During the Christmas holidays Ivanushka, from Basovka, dropped in to
see Kuzma. He was an old-fashioned peasant who had grown foolish from
old age, although once on a time he had been renowned for his bear-like
strength. Thickset, bent into a bow, he never lifted his shaggy dark
brown head. He always walked with his toes turned inward. And he amazed
Kuzma even more than had Menshoff, Akim, and Syery. In the cholera year
of ’ninety-two, the whole of Ivanushka’s huge family had died. All he
had left was a son, a soldier, who was now working for the railway as
a line-guard, about five versts from Durnovka. Ivanushka might have
passed his declining days with his son, but he preferred to roam about
and ask alms. He strode lightly, in his bandy-legged way, across the
farmyard, with his cap and his staff in his left hand, a bag in his
right, and his head, on which the snow shone white, uncovered--and for
some reason or other the sheep dogs did not growl at him. He entered
the house, mumbled “May God bless this house and the master of this
house,” and seated himself on the floor against the wall. Kuzma dropped
his book and in amazement stared timidly at him over his eyeglasses,
as if he had been some wild beast from the steppe, whose presence
inside a house was a prodigy.
Silently, with downcast lashes and a slight amiable smile, the Bride
made her appearance, walking lightly in her bark-slippers, gave
Ivanushka a bowl of boiled potatoes and the entire corner crust of a
loaf, all grey with salt, and remained standing at the door-jamb. She
wore bark-slippers; she was broad and robust in the shoulders; and her
handsome, faded face was so simple and old-fashioned, in the peasant
style, that it seemed as if she could not possibly address Ivanushka
otherwise than as “grandfather.” And, smiling for him and him alone,
she did indeed say softly: “Eat, eat, grandfather.”
And he, without raising his head, and recognizing her kindliness from
her voice alone, quietly wailed in reply, at times mumbling: “The Lord
save ye, granddaughter!” then crossed himself broadly and awkwardly,
as if his hand had been a paw, and eagerly fell to on the food. The
snow melted on his dark brown hair, supernaturally thick and coarse.
The water streamed down from his bark-shoes on to the floor. From his
ancient dark brown fitted coat, worn over a dirty hemp-crash shirt,
emanated the smoky odour of a chimneyless hovel. His hands were
deformed by long toil, and his horny unbending fingers fished up the
potatoes with difficulty.
“You must feel cold in that thin coat, don’t you?” inquired Kuzma, in a
loud tone.
“Hey?” answered Ivanushka in a faint wail, holding his hand to his
ear, which was all overgrown with hair.
“You are cold, aren’t you?”
Ivanushka thought it over. “Why cold?” he replied, pausing between his
words. “Not a bit cold. ’Twas a lot colder in days gone by.”
“Lift up your head; put your hair in order!”
Ivanushka slowly shook his head.
“I can’t raise it now, brother. It drags earthward.” And with a dim
smile he made an effort to lift his dreadful face, all overgrown with
hair, and his tiny screwed-up eyes.
When he had finished eating he heaved a sigh, made the sign of the
cross, collected the crumbs from his knees and chewed them up; then he
felt about at his sides, in search of his bag, stick, and cap, and,
having found them, and recovered his equanimity, he began a leisurely
conversation. He was capable of sitting silent for the whole day, but
Kuzma and the Bride plied him with questions, and he answered, as if
asleep and from a far distance. He narrated in his clumsy, ancient
language that the Tsar was made entirely of gold; that the Tsar could
not eat fish--’twas exceeding salt--that once on a time the Prophet
Elijah broke through the sky and tumbled down on the earth--“he was
exceedingly heavy”--that John the Baptist was as shaggy as a ram when
he was born, and that at his baptism he beat his godfather over the
head with his iron crutch, in order that the man might “come to his
senses”; that every horse, once a year, on St. Flor and St. Lavr’s Day,
seeks an opportunity to kill a man. He told how in days of yore the
rye had grown up so densely that it was impossible for a snake to crawl
through it; how in those times they reaped at the rate of two desyatini
a day for each man; how he himself had owned a gelding which was kept
“on a chain,” so powerful and terrible was it; how one day sixty years
agone he, Ivanushka, had had a shaft arch stolen from him for which he
would not have accepted two rubles. He was firmly convinced that his
family had died, not of cholera, but because after a fire they had gone
to a new cottage and had passed the night in it without having first
let a cock pass the night there, and that he and his son had been saved
solely by accident: he had slept on the grain-rick.
Toward evening Ivanushka rose and walked away, without paying the
slightest heed to what the weather was like and without yielding to all
their admonitions to remain until the morrow. And he caught his death
cold, and on Epiphany Day he died in his son’s guard-box. His son urged
him to receive the Sacrament. Ivanushka would not consent; he said that
once you received the Communion you would surely die, whereas he was
firmly determined not to “yield to death.” For whole days at a time he
lay unconscious; but even in his delirium he begged his daughter-in-law
to say that he was not at home if Death should knock at the door.
Once, at night, he came to himself, collected his forces, crept down
from the top of the oven, and knelt down in front of the holy picture,
illuminated by a shrine-lamp. He sighed heavily, mumbled for a long
time, kept repeating: “O Lord--Dear Little Father--forgive my sins.”
Then he became thoughtful and remained silent for a long time, with his
head bowed on the floor. Then, all of a sudden, he rose to his feet and
said firmly: “No. I will not yield!” But the next morning he noticed
that his daughter-in-law was rolling out the dough for patties and
heating the oven hot.
“Are you preparing for my funeral?” he asked, in a quavering voice.
His daughter-in-law made no reply. Again he collected his forces, again
crawled down from the oven, and went out into the vestibule. Yes, it
was true: there, upright against the wall, stood a huge purple coffin,
adorned with white eight-pointed crosses. Then he remembered what had
happened thirty years before, to his neighbour old Lukyan: Lukyan
had fallen ill, and they had bought a coffin for him--it, too, was a
fine, expensive coffin--and brought from the town flour, vodka, salted
striped bass; but Lukyan went and got well. What was to be done with
the coffin? How were they to justify the outlay? They cursed Lukyan
about it for the space of five years thereafter, made life unendurable
with their reproaches, tortured him with hunger, drove him frantic
with lice and dirt. Ivanushka, recalling this, bowed his head and
submissively went back into the cottage. And that night, as he lay
on his back, unconscious, he began, in a trembling, plaintive voice,
to sing, ever more and more softly. And suddenly he shook his knees,
hiccoughed, raised his chest high with a sigh, and, with foam on his
parted lips, grew cold in death....
X
Kuzma lay in his bed for almost a month, because of Ivanushka. On
Epiphany morning people declared that a bird would freeze stiff as it
flew, and Kuzma did not even possess felt boots. Nevertheless, he went
to take a last look at the dead man. His hands, folded and rigid below
his vast chest on a clean hempen shirt, deformed by calloused growths
in the course of full eighty years of rudimentarily heavy toil, were so
coarse and dreadful that Kuzma hastily turned his eyes away. And he was
unable to cast even so much as a sidelong glance at Ivanushka’s hair
and his dead wild-beast face. He drew the white calico up over him as
speedily as possible. And from beneath the calico there suddenly was
wafted a suffocatingly repulsive sweetish odour....
With a view to warming himself up, Kuzma drank some vodka and seated
himself in front of the hotly flaming oven. It was warm there in the
guardsman’s box, and neat as for a festival. Over the head of the
spacious purple coffin, covered with calico, twinkled the golden flame
of a small wax candle affixed to the dark holy picture in the corner;
and a cheap wood-cut, manufactured by the Josif Brothers, glared forth
in vivid colours. The soldier’s courteous wife easily lifted on her
oven-fork and thrust into the oven kettles weighing at least a pud,
chatted cheerfully about government, supplied fuel, and kept entreating
him to remain until her husband should return from the village.
But Kuzma was shaking with fever; his face burned from the vodka,
which, coursing like poison through his chilled body, began to induce
causeless tears to well up in his eyes. And without having got warm,
he drove away across the white, strong billows of the plain, to Tikhon
Ilitch. Covered with hoar-frost, the whitish-curly gelding trotted
swiftly along, emitting roaring and quacking sounds, like a drake,
ejecting from his nostrils columns of grey vapour. The sledge squeaked;
its iron runners screeched sonorously over the hard snow. Behind Kuzma,
in frozen circles, the low-hanging sun shone yellow; in front, from the
North, came a wind which scorched one and cut short one’s breath. The
branches which marked out the road bent under a thick, curly coating
of rime; the big grey gold-hammers flew in flocks ahead of the horse,
scattered over the glistening road, pecked at the frozen manure, again
took flight, and again dispersed. Kuzma gazed at them through his heavy
white eyelashes, feeling that his face had turned to wood, and that,
with his beard and mustache like white curls, he had come to resemble a
Christmastide mask. The sun was setting; the snowy billows gleamed with
a death-like green in the orange glow, and blue shadows extended from
their crests and crenellations. Kuzma turned his horse sharply about
and drove it back, in the direction of home. The sun had set; a faint
light glimmered in the house with its grey, neglected panes; the blue
twilight hung over it, and it looked cold and unsociable. The bullfinch
which had hung in a cage near the window, overlooking the orchard, had
died--in all probability from the coarse, strong tobacco--and lay with
its legs sticking up, its feathers ruffled, and its crimson beak agape.
“Done for!” said Kuzma, and picked up the bullfinch to throw out.
Durnovka, overwhelmed with frozen snow, was so far from all the world
on that mournful evening, in the heart of the steppe winter, that he
suddenly felt frightened by it. All was over! His burning head was
confused and heavy. He would take to his bed at once, and never rise
from it again.
The Bride, her bark-shoes screeching on the snow as she walked,
approached the porch, carrying a pail in her hand.
“I am ill, Duniushka!” said Kuzma caressingly, in the hope of hearing
from her lips a caressing word.
But the Bride replied indifferently, drily: “Shall I bring in the
samovar?” And she did not even inquire what was the matter with him.
Neither did she ask anything about Ivanushka.
Kuzma returned to the dark house and, shivering all over and wondering
with alarm where he could now go when need compelled, lay down on the
divan. And the evenings slipped into nights and the nights slipped
into days, and he lost all count of them.
About three o’clock on the first night he woke up and pounded on the
wall with his fist, in order to ask for a drink: he had been tormented
in his sleep by thirst and the thought, had they thrown out the
bullfinch? No one answered his knocking: the Bride had gone off to
the servants’ quarters to pass the night. And Kuzma, conscious now,
remembered that he was sick unto death, and he was overpowered by such
melancholy as would have seized him in a tomb. Obviously the vestibule,
which smelled of snow and straw and horse-collars, was empty! Obviously
he, sick and helpless, was utterly alone in that dark, ice-cold little
house, where the windows gleamed dim and grey amid the winter night,
with that useless cage hanging beside them!
“O Lord, save and have mercy; O Lord, help in some way,” he murmured,
pulling himself up and fumbling with trembling hands through his
pockets.
He wanted to strike a match. But his whisper was feverish; something
rustled and reverberated in his burning head; his hands and feet were
icy cold. Klasha came, quickly threw open the door, placed his head on
the pillow, and sat down on a chair by the side of the couch. She was
dressed like a young lady, in a velvet cloak and a little cap and muff
of white fur; her hands were scented with perfume, her eyes shone, her
cheeks had turned crimson with the frost. “Ah, how well everything has
come out!” some one whispered. But what was not nice was that Klasha,
for some reason, had not lighted the lamp; that she had come, not to
see him, but to go to Ivanushka’s funeral; that she suddenly began to
sing, accompanying herself on a guitar: “Haz-Bulat, the dauntless, thy
mountain hut is poor.”... Then, all at once, the whole thing vanished;
he opened his eyes--and not a trace remained of that mysterious,
agitating, and alarming affair which had filled his head with nonsense.
Again he beheld the dark, cold room, the grey gleaming windows; he
comprehended that everything around him was plain and simple, too
simple--that he was ill and quite, quite alone....
In the deadly melancholy which poisoned his soul at the beginning of
his illness, Kuzma had raved about the bullfinch, Klasha, Voronezh. But
even in his delirium the thought had never left him that he must tell
some one that they must show pity on him in one respect--they must not
bury him in Kolodezy. But, my God! was it not madness to hope for pity
in Durnovka? Once he came to himself in the morning, when the fire was
being made in the stove--and the simple, quiet voices of Koshel and the
Bride seemed to him pitiless, alien, and strange, as the life of well
people always appears pitiless, alien, strange to a sick person. He
tried to call out, to ask for the samovar--but remained dumb and almost
fell to weeping. The angry whisper of Koshel became audible--discussing
him, the sick man, of course--and the Bride’s abrupt reply: “Well,
all’s up with him! He’ll die--and be buried....”
Then his melancholy began to abate. The sun, declining to the west,
shone through the windows, athwart the bare branches of the acacias.
The tobacco smoke hung in a blue cloud. Beside the bed sat the aged
medical man, redolent of drugs and frosty freshness, pulling icicles
from his mustache. On the table the samovar was bubbling, and Tikhon
Ilitch, tall, grey, severe, was brewing aromatic tea as he stood by it.
The medical man drank eight or ten glasses, talked about his cows, the
price of flour and butter; Tikhon Ilitch described how wonderful, how
expensive, Nastasya Petrovna’s funeral had been, and how glad he was
that at last he had found a purchaser for Durnovka. Kuzma understood
that Tikhon Ilitch had just come from the town, that Nastasya Petrovna
had died there suddenly, on her way to a railway station; he understood
that the funeral had cost Tikhon Ilitch frightfully dear, and that he
had already taken earnest-money for Durnovka--and he was completely
indifferent.