Besides the two men just described and the coachman Deniska, who tirelessly whipped up the pair of frisky bay horses, there was one more passenger in the britzka—a boy of about nine whose face was dark with tan and stained with tears. This was Egorushka, Kuzmichov’s nephew. With his uncle’s permission and Father Khristofor’s blessing, he was going somewhere to enroll in school. His mama, Olga Ivanovna, widow of a collegiate secretary 1 and Kuzmichov’s sister, who liked educated people and wellborn society, had entreated her brother, who was going to sell wool, to take Egorushka with him and enroll him in school; and now the boy, not knowing where or why he was going, was sitting on the box beside Deniska, holding on to his elbow so as not to fall off, and bobbing up and down like a kettle on the stove. The quick pace made his red shirt balloon on his back, and his new coachman’s hat with a peacock feather kept slipping down on his neck. He felt himself an unhappy person in the highest degree and wanted to cry.
When the britzka drove past the prison, Egorushka looked at the sentries quietly pacing by the high white wall, at the small barred windows, at the cross gleaming on the roof, and remembered how, a week ago, on the day of the Kazan Mother of God,2 he had gone with his mama to the prison church for the feast; and earlier still, for Easter, he had gone to the prison with the cook Liudmila and Deniska and brought kulichi, 3 eggs, pies, and roasted beef; the prisoners had thanked them and crossed themselves, and one of them had given Egorushka some tin shirt studs of his own making.
The boy peered at the familiar places, and the hateful britzka raced past and left it all behind. After the prison flashed the black, sooty smithies, after them the cozy green cemetery surrounded by a stone wall; the white crosses and tombstones hiding among the green of the cherry trees and showing like white blotches from a distance, peeped merrily from behind the wall. Egorushka remembered that when the cherry trees were in bloom, these white spots blended with the blossoms into a white sea; and when the cherries were ripe, the white tombstones and crosses were strewn with blood-red spots. Behind the wall, under the cherries, Egorushka’s father and his grandmother Zinaida Danilovna slept day and night. When the grandmother died, they laid her in a long, narrow coffin and covered her eyes, which refused to close, with two five-kopeck pieces. Before her death she had been alive and had brought soft poppy-seed bagels from the market, but now she sleeps and sleeps...
And beyond the cemetery the brickworks smoked. Thick black smoke came in big puffs from under the long, thatched roofs flattened to the ground, and lazily rose upwards. The sky above the brickworks and cemetery was swarthy, and big shadows from the puffs of smoke crept over the fields and across the road. In the smoke near the roofs moved people and horses covered with red dust...
Beyond the brickworks the town ended and the fields began. Egorushka turned to look at the town for the last time, pressed his face against Deniska’s elbow, and wept bitterly...
‘‘So you’re not done crying, crybaby!’’ said Kuzmichov. ‘‘Mama’s boy, sniveling again! If you don’t want to go, stay then. Nobody’s forcing you!’’
‘‘Never mind, never mind, Egor old boy, never mind...’’ Father Khristofor murmured quickly. ‘‘Never mind, old boy...Call upon God...It’s nothing bad you’re going to, but something good. Learning is light, as they say, and ignorance is darkness...It’s truly so.’’
‘‘You want to turn back?’’ asked Kuzmichov.
‘‘Ye...yes...’’ answered Egorushka with a sob.
‘‘And you should. Anyhow, there’s no point in going, it’s a long way for nothing.’’
‘‘Never mind, never mind, old boy...’’ Father Khristofor went on. ‘‘Call upon God... Lomonosov4 traveled the same way with fishermen, yet from him came a man for all Europe. Intelligence, received with faith, yields fruit that is pleasing to God. How does the prayer go? ‘For the glory of the Creator, for the comfort of our parents, for the benefit of the Church and the fatherland’... That’s it.’’
‘‘Benefits vary...’’ said Kuzmichov, lighting up a cheap cigar. ‘‘There are some that study for twenty years and nothing comes of it.’’
‘‘It happens.’’
‘‘Some benefit from learning, but some just have their brains addled. My sister’s a woman of no understanding, tries to have it all in a wellborn way, and wants to turn Egorka into a scholar, and she doesn’t understand that with my affairs I could make Egorka happy forever. I explain this to you because, if everybody becomes scholars and gentlemen, there’ll be nobody to trade or sow grain. We’ll all starve to death.’’
‘‘But if everybody trades and sows grain, then nobody will comprehend learning.’’
And, thinking that they had both said something convincing and weighty, Kuzmichov and Father Khristofor put on serious faces and coughed simultaneously. Deniska, who was listening to their conversation and understood nothing, tossed his head and, rising a little, whipped up the two bays. Silence ensued.
Meanwhile, before the eyes of the travelers there now spread a wide, endless plain cut across by a chain of hills. Crowding and peeking from behind each other, these hills merge into an elevation that stretches to the right from the road all the way to the horizon and disappears in the purple distance; you go on and on and there is no way to tell where it begins and where it ends...The sun has already peeped out from behind the town and quietly, without fuss, set about its work. At first, far ahead, where the sky meets the earth, near the barrows and a windmill that, from afar, looks like a little man waving his arms, a broad, bright yellow strip crept over the ground; a moment later the same sort of strip lit up somewhat closer, crept to the right, and enveloped the hills; something warm touched Egorushka’s back, a strip of light, sneaking up from behind, darted across the britzka and the horses, raced to meet the other strips, and suddenly the whole wide steppe shook off the half-shade of morning, smiled, and sparkled with dew.
Mowed rye, tall weeds, milkwort, wild hemp—all of it brown from the heat, reddish and half dead, now washed by the dew and caressed by the sun—were reviving to flower again. Martins skimmed over the road with merry cries, gophers called to each other in the grass, somewhere far to the left peewits wept. A covey of partridges, frightened by the britzka, fluttered up and, with its soft ‘‘trrr,’’ flew off towards the hills. Grasshoppers, crickets, capricorn beetles, mole crickets struck up their monotonous chirring music in the grass.
But a little time passed, the dew evaporated, the air congealed, and the deceived steppe assumed its dismal July look. The grass wilted, life stood still. The sunburnt hills, brown-green, purple in the distance, with their peaceful, shadowy tones, the plain with its distant mistiness, and above them the overturned sky, which, in the steppe, where there are no forests or high mountains, seems terribly deep and transparent, now looked endless, transfixed with anguish ...