"Thirsty?" Iona asks him.
"Guess so."
"H'm, may it do you good, but my son is dead, brother • • . did you hear? This week in the hospital. • • . What a business!"
Iona looks to see the effect ofhis words, but he notices none. The young man has drawn his cover over his head and is already asleep. The old man sighs and scratches himself. Just as the young man was thirsty for water so he thirsts for talk. It will soon be a week since his son died and he hasn't talked to anybody about him prop- erly. He ought to be able to talk about it, taking his time, sensibly. He ought to teU how his son was taken ill, how he suffered, what he said before he died, how he died. . . . He ought to describe the funeral, and how he went to the hospital to fetch his son's clothes. His daughter Anisya is still in the country. . . . And he would like to talk about her, too. Yes, he has plenty to talk about now. And his listener should gasp and moan and keen. . • . It would be even better to talk to women. Though they are foolish, two words wiU make them blubber.
"I must go out and have a look at the horse," Iona thinks. 'There will be time enough for sleep. You will have enough sleep, no fear. . • ,"
He gets dressed and goes into the stable where his horse is standing. He thinks about oats, hay, the weather. When he is alone, he dares not think of his son. It is pos- sible to talk about him with someone, but to think of him when one is alone, to evoke his image is unbearably painful.
"You chewing?" Iona asks his mare seeing her shin- ing eyes. "There, chew away, chew away. . . . If we haven't earned enough for oats, we'll eat hay. . . . Yes. . . . I've grown too old to drive. My son had ought to be driving, not me. . . . He was a real cabby. . . . He had ought to have lived. . . ."
Iona is silent for a space and then goes on: "That's how it is, old girl. . . . Kuzma Ionych is gone. . . . Departed this life. . . . He went and died to no pur- pose. . . . Now let's say you had a little colt, and you were that little colt's own mother. And suddenly, let's say, that same little colt departed this life. . . . You'd be sorry, wouldn't you?"
The nag chews, listens and breathes on her master's hands. Iona is carried away and tells her everything.
1886
An Encounter
Y
E F REM DENISO V anxiously looked round.
He was tormented by thirst and he ached all over. His horse, who had not eaten for a long time and was miserable with the heat, drooped his head sadly. The road went downhill and disappeared in a vast forest of evergreens. The treetops in the distance merged with the blue of the sky, and above the deserted fields one could see nothing but birds lazily winging their way and a shimmering haze in the air. The forest, a green mon- ster, climbed up a terraced hill, and seemed endless.
Yefrem was traveling about to collect money for the building of a church to replace the one that had burned do^ in his native village in the province of Kursk. In his cart was set up an icon of the Virgin of Kazan, its paint faded and peeling; before the image stood a capacious tin box with bent sides and a slit in the top large enough to admit a good-sized rye cake. A board nailed to the back of the cart bore an inscription stating that on such and such a date "by an act of God the flames of a conflagration had destroyed a church" in the village of Malinovtzy, and that the village meeting, with the sanction and blessing of the proper authorities, had resolved to dispatch volunteers to collect contributions for the building of a new church. At one side of the cart hung a twenty-pound bell.
Yefrem did not know where he was, and the forest, which swallowed the road, held out no promise of a settlement near by. He stood still for a while, adjusted the breeching, and then began to lead the horse cau- tiously downhill. The cart creaked and the bell rang out, breaking the silence of the sultry day.
In the woods the air was close and thick with the smell of resin, moss, and rotting needles. Nothing was to be heard except the twanging of gnats and Yefrem's muffled footsteps. The sunlight lay in patches on the tree trunks, the lower branches, and the dark earth strewn with needles. The ground was bare, except for the ferns and stone brambles showing here and there at the base of the trees.
"Hello, Daddy!" Yefrem suddenly heard a sharp, rasp- ing voice. "Good luck to the traveler!"
Close to the road, his head propped on an ant-hill, lay a lanky peasant of about thirty wearing a cotton shirt and tight citified trousers tucked into reddish boots. Near his head was a cap that went with some uniform, now so faded that its original color could only be guessed from the spot that had once flaunted a cockade. The man did not lie stilclass="underline" all the while that Yefrem was looking at him, he kept jerking his arms and legs, as if attacked by gnats or suffering from the itch. But neither his garb nor his movements were as odd as his face. Yefrem had never seen such a face be- fore. Pale, with a scanty beard, a jutting chin and a forelock, in profile it looked like the new moon; the nose and ears were strikingly small, the eyes had a fixed look that might have been one of imbecility or aston- ishment, and, to add to its oddity, the skull was flat- tened on the sides, so that the back of the head pro- jected in a regular semicircle.
"Fellow Christian," Yefrem addressed him, "how far is it to the next village?"
"Not so far. Maloye ain't no more'n three or four miles from here."
"Am I dry!"
"Sure!" said the queer peasant, grinning. "It's a scorcher! Must be a hundred and twenty degrees or more. What's your name?"
"Yefrem, brother."
"Mine's Kuzma. As they say: Kuzma's my name, and great's my fame!"
Kuzma stepped on a wheel, thrust out his lips, and kissed the icon.
"Have you far to go?" he asked.
"Yes, fellow Christian. I was to Kursk and even to Moscow, and now I'm on my way to the fair at Nizhny."
"You're collecting for a church?"
"Just so, brother . . . for the Virgin of Kazan . . . Our church burned down!"
"How did that happen?"
Yefrem, articulating lazily, started telling how light- ning struck the church at Malinovtzy on St. Elijah's day, while both the priest and the sexton and the peasants were in the fields.
"The boys who stayed in the village saw the smoke and wanted to ring the church bells, but Elijah the Prophet must have been wroth, the church was locked, and the whole belfry was in flames, so there was no getting at the bells. We came from the fields and, good Lord, the church was ablaze—it was terrible to go near it."
Kuzma strode alongside and listened. He was sober, but he walked as though he were drunk, waving his arms and tramping now beside the cart, now in front of it ...
"And what do you get out of it? They pay you wages?" he asked.
"What wages? I am traveling for the salvation of my soul, the community sent me . . ."
"So you're traveling for nothing?"
''Who's to pay me wages? The community sent me, you know—they'll harvest my crops, sow the rye, pay the taxes for me . . . So it's not for nothing!"
"And how do you eat?"
"I beg my bread."
"And your gelding, does it belong to the community?"
''Why, yes."
"So, brother . . . You don't happen to have some tobacco on you?"
"I don't smoke, brother."
"And if your horse croaks, what will you do then? How will you travel?" "Why should he croak? He don't need to do that."
"And if robbers go for you?"
And Kuzma inquired further, what would happen to the horse and the money if Yefrem himself died, where would people put their contributions if the box were suddenly filled, and what if the bottom of the box fell out, and so on. Yefrem, getting no chance to answer all these queries, merely panted and stared at his fellow traveler in wonder.
"What a pot-bellied box," Kuzma chattered on, prod- ding it with his fist. "Oho, it's heavy! Must be a mint of silver in it! Maybe there's nothing but silver in it. Listen, did you collect a lot?"