Slowly, step by step, they moved ahead. The doctor kept walking … He stumbled, sank into the snow, and staggered in the wind—but he didn’t lose the road. The hollow went on and on. Suddenly, the doctor saw a hill coming closer, then realized that it wasn’t a hill but some sort of whirling snow cloud, racing toward them. He crouched. Over his head flew an impenetrable vortex of snow; his pince-nez was torn from his face and fluttered on its ribbon.
“Lord Almighty, forgive me for my sins…,” the doctor muttered, falling down on all fours.
The tornado stormed by, and to the doctor it seemed like a vast helicopter of impossible size. The horses neighed in fright under the hood. Crouper squatted, too, but didn’t let go of the steering rod.
This frightful thing passed over them and disappeared.
The doctor put on his pince-nez and looked at the rise ahead, the way out of the hollow. He saw the bared road.
“There’s the road!” he shouted to Crouper.
But Crouper had already seen it himself. Pleased, he waved his mitten at the doctor: “Yep!”
They made it to the road, sat back down, and drove on. The sled emerged from the hollow onto a gently sloping hillock, and Crouper stopped abruptly: there was a fork in the road. He didn’t remember this fork. In good weather he wouldn’t have noticed it, he would have gone the way everyone did. But now he had to decide which way—right or left.
“Old Market is ’bout two versts from the grove,” Crouper thought, pushing his hat back on his forehead, which was damp from sweat and snow. “That means it’s real close by, prob’ly to the left, and the road on the right, now, must lead around to the meadow. The meadow here’s a beauty, nice and smooth … So … we go left.”
The doctor silently awaited the driver’s decision.
“Left!” Crouper shouted, turning the steering rod to the left and giving the reins a jerk.
The sled edged to the left.
“Where are we?” yelled the doctor.
“In Old Market! We c’n rest up here, and afterward the road runs straight.”
The doctor nodded joyfully.
Crouper had been in Old Market only twice: for Matryona Khapilova’s wedding, and with his little brother, who bought a couple of piglets from the old man Avdei Semyonich, whom everyone called Fat Ass. But that had been in the fall and spring, not in the winter in a blizzard. Crouper liked Old Market: there were only nine households, all of them well kept and prosperous. The people there made a living by carving, threshing, and making counterweights. And their meadows were fine. Crouper and his brother and the piglets rode back by way of the meadows because the high road was muddy with the spring thaw. The smoothness and expanse of the Old Market meadows had impressed Crouper. But right now they were all under the snow.
The sled crawled across the flat land. Crouper remembered that just before Old Market there was a little grove, maybe linden, maybe oak.
“As soon as the grove shows up—Old Market’s right there. We’ll knock on a door to warm up. We’ll sit an hour or so and move on. Not far now…,” Crouper thought.
Sensing a village, the horses quickened to a trot even though the road was beginning to disappear under the snow and was soon entirely gone.
“I’ll have to change my boots right away…” The doctor wiggled his toes, which were wet and already beginning to freeze.
Crouper glanced back at the doctor. “The grove’ll be comin’ up now, and then Old Market,” he said to cheer up the doctor.
The doctor looked spent. His nose and pince-nez stuck out comically from the snow-covered figure hunched over the seat.
“Like a snow woman…,” Crouper chuckled to himself. “The old elephant, he’s tuckered now. Such bad luck he’s got with the weather…”
They moved at a slow pace along the white fluffy desert, but the grove of trees didn’t appear.
“Not a mistake here ’bouts, too?” Crouper thought, gazing into the storm with his eyelids forced wide open, though they drooped with exhaustion and threatened to stick together.
Finally the trees could be seen up ahead.
“Thank God…” Crouper laughed.
They reached the grove. The trees were huge, old. Crouper remembered very young trees with the first May leaves.
“Couldn’t have growed up so fast.” He rubbed his eyes.
Suddenly he made out a cross under the trees. Then another, and a third. They came closer. There were more and more crosses, sticking out of the snow.
“Lordy, it’s a cem’tery…” Crouper exhaled, pulling back on the reins.
“A cemetery?” The doctor began furiously wiping his pince-nez.
“A cem’tery,” Crouper repeated, dismounting.
“Well, where’s the village?” muttered the doctor, staring at the tilted crosses around which the blizzard danced and twined as though teasing and mocking them.
“Huh?” said Crouper, bending away from the wind.
“I said, where’s the village?!” the doctor shouted in a voice filled with hatred, for the storm, the cemetery, and that idiot birdbrain Crouper who had led him who knows where. He was angry at his wet toes freezing in his boots; at his heavy, fur-lined, snow-covered coat; at the ridiculous painted sled with its idiotic midget horses inside that idiotic plywood hood; at the blasted epidemic, brought to Russia by some swine from far-off, godforsaken, goddamned Bolivia, which no decent Russian person had any need for at all; at that scientific, pontificating crook Zilberstein, who cared only about his own career and had left earlier on the mail horses without a thought for his colleague, Dr. Garin; at the endless road surrounded by drowsy snowdrifts; at the snakelike, snowy wind whipping ominously above them; at the hopeless gray sky, tattered like the sieve of some stupid, grinning, sunflower-seed-cracking old woman, which kept sowing, sowing, and sowing these accursed snowflakes.
“’Round here somewheres…” Crouper turned his head this way and that, utterly bewildered.
“Why did you drive to the cemetery?” the doctor shouted angrily.
“Just did, yur ’onor, that’s all…” The driver frowned.
“Haven’t you been here before, you idiot?!” shouted the doctor, and began to cough.
“Sure enough I been here!” Crouper shouted, taking no offense. “Only it was summer.”
“Then why the hell…” The doctor began to talk but the snow flew into his mouth.
“I been here, yes I have.” Crouper turned his head back and forth like a magpie. “But I don’t know ’bout the cem’tery, cain’t ’member it at all.”
“Drive, drive! Why did you stop?” the doctor shouted, and began coughing.
“Ain’t sure which’s the right way.”
“Cemeteries are never far from the village,” the doctor suddenly screamed, so loud that he scared himself.
Crouper paid no attention to the shout. He thought a moment longer, turning his head from side to side, then led the sled decisively to the left of the cemetery, into the field.
“If’n the fork was Old Market one way, and the meadows t’other, and the cem’tery’s close by Old Market, then I went true. The fork musta been here but we missed it. Now Old Market’ll be left, and then the meadows.”
Having calmed down and recovered from his own shouting, the doctor didn’t even ask why Crouper hadn’t retraced his steps but had turned the sled left and was crossing the field.
“It’s all right, it’ll be all right,” the doctor muttered, trying to cheer himself. “There are a lot of idiots in the world. And even more assholes.”
Dragging himself through the deep snow, Crouper led the sled into the field. He was so certain of the direction that he didn’t pay much heed to the gathering snowy gloom that parted reluctantly ahead of him. The sled moved along heavily and the horses pulled grudgingly, but Crouper just kept walking alongside, letting the steering rod go and lightly nudging the sled; he walked with such certainty that gradually the doctor, too, was affected.