It was evening now and the room was dark; the mist gathered thick and threatening through the windows. Outside in the crisp, frosty moonlight, it was bright. The old man's face—all over-grown with white hair—and his bald skull, had a death-like look.
Vasena entered in her calm yet vigorous manner. Her broad hips and deep bosom were only loosely covered by a red jacket.
"Ippolyte Ippolytovich, it is time for your meal," she called in a matter of fact tone.
But he did not reply, nor utter his usual "Eh?"
They sent at once for the doctor, who felt his pulse, pressed a glass to his lips, then said in a low, solemn tone:
"He is dead."
Vasena, standing by the door, and somewhat resembling a wild animal, answered calmly:
"Well he wasn't so young as to…. Haven't we all got to die! What is it to him now? He and his had everything in their day! Dear Lord, they had everything!"
Low, downy cloudlets drifted over the sky in the early hours of the morning. Dark, lowering masses followed in their wake. The snow fell in large, cold, soft, feather-like flakes.
St. Martin's Summer was past, to be succeeded by the advent of another earthly joy—the first white covering of snow, when it is so delicious to follow the fresh footprints of the beasts, a rifle in hand.
Legend says that from the Sokolovaya Mountain—called the Mountain of Falcons, came Stenka Razin. It is written in books that from thence came also Emelian Pugachev.
The Sokolovaya Mountain towers high above the Volga and the plains, making a dark, precipitous descent to the pirate river below.
Across the Volga lies an ancient town. By the Glebychev Ravine, close to the old Cathedral guarded by one of Pugachev's guns, stands a mansion with a facade of ochre-coloured-columns. In olden days, when it was the residence of the princely Rastorovs' balls were held there, but decay had set in during the last twenty years, and Kseniya Davydovna—the mistress—old, ill, a spinster, was drawing to the end of her days.
She died in October, 1917, and now the tumbling, plundered house was occupied by—the heirs.
They had been scattered over the face of Russia, had spent their lives in Petersburg, Moscow and Paris; for twenty years the house had stood vacant and moribund. Then the Revolution came! The instinctive fury of the masses burst forth—and the remnants of the Rastorov family gathered in their old nest—to be hidden from the Revolution and famine.
Snow-storms—galloping snowy chargers—howled over the Steppe, theVolga, and the town. Elemental, all-devastating, as in the days ofStenka Razin—thundered the Revolution.
The rooms in the ancient mansion were damp, dark and chilly. The old cathedral could be seen from the window, and down below lay the Volga, seven miles wide, wrapt in a dazzling sheet of snow, its steamers moored to their wharves.
The family lived as a community at first, but their communism was nominal, for each barricaded and entrenched himself in his own room, with his own pot and samovar. They lived tedious, mean, malignant, worthless lives, execrating existence and the Revolution; they lived utterly apart from the turmoil that now replaced the placid even flow of the old regime: they were outside current events, and their thoughts for ever turned back to the past, awaiting its return.
General Kirill Lvovich awoke at seven o'clock. Everything was crowded closely together in the room, which was bedroom, drawing-room and dining-room combined. The blue dusk of morning was visible through the heavy blinds of the low window. The general put on his tasselled Bukhara dressing-gown and went outside, then returned coughing hoarsely.
"Anna," he snarled, "ask your kinsfolk which of them left the place in such a state. Don't they know we have no servants? It is your turn to set the samovar to-day. Are there no cigarette boxes?" he walked about the room, his hands behind his back, diamond rings glittering on his fingers.
"And it is your turn to go for the rations," retorted Anna Andreevna.
"That will do, I know it. There are four families living in the house and they cannot organise themselves so as to go in turn for the rations. Give me a sheet of paper and some ink."
The general sat down at the table and wrote out a notice:
"Ladies and Gentlemen, we have no servants;We must see to things ourselves. We can'tall perch like eagles, therefore,I beg you to be more careful.Kirill L. Lezhner."
Kirill Lvovich was not one of the heirs, it was his wife who came of the Rastorov family, and he had merely accompanied her to the ancestral mansion. Lvovich took his notice and hung it on the lavatory door. Then again he paced the floor, his jewels sparkling brilliantly.
"Why the devil do Sergius and his family occupy three rooms, and we only one?" he grumbled. "I shall leave this den. They don't behave like relatives! Are there no cigarettes?"
Anna Andreevna, a quiet, weary, feeble woman, replied tonelessly: "You know there are none. But I will look for some butt-ends in a moment. Lina sometimes throws away the unused cigarette wraps."
"What bourgeois they are—throwing away fag-ends and keeping servants!" her husband complained.
The dark twining corridor was strewn with rubbish, for no one had the will or wish to keep it neat. Anna Andreevna rummaged by the stove of Sergius Andreevich, Lina's husband, looking among the papers and sweepings. She peered into the stove and discovered that Leontyevna, the maid—a one-eyed Cyclop—had filled it with birch-wood, whereas it had been agreed that the rotting timber from the summer-house should be used as fuel first.
After enjoying a cigarette of his "own" tobacco, the general went out to the courtyard for firewood, returning with a bundle of sticks from the summer-house. The samovar was now ready and he sat down to his tea, leisurely drinking glass after glass, while Anna Andreevna heated her stove in the corridor.
A dim, wintry dawn was gradually breaking. The family of Sergius—the former head of a ministerial department—could be heard rousing themselves behind the wall.
"You have had sufficient albumen; take hydrates now," rose Lina's voice, calling to her children.
"Potatoes?"
"Yes."
"And fat?"
"You have had enough fat."
The general smiled craftily, then muttered grumpily:
"That is not eating, that is scientific alimentation." He cut himself a piece of bacon, ate it with some white bread, and drank more tea with sweet root and candied melon.
Gradually the occupants of the house roused themselves and half- dressed, sleepy—carrying their towels, empty samovars, and tooth brushes—they began to pass along the corridor in front of the general's open door.
Kirill Lvovich eyed them maliciously as he sat drinking his tea and inwardly cursed them all.
The Cyclop, Leontyevna, Sergius Andreevich's servant, tramped in heavily with her man's boots from the Labour Exchange; her solitary eye peered searchingly into Anna Andreevna's stove.
"I'll see she's not deceiving us over the firewood," she shouted aggressively: "Oh, what a store she's got!"
"But you have used the birch-wood," the general hit back from his room.
The Cyclop flew into a rage and slapped her thighs. One of the periodic scenes ensued.
"What?" Leontyevna cried, "I am not trusted, I am being spied on!Lina Fedorovna, I am going to complain to the Exchange."
Lina Fedorovna joined in from behind her door.
"She isn't trusted, she is being spied on," she echoed, "there must be spies in this house! And they call themselves intellectual people!"
"But you took the birch-wood!" protested Lvovich.
"And they call themselves intellectual!" screamed Lina.
The general came out into the passage and said severely:
"It is not forusto judge, Lina Fedorovna. We are not the heirs here. But it seems strange to me that Sergius should occupy three rooms, and Anna only one—yes, very strange indeed."
The quarrel became more violent. Satisfied, the general put on his overcoat and went out to take his place in the ration queue. Lina ran to her husband; he went to get an explanation of the scene, but Lvovich was not to be found, however; he remonstrated with his sister, Anna Andreevna.
"This spying is impossible, it must stop," he insisted.
"But, can't you understand, it all began with searching for the butt- end of a cigarette?" Anna pleaded in deep distress.
Lina had gone upstairs and was telling the whole story to Ekaterina. Anna appealed to her younger brother, Constantine, a Lyceum student, but he told her he was busy, immediately sitting down at his desk to write. Soon after, however, he rose and went to Sergius.
"Busy?" he asked.
"What? Yes, I am busy."
"Have a smoke."
They began to smoke an inferior brand of tobacco known as "Kepsten."They were silent.
"Will you have a game of chess?" Constantine asked after a while.
"Yes…But no, I think not," Sergius replied.
"Just one game?"
"Just one? Well, only one!"
They sat down and played chess. Constantine was dressed in a rumpledLyceum uniform; he wore rings on his fingers, like the general andSergius, and an antique gold chain hung round his neck.
Being in constant dread of requisitioners and robbers they had divided all the jewellery between them, and wore it for safety.
The brothers played one game, then a second, a fourth, a sixth— smoking and quarrelling, disagreeing over the moves and trying to re- arrange them. The general returned from the ration queue in the market and came along the passage. He peeped in at the two players through the open door, and after some hesitation decided to enter.
"Greenhorns, you don't know how to play!" he said.
"What do you mean? Don't know how to play?"
"Now, now, don't fly into a rage. If I am wrong—excuse an old man … I sent Kirka for the newspaper, I gave him a twenty copeck piece for a tip."
"I am not in a rage!"
"Very well, then that's all right. But throw over your chess. Let us play a game of chance."
They sat down and played it for the entire day, only interrupting the game to go to their rooms for dinner.
Whenever Sergius had to pay a fine he would say:
"Anyhow, Kirill Lvovich, you have an objectionable manner."
"Now, now, greenhorn!" the general would reply.
They had not a penny between them. Katerina Andreevna had been appointed guardian of their possessions. The men refused to recognise her authority and called it merely a "femocracy." Only Sergius still had some capital, the proceeds of an estate he had sold before the Revolution. Therefore he could well afford to keep a servant.
Upstairs with Katerina were two girls who had thrown up their careers on principle—the one her college studies, the other her Conservatoire courses. They kept up a desultory conversation while helping to clean potatoes. Presently Anna and Lina joined them, and they all went down to the storeroom and began rummaging through their grandparents' old wardrobes. They turned over a variety of crinolines, farthingales, bustles and wigs, laying on one side the articles of silver, bronze and porcelain—for the Tartars were coming after dinner. The storeroom smelt of rats. Packed along its walls were boxes, coffers, trunks, and a huge pair of rusty scales.
They all gathered together on the arrival of the Tartars, who greeted them with handshakes. The general snorted. One of the Tartars, an old man wearing new goloshes over felt boots, spoke to Katerina:
"How d'ye do, Barina?"
The general leisurely swung one leg over the other, and said stiffly:
"Be good enough to state your price."
The two Tartars looked over the old-fashioned articles, criticised them, none too well, and fixed the most ridiculous prices. The general burst out laughing and tried to be witty. Katerina grew angrier and angrier, until at last she could no longer contain herself:
"Kirill Lvovich," she shouted, "you are impossible!" "Very well," came the infuriated reply; "I am not one of the heirs, I can go!"
They calmed him, however, and then began bargaining with the Tartars, who slung the old-fashioned articles carelessly over their arms— laces worked by serfs, antique, hand made candle-sticks, a field- glass and an acetylene lamp.
The twilight spread gently over the town, and through its dusky, star-spangled veil, loomed the old Cathedral—reminiscent of Stenka Razin; now and then came the chime of its deep-toned bells.
The Tartars at length succeeding in striking a bargain, rolled the goods up into neat little packs with their customary promptitude, paid out Kerensky notes from their bulging purses and left.
Then the heirs divided the proceeds. They were sitting in the drawing-room. Blinds covered the low windows; some portraits hung on the walls, a chandelier was shrouded in a muslin wrapper that had not been changed for years. A yellow oaken piano was covered with dust, and the furniture's velvet covering was tarnished and threadbare. The house struck cold.
The heirs were dressed fantastically; the general in a dressing-gown with gold embroideries and tassels; Sergius wore a black hooded coat; Lina a warm hare-skin jacket, and Katerina, the eldest—the moustached guardian—a man's thick overcoat, a petticoat and felt shoes. On all were jewels—rings, ear-rings, bracelets and necklaces.
Sergius remarked ungallantly:
"This is a trying time for us all, and I propose that we divide the proceeds among us according to the number of consumers."
"I am not one of the heirs," the general hastily interposed.
"I don't share your socialistic views." Constantine informed Sergius with a cold smile; "I think they should be divided according to the number of heirs."
A heated argument followed, above which rang the Cathedral bells. At last, with great difficulty, they came to an agreement. Then Katerina brought in the samovar. All fetched their own bread and sweet roots and drank the tea, thankful not to have to prepare it for themselves.
Suddenly—with unexpected sadness and, therefore, unusually well—the general began to speak:
"When I—a lieutenant-bridegroom—met our Aunt Kseniya for the first time, she was wearing that bustle that you sold just now. Ah, will things ever be the same again? If I were told the Bolshevik tyranny would endure for another year, I should shoot myself! For, good Lord, what I suffer! How my heart is wrung! And I am an old man…. Life is simply not worth living."
All burst into tears; the general wept as old men weep, the moustached Katerina cried in a sobbing bass. Neither could Anna Andreevna, nor the two girls who stood clasping each other in the corner, refrain from shedding tears, the girls for their youth and the sparkling joys of their maidenhood of which they had been deprived.
"I would shoot them all if I could!" Katerina declared.
Then Sergius' children, Kira and Lira, came in and Lina told them they might take some albumen. Kira put butter on his.
The moon rose…. The stars shone brilliantly. The snow was dead- white. The river Volga was deserted. It was dark and still by the old Cathedral. The frost was hard and crisp, crackling underfoot. The two young girls, Kseniya and Lena, with Sergius and the general, were returning to the mansion to fetch their handsleighs and toboggan down the slope to the river.
Constantine had gone into town, to a club of cocaine-eaters, to drug himself, utter vulgar platitudes, and kiss the hands of loose women. Leontyevna, the Cyclop maid from the Exchange, lay down on a bench in the kitchen to rest from the day's work, said her prayers, and fell into a sound sleep.
The general stood on the door-steps. Sergius drew up the sleighs, and they took their seats—three abreast—Kseniya, Elena and himself, and whirled along over the crackling snow, down to the ice-covered Volga. The sleighs flew wildly down the slope, and in this impetuous flight, in the sprinkling and crackling snow, and bitter, numbing frost, Kseniya dreamed of a wondrous bliss: she felt a desire to embrace the world! Life suddenly seemed so joyous.
The frost was harsh, cruel and penetrating. On regaining the house the general bristled up like a sparrow—he was frozen—and called out from the door-step:
"Sergius! There is a frost to-day that will certainly burst the water-pipes. We will have to place a guard for the night."
Perhaps Sergius, and even the old man, had had a glimpse of wonderful happiness in the sleigh's swift flight over the snow. The former called back:
"Never mind!"—and again whirled wildly down from the old Cathedral to the Volga, where the boats and steamers plied amid the deep-blue, massive ice-floes, so sparkling and luminous in their snowy raiment.
But the general had now worked himself up to a state of great excitement. He rushed indoors and roused everyone:
"I tell you, it will freeze and the pipes will burst unless you let the water run a little. There are 27 degrees of frost!"
"But the tap is in the kitchen and Leontyevna is sleeping there," objected Lina.
"Well, waken her!"
"Impossible!"
"Damn rot!" snarled the general and went into the kitchen and shookLeontyevna, explaining to her about the pipes.
"I will go to the Exchange and complain! Not even letting one rest!…Stealing in to an undressed woman!…"
Lina jabbered her words after her like a parrot. Sergius ran in.
"Leave off, please," he begged. "It is I who am responsible. LetLeontyevna sleep."
"Certainly, I am not one of the heirs," the general retorted smoothly.
The night and the frost swept over the Volga, the Steppe, and Saratov. The general was unable to sleep. Kseniya and Lena were crying in the attic. Constantine arrived home late, and noiselessly crept in to Leontyevna.
Bluish patches of moonlight fell in through the windows.
The water pipes froze in the night and burst.
Forest, thickets, marshes, fields, a tranquil sky—and the crossways! The sky is overcast at times with dove-coloured clouds; the forest now gabbles, now groans in the glittering summer sunshine.
The crossways creep and crawl like a winding thread, without beginning and without end. Sometimes their stretch tires and vexes— one wants to go by a shorter route and turns aside, goes astray, comes back to the former way. Two wheel-tracks, ripple grass, a foot- path and around them, besides sky or rye or snow or trees, are the crossways, without beginning or end or limit. And over them pass the peasants singing their low toned songs. At times these are sorrowful, as endless as the crossways themselves: Russia was borne in these songs, born with them, from them.
Our ways lie through the crossways as they ever have done, and ever will. All Russia is in the crossways—amid the fields, thickets marshes, and forests.
But there were also those Others who wanted to march over the bog- ways, who planned to throw Russia on to her haunches, to press on through the marshlands, make main-roads straight as rules, and barricade themselves behind granite and steel, forgetful of Russia's peasant cottages. And on they marched!
Sometimes the main-road is joined by the crossways, and from them to the main-road and over it passes the long vaunted Rising, the people's tumult, to sweep away the Unnecessary, then vanish back again into the crossways.
Near the main-road lies the railway. By turning aside from it, walking through a field, fording a river, penetrating first through a dark aspen grove, then through a red pine belt, skirting some ravines, threading a way across a village, trudging wearily through dried-up river-beds and on through a marsh, the village of Pochinki is reached, surrounded by forest.
In the village were three cottages, their backs to the forest; their rugged noses seemed to scowl from beneath the pine-trees, and their dim, tear-dribbling window-eyes looked wolfish. Their grey timbers lay on them like wrinkles, their reddish-yellow thatch, like bobbed hair, hung to the ground. Behind them was the forest; in front, pasture, thickets, forest again, and sky. The neighbouring crossways coiled round them in a ring, then narrowed away into the forest.
In all three cottages dwelt Kononovs: they were not kinsfolk, though they bore that name, closer linked through their common life than kinsmen ever were. Kononov-Yonov, the One-Eyed, was the village elder: he no longer remembered his grandfather's name, but knew the olden times well, and remembered how his great-grandfathers and his great-great-grandfathers had lived and how it was good for men to live.
From the oldest to the youngest they toiled with all their strength from spring to autumn, from autumn to spring, and from sunrise to sundown, growing grey like their hen-coops from smoke, scorching in the heat and steaming sweat like boiling tar.
The kinsfolk of Yonov the One-eyed made tar besides tilling the land, while Yonov himself kept bee-hives in the forest. The sisters Yonov barked lime-trees and made bast shoes. It was a hard, stern life, with its smoke, heat, frosts, and languour; but they loved it profoundly.
The Kononovs lived alone in friendship with the woods, the fields, and the sky; yet ever engaged in stubborn struggle against them. They had to remember the rise and set of the sun, the nights and the dung- mounds. They had to look into putrid corners, watch for cold blasts from the north, and give ear to the rumbling and gabbling of the forest.
They knew:
With January, mid-winter time,Starts the year its frosty prime,Blows wild the wind e'er yet'tis still,Crackles the ice in the frozen rill;Epiphany betimes is past,Approaches now the Lenten Fast.
In February there's a breath of heat,Summer and winter at Candlemas meet.In April the year grows moist and warm the air,The old folks' lives without their doors bids fair;The woodcock then comes flying from the sea,Brings back the Spring from its captivity.
Under a showery sky,Bloom wide the fields of rye,Ever blue and chillMay will the granaries fill.
It was necessary to work stubbornly, sternly, in harmony with the earth, to fight hand-to-hand with the forest, the axe, the plough and the scythe. They had learnt to keep their eyes wide open, for each had to hold his own against the wood-spirit, the rumbling forest, famine, and the marshes. They had learnt to know their Mother-Earth by the birds, sky, wind, and stars, like those men of whom Yonov the One-Eyed told them—those who of old wended their way to Chuvsh tribes and the Murman Forest.
All the Kononovs were built alike, strong, rugged, with short legs and broad, heavy feet like juniper-roots, long backs, arms that hung down to their knees, shoulder-blades protruding as though made for harness, mossy green eyes that gazed with a slow stubborn look, and noses like earthen whistles.
They lived with the rye, horses, cows, the sheep, the woods, and the grass. They knew that as the rye dropped seeds to the ground and reproduced in abundance so also bred beast and bird, counteracting death with birth. They knew too that to breed was also man's lot.
Ulyanka reached her seventeenth year, Ivan his eighteenth: they bowed to the winds and went to the altar.
Ivan Kononov did not think of death when he went to the war, for what was death when through it came birth? Were there not heat-waves and drought in summer? Did not the winter sweep the earth by blizzards? Yet in spring all began to pulsate again with life.
The War came: Ivan Kononov went without understanding, without reason—what concern was it of Pochinki? He was dragged through towns, he pined in spittle-stained barracks; and then he was sent to the Carpathians. He fired. He fought hand-to-hand: he fled; he retreated forty versts a day, resting in the woods singing his peasant-songs with the soldiers—and yearning for Pochinki. He found all spoke like Grandfather Yonov the One-Eyed; he learnt of the land in the olden time order, of the people's Rising. At its approach he went on furlough to Pochinki, met it there, and there remained.
The Rising came like happy tidings, like the cool breath of dawn, like a May-time shower:
Under a showery skyBloom wide the fields of rye,Ever blue and chillMay will the granaries fill.
Formerly there were the village constable, the district clerk, trumperies, requisitions, and taxations; for then it was the gentry who were the guardians. But now, Yonov the One-Eyed croaked exultantly:
"Now it's ourselves! We ourselves! In our own way! In our own world!The land is ours! We are the masters: it is the Rising!OurRising!"
There were no storms that winter; it was cold and dark, and the wolf- packs were astir. One after another the inhabitants were stricken down with typhoid—it was with typhoid that they paid for the Rising! Half the village succumbed and was borne on the peasants' sleighs to the churchyard.
By Candlemas, when winter and summer meet, all the provisions were exhausted, and the villagers drove to the station. But even that had changed. New people congregated there, some shouting, others hurrying to and fro with sacks. The villagers returned with nothing and sat down to their potatoes.
In the spring prayers were offered up for the dead and a religious procession paraded round the village, the outskirts of which were bestrewn with ashes. Then the villagers started to take tar and bast shoes to the station; they wanted to sell them, and with the proceeds buy ploughshares, harrows, scythes, sickles, and leather straps. But they never reached the station.
Their way led them through fields all lilac-coloured in the glowing sun: there they encountered an honest peasant dressed in a short fur jacket and a cap beneath which his look was calm and grave.
He told them there was nothing at the station, that the townsfolk themselves were running like mice; and he urged them to go to Poriechie, to give Silvester the blacksmith some tar for his ploughshares, and, if he had none, to make them some of his own hand- ploughshares; then to go and sow flax. The towns were dying out. The towns were no more! It was the people's Rising, and they had to live as in the olden days: there were no towns then, and there was no need for them.
They turned back. To Poriechie for tar…. Silvester made them a hand-plough…. Grandfather Yonov the One Eyed stalked round the fields exhorting to sow: "We have to live by ourselves! Now we ourselves are the Masters! Ourselves alone! It is the Rising!"
They worked from dawn till sunset with all their strength, fastening their belts tight round their bodies to stifle the pangs of hunger.
The summer passed in heat-waves, thunder and lightning. The forest gabbled in the storms at night. Towards autumn it began to rustle, leafless, beneath the showers of rain. The rye, oats, millet, and buckwheat were carried into the corn-kilns and barns, and the fields lay stripped and bare.
The corn had been harvested; there was enough and to spare till the fallow crop was reaped. The air in the peasants' cottages was bedimmed by the smoke from the stoves; Grandfather Yonov the One-Eyed climbed on to his, to tell his grandchildren fairytales and to rest.
The nights grew dark and damp, the forest began to rumble, and wolves approached from the marshlands. A new couple had grown up, bowed to the winds and wedded; half the village had perished the previous winter, and it was necessary to breed. The people lived in their cabins together with the calves, the sheep, and the swine. They used splinters for lights, striking the light from flint.
Often at night starving people from the towns brought money, clothes, foot-ware, bundles of odds-and ends—in short anything they could steal from the towns and exchange for flour. They rapped on the windows like thieves.
The Kononov women sat at their looms while the men went a-preying in the forest. And so they toiled on stubbornly, sternly, alone, fighting hand-to-hand with the night, with the forest and with the frost. The crossways to the forests became choked, and they made new ways to the marshlands, to the Seven Brothers, to the wastelands. Life was hard and stern. The peasants looked out upon the world from beneath their brows, as their cottages from beneath the pines; and they lived gladsomely, as they should.
They knew it was the Rising. And in the Rising there could be no falling back.
Forests, thickets, fields, a tranquil sky—and crossways!… Sometimes the crossways joined the main-road that ran alongside the railway. Both led to the towns where dwelt Those Others who had yearned to march over the crossways, who had made the main-roads straight as rules. And to the towns the elemental Rising of the Crossways brought death.
There, lamenting the past, in terror before the people's Rising, all were employed in offices filling up papers. All for safety held official positions, all to a man busying themselves over papers, documents, cards, placards, and speeches until they were lost in a whirlwind of words.
The food of the towns was exhausted; the lights had gone out; there was neither fuel nor water. Dogs, cats, mice, all had disappeared— even the nettles on the outskirts had been plucked by famished urchins as vegetable for soup. Into the cookhouses, whence cutlery had vanished, crowded old men in bowlers and bonneted old women, whose bony fingers clutched convulsively at plates of leavings.
Everywhere there were groups of miscreants selling mouldy bread at exorbitant prices. The dead in their thousands, over whom there was no time to carry out funeral rites, were borne away to the churches.
Famine, disease, and death swept the towns. The inhabitants grew savage in their craving for bread. They starved. They sat without light. They froze. They pulled down the hedges and wooden buildings to warm their dying hearths and their offices. The red-blood life deserted the towns; indeed it had never really existed in them; and there came a white-paper life that was death. When death means life there is no death, but the towns were still-born.
There were harrowing scenes in the spring, when, like incense at funeral-rites, the smoky wood-piles smouldered on the pillaged, ransacked, and bespattered streets with their broken windows, boarded-up doors, and defaced walls, consuming carrion and enveloping the town in a stinking and stifling vapour.
Men with soft-skinned hands still frequented restaurants, still wooed lascivious women, still sought to pillage the towns; they even plundered the very corpses, hoping to carry loot into the country, to barter it for the bread that had been gained by horny-handed labour. Thus might they postpone their deaths another month, thus might they still fill up papers, still go on wooing (legally) carnal women and await their heart's desire, the return of the decadent past. They were afraid to recognise that only one thing was left them, to rot in death—to die—that even the past they longed for was a way to death for them.
… Forests, thickets, fields, a tranquil sky….
Many dwelt in the towns—amongst them a certain man, no different from the rest. He had no bread, and he too went into the country to bargain for flour in exchange for his gramophone. Producing all the necessary papers, permits, and licences, he proceeded to the railway, which was dying because it too was of the towns.
At the station there were thousands of others with permits to travel for bread, and because of those thousands only those without permits succeeded in boarding the train. This particular man fastened himself on the lower step of a carriage, under sacks that hung from the roof, travelling thus for some forty miles. Then he and his gramophone were thrown off, and for the first time in his life he tramped thirty miles on foot under the weight of a gramophone.
At the next station he climbed on to the roof of a carriage and travelled a hundred miles further. Then he was thrown off again, But there the main-road passed the railway; by turning aside from it, walking through a field, fording a river, making a way through the woods, skirting the ravines, trudging through river beds, and traversing the marshes he reached the village of Pochinki.
He arrived there with his gramophone at sundown. The red light of the sun was reflected on the windows, the women-folk were milking the cows: it was already autumn and the daylight faded rapidly. The man with the gramophone tapped at the window and Kononov Ivan lifted the shutter.
"Look, comrade, I've a gramophone here, to exchange for flour … a gramophone, a musical instrument, and records…."
Throwing back his shoulders, Kononov-Ivan stood by the window—then stooped, looked askance at the sunset, at the fields, at the musical instrument. He reflected a moment, then muttered absently:
"Aint wanted…. Go to Poriechie…." and the shutter dropped.
A sombre sky in autumnal lights—and the crossways…. Two wheel- tracks, ripple-grass, a foot-path. Sometimes the wanderer tired, that path seemed interminable, without beginning or ending. He turned aside, went astray, returned on his tracks—evermore to the thickets, forests, marshes….
End of Project Gutenberg's Tales of the Wilderness, by Boris Pilniak