Sketches from a Hunter's Album (12 page)

‘Do your best, uncle.'

‘All right, I'll do my best. Only just you look after yourself, just you watch out! I'm telling you that! No, no, don't make excuses… God be with you! Only just watch out for yourself, Mitya, otherwise you'll do yourself no good, you'll come a cropper, by God. Anyhow I don't want to have you round my neck all the time. I don't carry much weight, as it is. Well, be off with you, in God's name.'

Mitya went out. Tatyana Ilyinichna went after him.

‘Give him some tea, you old softie, you,' Ovsyanikov shouted after her. ‘The lad's no fool,' he continued, ‘and he's got a kind heart, only I'm fearful for him… In any case, forgive me for bothering you so long with trifles.'

The door from the hallway opened. A small, slightly grey-haired man came in dressed in a velvet jacket.

‘Ah, Franz Ivanych!' cried Ovsyanikov. ‘Greetings! How's the Good Lord treating you?'

Permit me, dear reader, to acquaint you with this gentleman.

Franz Ivanych Lejeune, my neighbour and an Oryol landowner, achieved the honoured title of Russian nobleman and gentleman in a rather unusual way. He was born in Orléans, of French parents, and together with Napoleon set off on the conquest of Russia as a drummer. To start with everything went swimmingly, and our Frenchman entered Moscow with head held high. But on the return route the poor Monsieur Lejeune, half-frozen and without his drum, fell into the hands of Smolensk peasants. The Smolensk peasants locked him up for the night in an empty fullery and the next day led him to a hole in the ice near the dam and began begging the drummer ‘
de la grrrrande armée
' to do them the honour, that is to say to plunge under the ice. M. Lejeune was unable to agree to their suggestion and began in his turn to persuade the Smolensk peasants, in his French dialect, to let him go back to Orléans. ‘There,
messieurs
,' he said, ‘I have a mother living,
une tendre mère
.' But the peasants, doubtless through ignorance of the geographical location of the city of Orléans, went on suggesting to him that he take an underwater journey down the winding Gniloterka River and even began
encouraging him with light shoves in his neck – and backbones when suddenly, to Lejeune's indescribable joy, there was a sound of horse-bells and on to the dam came a large sledge with the most colourful of covers laid over its exaggeratedly high back and drawn by a troika of light-brown Vyatka horses. In the sledge sat a stout and red-cheeked landowner in wolf fur.

‘What're you doing there?' he asked the peasants.

‘Drownin' a Frenchie, sir.'

‘Ah!' the landowner responded indifferently and turned away.

‘Monsieur! Monsieur!' exclaimed the poor fellow.

‘Aha!' said the wolf fur reproachfully, ‘with your dozen tongues you came to our Russia, burned Moscow, you scoundrel, stole the cross from off Ivan the Great's Tower and now it's all monsieur, monsieur! Now you've got your tail between your legs! A thief deserves what's coming to him… Off we go, Filka!'

The horses started away.

‘Oh, by the way, stop a moment!' added the landowner. ‘Hey you, monsieur, do you know any music?'

‘
Sauvez moi, sauvez moi, mon bon monsieur!
' Lejeune begged.

‘What a stupid people! Not a single one of them knows any Russian! Myuzik, myuzik, savvy myuzik voo? Savvy? Well, speak up! Comprenny? Savvy myuzik voo? On fortopiano zhooey savvy?'

Lejeune understood at last what the landowner was saying and nodded affirmatively.

‘
Oui, monsieur, oui, oui, je suis musicien; je joue de tous les instruments possibles! Oui, monsieur… Sauvez moi, monsieur!
'

‘Well, thank your lucky stars,' the landowner replied. ‘Lads, let him go. Here's twenty copecks for a drink!'

‘Thank you, sir, thank you. Please take him, sir.'

Lejeune was put in the sledge. He sighed with joy, wept, shivered, bowed to them and thanked the landowner, the coachman and the peasants. He was wearing only a green jersey with pink ribbons and there was a bitterly hard frost. The landowner gave one silent glance at his blue and freezing limbs and wrapped the unfortunate fellow in his own fur coat and took him home. The household ran to meet him. The Frenchman was quickly warmed up, fed and clothed. The landowner led him in to his daughters.

‘Here, children,' he told them, ‘a teacher's been found for you.
You were going on and on at me about wanting to learn music and that French dialect. Well, here's a Frenchman for you, and he plays the fortopiano… Well, monsieur,' he continued, indicating a crummy little piano he'd bought five years before off a Jew, who was in any case an eau-de-cologne salesman, ‘show us what you know: zhooey!'

Lejeune sat down on the chair with quaking heart because he'd never played a piano in his life.

‘Zhooey, zhooey!' the landowner repeated.

In desperation the poor fellow struck the keys, just as if he were beating a drum, and played the first thing that came into his head. ‘I literally thought,' he used to say afterwards, ‘that my saviour would seize me by the scruff of the neck and throw me out of the house.' But, to the extreme surprise of the unwilling improviser, the landowner after a short while tapped him appreciatively on the shoulder: ‘Good, good,' he said. ‘I see you know what to do. Now go and rest.'

After a couple of weeks Lejeune transferred from this landowner to another, a cultivated and wealthy man, caught his fancy through his happy and engaging character, married his pupil, entered the civil service, became a nobleman and a gentleman, married his own daughter off to an Oryol landowner called Lobyzanyev, a retired dragoon officer and amateur poet, and himself took up residence in Oryol.

It was this very Lejeune or, as he was now known, Franz Ivanych, who entered the sitting-room of Ovsyanikov, with whom he was on friendly terms…

But perhaps the reader has already grown tired of sitting with me at Farmer Ovsyanikov's and so I will now eloquently fall silent.

Although wild duck is not particularly attractive to a real hunter, for want of any other kind of wildfowl (it was the beginning of September and the woodcock had not yet flown in and I was bored with scouring the fields for partridge) I listened to my hunter and set off for Lgov.

Lgov is a large steppe village with an exceedingly ancient stone, single-towered church and two mills on the marshy riverlet Rosota. About three miles from Lgov this riverlet turns into a broad stretch of pond water, overgrown at the edges and in parts of the middle by thick reeds which are known as ‘mayer' in the Oryol region. On this pond, in the inlets and backwaters among the reeds, a great mass of ducks of every possible variety have found a habitat: mallard, half-mallard, pintail, teal, pochard, etc. Small flocks used continually to rise and fly about above the water, but at the sound of gunfire such clouds would rise that the hunter would be forced to hold down his hat and emit a prolonged ‘Phe-e-ew!' Yermolay and I started off by going round the side of the pond but, firstly, the duck, being a cautious bird, does not come close to the bank and, secondly, if some slowcoach of an inexperienced teal should indeed have submitted itself to our shots and given up its life, then our dogs wouldn't have been in any condition to retrieve it from the thick reeds because, despite their noblest and most self-sacrificing efforts, they wouldn't have been able to swim or walk along the bottom and would only have cut their precious noses needlessly on the sharp edges of the reeds.

‘No,' said Yermolay at last, ‘it's no good, we've got to get a boat. Let's go back to Lgov.'

We set off. We'd scarcely gone a few steps when a rather undistinguished-looking setter rushed towards us from behind a thick clump of willow and there then appeared a man of medium height in a blue, badly torn coat, a yellowish waistcoat and trousers the colour of
gris de lin
or
bleu d'amour
¹
which had been hastily tucked into badly holed boots, with a red kerchief round his neck and a single-barrelled gun over his shoulder. While our dogs, with the usual Chinese ceremonial characteristic of their species, sniffed their new acquaintance, who, it appeared, got cold feet and tucked its tail between its legs, drew back its ears and rapidly twisted its body to and fro without bending its knees, its teeth bared, the stranger approached us and bowed exceedingly politely. He appeared to be about twenty-five. His long light-brown hair, liberally plastered with
kvas
, stuck up in fixed spikes, his small brown eyes blinked in welcome and his entire face, wound about with a black handkerchief as if he had toothache, was wreathed in a sugary smile.

‘Permit me to introduce myself,' he began in a soft and insinuating voice. ‘I'm the local hunter, Vladimir… Learning of your arrival and knowing that you'd graciously made your way on to the banks of our pond, I resolved, if you have no objections, to offer you my services.'

The hunter Vladimir spoke, without putting too fine a point on it, like a young provincial actor playing a juvenile lead. I agreed to his offer and before reaching Lgov had already learned the story of his life. He was a freed manorial serf. In his tenderest youth he'd learned music, then he'd worked as a valet, had learned to read and had read, so far as I could gather, one or two books, and, living now as do so many in Russia, without a penny to call his own and no permanent employment, he fed himself on scarcely anything save manna from heaven. He expressed himself unusually elegantly and evidently prided himself on his fancy manners. He was also, no doubt, a frightful one with the girls and probably successful, because Russian girls love eloquence. Besides, he let me know that he sometimes visited local landowners and received hospitality in the town and played whist and was on good terms with people from the capital. He was expert at smiling and had an extraordinarily wide range of smiles. One particularly suited him, a modest, withdrawn smile which played on his lips when he was listening to a stranger speaking
to him. He would listen to you and agree with you completely, but never leave go of his sense of personal dignity, and he always sought to let you know that he could, if the occasion arose, give expression to his own opinion. Yermolay, as a man who was not too well-educated and in no way ‘subtle', began by speaking to him as one of his own. It was a sight to see the way Vladimir condescended to him by saying: ‘You, sir…'

‘Why've you got that handkerchief wound round your face?' I asked him. ‘Have you got toothache?'

‘No, sir,' he replied, ‘a far more ruinous consequence of inattention. I had a friend, a good man, sir, but in no sense a hunter, as things turned out, sir. One day, sir, he said to me: “My dear chap, take me hunting, I'm longing to know what sort of a sport it is.” I, of course, didn't want to refuse a friend and obtained a weapon for him, for my part, sir, and took him hunting. Well, sir, we hunted, as we're accustomed to, and then we rested, sir. I sat down under a tree and he, for his part, sir, sat opposite, started playing tricks with his gun and aimed at me. I begged him to decease but, in his inexperience, he didn't pay any attention, sir. There was a loud shot and I lost my chin and the forefinger on my right hand.'

We reached Lgov. Both Vladimir and Yermolay had decided that it was impossible to hunt without a boat.

‘Old Knot's got a punt,'
*
Vladimir remarked, ‘but I don't know where he's hidden it. I'll have to go and see him.'

‘Who's that?' I asked.

‘There's a man lives here nicknamed Old Knot.'

Vladimir and Yermolay set off to find Old Knot. I told them I'd wait for them by the church. As I was looking at the gravestones in the churchyard I came across a blackened four-cornered urn with the following inscriptions: on one side in French: ‘
Ce gît Théophile Henri, vicomte de Blangy
', and on the other: ‘Beneath this stone is laid the body of the Frenchman, Count Blanzhy, born 1737, died 1799, his life numbering in all 62 years'; on the third: ‘May his Ashes Rest in Peace', and on the fourth:

The arrival of Yermolay, Vladimir and the man with the strange nickname, Old Knot, interrupted my reflections. The barefoot, tattered and unkempt Old Knot seemed, to judge from appearances, a former manorial serf of about sixty.

‘Have you a boat?' I asked.

‘I have,' he answered in a hoarse and broken voice, ‘but it's in a bad way.'

‘How's that?'

‘It's got leaky. An' the rivets've come out.'

‘That's nothing!' exclaimed Yermolay. ‘You can fill 'em with oakum.'

‘Sure can,' Old Knot agreed.

‘Who
are
you?'

‘I'm the master's fisherman, sir.'

‘How is it you're a fisherman, but your boat's in such a state of disrepair?'

‘Well, there's no fish in the river.'

‘Fish dislike marsh mildew,' my hunter remarked self-importantly.

‘Well,' I said to Yermolay, ‘go and get some oakum and patch up the boat as soon as possible.'

Yermolay went off.

‘Surely we'll sink to the bottom very likely, won't we?' I said to Vladimir.

‘God is merciful,' he answered. ‘In any case, it must be supposed that the pond is not deep.'

‘Sure it's not deep,' said Old Knot who spoke somewhat strangely, as if he'd only just woken up. ‘Sure it's got a bottom full o' weeds an' grass, an' sure it's all overgrown with grass, it is. Mind you, it's also got some real deep holes, it has.'

‘However, if the grass is so thick,' remarked Vladimir, ‘it won't be possible to row in it.'

‘Well, who rows in a punt, eh? You gotta punt it. I'll come with you, ‘cos I gotta pole there. Or it's possible to use a shovel.'

‘A shovel's awkward, sometimes you can't reach the bottom,' said Vladimir.

‘It's true it's awkward.'

I sat down on a gravestone to wait for Yermolay. Vladimir went off a little to one side out of politeness and also sat down. Old Knot stayed standing in one place, his head lowered and his hands behind his back according to old custom.

‘Tell me, please,' I began, ‘have you been fisherman here long?'

‘It'll be seven years, sir,' he answered, giving himself a shake.

‘And what were you before?'

‘Before I were a coachman.'

‘Who stopped you being a coachman?'

‘Our new lady.'

‘Which lady?'

‘The one who bought us. You're not knowing her, sir: Alyona Timofevna, the stout lady… not young.'

‘What on earth made her turn you into a fisherman?'

‘God knows. She came to us from her estate, from Tambov, an' ordered all us workers to gather in a group an' then she came out to see us. First of all we go an' kiss her hand and she doesn't mind, doesn't get upset… Then she started askin' us one after another what we do, what employment we have. When it was my turn, she asks: “What were you?” I said: “Coachman.” “Coachman? Well, what sort of coachman do you think you are, just look at yourself, ask yourself that, eh? It's not right for you to be a coachman, but you can be my fisherman and shave off your beard. Whenever I have occasion to visit and come to dinner, you have fish ready, do you hear?” Since then I've been counted among the fishermen. “And see you keep my pond water in good condition,” she said. But how can I do that?'

‘Whose serf were you before?'

‘Sergey Sergeich Pekhterev's. We were his by inheritance. An' he didn't own us long, just six years. It was for him I were coachman, though not in the town – he had others for town – only in the country.'

‘Were you always a coachman?'

‘Not always I weren't! I became a coachman under Sergey Ser-geich, but before that I were a cook, but not a cook in town, just a cook here in the country.'

‘Who were you a cook for?'

‘A previous gentleman, Afanasy Nefedych, Sergey Sergeich's uncle. He bought Lgov, Afanasy Nefedych did, while Sergey Sergeich inherited his estate.'

‘Who did he buy it from?'

‘From Tatyana Vasilyevna.'

‘Which Tatyana Vasilyevna?'

‘The one who died last year near Bolkhov – that's to say, near Karachev – the spinster, the one who never got married. You perhaps know her? We passed to her from her father, from Vasily Semyonych. She owned us a long, long time – ‘bout twenty years or so.'

‘So you were a cook for her, were you?'

‘At first I were just that, a cook, but then I became a cofficial.'

‘A what?'

‘A cofficial.'

‘What sort of a job is that?'

‘I don't really know, sir. Standing by the sideboard and being called Anton, not Kuzma. That's what our ladyship ordered.'

‘Is your real name Kuzma?'

‘Kuzma.'

‘And you were a cofficial all the time?'

‘No, not all the time. I was also an akhtor.'

‘Really?'

‘Sure I were. An akhtor in a keatre. Our ladyship had a keatre.'

‘What parts did you play?'

‘Pardon?'

‘What did you do in the theatre?'

‘You don't know what we did, eh? They'd take me and dress me up and I'd walk on dressed-up, or stand, or sit, as was needed. They'd say, You say this, and I'd say it. Once I were a blind man. They put a pea under each eyelid… That's what we did.'

‘And then what?'

‘Then I became a cook again.'

‘Why did they demote you to cook?'

‘'Cos my brother ran away.'

‘I see. But what were you under your first lady's father?'

‘I had various employments. First I were a pageboy, then an outrider, then a gardener, then a huntsman.'

‘A huntsman? So you rode to hounds?'

‘I rode to hounds, but I got hurt. I fell with the horse and the horse got hurt. The old master, he were real strict with us. He ordered me flogged and sent off to Moscow, to be apprentice to a shoemaker.'

‘To be an apprentice? You weren't a boy when you were made a huntsman, were you?'

‘No, I were twenty years old or so.'

‘What sort of an apprentice would you be if you were twenty?'

‘That didn't matter, it's what had to happen if the master ordered. Luckily, he died soon afterwards and I were sent back to the country.'

‘When did you learn to be a cook?'

Old Knot raised his thin and yellowish face and grinned.

‘Do you have to learn that? It's women's work, cooking!'

‘Well,' I said, ‘you've seen some sights in your time, Kuzma! What do you do now as a fisherman if there are no fish?'

‘I don't complain, sir. An' I thank God I were made a fisherman. There's another old man like me, Andrey Pupyr, her ladyship ordered him to work in the dipping-room in the paper factory. It's a sin, she said, for him to eat bread for nothing… But Pupyr'd hoped to gain her favour. He had a relative of his working as a clerk in her office. He promised to put in a good word for him with her ladyship, remind her, you know. Well, he reminded her right enough! Pupyr, you know, had bowed down to that relative's feet right before my very eyes…'

‘Have you got a family? Were you married?'

‘No, sir, I wasn't. The late Tatyana Vasilyevna – God rest her soul! – she wouldn't allow anyone to marry. Heaven preserve us! She'd say: “I live like a spinster, don't I, so what's the fuss? What more do they want?” ‘

‘How do you make a living now? Do you get any pay?'

‘Pay, sir! No!… Food is provided – so, glory be to God, I'm greatly content. May God grant our ladyship long life!'

Yermolay returned.

‘The boat's put right,' he pronounced severely. ‘You go off and get your pole, you!'

Old Knot ran off for his pole. Throughout my conversation with the poor old man the hunter Vladimir had been giving him glances and grinning disdainfully.

‘A stupid fellow, sir,' he said when the other had gone, ‘a completely uneducated fellow, sir, just a peasant, sir, nothing else. You can't call him a household servant, sir… and such a boaster… How could he be thought of as an actor, judge for yourself! You bothered with him for nothing, talking to him as you did, sir!'

Within a quarter of an hour we were already sitting in Old Knot's punt. (We left the dogs in a peasant hut in the care of the coachman Yehudi.) It wasn't very comfortable for us, but hunters are never very choosy. At the blunt rear end stood Old Knot and ‘punted' with his pole. Vladimir and I sat on the centre cross-seat and Yermolay perched himself up front, in the bow. Despite the oakum, water soon appeared round our feet. Luckily the weather was calm and the pond water literally seemed to have gone to sleep.

We traversed the water fairly slowly. The old man had difficulty in pulling his long pole out of the sticky mud because it had become twined about with the green threads of underwater grasses and the solid round pads of the marsh lilies also hindered our boat's progress. Eventually we reached the clumps of reeds and the fun started. The ducks rose noisily, literally ‘exploding' from the pond in fright at our sudden appearance in their domain and gunfire resounded in unison after them and it was a delight to see how the stumpy birds somersaulted in the air and splashed down heavily in the water. We didn't of course retrieve all the shot duck. Some of the slightly injured ones dived, some of the dead ones fell in such thick ‘mayer' that even the lynx-eyed Yermolay couldn't spot them, but nevertheless by dinnertime our boat had become filled to the brim with our bag.

Vladimir, to Yermolay's great satisfaction, was by no means an expert shot and after each failure showed his surprise, inspected his gun, blew through it, expressed puzzlement and finally gave us his reasons for missing his target. Yermolay as usual shot victoriously and I, as usual, rather poorly. Old Knot studied us with the eyes of someone who'd been all his life in someone or other's service and from time to time cried out: ‘There's one, there's a duck!' and all the
while scratched his back not with his hands but with movements of his shoulders. The weather remained perfect. White round clouds hung high and calm above us, clearly reflected in the water. The reeds murmured softly all about us and in places the pond water glittered in the sunlight like steel. We were on the point of returning to the village when suddenly something rather unpleasant occurred.

We'd been aware for some time that water had slowly been seeping into the punt. Vladimir had been given the task of bailing it out with a ladle pinched for the purpose by my prudent hunter from a dozy old woman. Everything was all right so long as Vladimir remembered what he had to do. But towards the end of our hunt, as if in farewell, the ducks started to rise in such flocks that we scarcely had time to reload our guns. In the heat of firing we didn't pay any attention to the state of our punt, when suddenly, as a result of a strong movement from Yermolay, who had stretched out full-length along the gunwale in order to reach a shot bird, our ancient craft leaned to one side, keeled over and solemnly sank to the bottom, luckily in a shallow place. We cried out but it was already too late. In a moment we were standing up to our necks in water surrounded by the floating bodies of dead ducks. Now I can't help recalling without laughing the pale and frightened faces of my comrades (very likely my own face wasn't all that healthily pink at the time), but I must confess that at that moment it didn't occur to me to laugh at all. Each of us held our guns above our heads and Old Knot, no doubt through his habit of always copying his masters, also held his pole up. The first to break the silence was Yermolay.

‘Phew, tipped right up!' he complained, spitting in the water. ‘What an occasion! And it's all down to you, you old devil!' he added heatedly, turning to Old Knot. ‘What sort of a boat is it you've got?'

‘Sorry,' muttered the old man.

‘Yes, and a lot of good you are,' my hunter went on, turning his head in the direction of Vladimir. ‘Where were you looking? Why weren't you bailing? Oh, you, you, you…'

But Vladimir was in no mood to respond because he was shaking like a leaf, his teeth chattered without meeting and he was smiling completely senselessly. God knows what had happened to his eloquence and sense of elegant propriety and personal dignity!

The damned punt swayed about feebly under our feet. The instant after our shipwreck the water had seemed extremely cold, but we soon got used to it. When the first fright was over, I looked around and saw that ten or so paces from us were reeds and beyond, above their tips, could be seen the bank. ‘Not good!' I thought.

‘What can we do?' I asked Yermolay.

‘Well, let's take a look, since we can't spend the night here,' he answered. ‘Here, you, take hold of my gun,' he said to Vladimir.

Vladimir obeyed without a word.

‘I'm going to look for a fording place,' continued Yermolay in the sure conviction that every stretch of pond water must have a fording place, seized hold of Old Knot's pole and set off in the direction of the bank, carefully feeling his way along the bottom.

‘Do you know how to swim?' I asked him.

‘No, I don't,' his voice resounded beyond the reeds.

‘Well, he's bound to drown,' was the indifferent comment from Old Knot, who, as earlier, had been frightened not by the danger so much as by our anger and now, completely calm, merely emitted the occasional long breath and gave the impression of feeling no need to change his position.

‘And he'll perish quite uselessly, sir,' Vladimir added piteously.

Yermolay didn't return for more than an hour. That hour seemed to us an eternity. To start with we exchanged shouts with him very eagerly, but later he began to answer our shouts more rarely and finally he ceased altogether. In the village the bells were tolling for the evening service. We didn't talk among ourselves and even tried to avoid each other's eyes. The ducks flew over our heads; some would be about to alight near us but would then suddenly rise up, as they say, ‘in formation' and fly off with much quacking. We started to grow stiff. Old Knot started blinking his eyes as if he was preparing to go to sleep.