by Otto Penzler
“Vladimir, my dear man,” said Aniskin. “Why don’t you sit down on the sill, while I stand here outside.”
“Thank you,” answered the teacher hoarsely, “thank you, but I have no intention of sitting on the sill.”
The teacher spoke defiantly, but he did not dare to look Aniskin in the eye, using the pretext of his unshaven cheek to turn further and further away from him until he presented to the inspector’s gaze an ear pierced through by the sunrays and therefore of a bright scarlet colour.
“It was a good idea, Vladimir,” Aniskin said gayly. “A very good idea to use an electric razor.”
“Excuse me, Comrade Aniskin, but I don’t get your meaning.”
“There is nothing to get,” Aniskin answered, growing serious. “Clear as day.”
The inspector grew as subdued as a village of an evening. He turned away from the teacher, too, leaned his back against the log wall, hands drooping, head to one side. His breathing was laboured and wheezy, the skin on his face was grey and the collar of his shirt was open revealing a chest covered with grey hairs. It was a long time since the inspector had been seen in such a condition in the village, and the teacher threw him a glance out of the corner of his eye.
“I can’t sleep, Vladimir, I have not been sleeping for the last three nights,” he complained miserably. “I walk the street at night and examine my life from all angles. I turn myself inside out like a sheepskin coat, Vladimir, and it makes me restless. I regret something, fear something, want something.… The dogs bark, the moon shines, the Ob flows on its way.… I feel sick at heart, when I look behind me.” He paused, sucked his tooth and added, “This is because a terrible thing has happened in our village.”
Aniskin raised his head, gave a forced smile, smoothed his grey hair and stood silent and subdued for another minute, as though coming back from very far away, from an incomprehensible distance to this house made of fresh pine logs, this window, and the teacher at whom he stared unseeingly. It took him a long time, but he came back at last.
“You know what I meant about the razor,” he went on. “I meant that it was much safer to use an electric razor when one has a bad hangover. You won’t cut yourself.”
“Comrade Aniskin!” the teacher said.
“I’ve been ‘Comrade Aniskin’ for sixty years now,” the inspector said drily. “But I shall have to tell you the truth to your face, Comrade Filatov, since it’s such a bad day anyway. I would probably have left you alone yesterday, but today.… Why do you drink and quarrel with your wife at night?” Aniskin demanded fiercely, goggling at the teacher lobster fashion. “What right have you to drink 600 grams of vodka an evening and raise a row at home?”
“I am not going to answer your questions,” replied the teacher with a sarcastic smile.” Don’t you think you are exceeding your rights and duties?”
The teacher no longer averted his face from Aniskin, he no longer hid his shaking hands behind his back, but stretched out his thin neck and hissed like an angry goose. He was a puny man and Aniskin, looking at him, thought with an inward smile, “Why is it always like this? A chicken of a man will strut before his wife!” But Aniskin did not smile outwardly, only shook his head and said:
“And don’t you take it into your head that your wife has been complaining to me. She had nothing to do with it. I heard you shouting myself as I was roaming around in the moonlight. You made a terrific racket. It could be heard for miles around.”
With these words Aniskin walked away from the window and sat down on a bit of wood that the builders had cut off a huge beam. The sunrays slanted onto him, forming a big square on his back that looked like a yellow patch. He was silent, and so was the teacher. The teacher’s head was still raised haughtily and his eyes were narrowed, but colour was creeping into his blue cheeks and his lips trembled as though they kept back words with difficulty.
“I know how you started drinking, Vladimir,” Aniskin said quietly. “That soak Cherkashin drags you into his house every Saturday, gives you some filthy muck to drink and complains that he was sacked from the chairman’s post through intrigue.” Aniskin snorted bitterly. “Cherkashin is a vicious and spiteful man, and you, Vladimir, are beginning to get like him.”
“How? Can you be more specific?” the teacher asked with a crooked smile and an ironic shrug of his shoulders, though he realised that Aniskin was behaving strangely today. There were no golden sparks dancing in his grey eyes, he did not respond with his usual, reflective “Ho-ho!” and did not turn his face to the Ob to catch the cool breeze.
“You are like Cherkashin, Vladimir, in that you only see the bad in people. This is why you heap foul abuse on your wife, and why your class has seven unsatisfactory marks in arithmetic, and only four in Russian. Your opinion of people is by three marks lower than Yevgeni Samoilovich’s who teaches the kids Russian.”
Aniskin fell silent. The yellow patch lay on his back, his big gnarled hands hung between his legs, his dead tooth could be seen through his parted lips. He sat thus for some ten seconds, then said with a laugh:
“You are unjust to me too, Vladimir. Whatever did you call me Corporal Prishibeyev* for last Saturday in Cherkashin’s company? Cherkashin has a bone to pick with me because I did a lot to get him sacked. Did you want to make him happy? You used to treat me fairly enough, Vladimir.” Aniskin did not raise his head, but he was aware nonetheless that the teacher bit his lower lip, put the razor quietly on the window-sill and gripped the wooden frame warmed by the sun. Aniskin knew that the teacher’s face had turned red, his dark eyes had become moist with shame and his hands had ceased to shake.
“Fyodor Ivanovich,” the teacher whispered. “Fyodor Ivanovich.…”
“As for Fyodor Ivanovich, I’ve been called that for the last twenty years at least,” Aniskin said with a smile. “Before that people called me Fyodor, and before that Fedka.”
The inspector rose from the stump and put his hands behind his back slowly, but instead of starting down the street turned his face towards the Ob, for the first time since the conversation began. There was, as usual, a moist breeze coming from the river and it blew at Aniskin’s cheeks, strong neck and open chest. The same wind from the Ob ruffled his hair which was a solid grey but as thick as in his youth now long past.
“I don’t hold it against you, Vladimir, that you called me Corporal Prishibeyev, for you are still young and silly. You don’t even understand how things have changed since Corporal Prishibeyev’s time. If you called a police officer that in those days …” Aniskin gave a listless wave of his hand. “Oh well, what’s the use.… You wouldn’t understand.”
Without another glance at the teacher, Aniskin plodded down the village street, leaving round tracks in the dust with his sandals and shaking his head every three steps. He did not hurry, but his stride was long and he soon disappeared in the sun’s rosy glow.
* Corporal Prishibeyev is a character from Chekhov’s story of the same title who keeps pulling people up and playing a volunteer policeman in the hope of introducing his beloved army order everywhere.—Tr.
3
Aniskin awoke about eight o’clock in the evening, his usual time, opened his eyes, lay for a while silently, without stirring, listening to the noises inside the house, the tread of his wife Glafira on the floorboards, his youngest daughter Zinaida whispering with a girl-friend in the next room and the cow chewing its cud in the shed. It was hot and stuffy under the cotton bed-curtain, but Aniskin was not sweaty, for he had not been making any strenuous movements in his sleep.
The inspector thought about this and that: the Kolotovkins had been missing a calf these five days; the Murzins were expecting a son to come on leave from his military service and could well be planning to make some illicit homebrew; the first team had two harrows missing, old ones, to be true, but quite good, with a horse; Vanka, the tractor-driver, had again spent the night at Panka Voloshina’s; the lad was nearing twenty and his parents hoped he would marry soon; Grandfather A
nisim, the fisherman, was selling sterlet on the sly and it was the forbidden season for sterlet fishing. A lot of thoughts crowded into Aniskin’s head, but one was uppermost, and only now he admitted to himself that ever since the morning he had been turning it over in his big head, as incessantly and heavily as the river current rolls over smooth stone, “Will he go or won’t he?”
All the while Aniskin was making his way to the teacher’s house, talking to him, thinking about things past or lying down for his afternoon nap, the same thought was boring into his mind, “Will he go or won’t he?” But if he had avoided thinking about it all day and chased the thought away, now, as he lay under the curtain cool with inactivity, he began thinking about Genka Paltsev full blast. And as soon as he let his thoughts dwell on him, he understood that his visit to the teacher and his sleep under the curtain and his present meaningless lolling were all manoeuvres to escape Genka Paltsev.
The last thought stuck with Aniskin, and he kept turning it this way and that, letting it sink in and then discarding it to snatch it back again the next moment. Thousands of threads took him back into the past, hit at him and caressed him, lulled him and roused him. One moment Aniskin turned himself inside out, as it were, the next he shrank into a ball. The thought puzzled and baffled him and he was caught in a mass of inexplicables.
“Damn,” he swore finally in a whisper and suddenly noticed that he was covered with sticky sweat. It appeared that, while thinking about Genka, he had been tossing about in bed and making unnecessary movements with his arms and legs.
“Glafira!” he called out.
Nobody answered, there were no steps heard, but a tawny gypsy face appeared in the parting of the curtain and the sullen eyes gleamed inquiringly:
“Well?”
“I’m getting up. Put on the samovar.”
“The samovar is ready.”
Glafira disappeared as noiselessly as she had come, and Aniskin shook his finger at her back.
“She always knows everything,” he thought in resentful wonderment, lowering his legs and pushing them into his well-worn sandals.
Silence rolled about the rooms of the house, a usual but always unpleasant fact for Aniskin. Somehow it so happened that he was always busy and the life of his own family went on irrespective of him, not around him, but along some distant parallel. Nobody ever stopped to ask himself whether it was good or bad, for the divisional militia inspector lived a mysterious and unusual kind of life not only in the eyes of his family but of all the villagers. He was as enigmatic and removed from everyday human pursuits as a high-ranking general who spent all days behind the doors of his office.
As usual Aniskin had his tea by himself. His red face expressed bliss, delight and contentment. Everything was as usual, but he had his tea in the kitchen instead of in the yard. And Glafira, knowing that the only time he felt at home was during his meals, came into the kitchen and sat down in front of him. She sat quietly, resting, and her face was blissful too. Strangely enough, the thin bony Glafira and her stout husband were somehow alike, either in their manner of looking at people, or in the frown of the eyebrows, or in the vertical furrow over the bridge of the nose.
“Finished weeding the tomatoes?” Aniskin asked looking sideways at her.
“Yes.”
Long comfortable minutes floated by. Aniskin drank one glass of tea after another, bit the sugar noisily, champed at a piece of bacon and puffed right and left. Glafira sat silent, gazing down, but one could see from the restful look of her ear, the strand of dark hair and the curved toe on her foot that she enjoyed these minutes alone with her husband.
“Bought boots for Fedka?” Aniskin asked her lazily.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“What does he want pigskin boots for?”
Again there was a spell of silence, the special kind characteristic of this house. Aniskin listened to it, opened his mouth to say something, but changed his mind and only waved his arm.
“I’ll buy him boots next week,” Glafira explained. “Duska sent an order to the district when she heard Fedka needed some. Have you been after her again?”
“She has been cheating children out of their change. The day before yesterday she robbed Petka Surov of three kopecks.”
“And Darya’s Luska of five kopecks,” Glafira volunteered after some consideration.
“Five kopecks?” Aniskin asked, placing his glass on the table and turning to his wife heavily. “Five kopecks!”
“Yes. She thinks that because I’ve quarrelled with Darya I won’t find out about the five kopecks. But Darya is not a fool, she came and told me. ‘All right,’ she said, ‘you and I had a quarrel, but it’s real shameless to cheat a child out of five kopecks.’ I’m sure Duska knows that she complained, so she’s in a hurry to get Fedka real nice boots.”
“I’ll keep it in mind,” Aniskin said smiling and shaking his head. “Duska, Duska, funny woman! What does she want all that money for?”
“She is making herself a new coat. Remember they delivered three fur collars to the shop and she bought one of them.”
“I know about that.”
“Then why do you ask what she wants the money for? D’you think she’d let that collar lie another winter?”
“Oh, you always know everything,” Aniskin said with sudden severity and turned away from his wife, who did not react to his change of tone in any way, however, but sat there as happy and relaxed as before. She simply stared more intently down at the floor and bent her scrawny neck lower. Suddenly her sunken cheeks moved in a smile.
“You know, Fedka is already wearing size nine. Can you imagine it?”
“Take ten then,” Aniskin responded after a pause. “I suppose you were going to anyway?”
“Yes.”
And again the room was immersed in silence. Aniskin drank two more glasses of tea, then upturned his empty glass resolutely and rose with a springy motion. The table and the stool creaked, the floorboards groaned under his elephant weight, Glafira started and then relaxed again, reluctant to put an end to the blissful interlude of inactivity.
“It’s a quarter to nine,” said Aniskin.“I’ll go to the farm board.There is some important business to discuss. Make me up a bed in the outhouse, will you.”
He wiped his sweaty face with a towel, dropped the towel on the window-sill and waddled to the door. He walked in his usual unhurried manner. Glafira did not change her posture and still sat with her head bent low, her eyes staring at the floor. But she obviously was aware that her husband was at the door for she suddenly called out:
“Aniskin!”
“What is it?”
“You’d better take your gun along,” she said very quietly.
Aniskin stopped in the doorway, turned to her slowly as though his hinges were too stiff, and said after a considering pause with a wave of his arm:
“No, I won’t. I’m not thinking of killing him.”
4
At a quarter to twelve the moon was suspended high over the village, and its shadows had grown so short that they were no longer dogging Aniskin’s steps. The moon was yellow like a piece of cheap amber inserted into a dark fabric sprinkled with stars. The night was cool and bright.
Aniskin felt fine at night. His heart did not ache, his legs did not hurt, there was no gnawing feeling in the pit of his stomach; he felt healthy, cheerful and strong and so perceived everything with youthful freshness of feeling. He liked the moon, enjoyed the distant sounds of the accordion and looked with pleasure at the silver zigzag of the moonlit Ob.
The accordion sang the moving old song about young Komsomol lovers parted by the Civil War, about him pressing her hand and looking tenderly into the girl’s eyes. Aniskin stopped for a while listening to the accordion singing about himself, his own youth. “I am a cunning fox,” he thought of himself admiringly. “I certainly picked the right time for Genka’s arrest—at midnight.” The accordion made the inspector feel young and even handsome.
Genka’s house was the last in the row. An empty bird box was nailed to an old willow tree. The young bull uttered short restless moos in the shed. The windows were gilded all over with moonlight. The yard was crowded with shadows thrown by the well pole, the numerous sheds, barns and outhouses. These shadows, dark-grey and shapeless, lived a life of their own, unconnected, as it were, with the moon. Aniskin walked up to the house and gazed at it for a while.
“Here we meet again, Dmitri,” he thought.
Nobody in the village knew why starlings never made nests in the little boxes put up by Dmitri Paltsev or his son Genka. The excited birds, reaching home after their long flight from the south, fought among themselves for the possession of every little box available, but, for some reason, gave a wide berth to the Paltsevs’ yard.
“Eh, Dmitri,” Aniskin thought ruefully, “millions of people have been won over by Soviet power, but you remained what you have always been, a miserable, tight-fisted kulak.”
Aniskin opened the gate soundlessly and entered the yard, dragging his dark-grey legless shadow along. The shadow went across the yard, winded its way among the outhouses and barns and stopped in front of the big shed. Moonlight made its way gladly and confidently into the opened door of the shed lighting its interior with pale mat reflection. In this paleness Aniskin could see two green dots and a strip of white.
Entering the shed, Aniskin made out what they were, the two green dots and the strip of white. Genka was sitting on an upturned tub, staring glassily, his teeth bared in a snarl. He was holding a gleaming revolver in his hand, his arm bent at an awkward angle so that it was hard to say where the revolver was pointing. When Aniskin crunched his way across the sandy floor and stopped, the barrel of the revolver turned on the inspector. Turned and remained in that position.
