The village. [Translation from the original Russian text by Isabel Hapgood]

by Bunin, Ivan Alekseevich, 1870-1953

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  train-oil. Those years had, in truth, been a drain on his strength—the fatigue of not changing his shirt for a fortnight, of food eaten without the relief of any liquid, of lameness caused by heels bruised to the point of bleeding, of nights passed in strange villages, in strange cottages and sheds!

  Ill

  KUZMA crossed himself with a grand flourish when, at last, he escaped from that slavery. But he was already nearly thirty years of age; his hair was noticeably grey; he had become more sober, more serious; he had abandoned his verses, had abandoned reading; he had become accustomed to eating-houses, to drinking-bouts. He served for a year less a week with a drover near Eletz, went to Moscow on his employer's business—and left his service. Long before that time he had begun a love affair in Vero-nezh, with a married woman, and he longed to go thither. So he knocked about in Voronezh for nearly ten years, busying himself with the purchase of grain, horse-trading, and writing articles about the grain trade for the newspapers, bewildering—or, to speak more correctly, poisoning—his mind with the articles of Tolstoy and the satires of Saltykoff. And, all the while, he was overwhelmed with the conviction that he was wasting—had wasted—his life.

  "There, now," he said, as he recalled those years,

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  "that's what it signifies—that knowledge without education!"

  In the early 'nineties Balashkin died of hernia, and Kuzma saw him, for the last time, not long before his death. And What an interview it was!

  "I must write," complained one, gloomily and angrily. "One withers away like a burdock in the field."

  "Yes, yes," boomed the other. The squint of his dying eye was already drowsy, and his jaws moved with difficulty, and the coarse tobacco did not fall as it should have done on his cigarette paper. "As the saying runs: learn every hour, think every hour, look about you at all our poverty and wretchedness—" Then, with a shame-faced grin, he laid aside his cigarette and thrust his hand into the breast of his coat. "Here," he mumbled, rummaging in a package of tattered papers and clippings from newspapers. "Here, my friend, is a pile of stuff of some value. There was a great famine, curse it. And I read everything about it, and wrote it all down. When I die, 'twill be of some use to you, this devil's material. Nothing but scurvy and typhus, typhus and scurvy. In one county all the small children died; in another all the dogs were eaten up. God is my witness that I am telling no lie! Here, wait a minute, I'll find it for you immediately—"

  But he rummaged and rummaged and did not find it, hunted for his spectacles, began in alarm to search through his pockets, to look under the counter, got tired, and gave it up. And, as soon as he gave up the

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  search, he began to drowse and waggle his head.

  "But no, no—don't you dare to touch on that yet. You are still uneducated, a weak-minded fellow. Cut a tree to suit your powers. Have you written anything on that subject I suggested to you—about Suk-honosy? Not yet? Well, so you are an ass's jaw, as I said, after all. What a subject that was!"

  "I ought to write about the village, about the populace," said Kuzma. "For you yourself are always saying: 'Russia, Russia—'"

  "Well, and isn't Sukhonosy the populace? isn't it Russia? All Russia is nothing but a village: get that firmly fixed in your noddle! Look about you: is this a town, in your opinion? The flocks jam the streets every evening—they kick up such a dust that you can't see your next-door neighbour. But you call it a 'town'! Ugh, you dull clodhopper—'tis plain that one might drive a stake into your head, and still you would never write anything."

  And Kuzma understood clearly and conclusively that Balashkin had spoken the sacred truth: he was not destined to write. There was Sukhonosy. For many years that repulsive old man of the Suburb had never been out of his mind—an old man whose sole property consisted of a mattress infested with bugs and a woman's moth-eaten cloak which he had inherited from his wife. He begged, fell ill, starved, roosted for fifty kopeks a month in one corner of a cottage occupied by a woman trader in the "gluttons' row," and, in her opinion, might very well set his affairs straight by selling his inheritance. But he prized it

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  as the apple of his eye—and, of course, not in the least because of tender feelings toward the late lamented: it afforded him the consciousness that he owned incomparably more property than other folks. It seemed to him that it was worth a devilishly high price: "Nowadays such cloaks are not to be had at all!" He was not disinclined, not in the least disinclined, to sell it. But he asked such an outrageous price that would-be purchasers were dazed. And Kuzma understood this tragedy of the Suburb perfectly. But when he began to consider how it should be expressed, he began to live through the whole complicated life of the Suburb, through recollections of his childhood, of his youth—and he became confused, drowned Sukhonosy in the abundance of the pictures which besieged his memory, and dropped his hands in despair, crushed by the necessity of expressing his own soul, of setting forth everything which had crippled his own life. And the most terrible thing about that life was the fact that it was a simple, everyday life, which broke up into petty details with incomprehensible rapidity. Yes, and what was more, he did not know how to write: he did not even know how to think regularly or long; he suffered like a puppy in a bed of straw when he took up a pen. And Balashkin's death-bed prophecy brought him to his senses; 'twas not for him to write stories! So the first thought which flashed through his mind was, to write "The Sum-Total," a stern, harsh epitaph on himself and—on Russia.

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  IV

  BUT since that time twelve more barren years had elapsed. He had plied the trade of horse-dealer in Voronezh; then, when the woman with whom he had been living died of puerperal fever, he had carried on the same trade in Eletz, had worked in a candle shop in Lipetzk, had been a clerk on Kasatkin's farm. And his life had flowed on smoothly, engrossed in work, in everyday tasks—until his habit of tippling had rather abruptly turned into hard drinking. He had become a passionate follower of Tolstoy: for about a year he did not smoke, never took a drop of vodka, ate no meat, never parted with "My Confession" and "The Gospels," wanted to emigrate to the Caucasus anoVjoin the Dukhobortzy. 1 But he was sent to Kieff on a business matter. And as he set forth, he felt something akin to a sickly joy, as if he had suddenly been released, after prolonged imprisonment, into complete freedom. It was clear weather at the end of September, and everything seemed easy, very beautiful—the pure air, the comfortable sun, and the cadence of the train, the open windows, and the flowering forests which flashed past them. All at once, when the train halted at Nyezhin, Kuzma saw a large

  1 A sect which denies the divinity of the Holy Spirit. They emigrated from the Caucasus to British Columbia in the Ws, with money furnished by Count L. N. Tolstoy, and have had many conflicts with the British authorities.— trans.

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  crowd surrounding the door of the station. The crowd was gathered round some one, and was shouting and quarrelling in great agitation. Kuzma's heart began to beat violently, and he ran toward the crowd. Rapidly elbowing his way through it, he caught sight of the red cap of the station-master, the white, pyramidal cap of a cook, resembling that of a Kazak Hetman, and the grey overcoat of a sturdy gendarme, engaged in roundly berating three Little Russians, who were standing meekly erect in front of him, clad in short, thick coats, indestructible boots, and caps of snuff-coloured lambskin. These caps hung precariously on some dreadful objects that proved to be round heads bandaged with coarse muslin, stiff with dried serous fluid, above swollen eyes and faces puffy and glassy with greenish-yellow bruises, bearing wounds on which the blood had coagulated and turned black. The men had been bitten by a mad wolf, had been despatched to the hospital in Kieff, and had been held up for days at a stretch at almost every large station, without a morsel of bread or a kopek of money. And, on learning that they were not to be taken aboard now, because the train was called an express train,
Kuzma suddenly flew into a rage and, to the accompaniment of approving yells from the Jews in the throng, began to bawl and stamp his feet at the gendarme. He was arrested, an official report was drawn up, and, while awaiting the next train, Kuzma, for the first time in his life, got dead drunk. The Little Russians were from the Tchernigoff

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  Government. This he had always thought of as a faraway region with a sky of dim, gloomy blue above the forests. These men, who had gone through a hand-to-hand encounter with the mad wolf, reminded him of the days of Vladimir, the life of long ago, of ancient peasant life in the pine forests. And as he proceeded to get drunk, pouring out glass after glass of liquor with hands shaking after the row, Kuzma became transported with delight: "Akh, that was a great epoch!" He was choking with wrath at the gendarme, and at those meek cattle in their long-tailed coats. Stupid, savage, curse them! But—Russia, ancient Russia! And tears of drunken joy and fervour, which distorted every picture to supernatural dimensions, obscured Kuzma's vision. "But how about non-resistance?" recurred to his mind at intervals, and he shook his head with a grin. A trim young officer was eating his dinner, with his back to him, at the general table; and Kuzma gazed in an amicably insolent manner at his white linen uniform blouse, so short, so high-waisted, that he wanted to step up to him and pull it down. "And I will do that!" thought Kuzma. "But he would jump up and shout —and slap my face! There's non-resistance for you!" Then he journeyed on to Kieff and, completely abandoning his business, spent three days roaming about the city and on the bluffs above the Dnyepr, in the joyous excitement induced by his intoxication.

  In the Cathedral of St. Sophia, at the Liturgy, many persons stared in amazement at the thin, broad-

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  shouldered katzap x who stood in front of Yaroslaff's 2 tomb. He was neatly dressed, held in his hand a new peaked cap, stood with decorum; but there was something queer in his general appearance. The service came to an end: the congregation departed, and the doors were opened; the verger extinguished the candles. Through the upper windows, athwart the blue smoke, filtered golden streaks of the hot noonday sun; but he, with set teeth, his sparse greying beard drooping on his breast and his deeply sunken eyes closed in a sort of happy pain, remained there listening to the pealing of the bells, carolling and dully booming above the cathedral—that ancient peal which had, in days of yore, accompanied the campaigns against the Petchen-yegi. 3 And, toward evening, Kuzma was seen at the Lavia. 4 He was sitting opposite its gate beneath a withered acacia, alongside a crippled lad, gazing with a troubled, melancholy smile at its white walls and enclosures, at the gold of its little cupolas shining against the pure autumnal sky. The lad had no cap, a sack of coarse linen hung over his shoulder, and on his body hung dirty, ragged old garments; in one hand he held

  1 The Little Russian nickname for the Great Russians.—

  TRANS.

  2 YaroslafT the Great, son of Prince Vladimir, 1016-1054.

  —TRANS.

  3 A Turkish tribe which migrated from Asia to Eastern Europe. They came into collision with the Russians at the end of the ninth century and the beginning of the tenth.—

  TRANS.

  4 A Lavra is a first-class Monastery. Here it refers to the famous "Catacombs" Monastery.— trans.

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  a wooden cup, with a kopek in the bottom, while with the other he incessantly changed the position of his deformed leg—which was bare to the knee, withered and unnaturally thin, burned black by the sun, and covered with a thick growth of golden-hued hair—as if it did not belong to him, as if it were a mere object. There was no one in their vicinity; but the lad, with his close-cropped head thrown back, stiff from the effects of the sun and the dust, displaying his thin, childish collar-bones, and paying no heed to the flies which settled on the excretions of his nostrils, drawled drowsily, painfully, and without ceasing:

  "Take a look, ye mammas, See how unhappy, how miserable we are! Akh, God grant you, mammas, Never to suffer so!"

  And Kuzma confirmed him: "That's so, that's right!"

  When he had conquered his intoxication and come to his senses, Kuzma felt that he was already an old man. Since that trip to Kieff three years had elapsed. And, during that space of time, something extremely important had indubitably been effected within him. How it had been effected, he himself did not even attempt to define. Life during those three years had been too abnormal—his own life and the life of the community. Of course, he had understood while still in Kieff that he would not remain long with Kasatkin, and that ahead of him lay poverty, the loss of even the semblance of manhood. And so it came to pass.

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  He managed to scrape along through two more jobs, but under very humiliating and oppressive conditions: eternally half-drunk, slovenly, with voice turned hoarse, permeated through and through with the reek of cheap, strong tobacco, making herculean efforts to conceal his unfitness for business. Then he fell lower still; he returned to his native town, and ran through his last kopeks; he spent his nights all winter long in the general room of the lodging-house of Khodoff, whiled away the days in Avdyeef's eating-house in the Women's Bazaar. Out of these last kopeks many went for a stupid caprice, the publication of a little volume of verses—after which he had to stroll about among the patrons of Avdyeef's establishment and force his booklet on them at half-price.

  But even that was not all: he came near turning into a buffoon! Once, on a frosty, sunny morning, he was standing in the bazaar near the flour shops and gazing at a barefoot beggar cutting up antics before Mozzhukin the merchant, who had come out on his threshold. Mozzhukin, drowsily derisive, with a face resembling the reflection in a samovar, was chiefly interested in a cat which was licking his polished boot. But the beggar did not stop. He thumped his breast with his fists and, humping his shoulders, began in a hoarse voice to declaim:

  "He who drinks when he is already drunk, Plays the part of a wise man. . . ."

  And Kuzma, his swollen eyes beaming, suddenly cut in:

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  "Then long live jollity, Long life to good liquor!"

  And an old woman of the petty burgher class, who was passing by—she had a face like that of an aged lioness—halted, cast a sidelong glance at him, and, elevating her crutch, remarked distinctly and maliciously: " Tis likely you don't know your prayers as well as that!"

  Lower than that there was no place to fall. But precisely that was what saved him. He survived several attacks of heart disease—and immediately stopped getting drunk, firmly resolving to undertake the simplest, most laborious sort of life; to hire, for example, an orchard, a vegetable-garden; to purchase, somewhere in his native county, a bee-farm. Fortunately, he still had a hundred and fifty rubles left.

  At first this idea delighted him. "Yes, that's capital," he said to himself with that mournful ironical smile which he had acquired so long ago. Tis time to go home!" And, of a truth, he needed a rest. It was not very long since that vast agitation had begun, both within him and round about him. But it had already done its work. He had become something very different from what he had been previously. His beard had turned completely grey; his hair, which he wore parted in the middle, and which curled at the ends, had grown thin and acquired a rusty hue; his broad face, with its high cheek bones, had grown darker and leaner than ever. His observing, sceptical mind had grown more keen. His soul had been puri-

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  tied, had become more unhealthily sensitive, although he was able to conceal the fact behind the serious and, at times, even severe look of the little eyes under brows which almost met across his nose. He had completely pulled himself together, and had begun to think less of himself, more of those round about him. Nevertheless, he longed to go "home" and rest: he craved work to his liking.

  V

  IN the spring, several months before the reconciliation with Tikhon, Kuzma heard that a garden in the village of KazakofT, in his native district, was to be leased, an
d he hastened thither. It was a remote spot, with black loam soil, not far from the place where the Krasoffs had first taken root.

  It was the beginning of May; cold weather and rain had returned after a hot spell; gloomy autumnal storm-clouds sailed over the town. Kuzma, in an old overcoat and without goloshes over his broken calfskin boots, was trudging to the railway station beyond the Cannon-makers' Suburb, and, shaking his head and screwing up his face from the effects of the cigarette held in his teeth, with hands clasped behind his back under his overcoat, he was smiling to himself. A dirty little barefoot boy ran up to him with a pile of newspapers and, as he ran, shouted briskly the customary phrase: "Giniral strike!"

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  "You're behind the times, my lad," said Kuzma. "Isn't there anything newer?"

  The small boy came to a halt, with flashing eyes.

  "The policeman has carried the news off to the station," he replied.

  "All hail to the constitution!" said Kuzma caustically, and pursued his course, skipping along through the mud, past fences darkened by the rain, past the branches of dripping gardens and the windows of lopsided hovels which were sliding down hill, to the end of the town street. "Wonders will never cease!" he said to himself as he went leaping along. "In former days, with such weather, people would have been yawning, hardly exchanging a word, in all the shops and eating-houses. But now, all over the town, they do nothing but discuss the Duma, riots and conflagrations, and how 'MurontzefF 1 has given the prime-minister a sound rating.' Well, a frog does not keep its tail very long!" The fireman's band was already playing in the town park. A whole company of kazaks had been sent. And the day before yesterday, on Trading Street, one of them, when drunk, went up to the window of the public library and made an insulting gesture to the young lady librarian. An elderly cabman, who was standing near by, began to reprove him, but the kazak jerked out his sabre from its scabbard, slashed the cabman's shoulder, and, cursing violently, rushed down the street in pursuit of the people who were walking and driving past, and, crazed