IN EXILE
By Anton Chekhov
Old Simon, nicknamed Wiseacre, and a young Tartar, whom no one knew by name, sat on the river-bank before a bonfire. The other three ferrymen were in the hut. Simon, a man of sixty, gaunt and toothless, but broad of shoulder and still hale in appearance, was drunk. He had meant to go to sleep long ago, but there was a flask in his pocket, and he feared that his comrades in the hut might ask him to pass it around. The Tartar felt ill and tired; shivering in his rags, he was recounting what a comfortable home he had had in his native province, and what a handsome, clever wife he had left there. He was hardly more than twenty-five years old, but now, before the blaze of the bonfire, his pale, melancholy face seemed to be that of a mere lad.
“It’s no paradise here, to be sure,” Wiseacre agreed with him. “You can see for yourself: water, bare banks, and everywhere clay—nothing more.... Holy Week has passed, there’s ice on the river, and only this morning it snowed.”
“It’s miserable! Miserable!” said the Tartar, as he glanced round him in terror.
Some ten paces away flowed the dark, cold river. It seemed to grumble as it noised its way past the corroded clay bank and rapidly bore itself onward somewhere towards the distant sea. At the very edge of the bank there rose the dark, massive form of a barge, the kind calledkarbassby the ferrymen. Looking in the distance towards the opposite bank, one could see numerous fires, flaring and retreating, and resembling so many leaping serpents. It was the burning of last year’s grass. And beyond the fires, again darkness. The sound of floating ice beating against the barge could be heard. It was damp, cold....
The Tartar glanced up towards the sky. There were just as many stars here as at home, and the same surrounding darkness; yet there was something lacking. Somehow, at home, in the Simbirsk province, there were no such stars and no such sky.
“It’s miserable! Miserable!” he repeated.
“You’ll get used to it!” said Wiseacre, and laughed. “You are still in your teens, and silly. Your mother’s milk hasn’t as yet dried upon your lips. Of course it seems to your foolish mind that there is no one more miserable than you; but the time will come when you yourself will say, ‘May God grant every one such a life!’ Now,look at me. In another week the water will be normal again; I shall take charge of the ferry-boat; you will go jaunting through Siberia, while I shall remain here and resume making my way from bank to bank. I’ve been doing it twenty-two years, night and day. The pike and the salmon under the water; I above it. And thank God for that! I want nothing. May God grant every one such a life!”
The Tartar threw more brushwood into the fire, and, moving closer to it, said:
“I have an ailing father. When he dies, my mother and my wife will join me here. They have promised.”
“What do you want with a mother and a wife?” asked Wiseacre. “You’ll repent it, brother. It’s the devil that’s putting you up to it, curse his soul! Don’t listen to him, the accursed one! Don’t give in to him. When he gets your mind on women, just spite him; tell him, ‘I don’t want them!’ When he talks freedom to you, get stubborn; tell him, ‘I don’t want it! I want nothing—neither father, nor mother, nor wife, nor freedom, nor house, nor anything! I want nothing, confound their souls!’”
Wiseacre took another gulp from his flask, and continued:
“Now, look at me, brother. I am not a simplemuzhik, but a sexton’s son, in fact; and when I lived in freedom in Kursk I wore a frock-coat; but now I’ve gotten so that I could sleep naked on the ground and eat grass. And God grant every one such a life! I want nothing, and I fear no one. I’m on good terms with myself, and I cannot imagine any one richer and freer than I. When I was banished from Russia, I insisted from the very first day: ‘I want nothing!’ The devil he talks to me of wife, and of home, and of freedom; and I back at him: ‘I want nothing!’ I insisted on mine, and, as you see, I live well, and do not complain. Give way to the devil but an inch, and you are lost. There’s no deliverance, you sink into the bog over your very head, and there’s no getting out. Not alone your brother, the stupidmuzhik; but nobles and educated men are lost. Some fifteen years ago they sent here one of that gentry. He didn’t share some property with his brothers, tampered somehow with a will. They say he comes from the dukes or the barons—or perhaps he is only an official—how should one know? Well, this gentleman arrived here, and the first thing he did was to buy himself a house and some land. ‘I intend,’ he said, ‘to live by the sweat of my brow, because,’ he said, ‘I am no longer a gentleman, but a convict.’ ‘Well,’ said I to myself, ‘may God help him, hemeans well!’ He was at that time a fussy, bustling young man; did his own mowing and now and then caught fish, and rode sixty versts a day on horseback. That was his one misfortune. From the very first year he made trips to Girino, to the post-office there. Times were and he would be on my ferry-boat, sighing: ‘Ah, Simon, it’s rather a long time since they have sent me money from home!’ ‘There’s no need,’ I’d go on telling him, ‘of money, Vassili Sergeyich. What good is it? Throw it aside,’ I argued with him. ‘All that’s gone by; forget it as if it never were; as if you had only dreamt it; and begin life anew. Don’t listen,’ I said to him, ‘to the devil. It’ll lead to no good; it’ll only draw a noose around your neck. Now it’s money you want, and later it’ll be another thing—there’s no end to it. If it’s happiness you seek, first of all desire nothing. Yes.... If,’ I said to him, ‘fate has treated you and me badly, there’s no begging charity of her, no falling at her feet; rather should one treat her with scorn and laugh at her—then she too will laugh.’ So I spoke to him.... Two years later I ferried him over to this side—and he all overjoyed and laughing. ‘I am going,’ he said, ‘to Girino to meet my wife. She has taken pity on me,’ he said, ‘and is coming out here. She’s a fine woman, good-hearted.’ He almostchoked from happiness. The next day he brought his wife. She was young, handsome, in a pretty hat; and in her arms a girl baby; and all sorts of baggage with her. As to Vassili Sergeyich, he fussed around her, couldn’t stop feasting his eyes on her or stop raving about her. ‘Yes, brother Simon, even in Siberia people live.’ ‘All right,’ I said to myself. ‘Don’t be too sure of that.’ And from that time on, mark it, he began to make weekly visits to Girino: to see if any money had come from Russia. He needed no end of money. ‘She,’ he said, ‘is sacrificing her youth and beauty in Siberia for my sake, and is sharing with me my bitter lot; and therefore,’ he said, ‘I should give her every possible pleasure.’ ... To make it cheerful for her, he started up an acquaintance with the officials and with all sorts of trashy people. Well, all this company had to be furnished food and drink; then a piano had to be had, and a shaggy little dog for the sofa—the deuce take it!... In a word, luxury, extravagance! She did not live long with him. How could she? Here she saw only mud, water, cold, no vegetables or fruits, and all around her uneducated people, full of drink, and without manners—and she a spoiled lady from St. Petersburg.... Naturally, she grew sick of it. And the husband too was no longer what he had been, but a convict.
“It was one Assumption Eve, three years later, that I remember some one shouting from the opposite bank. I crossed over, and whom should I see but the lady herself, all wrapped up—and with her a young gentleman, one of the officials. A troika!... I ferried them over to this side; the troika was ready; ah, but you should have seen them fly! Hardly the wink of an eye and there was not a trace of them.
“And in the morning Vassili Sergeyich came running here. ‘Simon, has my wife passed this way with a gentleman in spectacles?’ ‘Yes, she did pass this way,’ I said to him. ‘Go and seek the wind in the fields!’ He gave chase to them, but returned in five days. When I ferried him across to the other side, he threw himself down in the bottom of the boat, and began to beat his head against the planks and to whine. ‘What else had you to expect?’ I said to him. I laughed and reminded him: ‘Even in Siberia people live!’ But he only beat his head the harder.... Then he began to hanker after freedom. He heard his wife was in Russia, and of course he wanted to go there and to take her away from her lover. Almost every day he would go to the post-office or to the government offices. He presented petition after petition, begging for pardon and for permission to return home. He told me hehad spent a couple of hundred rubles on telegrams alone. He sold his land, while he mortgaged his house to Jews. He grew gray and bent; his face yellow—a consumptive, in fact. Speaking to you, he would always go:khe-khe-khe... and his eyes full of tears. For eight years he kept on handing in those petitions, but after that he had come to life and grown jolly again. You see, he had thought of another luxury. His daughter had grown up. And he feasted his eyes on her and didn’t get enough of it. She really was an attractive girl—pretty, black-browed, and rather spirited in manner. Every Sunday he’d take her with him to Girino to church. They’d stand hand in hand on the ferry, and he not taking his eyes from her. ‘Yes, Simon,’ he would say, ‘even in Siberia people live. Even in Siberia there is happiness. Just look what a daughter I’ve got! You can’t find another like her if you seek a thousand miles around!’ The girl, as I said, was really a beauty.... But I thought to myself: ‘Just wait.... She’s a young girl; the blood tingles, and one wants to live, and what sort of life is to be had here?’ And, comrade, to make the story short, she really began to ail.... She got to coughing, and coughing, to pining away; and now she is very sick, can hardly stand on her legs.Consumption! There’s your Siberian happiness for you—the deuce take it!—that’s how even in Siberia people live.... Now he’s begun to chase after doctors, and to bring them back home with him. Let him but hear there’s a doctor or a healer within two hundred or three hundred versts, and off he goes after him. It’s terrible to think how much money he has spent on doctors. I’d rather drink up the money.... She’ll die, any way. She’ll die, there’s no gainsaying that, and then he’ll be lost altogether. He’ll hang himself from sorrow, or he’ll escape to Russia—and then you know what will happen. He’ll be caught, sentenced to hard labor; he’ll taste the knout....”
“That is well,” murmured the Tartar, trembling with cold.
“What is well?” asked Wiseacre.
“He’s had his wife, his daughter.... You say you want nothing. To have nothing is bad! His wife lived with him three years—God was good to him. To have nothing is bad, but three years is good. Don’t you understand?”
Trembling with cold, stammering out with difficulty the few Russian words he knew, the Tartar expressed the hope that God might preserve him from dying in a strange land and being buried in a cold, blighted earth; if his wife shouldcome only for a single day, for a single hour, he would consent, for the sake of this brief happiness, to undergo the worst tortures and thank God for them. Better one day of happiness than nothing!
Again he spoke of the handsome and clever wife he had left at home; then, putting his hands to his head, he began to cry and to assure Simon that he was innocent and was undergoing punishment for no just cause. His two brothers and an uncle had stolen some horses from amuzhikand had beaten the old man half to death; but society dealt with him unjustly, and sent the three brothers to Siberia, while the uncle, a rich man, remained at home.
“You’ll get used to it,” said Simon.
The Tartar did not reply, but fixed a tearful gaze upon the fire. His face expressed doubt and alarm, as if he still did not understand why he was here in this darkness and cold, among strangers, and not at home. Wiseacre lay beside the fire, chuckled at something, and hummed.
“What sort of happiness is there for her with her father?” he said after a pause. “He loves her, and is comforted in her, it is true; but he’s no fool; he’s a stern, harsh old man—and young girls don’t want sternness.... They want caresses and ha-ha-ha! and hi-ho-ho!—and perfumeand pomade. Yes.... Ekh, this business!” sighed Simon, and lifted himself awkwardly. “The vodka’s all gone; that means it’s time to go to bed. Well, I’m going, brother....”
Left alone, the Tartar added more brushwood to the fire, lay down facing it, and began to think of his native village and of his wife; if she were to come, even if only for a month, for a day—then let her go back if she wanted to! Better a month, even a day, than nothing! But if his wife were to keep her promise and come, how should he feed her? Where could she live?
“If there is nothing to eat, how can one live?” he asked aloud.
For working day and night at an oar he was paid but ten copecks a day; it is true, passengers sometimes gave a gratuity for tea and for vodka, but his companions shared it among themselves, and gave the Tartar nothing, only laughing at him. And poverty made him feel hungry, cold, and frightened. Now, since his body ached and trembled, he wished to go into the hut and to bed, but he knew that there was nothing there to cover oneself with, and that it was colder than on the bank; here too there was nothing to cover oneself with, but one could at least keep up the fire....
In another week, when the water should havesubsided, and the regular ferry-boat resumed its course, the services of the ferrymen, with the exception of Simon’s, would be dispensed with; then the Tartar must start tramping from village to village and beg for alms and work. His wife was but seventeen years old; pretty, petted, and shy—must she too traverse villages and beg for bread? No, the mere thought of it was terrible.
Dawn was already breaking. The barge and the willows stood out clearly; the surging foam too was visible. Glancing behind him, the Tartar could see the clayey slope; the small, brown-thatched hut was at its base, and the huts of the village above. The cocks already crowed in the village.
The red clayey slope, the barge, the river, the strange, evil-minded people, hunger, cold, disease—they all seemed not to exist at all. It was all a dream, thought the Tartar. He imagined that he was asleep and could hear himself snoring.... Of course he was at home, in the Simbirsk province, and all he needed to do to have his wife appear was to call her by name; and in the next room was his mother.... What terrible things dreams are! Of what use are they? The Tartar smiled and opened his eyes. What river was this? The Volga?
It began to snow.
“Ho, there!” came a shout from the other side. “The boat!”
The Tartar sprang up and went to wake his companions. Pulling on their torn sheepskin coats while on the way to the boat, filling the air with oaths from their hoarse throats, and shivering with cold, the ferrymen made their appearance. After their sleep, the river, with its cold, penetrating wind, seemed to them most repellent and terrible. Leisurely they took their places in thekarbass.
The Tartar and three ferrymen seized the long, broad-bladed oars, resembling in the dark the claws of a crab; while Simon threw himself down on his stomach across the helm. The shouting continued on the other side; two revolver-shots were also heard; it was apparent that he who fired them thought the ferrymen were still asleep, or in the village tavern.
“Never mind, you’ll get there,” murmured Wiseacre in a voice which conveyed his assurance that in this world there was no need of hurrying—that it was all the same in the long run.
The heavy, awkward barge parted from the bank, and made its way slowly through the willows; and only the slightly perceptible backward movement of the willows indicated that the barge was moving at all. The ferrymen, with measuredslowness, swung their oars. Wiseacre lay on his stomach across the helm, and, describing a curve in the air, was thrown from one side to the other. In the dark, it seemed as if a number of men were sitting on some long-clawed antediluvian animal and were floating towards that cold, melancholy land seen only in nightmares.
The barge passed beyond the willows and was now in the open. Presently, on the other bank, could be heard the creaking and the measured dipping of the oars; while those in the boat could hear some one shouting, “Quicker! Quicker!” Another ten minutes, and the barge struck heavily against the landing.
“It keeps on snowing! It keeps on snowing!” grumbled Simon, wiping the snow from his face. “God knows where it all comes from!”
On the bank stood a rather thin, low-statured old man, dressed in a short foxskin coat and a white lambskin cap. He stood at some distance from the horses and did not move; his face had a morose, concentrated expression, as if he were making an effort to recall something and were angry at his disobedient memory. When Simon, smiling, approached him, and took off his cap, the man said:
“I am in great haste to go to Anastasevka.My daughter is worse again, and there, I am told, a new doctor has come.”
The coach was wheeled on board the barge, which started to cross back. The man, whom Simon called Vassili Sergeyich, stood all the time immovable, tightly compressing his thick lips, and looking with a fixed gaze into the distance. When the driver asked permission to smoke in his presence, he did not reply, as if he had not heard. Simon lay on the bottom of the boat, on his stomach, looked at him derisively, and said:
“Even in Siberia people live. L-live!”
The face of Wiseacre wore a triumphant expression, as if he had demonstrated something and rejoiced that what he had prophesied had come true. The unhappy, helpless look of the man in the foxskin coat apparently afforded him considerable gratification.
“Rather muddy now for travelling, Vassili Sergeyich,” said he, while the horses were being harnessed. “It wouldn’t be a bad idea to postpone your trip for a week or two, till it gets a bit more dry. Perhaps it were better you didn’t go at all.... If there were only some sense in your going! Well, you yourself know that people travel eternally, day and night, and get nowheres. What do you say?”
Vassili Sergeyich gave the ferrymen for vodka, sat himself in the coach, and was off.
“There! After the doctor again!” said Simon, trembling from cold.... “Yes, seek a real doctor, catch the wind in the field, seize the devil by the tail, confound your soul! What queer people there are! And forgive me, O Lord, a sinner!”
The Tartar walked up to Wiseacre, and looked at him with hatred and repulsion. He trembled, and as he spoke he mingled with his broken Russian several Tartar words:
“He is good ... good, but you are bad! You are bad! He is a good soul, a noble soul, but you are a beast, you are bad! He is living, but you are dead.... God created men that they might live, that they might have joys and sorrows; but you want nothing—which means that you are dead, you’re a stone, you’re earth! A stone wants nothing—and you want nothing!... You’re a stone—and God does not love you, but him He loves!”
All laughed; the Tartar frowned disgustedly, waved with his hand, and, wrapping his rags around him, walked up to the fire. Simon and the ferrymen went towards the hut.
“It’s cold!” hoarsely murmured one ferryman, stretching himself on the straw, with which the entire floor was covered.
“Yes, it isn’t warm!” agreed another. “A galley slave’s life!”
All lay down. The door flew open before the wind, and the snow drifted into the hut. No one wanted to get up and close the door; they all felt cold and lazy.
“Well, things suit me,” said Simon drowsily. “God grant every one such a life!”
“You, as every one knows, are a born galley slave. Even the devil won’t take you!”
From the outside came sounds resembling the whining of a dog.
“What’s that? Who’s there?”
“That’s the Tartar crying!”
“Well!... What a character!”
“He’ll get used to it!” said Simon, and soon was asleep.
Soon the others were also asleep. But the door remained unshut.