“Might you be Pantelei from the Makarov estate?”
“Himself,” the overseer replied.
“Now I see. I couldn’t tell—so you’ll be a rich man.2 Where did God fetch you from?”
“The Kovylevsky tract.”
“That’s far off. Is it let out for sharecropping?”
“Various things. Some for sharecropping, some on lease, some for melon patches. In fact, I just went to the mill.”
A big old sheepdog of a dirty white color, shaggy, with clumps of fur around its eyes and nose, trying to seem indifferent to the presence of strangers, calmly circled the horse three times and suddenly, unexpectedly, with a vicious old dog’s wheezing, attacked the overseer from behind. The other dogs could not control themselves and jumped up from their places.
“Shush, damn you!” the old man shouted, rising on his elbow. “Ah, go burst, you fiendish creature!”
When the dogs calmed down, the old man assumed his former pose and said in a calm voice:
“And in Kovyli, right on Ascension Day, Efim Zhmenya died. Shouldn’t say it before sleep, it’s a sin to think of such people—he was a vile old man. You must have heard.”
“No, I haven’t.”
“Efim Zhmenya, Styopka the blacksmith’s uncle. Everybody around here knew him. Oh, yes, a cursed old man! Some sixty years I knew him, ever since the tsar Alexander, the one who drove the French out, was being brought from Taganrog to Moscow in a wagon.3 We went together to meet the dead tsar, and back then the high road didn’t go through Bakhmut, but from Esaulovka to Gorodishche, and where Kovyli is now there were bustards’ nests—you take a step and there’s a bustard’s nest. I noticed then that Zhmenya had given up his soul, and there was an unclean spirit in him. I’ve observed: if a man of the peasant order mostly keeps quiet, is interested in old women’s things, and prefers to live by himself, there’s little good in it, and this Efim, it so happens, was always silent, silent, ever since childhood, and looked askance at you, and kept pouting and puffing himself up, like a rooster in front of a hen. So that going to church, or hanging out with the lads in the street, or in a pot-house, just wasn’t his style, and he mostly sat alone or gossiping with old women. He was young, but already hired himself out to the beekeepers and melon-growers. It so happened good people would come to him at the melon patches, and his watermelons and muskmelons would whistle. Or once he caught a pike in front of people, and—ho-ho-ho!—it burst out laughing…”
“It happens,” said Pantelei.
The young shepherd turned on his side and, raising his black eyebrows, looked intently at the old man.
“Did you ever hear watermelons whistle?” he asked.
“Me, no, God spared me,” the old man sighed, “but people tell about it. It’s no great wonder…If unclean powers want to, they’ll whistle in a stone. Before the freedom,4 we had a rock humming for three days and three nights. I heard it myself. And the pike laughed because Zhmenya caught a demon, not a pike.”
The old man remembered something. He quickly got up on his knees and, huddling as if from the cold, nervously tucking his hands into his sleeves, murmured through his nose an old woman’s patter:
“God save us and have mercy! Once I was going along the riverbank to Novopavlovka. A thunderstorm was gathering, and there was such a gale, save us, Queen of Heaven, Holy Mother…I’m hurrying as fast as I can, and I see a white ox going down the path among the blackthorn bushes. The blackthorns were in bloom then. And I think: Whose ox is it? What ill wind brought him here? He goes along, swinging his tail and moo-o-o! Only this same ox, brothers, when I caught up with him, got close, and looked!—it was no ox now, it was Zhmenya. Holy, holy, holy! I made the sign of the cross, and he looks at me and mutters, his eyes bugging out. I was frightened, terribly! We walked side by side, I’m afraid to say a word to him—thunder rolls, lightning streaks the sky, the pussywillows bend down right to the water—suddenly, brothers, God punish me, so I die without repentance, a hare runs across our path…He runs, stops, and says in human language: ‘Hello, boys!’ Away, damn you!” the old man yelled at the shaggy dog, who was circling the horse again. “Ah, go croak!”
“It happens,” the overseer said, still leaning against the saddle and not stirring; he said it in a soundless, muted voice, the way people speak who are sunk in thought.
“It happens,” he repeated meaningfully and with conviction.
“Ohh, a fiendish old man he was!” the old man went on, not so heatedly now. “Five years after the freedom, we all flogged him in the village office, and to show his anger, he sent a throat ailment to everybody in Kovyli. A host of people died then, no counting them, like from cholera…”
“How did he send this ailment?” the young shepherd asked after a pause.
“As if we don’t know. No need for great wisdom here, if there’s the will. Zhmenya did people in with viper fat. It’s such stuff that, not just the fat itself, but even the smell kills people.”
“That’s right,” Pantelei agreed.
“Our boys wanted to kill him then, but the old men wouldn’t allow it. It was forbidden to kill him; he knew where the treasure was. Apart from him, not a single soul knew. Around here treasures have a spell on them, so that even if you happen on it, you don’t see it—but he saw it. He’d go along a riverbank or through a wood, and there would be little fires, fires, fires under the bushes or rocks…Little fires, as if from sulfur. I saw them myself. Everybody waited for Zhmenya to point the places out to people, or dig them up himself, but he—a real dog in the manger—went and died: didn’t dig it up himself, didn’t show anybody else.”
The overseer lit his pipe and for a moment revealed his big moustache and a sharp, stern, respectable-looking nose. Small circles of light jumped from his hands to his visored cap, flitted across the saddle over the horse’s back, and disappeared in the mane by its ears.
“In these parts there are many treasures,” he said.
And, slowly drawing on his pipe, he looked around, rested his gaze on the brightening east, and added:
“There must be treasures.”
“What’s there to talk about,” sighed the old man. “By the looks of it there are, brother, only there’s nobody to dig them up. Nobody knows the real places, and nowadays, most likely, all the treasures have a spell on them. To find them and see them, you’ve got to have a talisman, and without a talisman, my lad, you can’t do anything. Zhmenya had talismans, but was there any wheedling them out of him? The bald devil held on to them so nobody could get them.”
The young shepherd crept a couple of paces toward the old man, and, propping his head on his fists, fixed his unmoving gaze on him. A childlike expression of fear and curiosity lit up in his dark eyes and, as it seemed in the twilight, stretched and flattened the large features of his coarse young face. He listened intently.
“And in writings it’s written that there are many treasures here,” the old man went on. “What’s there to talk about…there’s nothing to say. An old soldier from Novopavlovsk was shown a tag in Ivanovka, and printed on this tag was the place, and even how many pounds of gold, and in what sort of vessel; this treasure could have been found long ago, only there’s a spell on it so you can’t get to it.”
“Why can’t you get to it, grandpa?” asked the young one.
“Must be there’s some reason, the soldier didn’t say. There’s a spell…You need a talisman.”
The old man spoke with enthusiasm, as if he were pouring out his soul before the passerby. Being unused to speaking much and quickly, he maundered, stammered, and, sensing the deficiency of his speech, tried to make up for it by gesticulating with his head, hands, and scrawny shoulders. With each movement, his sackcloth shirt crumpled, pulled up to the shoulders, and bared his back, blackened from sunburn and old age. He pulled it down, but it pulled up again at once. Finally, as if driven beyond all patience by the disobedient shirt, he jumped up and said bitterly: