Collected Shorter Fiction, Volume 2

by Leo Tolstoy

  Butler, having drunk rather more chikhír wine than was good for him, went to his bedroom, tired but contented, and hardly had time to undress before he fell into a sound, dreamless, and unbroken sleep with his hand under his handsome curly head.

  XVII

  THE aoul which had been destroyed was that in which Hadji Murád had spent the night before he went over to the Russians. Sado and his family had left the aoul on the approach of the Russian detachment, and when he returned he found his sáklya in ruins – the roof fallen in, the door and the posts supporting the penthouse burned, and the interior filthy. His son, the handsome bright-eyed boy who had gazed with such ecstasy at Hadji Murád, was brought dead to the mosque on a horse covered with a búrka: he had been stabbed in the back with a bayonet. The dignified woman who had served Hadji Murád when he was at the house now stood over her son’s body, her smock torn in front, her withered old breasts exposed, her hair down, and she dug her nails into her face till it bled, and wailed incessantly. Sado, taking a pick-axe and spade, had gone with his relatives to dig a grave for his son. The old grandfather sat by the wall of the ruined sáklya cutting a stick and gazing stolidly in front of him. He had only just returned from the apiary. The two stacks of hay there had been burnt, the apricot and cherry trees he had planted and reared were broken and scorched, and worse still all the beehives and bees had been burnt. The wailing of the women and the little children, who cried with their mothers, mingled with the lowing of the hungry cattle for whom there was no food. The bigger children, instead of playing, followed their elders with frightened eyes. The fountain was polluted, evidently on purpose, so that the water could not be used. The mosque was polluted in the same way, and the Mullah and his assistants were cleaning it out. No one spoke of hatred of the Russians. The feeling experienced by all the Chechens, from the youngest to the oldest, was stronger than hate. It was not hatred, for they did not regard those Russian dogs as human beings, but it was such repulsion, disgust, and perplexity at the senseless cruelty of these creatures, that the desire to exterminate them – like the desire to exterminate rats, poisonous spiders, or wolves – was as natural an instinct as that of self-preservation.

  The inhabitants of the aoul were confronted by the choice of remaining there and restoring with frightful effort what had been produced with such labour and had been so lightly and senselessly destroyed, facing every moment the possibility of a repetition of what had happened; or to submit to the Russians – contrary to their religion and despite the repulsion and contempt they felt for them. The old men prayed, and unanimously decided to send envoys to Shamil asking him for help. Then they immediately set to work to restore what had been destroyed.

  XVIII

  ON the morning after the raid, not very early, Butler left the house by the back porch meaning to take a stroll and a breath of fresh air before breakfast, which he usually had with Petróv. The sun had already risen above the hills and it was painful to look at the brightly lit-up white walls of the houses on the right side of the street. But then as always it was cheerful and soothing to look to the left, at the dark receding and ascending forest-clad hills and at the dim line of snow peaks, which as usual pretended to be clouds. Butler looked at these mountains, inhaling deep breaths and rejoicing that he was alive, that it was just he that was alive, and that he lived in this beautiful place.

  He was also rather pleased that he had behaved so well in yesterday’s affair both during the advance and especially during the retreat when things were pretty hot; he was also pleased to remember how Másha (or Márya Dmítrievna), Petróv’s mistress, had treated them at dinner on their return after the raid, and how she had been particularly nice and simple with everybody, but specially kind – as he thought – to him.

  Márya Dmítrievna with her thick plait of hair, her broad shoulders, her high bosom, and the radiant smile on her kindly freckled face, involuntarily attracted Butler, who was a healthy young bachelor. It sometimes even seemed to him that she wanted him, but he considered that that would be doing his good-natured simple-hearted comrade a wrong, and he maintained a simple, respectful attitude towards her and was pleased with himself for doing so.

  He was thinking of this when his meditations were disturbed by the tramp of many horses’ hoofs along the dusty road in front of him, as if several men were riding that way. He looked up and saw at the end of the street a group of horsemen coming towards him at a walk. In front of a score of Cossacks rode two men: one in a white Circassian coat with a tall turban on his head, the other an officer in the Russian service, dark, with an aquiline nose, and much silver on his uniform and weapons. The man with the turban rode a fine chestnut horse with mane and tail of a lighter shade, a small head, and beautiful eyes. The officer’s was a large, handsome Karabákh horse. Butler, a lover of horses, immediately recognized the great strength of the first horse and stopped to learn who these people were.

  The officer addressed him. ‘This the house of commanding officer?’ he asked, his foreign accent and his words betraying his foreign origin.

  Butler replied that it was. ‘And who is that?’ he added, coming nearer to the officer and indicating the man with the turban.

  ‘That Hadji Murád. He come here to stay with the commander,’ said the officer.

  Butler knew about Hadji Murád and about his having come over to the Russians, but he had not at all expected to see him here in this little fort. Hadji Murád gave him a friendly look.

  ‘Good day, kotkildy,’ said Butler, repeating the Tartar greeting he had learnt.

  ‘Saubul!’ (‘Be well!’) replied Hadji Murád, nodding. He rode up to Butler and held out his hand, from two fingers of which hung his whip.

  ‘Are you the chief?’ he asked.

  ‘No, the chief is in here. I will go and call him,’ said Butler addressing the officer, and he went up the steps and pushed the door. But the door of the visitors’ entrance, as Márya Dmítrievna called it, was locked, and as it still remained closed after he had knocked, Butler went round to the back door. He called his orderly but received no reply, and finding neither of the two orderlies he went into the kitchen, where Márya Dmítrievna – flushed, with a kerchief tied round her head and her sleeves rolled up on her plump white arms – was rolling pastry, white as her hands, and cutting it into small pieces to make pies of.

  ‘Where have the orderlies gone to?’ asked Butler.

  ‘Gone to drink,’ replied Márya Dmítrievna. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘To have the front door opened. You have a whole horde of mountaineers in front of your house. Hadji Murád has come!’

  ‘Invent something else!’ said Márya Dmítrievna, smiling.

  ‘I am not joking, he is really waiting by the porch!’

  ‘Is it really true?’ said she.

  ‘Why should I wish to deceive you? Go and see, he’s just at the porch!’

  ‘Dear me, here’s a go!’ said Márya Dmítrievna pulling down her sleeves and putting up her hand to feel whether the hairpins in her thick plait were all in order. ‘Then I will go and wake Iván Matvéich.’

  ‘No, I’ll go myself. And you Bondarénko, go and open the door,’ said he to Petróv’s orderly who had just appeared.

  ‘Well, so much the better!’ said Márya Dmítrievna and returned to her work.

  When he heard that Hadji Murád had come to his house, Iván Matvéich Petróv, the major, who had already heard that Hadji Murád was in Grózny, was not at all surprised. Sitting up in bed he rolled a cigarette, lit it, and began to dress, loudly clearing his throat and grumbling at the authorities who had sent ‘that devil’ to him.

  When he was ready he told his orderly to bring him some medicine. The orderly knew that ‘medicine’ meant vodka, and brought some.

  ‘There is nothing so bad as mixing,’ muttered the major when he had drunk the vodka and taken a bite of rye bread. ‘Yesterday I drank a little chikhír and now I have a headache.… Well, I’m ready,’ he added, and went to the
parlour, into which Butler had already shown Hadji Murád and the officer who accompanied him.

  The officer handed the major orders from the commander of the left flank to the effect that he should receive Hadji Murád and should allow him to have intercourse with the mountaineers through spies, but was on no account to allow him to leave the fort without a convoy of Cossacks.

  Having read the order the major looked intently at Hadji Murád and again scrutinized the paper. After passing his eyes several times from one to the other in this manner, he at last fixed them on Hadji Murád and said:

  ‘Yakshí, Bek; yakshí!’ ‘(‘Very well, sir, very well!’)’ ‘Let him stay here, and tell him I have orders not to let him out – and what is commanded is sacred! Well, Butler, where do you think we’d better lodge him? Shall we put him in the office?’

  Butler had not time to answer before Márya Dmítrievna – who had come from the kitchen and was standing in the doorway – said to the major:

  ‘Why? Keep him here! We will give him the guest-chamber and the storeroom. Then at any rate he will be within sight,’ said she, glancing at Hadji Murád; but meeting his eyes she turned quickly away.

  ‘Do you know, I think Márya Dmítrievna is right,’ said Butler.

  ‘Now then, now then, get away! Women have no business here,’ said the major frowning.

  During the whole of this discussion Hadji Murád sat with his hand on the hilt of his dagger and a faint smile of contempt on his lips. He said it was all the same to him where he lodged, and that he wanted nothing but what the Sirdar had permitted – namely, to have communication with the mountaineers, and that he therefore wished they should be allowed to come to him.

  The major said this should be done, and asked Butler to entertain the visitors till something could be got for them to eat and their rooms prepared. Meantime he himself would go across to the office to write what was necessary and to give some orders.

  Hadji Murád’s relations with his new acquaintances were at once very clearly defined. From the first he was repelled by and contemptuous of the major, to whom he always behaved very haughtily. Márya Dmítrievna, who prepared and served up his food, pleased him particularly. He liked her simplicity and especially the – to him – foreign type of her beauty, and he was influenced by the attraction she felt towards him and unconsciously conveyed. He tried not to look at her or speak to her, but his eyes involuntarily turned towards her and followed her movements. With Butler, from their first acquaintance, he immediately made friends and talked much and willingly with him, questioning him about his life, telling him of his own, communicating to him the news the spies brought him of his family’s condition, and even consulting him as to how he ought to act.

  The news he received through the spies was not good. During the first four days of his stay in the fort they came to see him twice and both times brought bad news.

  XIX

  HADJI MURÁD’S family had been removed to Vedenó soon after his desertion to the Russians, and were there kept under guard awaiting Shamil’s decision. The women – his old mother Patimát and his two wives with their five little children – were kept under guard in the sáklya of the officer Ibrahim Raschid, while Hadji Murád’s son Yusúf, a youth of eighteen, was put in prison – that is, into a pit more than seven feet deep, together with seven criminals, who like himself were awaiting a decision as to their fate.

  The decision was delayed because Shamil was away on a campaign against the Russians.

  On January 6, 1852, he returned to Vedenó after a battle, in which according to the Russians he had been vanquished and had fled to Vedenó; but in which according to him and all the murids he had been victorious and had repulsed the Russians. In this battle he himself fired his rifle – a thing he seldom did – and drawing his sword would have charged straight at the Russians had not the murids who accompanied him held him back. Two of them were killed on the spot at his side.

  It was noon when Shamil, surrounded by a party of murids who caracoled around him firing their rifles and pistols and continually singing Lya illyah il Allah! rode up to his place of residence.

  All the inhabitants of the large aoul were in the street or on their roofs to meet their ruler, and as a sign of triumph they also fired off rifles and pistols. Shamil rode a white Arab steed which pulled at its bit as it approached the house. The horse had no gold or silver ornaments, its equipment was of the simplest – a delicately worked red leather bridle with a stripe down the middle, metal cup-shaped stirrups, and a red saddlecloth showing a little from under the saddle. The Imám wore a brown cloth cloak lined with black fur showing at the neck and sleeves, and was tightly girded round his long thin waist with a black strap which held a dagger. On his head he wore a tall cap with flat crown and black tassel, and round it was wound a white turban, one end of which hung down on his neck. He wore green slippers, and black leggings trimmed with plain braid.

  He wore nothing bright – no gold or silver – and his tall, erect, powerful figure, clothed in garments without any ornaments, surrounded by murids with gold and silver on their clothes and weapons, produced on the people just the impression and influence he desired and knew how to produce. His pale face framed by a closely trimmed reddish beard, with his small eyes always screwed up, was as immovable as though hewn out of stone. As he rode through the aoul he felt the gaze of a thousand eyes turned eagerly on him, but he himself looked at no one.

  Hadji Murád’s wives had come out into the penthouse with the rest of the inmates of the sáklya to see the Imám’s entry. Only Patimát, Hadji Murád’s old mother, did not go out but remained sitting on the floor of the sáklya with her grey hair down, her long arms encircling her thin knees, blinking with her fiery black eyes as she watched the dying embers in the fireplace. Like her son she had always hated Shamil, and now she hated him more than ever and had no wish to see him. Neither did Hadji Murád’s son see Shamil’s triumphal entry. Sitting in the dark and fetid pit he heard the firing and singing, and endured tortures such as can only be felt by the young who are full of vitality and deprived of freedom. He only saw his unfortunate, dirty, and exhausted fellow-prisoners – embittered and for the most part filled with hatred of one another. He now passionately envied those who, enjoying fresh air and light and freedom, caracoled on fiery steeds around their chief, shooting and heartily singing: Lya illyah il Allah!

  When he had crossed the aoul Shamil rode into the large courtyard adjoining the inner court where his seraglio was. Two armed Lesghians met him at the open gates of this outer court, which was crowded with people. Some had come from distant parts about their own affairs, some had come with petitions, and some had been summoned by Shamil to be tried and sentenced. As the Imám rode in, they all respectfully saluted him with their hands on their breasts, some of them kneeling down and remaining on their knees while he rode across the court from the outer to the inner gates. Though he recognized among the people who waited in the court many whom he disliked, and many tedious petitioners who wanted his attention, Shamil passed them all with the same immovable, stony expression on his face, and having entered the inner court dismounted at the penthouse in front of his apartment, to the left of the gate. He was worn out, mentally rather than physically, by the strain of the campaign, for in spite of the public declaration that he had been victorious he knew very well that his campaign had been unsuccessful, that many Chechen aouls had been burnt down and ruined, and that the unstable and fickle Chechens were wavering and those nearest the border line were ready to go over to the Russians.

  All this had to be dealt with, and it oppressed him, for at that moment he did not wish to think at all. He only desired one thing: rest and the delights of family life, and the caresses of his favourite wife, the black-eyed quick-footed eighteen-year-old Aminal, who at that very moment was close at hand behind the fence that divided the inner court and separated the men’s from the women’s quarters (Shamil felt sure she was there with his other wives, looking throu
gh a chink in the fence while he dismounted). But not only was it impossible for him to go to her, he could not even lie down on his feather cushions and rest from his fatigues; he had first of all to perform the midday rites for which he had just then not the least inclination, but which as the religious leader of the people he could not omit, and which moreover were as necessary to him himself as his daily food. So he performed his ablutions and said his prayers and summoned those who were waiting for him.

  The first to enter was Jemal Eddin, his father-in-law and teacher, a tall grey-haired good-looking old man with a beard white as snow and a rosy red face. He said a prayer and began questioning Shamil about the incidents of the campaign and telling him what had happened in the mountains during his absence.

  Among events of many kinds – murders connected with blood-feuds, cattle-stealing, people accused of disobeying the Tarikát (smoking and drinking wine) – Jemal Eddin related how Hadji Murád had sent men to bring his family over to the Russians, but that this had been detected and the family had been brought to Vedenó where they were kept under guard and awaited the Imám’s decision. In the next room, the guest-chamber, the Elders were assembled to discuss all these affairs, and Jemal Eddin advised Shamil to finish with them and let them go that same day, as they had already been waiting three days for him.

  After eating his dinner – served to him in his room by Zeidát, a dark, sharp-nosed, disagreeable-looking woman whom he did not love but who was his eldest wife – Shamil passed into the guest-chamber.

  The six old men who made up his council – white, grey, or red-bearded, with tall caps on their heads, some with turbans and some without, wearing new beshméts and Circassian coats girdled with straps on which their daggers were suspended – rose to greet him on his entrance. Shamil towered a head above them all. On entering the room he, as well as all the others, lifted his hands, palms upwards, closed his eyes and recited a prayer, and then stroked his face downwards with both hands, uniting them at the end of his beard. Having done this they all sat down, Shamil on a larger cushion than the others, and discussed the various cases before them.