Forty Stories (28 page)

“From the very first year he would ride to the post office at Gyrino. He would be standing with me on my ferryboat, and he would say with a sigh: ‘Ah, Semyon, it’s a long time since they sent me any money from home.’ And I’d say: ‘You don’t need money, Vassily Sergeich. What good is it? Throw all the past away, forget it as though it had never existed, as though it was only a dream, and begin a new life. Don’t listen to the devil,’ I’d say to him. ‘He’ll never bring you any good, he’ll only tighten the noose. At present you want money,’ I’d tell him, ‘but in a little while you’ll be wanting something more, and then
you’ll want still more, but if you have put your heart on being happy, then you’ll have to learn not to want anything. Yes.… Already,’ I’d pursue the argument, ‘fate has played cruel tricks on both of us, but it’s no good going down on your knees and begging his mercy—you have to despise fate, laugh in his face! Then fate will begin laughing at itself.’ That’s what I told him.… Well, two years passed, and I ferried him across to this side of the river, and one day he was rubbing his hands together and laughing. ‘I’m going to Gyrino,’ he said, ‘to meet my wife. She has taken pity on me, and has come to join me. I have a nice kind wife.’ He was breathless with joy. And the next day he arrived with his wife, a pretty young lady wearing a hat, with a little girl in her arms. And lots of luggage of all kinds. My Vassily Sergeich was spinning around her, he couldn’t take his eyes away from her, and couldn’t praise her enough. ‘Yes, brother Semyon, even in Siberia people live!’ Well, thought I, he won’t always be showing a happy face to the world. From that time he went riding almost every week to Gyrino to find out whether the money was being sent from Russia. He needed a pile of money. He would tell me: ‘She is ruining her youth and beauty in Siberia for my sake, and sharing my miserable fate, and so I ought to provide her with every comfort.’ And to make life more cheerful for his lady, he made the acquaintance of officials and all sorts of riffraff, and of course he had to provide food and drink for the whole crowd, and there had to be a piano and a shaggy dog sitting on the sofa—a plague on such nonsense!… Luxury and self-indulgence, that’s what it was! The lady did not stay long with him. How could she? Clay, water, cold weather, no vegetables for you, no fruit, surrounded by ignorant and drunken people, and she a pampered darling from the capital.… Of course she got bored. Besides, her husband was no gentleman any longer: he was in exile, and there’s no honor in that. Three years later, I remember, on the eve of the Assumption, there was the sound of shouting from the other bank. I went over on the ferry and
saw the lady herself—she was all muffled up, and there was a young gentleman with her, one of the officials. There was a troika, too.… I ferried them across, and they got into the troika and vanished into thin air! That was the last we saw of them. Toward morning Vassily Sergeich came galloping down to the ferry. ‘Semyon, tell me,’ he said, ‘didn’t my wife pass this way with a gentleman in spectacles?’ ‘Yes, she did,’ I told him. ‘Run after the wind in the fields.…’ So he galloped after them, and for five days and nights he was pursuing them. Later, when I took him over to the other side, he flung himself down in the ferry and beat his head against the planking and howled. ‘So that’s how it is!’ said I, and I laughed and reminded him how he had said: ‘People can live even in Siberia.’ And he beat his head all the more.… After that he began to long for his freedom. His wife had gone back to Russia, and so naturally he was drawn there, so that he could see her and take her away from her lover. And then, brother, what did he do but ride off nearly every day to the post office or the town to see the authorities. He kept sending them petitions begging them to have mercy on him and to let him return home, and he used to say he spent two hundred rubles on telegrams alone. He sold his land and mortgaged his house to a Jew. He grew gray, stooped, and his face turned yellow like a consumptive’s. He would talk to you and go:
hee-hee-hee
 … and there would be tears in his eyes. He wasted away with all those petitions for eight years, but recently he has recovered his spirits and shows a more cheerful face to the world: he has thought up a new self-indulgence. His daughter, you see, was growing up. He was always looking at her and doting on her. To tell the truth, there’s nothing wrong with her—she’s a pretty thing, with black eyebrows, and high-spirited. Every Sunday he would go to church with her at Gyrino. They would be standing side by side on the ferryboat, and the girl would be laughing, and he would never look away from her. ‘Yes, Semyon,’ he would say, ‘people can live in Siberia. Even in Siberia there is happiness.
Look what a daughter I have! I don’t believe that if you traveled a thousand miles you would find another like her!’ And I’d say to him: ‘Your daughter’s all right, there’s no question at all.…’ And I’d find myself thinking: ‘Wait a bit.… The girl is still young, the blood is dancing in her veins, she wants to live, and what kind of life is there here?’ And, brother, she began to pine away. She withered and wasted away and fell into a decline until she was too weak to stand on her feet. Consumption! There’s your Siberian happiness for you, a curse on it! That’s how people live in Siberia.… Now he spends his time running after doctors and taking them home with him. As soon as he hears of a doctor or a quack two or three hundred miles away, he drives over to fetch him. It’s terrible to think of the money he spends on doctors, and it’s my opinion he would much better spend it on drinking.… She’ll die anyway. She’s certain to die, and then he will be finished. He’ll hang himself from grief or run away to Russia, that’s for sure. If he runs away, they’ll catch him, there’ll be a trial, he’ll be sentenced to hard labor, and they’ll give him the taste of the whip.…”

“Good, good,” muttered the Tartar, shivering with cold.

“Why good?” Smarty asked.

“Wife, daughter.… Let suffer hard labor, let sorrow, but he seen wife, daughter.… You say: want nothing. But nothing is bad! Wife lived with him three years—this is gift from God. Nothing is bad, but three years is good. How not understand?”

Trembling with cold and stammering, the Tartar picked out with great difficulty the Russian words, of which he knew so few, and he went on to say that God forbid one should fall ill in a strange land, and die, and be buried in the cold, rusty earth; and if his wife should come to him even for a single day or a single hour, then for such happiness he would be willing to bear any torture whatsoever, and he would thank God for it. Better a single day of happiness than nothing at all.

Then once again he described how he had left a pretty and clever wife at home; then, clutching his head with both hands, he began to weep, assuring Semyon that he was not guilty and had in fact been falsely accused. His uncle and two brothers had run off with a peasant’s horse and beaten the old man until he was half dead, but society had judged them and decided to sentence all three brothers to Siberia, while the uncle, a rich man, went scot-free.

“You’ll soo-oo-oon get used to it,” Semyon said.

The Tartar fell silent, turning his tearful gaze on the fire: his face expressed bewilderment and fear, as though he still failed to understand what he was doing there, in the darkness and the damp, among strangers, and far from Simbirsk province. Smarty lay beside the fire, and he laughed quietly at something, and began singing under his breath.

“What happiness can she have with her father?” he asked a few moments later. “He loves her and finds consolation with her, and all that is true. But, brother, you can’t put your fingers in his mouth, as they say. He’s a strict old man, and a harsh one, and what use is strictness to a young woman? What she wants is caresses and ha-ha-ha and ho-ho-ho and scents and pomades, isn’t that so? Eh, eh, such troubles there are!” Semyon sighed, and he rose heavily to his feet. “The vodka has all gone, so it’s time to sleep. Well, brother, I’m off to bed.”

Left alone, the Tartar added more brushwood to the fire, lay down, gazed into the flames, and began to dream of his wife and village. If only his wife would come for a month or even a day, and if she wanted to, she could then go back again! Better a month or even a day than nothing. But if she kept her promise and came, how would he provide for her and where would she stay?

“How could she live without anything to eat?” he asked aloud.

They paid him only ten kopecks for working night and day at the oars. True, the passengers sometimes gave tea and vodka money, but the ferrymen shared all the money they received
among themselves; they never gave any to the Tartar, and only laughed at him. Poverty made him hungry, cold, and frightened.… Now that his whole body was aching and shivering, he ought to have gone to the hut to lie down and sleep, but he had nothing to cover him there, and it was colder than on the banks of the river; here he had nothing to cover himself with, but at least he could make a fire.…

In another week the waters would have fallen, the ferryboat would put up sails, and the ferrymen, except for Semyon, would no longer be needed: then the Tartar would begin wandering from village to village, looking for work and begging for alms. His wife was only seventeen, a shy, pretty, spoiled girl—could she possibly go to the villages begging for alms, with her face unveiled? No, it was too horrible to think about.…

It was already growing light. The barge, the willow bushes on the water, and the ripples were clearly distinguishable, and, looking round, you could see the steep clay slopes with the small huts thatched with brown straw at the bottom, while the village huts clung to the higher ground. The cocks were already crowing in the village.

The red clay slopes, the barge, the river, the strange and evil villagers, the cold, the hunger, and the sickness—perhaps all these had no real existence. Perhaps, thought the Tartar, it was all a dream. He thought he was asleep and heard himself snoring.… It occurred to him that he was at home in Simbirsk province, and he had only to call his wife’s name and she would answer him, and in the next room was his mother.… How terrible these dreams were! What are they for? The Tartar smiled and opened his eyes wide. What river was this? Was it the Volga?

Snow was falling.

“Ahoy there!” someone shouted from the other side. “
Karba-a-a-ss
!”

The Tartar awoke and went to wake his comrades, to row over to the other side. Slipping into their sheepskins as they
emerged from the hut, the ferrymen came along the bank, swearing in hoarse, sleepy voices, shuddering in the cold. After their sleep, the river, with its piercing cold, seemed quite disgusting and horrifying. And they made no haste as they tumbled onto the barge.… Then the Tartar and the three ferrymen manned the long, broad-bladed oars, which in the darkness somehow resembled the claws of a crab, and Semyon leaned his belly against the long tiller. The shouting could still be heard from the other side, and two shots were fired from a revolver, in the belief perhaps that the ferrymen were fast asleep or had wandered off to the village tavern.

“All right, all right, you’ll get over in time!” Smarty said in the tone of a man convinced that there is nothing in the world worth hurrying for, because it was all one in the end and nothing would ever come of it.

The heavy blundering barge drew away from the bank and moved through the willow bushes, only the backward motion of the willows suggesting they were not standing still, but moving. The ferrymen dipped and raised their oars evenly, in unison. Smarty pressed his belly against the tiller, his body describing an arc as he danced from one side of the boat to the other. In the darkness the men seemed to be sitting on a long-pawed prehistoric animal, floating through a cold and desolate landscape, the very same landscape we sometimes see in dreams.

They slipped beyond the willows and came out into the open river. The creaking and the measured dipping of the oars could be heard on the other bank, and a voice crying: “Hurry! Hurry!” Ten minutes passed before the barge bumped heavily against the landing stage.

“It keeps coming down,” Semyon muttered, wiping the snow from his face. “And where it comes from, only God knows!”

On the bank stood a small thin man wearing a jacket lined with fox fur and a cap of white lamb’s wool. He stood at some distance from the horses, motionless; he wore a melancholy and concentrated expression, as though trying to remember something,
annoyed with the failing powers of his memory. Semyon approached him with a smile, doffing his cap, and the man said: “I’m in a hurry to reach Anastasyevka. My daughter is worse. There is a new doctor at Anastasyevka, they tell me.”

So his carriage was dragged onto the barge, and they made their way across the river. The man whom Semyon called Vassily Sergeich stood motionless throughout the journey, his thick lips tightly compressed, his eyes fixed on one place; and when the coachman asked for permission to smoke in his presence, he made no reply; it was as though he had not heard. But Semyon, pressing his belly against the tiller, looked at him mockingly and said: “Even in Siberia people can live. Li-i-i-ive!”

On Semyon’s face there was an expression of triumph, as though he had proved something and rejoiced that everything had happened as he predicted. The miserable, helpless look on the face of the man in the jacket lined with fox fur evidently afforded him great satisfaction.

“It’s muddy traveling this time of the year, Vassily Sergeich,” he said while they were harnessing the horses on the riverbank. “You’d have done better to wait a week or two, when it gets drier. Or better still, given up the journey.… It might be worthwhile if any good could come out of it, but as you know yourself, people have been driving about for ages and ages, and day and night too, and nothing ever came of it. That’s the truth!”

In silence Vassily Sergeich handed them some vodka money, climbed into the carriage, and drove away.

“So he’s chasing after a doctor,” said Semyon, shuddering with cold. “Looking for a real doctor is like hunting the wind across the fields or taking the devil by the hind leg, damn it all! What queer fellows, eh? Lord have mercy on me!”