“What shall I write?” asked Yegor, dipping his pen in the ink.
Vasilissa had not seen her daughter for four years. Efimia had gone away
to St. Petersburg with her husband after her wedding, had written two
letters, and then had vanished as if the earth had engulfed her, not a
word nor a sound had come from her since. So now, whether the aged
mother was milking the cow at daybreak, or lighting the stove, or dozing
at night, the tenor of her thoughts was always the same: “How is Efimia?
Is she alive and well?” She wanted to send her a letter, but the old
father could not write, and there was no one whom they could ask to
write it for them.
But now Christmas had come, and Vasilissa could endure the silence no
longer. She went to the tavern to see Yegor, the innkeeper’s wife’s
brother, who had done nothing but sit idly at home in the tavern since
he had come back from military service, but of whom people said that he
wrote the most beautiful letters, if only one paid him enough. Vasilissa
talked with the cook at the tavern, and with the innkeeper’s wife, and
finally with Yegor himself, and at last they agreed on a price of
fifteen copecks.
So now, on the second day of the Christmas festival, Yegor was sitting
at a table in the inn kitchen with a pen in his hand. Vasilissa was
standing in front of him, plunged in thought, with a look of care and
sorrow on her face. Her husband, Peter, a tall, gaunt old man with a
bald, brown head, had accompanied her. He was staring steadily in front
of him like a blind man; a pan of pork that was frying on the stove was
sizzling and puffing, and seeming to say: “Hush, hush, hush!” The
kitchen was hot and close.
“What shall I write?” Yegor asked again.
“What’s that?” asked Vasilissa, looking at him angrily and suspiciously.
“Don’t hurry me! You are writing this letter for money, not for love!
Now then, begin. To our esteemed son-in-law, Andrei Khrisanfitch, and
our only and beloved daughter Efimia, we send greetings and love, and
the everlasting blessing of their parents.”
“All right, fire away!”
“We wish them a happy Christmas. We are alive and well, and we wish the
same for you in the name of God, our Father in heaven—our Father in
heaven——”
Vasilissa stopped to think, and exchanged glances with the old man.
“We wish the same for you in the name of God, our Father in Heaven—” she
repeated and burst into tears.
That was all she could say. Yet she had thought, as she had lain awake
thinking night after night, that ten letters could not contain all she
wanted to say. Much water had flowed into the sea since their daughter
had gone away with her husband, and the old people had been as lonely as
orphans, sighing sadly in the night hours, as if they had buried their
child. How many things had happened in the village in all these years!
How many people had married, how many had died! How long the winters had
been, and how long the nights!
“My, but it’s hot!” exclaimed Yegor, unbuttoning his waistcoat. “The
temperature must be seventy! Well, what next?” he asked.
The old people answered nothing.
“What is your son-in-law’s profession?”
“He used to be a soldier, brother; you know that,” replied the old man
in a feeble voice. “He went into military service at the same time you
did. He used to be a soldier, but now he is in a hospital where a doctor
treats sick people with water. He is the doorkeeper there.”
“You can see it written here,” said the old woman, taking a letter out
of her handkerchief. “We got this from Efimia a long, long time ago. She
may not be alive now.”
Yegor reflected a moment, and then began to write swiftly.
“Fate has ordained you for the military profession,” he wrote,
“therefore we recommend you to look into the articles on disciplinary
punishment and penal laws of the war department, and to find there the
laws of civilisation for members of that department.”
When this was written he read it aloud whilst Vasilissa thought of how
she would like to write that there had been a famine last year, and that
their flour had not even lasted until Christmas, so that they had been
obliged to sell their cow; that the old man was often ill, and must soon
surrender his soul to God; that they needed money—but how could she put
all this into words? What should she say first and what last?
“Turn your attention to the fifth volume of military definitions,” Yegor
wrote. “The word soldier is a general appellation, a distinguishing
term. Both the commander-in-chief of an army and the last infantryman in
the ranks are alike called soldiers——”
The old man’s lips moved and he said in a low voice:
“I should like to see my little grandchildren!”
“What grandchildren?” asked the old woman crossly. “Perhaps there are no
grandchildren.”
“No grandchildren? But perhaps there are! Who knows?”
“And from this you may deduce,” Yegor hurried on, “which is an internal,
and which is a foreign enemy. Our greatest internal enemy is Bacchus——”
The pen scraped and scratched, and drew long, curly lines like
fish-hooks across the paper. Yegor wrote at full speed and underlined
each sentence two or three times. He was sitting on a stool with his
legs stretched far apart under the table, a fat, lusty creature with a
fiery nape and the face of a bulldog. He was the very essence of coarse,
arrogant, stiff-necked vulgarity, proud to have been born and bred in a
pot-house, and Vasilissa well knew how vulgar he was, but could not find
words to express it, and could only glare angrily and suspiciously at
him. Her head ached from the sound of his voice and his unintelligible
words, and from the oppressive heat of the room, and her mind was
confused. She could neither think nor speak, and could only stand and
wait for Yegor’s pen to stop scratching. But the old man was looking at
the writer with unbounded confidence in his eyes. He trusted his old
woman who had brought him here, he trusted Yegor, and, when he had
spoken of the hydropathic establishment just now, his face had shown
that he trusted that, and the healing power of its waters.
When the letter was written, Yegor got up and read it aloud from
beginning to end. The old man understood not a word, but he nodded his
head confidingly, and said:
“Very good. It runs smoothly. Thank you kindly, it is very good.”
They laid three five-copeck pieces on the table and went out. The old
man walked away staring straight ahead of him like a blind man, and a
look of utmost confidence lay in his eyes, but Vasilissa, as she left
the tavern, struck at a dog in her path and exclaimed angrily:
“Ugh—the plague!”
All that night the old woman lay awake full of restless thoughts, and at
dawn she rose, said her prayers, and walked eleven miles to the station
to post the letter.