I bore in mind all these curious examples and looked closely at Chepkun and Bakshey myself, and it became clear to me, too, that Bakshey was bound to collapse, because his eyes already looked quite stupefied, and his lips were drawn thin and revealed his bare teeth … And, in fact, we look: Bakshey gives Chepkun some twenty more lashes, weaker and weaker each time, and suddenly flops backwards, letting go of Chepkun’s left hand, but still moving his right as if lashing, only unconsciously now, completely passed out. Well, here my acquaintance said: “That’s it: my twenty kopecks are gone.” Here all the Tartars started talking, congratulating Chepkun, shouting:
“Ai, clever Chepkun Emgurcheev, ai, clever head—completely outwhipped Bakshey. Mount up—the mare is yours now.”
And Khan Dzhangar himself got up from the rug and strode about, and smacked his lips, and also said:
“Yours, Chepkun, the mare is yours: mount up, ride, you can rest on her.”
And Chepkun got up: blood streamed down his back, but he didn’t show any pain; he put his robe and beshmet on the mare’s back, threw himself on his belly over her, and rode off that way, and I again felt bored.
“There,” I think, “it’s over now, and thoughts about my situation will start coming into my head again”—and Lord knows I didn’t want to think about that.
But, thanks be, this acquaintance of mine says to me:
“Wait, don’t leave, there’s sure to be something more here.”
I say:
“What more can there be? It’s all over.”
“No,” he says, “it’s not over. Look how Khan Dzhangar’s pipe is burning. See, it’s smoking away: he’s sure to be thinking something over to himself, something most Asiatic.”
And I thought to myself: “Ah, if there’s going to be more of the same sort, then just let somebody wager on me and see if I back down.”
VI
And what do you think? It all came out just as I wished: Khan Dzhangar’s pipe was smoking away, and another little Tartar comes racing towards him from the open, this one not on a mare like the one Chepkun peaceably took from Bakshey, but on a dark bay colt impossible to describe. If you’ve ever seen how a corncrake—in Orel we call him a twitcher—runs along a boundary through the wheat: he spreads his wings out wide, but his behind doesn’t spread in the air, as with other birds, but hangs down, and he lets his legs dangle, too, as if he doesn’t need them—it comes out as if he’s really riding on air. So this new horse, just like the bird, raced as if by a power not his own.
I truly won’t be telling a lie if I say that he didn’t even fly, but the ground behind him just kept increasing. Never in my life had I seen such lightness, and I didn’t know how to put a price on a horse like that, in what treasure, and whom he was fated for, what kind of prince, and still less did I ever think that this horse would become mine.
“So he became yours?” the astonished listeners interrupted the storyteller.
“Yes, sir, mine, by all rights mine, but only for one minute, and kindly listen to how it happened, if you want.”
The gentlemen, as was their habit, began haggling over this horse as well, and my remount officer, to whom I had given the baby, also mixed into it, but against them, like their equal, the Tartar Savakirey stepped in, a short fellow, small but sturdy, well-knit, head shaven as if turned on a lathe and round as a firm young cabbage, and his mug red as a carrot, and the whole of him like some sort of healthy and fresh vegetable. He shouts: “Why empty your pockets for nothing? Whoever wants to can lay down his money, as much as the khan asks, and flog it out with me for who gets the horse.”
For the gentlemen, naturally, that was unseemly, and they backed away from it at once: why should they go thrashing with this Tartar—the rascal would outwhip them all. And by then my remount officer wasn’t rolling in money, because in Penza he had lost at cards again, but I could see he wanted the horse. So I tugged his sleeve from behind and said: “Thus and so, don’t offer anything extra, but give what the khan asks, and I’ll sit down to contend peaceably with Savakirey.”
At first he didn’t want to, but I persuaded him. I said:
“Do me the favor: I want it.”
Well, and so we did.
“What … you and that Tartar … whipped each other?”
“Yes, sir, we also thrashed it out peaceably in the same way, and the colt went to me.”
“So you beat the Tartar?”
“Beat him, sir, not without difficulty, but I overcame him.”
“Yet it must have been terribly painful.”
“Mmm … how shall I put it … Yes, to begin with it was; I really felt it, especially since I was unaccustomed, and he, that Savakirey, also had a trick of hitting so that it swelled and didn’t let the blood out, but against that fine art of his I applied my own clever trick: as he lashed me, I hitched my back up under the whip and adjusted it so that the skin got torn at once, that way it was safe, and I finished Savakirey off.”
“How, finished him off? You mean to death?”
“Yes, sir, through his stubbornness and through his politics, he stupidly let himself go so far that he was no longer in the world,” the storyteller replied good-naturedly and impassively, and, seeing that all his listeners were looking at him, if not with horror, then with dumb bewilderment, he seemed to feel the need to supplement his story with an explanation.
“You see,” he went on, “that came not from me, but from him, because he was considered the foremost battler in the whole Ryn Sands, and on account of that ambition he didn’t want to yield to me for anything, he wanted to endure nobly, so that shame wouldn’t fall on his Asiatic nation on account of him, but he wilted, the poor fellow, and couldn’t hold out against me, probably because I kept a copper in my mouth. That helped me terribly, and I kept biting it so as not to feel the pain, and to distract my mind I counted the strokes, so it was all right for me.”
“And how many strokes did you count?” they interrupted the storyteller.
“I can’t say for certain. I remember that I counted up to two hundred and eighty-two, but then I suddenly reeled in something like a swoon and lost count for a moment, and then went on without counting, but soon after that Savakirey swung at me for the last time, but couldn’t hit anymore, and fell over onto me like a doll: they looked, and he was dead … Pah, what a fool! To hold out that long! I almost landed in jail on account of him. It was nothing to the Tartars: well, if you killed him, you killed him, those were the conditions, because he could have beaten me to death as well, but our own folk, our Russians, it’s even annoying how they didn’t understand and got riled up. I said:
“ ‘Well, what is it to you? What are you after?’
“ ‘But,’ they say, ‘you killed the Asiatic, didn’t you?’
“ ‘Well, what if I did? It was all done amicably. Would it have been better if he beat me to death?’
“ ‘He could beat you to death,’ they say, ‘and it would be nothing to him, because he’s of another faith, but you,’ they say, ‘have got to judge by Christianity. Come along,’ they say, ‘let’s go to the police.’
“Well, I think to myself: ‘All right, brothers, chase the wind in the field.’ And since, in my opinion, there’s nothing more pernicious than the police, I dodged behind one Tartar, then behind another. I whisper to them:
“ ‘Save me, princes: you saw it was all a fair fight …’
“They pressed together and pushed me from one to the other, and concealed me.”
“Excuse me … but how did they conceal you?”
“I cleared out with them all the way to their steppe.”
“To the steppe even!”
“Yes, sir, right to the Ryn Sands.”
“And did you spend long there?”
“A whole ten years: I was twenty-three when they brought me to the Ryn Sands and thirty-four when I escaped and came back.”
“So, did you like living in the steppe or not?”
“No, what could you like there? Bore
dom, and nothing else; only it was impossible to get away earlier.”
“Why’s that? Did the Tartars keep you in a pit or under guard?”
“No, they’re kind, they didn’t allow themselves such meanness with me as to put me in a pit or in the stocks, but simply said: ‘Be our friend, Ivan; we like you very much, and you’ll live with us in the steppe and be a useful man—treat our horses and help our women.’ ”
“And did you treat them?”
“Yes, I was like a doctor to them, and I attended to them, and all their cattle, and horses, and sheep, and most of all their wives, the Tartar women.”
“So you know how to treat people?”
“How shall I put it … Well, I mean, what’s so clever about it? When somebody was sick, I gave them aloe or galingale root, and it would go away, and they had a lot of aloe—in Saratov one of the Tartars found a whole sack of it and brought it back, but before me they didn’t know what it was meant for.”
“And you felt at home with them?”
“No, sir, I always longed to go back.”
“And can it really have been so impossible to leave them?”
“No—why? If my feet had been in good shape, I’d most likely have gone back to the fatherland long before.”
“And what happened to your feet?”
“They bristled me up after the first time.”
“How’s that? … Forgive us, please, we don’t quite understand what you mean by ‘bristled up.’ ”
“It’s a most ordinary means with them: if they like somebody and want to keep him, but the man pines away or tries to escape, they do it to him so he doesn’t get away. So with me, after I got lost trying to escape once, they caught me and said: ‘You know, Ivan, you be our friend, and to make it so you don’t leave us again, we’d better cut open your heels and stuff a few bristles in them.’ Well, they ruined my feet that way, so I had to crawl on all fours all the time.”
“Tell us, please, how do they do this terrible operation?”
“Very simply. Some ten men threw me down on the ground and said: ‘Shout, Ivan, shout louder when we start cutting. It’ll be easier for you.’ And they sat on me, and in a trice one master craftsman of theirs cut the skin open on my soles, put in some chopped-up horsehair, covered it with the skin, and sewed it up with string. After that they kept my hands tied for a few days, for fear I’d harm my wounds and the bristles would come out with the pus; but once the skin healed, they let me go: ‘Now,’ they say, ‘greetings to you, Ivan, now you’re our real friend and you’ll never go away and leave us.’
“I only just got to my feet then, when I went crashing to the ground again: the chopped-up hair sewn under the skin of my heels pricked the live flesh with such deadly pain that it was not only impossible to take a step, but there was even no way to stand on my feet. I had never cried in my life, but here I even howled out loud.
“ ‘What have you done to me, you cursed Asiatics?’ I say. ‘You’d have done better to kill me outright, you vipers, than to make me a cripple like this for all time, so that I can’t take a step.’
“But they say:
“ ‘Never mind, Ivan, never mind, don’t upset yourself over a trifle.’
“ ‘What kind of trifle is it?’ I say. ‘You ruin a man like this, and then say he shouldn’t upset himself?’
“ ‘You’ll get the knack of it,’ they say. ‘Don’t step square on your heels, but walk bowlegged on the little bones.’
“ ‘Pah, you scoundrels!’ I thought to myself and turned my back on them and didn’t talk, but made up my mind that I’d rather die than follow their advice about walking bowlegged on my anklebones; but then I went on lying there—a deadly boredom came over me, and I began to get the knack of it, and gradually hobbled around on my anklebones. But they didn’t laugh at me in the least for that, and kept saying:
“ ‘How well you walk, Ivan, see how well you walk.’ ”
“What a misfortune! And how was it you tried to escape and got caught?”
“It was impossible, sir; the steppe is flat, there are no roads, and you get hungry … I walked for three days, grew feeble as a fox, caught some sort of bird barehanded and ate it raw, then got hungry again, and there was no water … How could I go on? … So I fell down, and they found me and took and bristled me up.”
One of the listeners remarked, apropos of this bristling up, that it must have been devilishly awkward to walk on your anklebones.
“At the outstart it was even very bad,” Ivan Severyanych replied, “and later on, though I managed better, all the same I couldn’t go far. But then again, I’ll tell you no lies, those Tartars took good care of me after that.
“ ‘Now, Ivan,’ they say, ‘it’s going to be pretty hard for you to fetch water, and to cook for yourself will also be awkward. Take yourself a Natasha now, brother,’ they say, ‘we’ll give you a nice Natasha, choose whichever one you like.’
“I say:
“ ‘What’s there to choose: they’re the same use one and all. Give me whichever you like.’ Well, so they married me off at once without any argument.”
“What? Married you to a Tartar woman?”
“Yes, naturally, to a Tartar woman. First to one who’d been the wife of that Savakirey that I outwhipped, only she, this Tartar woman, wasn’t to my taste at all: she was a bit off and always seemed very afraid of me and didn’t delight me in the least. She missed her husband, maybe, or had something weighing on her heart. Well, so they noticed that I began to feel burdened by her and right away brought me another, this one a young little girl, no more than thirteen years old … They said to me:
“ ‘Take this Natasha, too, Ivan, this one will be more fun.’
“So I took her.”
“And was she really more fun for you?” the listeners asked Ivan Severyanych.
“Yes,” he replied, “this one turned out to be more fun, only sometimes she amused me, and sometimes she annoyed me with her pranks.”
“What sort of pranks?”
“All sorts … Whatever she happened to think up; she’d jump onto my knees; or I’d be asleep, and she’d flick the skullcap off my head with her foot and throw it away somewhere and laugh. I’d start scolding her, and she’d laugh loud, merrily, running around like a nymph, and I couldn’t catch her on all fours—I’d fall down and burst out laughing myself.”
“So you shaved your head there on the steppe and wore a skullcap?”
“That I did, sir.”
“What for? Most likely you wanted to please your wives?”
“No, more for cleanliness, because there are no bathhouses there.”
“So you had two wives at once?”
“Yes, sir, two in that steppe; and then with another khan, with Agashimola, who stole me from Otuchev, they gave me two more.”
“Excuse me,” one of the listeners inquired again, “but how could they steal you?”
“By trickery, sir. I ran away from Penza with the Tartars of Chepkun Emgurcheev, and for some five years on end I lived in Emgurcheev’s horde, and all the princes, and uhlans, and sheikh-zadas, and malozadas used to get together with him there for festivities, and Khan Dzhangar would be there, and Bakshey Otuchev.”
“The one Chepkun whipped?”
“Yes, sir, the very same.”
“But how’s that … Wasn’t Bakshey angry with Chepkun?”
“What for?”
“For outwhipping him and winning the horse away from him?”
“No, sir, they never get angry with each other for that: whoever wins out by amicable agreement takes it, and that’s all; though once, in fact, Khan Dzhangar reproached me … ‘Eh, Ivan,’ he says, ‘eh, you numbskull, Ivan, why did you sit down for the whipping with Savakirey in place of the Russian prince? I wanted to have a laugh,’ he says, ‘seeing a Russian prince take his shirt off.’
“ ‘You’d have had a long wait,’ I replied to him.
“ ‘How so?’
“ ‘Beca
use,’ I say, ‘our princes are fainthearted and unmanly, and their strength is quite negligible.’
“He understood.
“ ‘I could see,’ he says, ‘that they had no real passion, and if they wanted to get something, they’d pay money for it.’
“ ‘True enough: they can’t do anything without money.’ Well, but Agashimola, he was from a far-off horde, his herds roamed about somewhere near the Caspian; he loved medical treatment and invited me to cure his wife and promised Emgurchey many head of cattle for it. Emgurchey let me go with him: I took along a supply of aloe and galingale root and went. But as soon as Agashimola took me, he hied himself off with his whole band, and we galloped for eight days.”
“And you rode on horseback?”
“That I did, sir.”
“But what about your feet?”
“What about them?”
“The chopped-up horsehair that was in your heels didn’t bother you?”
“Not at all. They’ve got it worked out nicely: when they bristle a man up like that, he can’t walk very well, but such a bristled-up man sits a horse better than anybody, because, walking on his anklebones all the time, he’s used to being bowlegged and grips the horse so tight he can’t be knocked off for anything.”
“Well, and how was it for you afterwards in the new steppe with Agashimola?”
“I was dying again even more cruelly.”
“But you didn’t die?”
“No, sir, I didn’t.”
“Will you be so kind as to tell us what you endured after that with Agashimola?”
“If you like.”
VII
“As soon as Agashimola’s Tartars brought me to their camp, they hied themselves off to another one, in a new place, and wouldn’t let me leave.
“ ‘Why should you live with Emgurchey’s people, Ivan?’ they say. ‘Emgurchey’s a thief. Live with us, we’ll gladly respect you and give you nice Natashas. There you had two Natashas in all, but we’ll give you more.’
“I refused.
“ ‘Why should I have more?’ I say. ‘I don’t need more.’
“ ‘No,’ they say, ‘you don’t understand, more Natashas are better: they’ll bear you more Kolkas, they’ll all call you daddy.’
The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories Page 21
