The Blizzard (19 page)

Crouper felt that the doctor had fallen asleep; he turned slightly and rearranged the horses on him and in empty spaces.

“Everbody’s in one piece … They fits … And me and the doctor fits…,” he thought. “Well, that’s that.”

Everything was fine under the hood: the doctor, Crouper, and the horses all had enough room. Only one thing was worrisome: the crack. The wood had split along the seam, just behind Crouper’s back, and as bad luck would have it, his sheepskin coat had an old hole right near the left shoulder—last winter he’d caught it on a latch in the Khliupin bakery when he was carrying out a tray of bread. He’d sewn it up with a coarse thread and gotten through that winter, but now the thread had apparently frayed, and a draft from the crack was blowing right onto his left shoulder blade, and he couldn’t turn over because the doctor was asleep.

“Bad luck…,” Crouper thought, turning slightly to protect the horses, shifting his left shoulder away from the crack, trying to put his back against it.

One of the horses got its head tangled in his beard.

“Who’s that tickling me there?” Crouper grinned.

The horse whinnied.

“Sivka, what is it?” Crouper recognized the voice of one of his four gray geldings.

The gelding whickered on hearing its name. Then it urinated on Crouper’s chest.

“Don’t get all worked up now.” Crouper pushed the horse’s head gently with his chin.

The gray drew back and poked his muzzle into Crouper’s neck, where two other horses were already nuzzling him. Hearing the gray’s voice, the lively roan, who had been about to doze off inside his master’s sleeve, grew jealous and neighed aggressively.

“What’s got into ye?” Crouper flicked him on the withers, which protruded from his sleeve.

The roan quieted down and nibbled his master’s arm with playful gratitude.

“There’s my gadfly…,” Crouper thought about the roan; smiling in the darkness, he remembered how he had brought him home last summer under his shirt.

Previously, Crouper only had a black roan in the herd. He traded a canister of gasoline to a visiting tailor in Khliupin for the six-month-old red roan colt. He had bought the canister from his brother-in-law, and had already loaded it on the cart of the late land surveyor Romych, when a drunken tailor showed up and began boasting that he’d been paid for two women’s dresses and two velour jackets with a little colt. He pulled the roan out of his pocket and showed it to Crouper. The roan’s coloring was unusual; he was red with streaks of gray, a fiery mane, and he was vigorous, though not very broad-chested. He neighed continually. Crouper liked him from the start. Perhaps because he’d recently lost two colts to some unknown disease and there were two empty collars in the third row. Or maybe because the roan was a redhead, like Crouper himself. The tailor kept on babbling, saying he would raise the colt and rent it out to coachmen. But when Crouper offered him the canister of 92-grade gasoline, he quickly agreed. On the way home the roan neighed uneasily under Crouper’s shirt. Nor did he calm down in the herd. His lively, brash temperament distinguished him from the others, but he wasn’t lead material. The lead horse was always the calm bay, a broad-chested gelding.

Crouper twisted around, trying to protect the tear at his shoulder from the gap. Cold rose from the frozen plank floor of the hood. The only warmth came from the horses. Even in the darkness, Crouper could feel where each and every animal was. He knew that the eight chestnuts, who always gathered in their own herd, had managed even now to huddle together in the spaces between the doctor’s legs and Crouper’s. The doctor was sleeping, breathing hoarsely onto Crouper’s forehead. He was a large man, and his arms and legs filled almost the entire space under the hood.

“A big fellow…,” Crouper thought, and suddenly remembered the giant’s corpse and its hard forehead, which he had hacked to pieces.

“Chopped and chopped, I did … and barely managed to chop it open…,” he thought, yawning with a shiver.

He shivered every now and then. He hadn’t been this tired for ages. The exhaustion of the endless road was so intense that he no longer noticed the cold. He didn’t want to move, even though a draft was blowing on his shoulder. The shivering and exhaustion felt sweet, much like when he was a child.

“Thank God it isn’t too freezing…,” he thought as he dozed off.

Sleep carried him into its own expanses. As he fell asleep, Crouper remembered the cleaver the giants had in Pokrovskoye when he was little. That enormous, massively heavy cleaver didn’t look like the ordinary axes the peasants used to split firewood: there was a hole that ran through the side, with an iron grommet in it that passed through the handle. The men were surprised: in normal cleavers and axes, the cleat wedges were lodged in the butt end of the axe handle, but in this case they were on the side.

That grommet, the grommet from the giants’ cleaver, was big. Very big. Heavy. Weighty. It weighed many poods, hundreds, thousands of poods, and stretched, stretched, stretched from merchant Baksheev’s house to the house of Crouper’s father, a sturdy house with a weathervane, a super-antenna, and pink gingerbread-house-style decorative window frames, the very house that Crouper burned down when he was a little boy, burned down when he and Funtik found some Chinese firecrackers, and his parents and Uncle Misha and his sister Polina were in the fields, and Funtik placed a cartridge of firecrackers on a Three Warriors beer box, and they lit them, and the firecrackers went off, the box fell over for some reason, the cartridge flew in the air and popped in all directions, and the firecrackers landed on the drying barn, the straw roof, and the house, right up top, shooting straight into the open attic, where Father had laid out beeswax on paper; the roof of the drying barn caught fire, the inside of the attic caught fire, and Funtik got scared and ran off, but Kozma, who was also scared, didn’t run away and didn’t cry out, he just stood there and watched the drying barn burn, he stood and watched, stood and watched, he kept on standing and watching the fire while the roof burned and flames jumped to the hayloft and the hayloft caught fire; he was still standing and watching when the neighbors ran over; the attic room under the roof was blazing, there were flames coming from the window, the house could no longer be saved, and the neighbors were dragging things out; but he, Kozma, was supposed to save something important in the house, something that burned back then but wouldn’t burn now, something his father couldn’t forgive him for at the time, though he forgave him the burned house, the drying barn, and the hayloft, but for the fact that this thing had burned he could never forgive him, which was why Kozma left his father’s house so early, but now he would be able to save the thing, he’d know how to drag it out of the house, he only has to force himself to do it, to move from that spot, and he grabs hold of his leg and lifts it with his hands, he moves it, then grabs the other one and moves it; his legs don’t want to walk, but he grabs them, digs into them, tears the flesh with his nails until he bleeds, moves them, moves the flesh of his legs, his hands walk his legs, his hands, his hands make his legs walk; bending over his legs and forcing himself to walk, he enters the house, the house is already hot, the upstairs is burning, burning fast, the neighbors have taken everything out, they’ve saved the icons and both trunks, but only he knows where the most important thing is hidden, his father’s greatest treasure. He grabs the ring of the cellar trapdoor, pulls, lifts the wood trap, and climbs down into the cellar; there are barrels of marinated cabbage and pickles, a ham wrapped in cheesecloth hangs from a beam, and next to the ham, also wrapped in cheesecloth, disguised as meat, hangs the cocoon of a large butterfly, it’s the size of a leg of meat, but the wingspan of the butterfly that will hatch from this cocoon is more than two meters, his father and uncle stole it from the royal incubator near Podolsk, his uncle was working in the greenhouses for the season, they took the cocoon out and hid it in a wheelbarrow full of peat, took it to Pokrovskoye, his father hid it in the cellar, disguised as a leg of salted beef, wrapped it in cheesecloth, rubbed it with lard, the cocoon of a huge blue Death’s Head; it was very expensive, very beautiful, it cost three times more than Father’s house, Father had already arranged to sell it to the Romanians, the main thing was to keep it in a cool place so that the butterfly didn’t hatch too early or everything would be ruined. Kozma must take it out of the house and quickly hide it in the old cellar in the garden, where it is also cold, and Father would return, and the cocoon would be safe; he gropes for it in the cellar and holds it in his arms, it’s like an infant, he crawls out of the cellar with it, and everything around is burning, everything has caught fire so fast, everything is in flames, it’s so hot, so bright, he heads for the door carrying the cocoon, but suddenly it cracks, he keeps going, but it cracks, and a dark-blue, unbelievably beautiful butterfly begins to burst out of the cocoon, bursts out of the membrane, bursts out of his hands, it is so lovely, so smooth, silky, incredibly beautiful, so beautiful that he forgets about his father, it’s pretty, like an angel, it has a beautiful, light-blue shining skull on its back, but it isn’t really a skull, it’s an angelic face, a sublime angelic visage, shining in every tint of blue and violet, it sings in a delicate, quivering voice, and it tears away, tears out of his hands, its huge wings flap, it tears away so forcefully, so charmingly, that Kozma’s heart begins to quiver like its wings, he can’t let it go, he mustn’t let it go, he’ll do anything to hold on to it, he grabs it by its thick, silky legs, it sings, flaps its wings, and flies through the burning window, it carries Kozma through the fiery window, and Kozma’s arms join with the butterfly’s legs, his bones fuse with its bones, his bones sing along with the butterfly, a song of new life, a song of ultimate happiness, a song of great joy; they sing, and the butterfly carries him into the infinite fiery window, into the narrow fiery window, into the swift window of fire, into the long window of fire, into the window of fire, into the window of fire, into the window of fire.

*   *   *

The sun sparkled on the gray horizon. It illuminated the snowy field and the clear pale-blue sky with its fading stars and moon. A ray of sun, stretching across the field, touched the snow-covered sled, hit the crack in the hood and the eye of one of the four horses sleeping on the doctor’s fur hat. The dark bay stallion opened one eye.

The crunch of snow could be heard next to the hood. Something outside was scratching at the plywood. The bright red muzzle of a fox poked under the matting. The dark bay neighed in terror. The other horses turned over and woke up. They saw the fox and whinnied, bolting back. The fox grabbed the first horse it could, and took off. The horses neighed and reared.

The neighing rang painfully in the doctor’s left ear. He thought that neurosurgeons were drilling into his ear. He just managed to open his eyes. And saw nothing but darkness. The darkness was whickering. The doctor wanted to move his right arm. But he couldn’t. He moved the fingers of his left hand. His left hand was under the flap of his fur coat. He pulled the numb, disobedient hand out from under the coat and felt for his face with his stiff, frozen fingers. His hat was on his face. With tremendous difficulty, the doctor managed to move the hat off his face with those disobedient fingers. The ray of sun immediately hit his left eye. The horses neighed, and their hooves trampled the doctor’s body and head.

The doctor opened his eyes wide but couldn’t see anything and didn’t understand where or who he was.

He tried to move. Nothing worked. His body wouldn’t obey, as though he weren’t even there. He unstuck his lips and sucked freezing air into his lungs. He exhaled it. His breath billowed in the ray of sun. The little horses stomped on the doctor. He made a huge effort to raise his head. His chin ran up against something smooth and cold. The horses jumped off the hat. The doctor moved slightly. Pain shot through his back and shoulders: his entire body had grown numb and stiff with cold.

The doctor’s mouth opened, but instead of a moan a weak rasp emerged. He tried to raise himself a tiny bit. But something was hindering his body and legs, which he couldn’t feel at all.

The sunlight beat painfully in his eyes. The doctor remembered his pince-nez and patted his chest to find it. But his fingers wouldn’t work right, and something cold and strong was preventing him from finding the pince-nez. Finally he located it and pulled it to his face.

Suddenly, he heard loud human voices outside. The matting was torn abruptly from the hood. Two human silhouettes hung over the doctor’s head, blocking out the sun.

“Ni hai huozhe ma?”
one of the silhouettes asked, not sure whether the doctor was still alive.

“Wo kao!”
The other man laughed.

Frowning, the doctor put the pince-nez to his eyes. Two Chinese men were leaning over him. The horses whinnied and snorted. The doctor tried to turn, holding the pince-nez to his eyes, but the cord of the pince-nez caught on something. It was Crouper’s nose. His face was close, and it seemed to the doctor that it filled the entire hood. The huge face was lifeless and wax-white; only the sharp nose was blue. The sun shone on Crouper’s frost-covered eyelashes and his icy beard. His pale lips had frozen in a half smile. The expression on his face was now even more birdlike, mockingly self-assured, surprised by nothing and afraid of nothing.

A live hand stretched out, touched Crouper’s cold face, and quickly withdrew.

“Gua le!”
Then the warm, rough fingers of another hand touched the doctor’s cheeks.

“You alive?” a voice asked in Russian.

The doctor suddenly remembered everything.

“Who are you?” the voice asked him.

He opened his mouth to answer, but instead of words only a raspy noise and steam came out.

“
Wo shi yisheng
,” the doctor croaked in horrible Chinese.
“Bangzhu … bangzhu … qing ban wo
…”

“You’re a doctor? Don’t worry, we’ll help you.”