favorite saying.

Garin’s great-grandfather, an accountant, often reminisced about the distant Stalin era, when that saying was popular with the authorities and the people.

Crouper made it through the bone and then, instead of white chips, greenish ones flew from under the axe.

“Aha! He had sinusitis…,” thought the doctor, squinting at the giant professionally. “Probably a vagrant. He was walking, drinking. Got drunk, stumbled, fell asleep. Froze …

“Russia…,” he muttered, and recalled how he’d once treated a giant who’d developed a hernia. The big one had been hired in Repishnaya for earthwork. He’d dug a foundation pit with his huge shovel, and then moved a barn and overexerted himself. When Garin, along with three volunteers, fixed the hernia, the big one howled, chomped on the chains that had been used to hold him fast to the floor, and roared:

“Don’t! Don’t!”

They fixed the hernia successfully that time …

“Chopped right through, tarnation.” Exhausted, Crouper straightened up, took off his hat, and wiped his face.

“Hmm…” A cloud had crossed the moon, and in the dim light the doctor examined the light stripe of the runner in the pit of the head. The giant’s face, disfigured by the axe, looked ominous.

“Shud we push it back?” Throwing down the axe, Crouper leaned against the nose of the sled.

“Let’s push!” The doctor leaned against the other side.