A Bad Business

The Peasant Marey
But I think all these professions de foi are very boring to read; so I am going to tell a certain story, or not even a story, but just a particular distant memory which I’m very keen to recall, for some reason, right here and now, to round off this treatise on the Russian people. I was just nine at the time… no, I’d better start with when I was twenty.
 
It was the second day of Holy Week. The air was warm, the sky was blue, the sun high in the sky, shining warm and bright; but my heart was very heavy. I wandered behind the barrack huts, staring at the palings of the stout prison fence, counting them off – but I didn’t even feel like counting them, though I was in the habit of doing that. It was the second day of the prison ‘holiday’; the convicts were not being taken out to labour, there were crowds of drunk men, and loud abuse and constant quarrels breaking out all over the place. Foul, disgusting songs, gamblers playing cards on the floor by the bunks, and several half-dead convicts, sentenced by their fellows to be beaten up for excessive violence, who were now lying on their bunks covered with sheepskins till they recovered and came round. Already, several times, knives had been drawn. I had found all this, over the first two days of the holiday, so excruciatingly depressing that it made me ill. I had always been revolted by drunken rampages, and more than ever in this place. On these particular days the guards never looked in on the prison at all; there were no searches, no hunts for vodka – they realised that even these outcasts had to be given their heads, just once a year, otherwise things would get even worse. Eventually my heart blazed up in fury. I walked met M—cki, a Polish political, who gave me a sour look. His eyes flashed, his lips trembled. ‘Je hais ces brigands!’ he muttered through gritted teeth as he walked on. I went back to my barrack hut, though only a quarter of an hour before I had rushed out of it like a maniac, when six stalwart peasants hurled themselves as one man at Gazin, a drunk Tatar, to shut him up. They set about beating him up, but they were doing it stupidly: their blows could have killed a camel, but they knew that this Hercules would be hard to kill, so they didn’t hold back. Now, as I came to my hut, I looked down to the far end and saw Gazin lying on the corner bunk, unconscious and barely showing a sign of life. He had a sheepskin over him, and the men walked round him in silence. They were confident that he would come round by next morning, but even so – you never knew, if the man was unlucky he might die from a beating like that.
 
I went along to my own bunk, by a window with an iron grille over it, lay down on my back with my hands behind my head, and shut my eyes. I liked lying like that: a sleeping man gets left alone, and meanwhile one can think and dream. But I couldn’t dream: my heart was beating uneasily, and M—cki’s words were echoing in my ears: Je hais ces brigands! But why describe my impressions: even now at night I sometimes dream about those times, and those are my most agonising dreams of all. Readers may notice that up till now I have scarcely ever spoken of my own prison life in print. Fifteen years ago I wrote Notes from the House of the Dead, in the voice of an invented character, a criminal who had killed his wife. I might add in passing that since then many people have thought, and still maintain to this day, that I was sentenced to a prison camp for murdering my wife.
 
Gradually I lapsed into forgetfulness, and my mind strayed off into memories. All through my four years of imprisonment, I would constantly remember my past life, so that it felt as if I had lived through the whole of that life a second time. These memories rose up of their own accord; only rarely would I deliberately call them up. They would start from some minor point, a small detail, sometimes unnoticed, and little by little grow into a whole picture, a powerful and complete impression. I would analyse those impressions, adding new details to what I had lived through long ago, and most importantly, I was constantly correcting the picture – that was my main amusement. On this occasion I suddenly recalled, for some reason, an insignificant moment from my early childhood, when I was just nine: a moment that I might have completely forgotten, but at that time I was particularly fond of those memories of my earliest childhood.
 
I remembered one August day in the country, a day that was dry and bright but rather cold and windy. Summer was on the way out, and soon we’d have to go back to Moscow for me to spend a boring winter at my French lessons, and I was so sad to leave the country. I walked past the threshing-floor, down into a gully, and up to a dense thicket on the far side of it which stretched as far as the woodland. Here I advanced deeper into the bushes; not far off, about thirty paces away, I could hear a solitary peasant ploughing the meadow. I knew that he was moving up a steep hill and the horse was having trouble climbing the slope; every now and then his cries of ‘Giddy up!’would float over to me. I know almost all our peasants, but I don’t know which of them is ploughing here, nor do I care; I’m deep in my own affairs, for I’m busy too. I’m breaking off a hazel switch to whip the frogs with. Hazel twigs are so pretty, and so flimsy – not like birch twigs at all. I’m interested in bugs and beetles as well, and I collect them: there are some very fine ones, and I also like the nimble little red-and-yellow lizards with their black spots, but I’m afraid of snakes. Though there are far fewer snakes around than lizards. There aren’t many mushrooms here; for mushrooms you have to go into the birch wood, and and I mean to go there. There was nothing in the world I liked so much as the wood with its mushrooms and wild berries, its insects and birds, hedgehogs and squirrels, and my favourite smell, the damp smell of rotting leaves.
 
Suddenly the deep silence was broken – I heard, clearly and distinctly, a cry of ‘Wolf!’  I shrieked, and ran, petrified with terror and yelling at the top of my voice, out onto the meadow and straight up to the peasant ploughing there.
 
It was our peasant Marey. I don’t know if such a name exists, but everyone called him Marey. A stockily built peasant of around fifty, quite tall, with a striking grey streak in his thick dark brown beard. I knew him, but I had scarcely ever happened to speak to him. He pulled up his horse when he heard my cries, and when I reached him at full tilt, grabbing his plough with one hand and his sleeve with the other, he could see how frightened I was.
 
‘There’s a wolf!’ I panted at the top of my voice.
 
Instinctively he raised his head and looked round, almost believing me for a second.
 
‘Where’s the wolf?’
 
‘They shouted… Someone just shouted ‘Wolf!’ I stammered.
 
‘Get along, get along, how could there be a wolf? You imagined it! Look around – how could there be a wolf here?’ he said quietly and reassuringly. But I was still trembling with fear, and clung even tighter to his smock. I must have been very white too. He looked at me with an anxious smile, evidently fearful and alarmed on my account.
 
‘Dear, dear, what a fright you’ve had!’ he said, shaking his head. ‘That’ll do, little one! Dear, dear!’
 
He stretched out his hand and suddenly stroked my cheek.
 
‘There, there, that’ll do, Christ be with you, cross yourself now.’ But I didn’t cross myself. The corners of my mouth were twitching, and I think that must have particularly struck him. He slowly extended one plump earthy finger with a blackened nail, and gently touched my trembling lips.
 
‘Well I never, deary me,’ – and he smiled a slow, almost motherly smile. ‘Lord above, look at you, goodness me, dear dear!’
 
Eventually I realised that there was no wolf, and I had imagined that cry of ‘Wolf!’. It really had been a very clear and distinct cry, but once or twice in the past I had seemed to hear cries like that (and not only about wolves), and I knew that I had imagined them. (Later on, as I grew older, those hallucinations left me).
 
‘Well, I’ll be off,’ I said, with a shy, questioning look at him.
 
‘Very well then, run along, and I’ll watch you from here. I won’t let the wolf get you!’ he added, still with that motherly smile. ‘All right, Christ go with you, off you go,’ – and he made the sign of the cross over me and himself. I went off, looking back almost every ten steps. As I went, Marey stayed standing there beside his horse, watching me go and giving me a nod every time I looked back. I must confess I was a little embarrassed at having been so frightened, but on I went, still very scared of the wolf, until I reached the first barn halfway up the slope of the hollow. Then all my fear vanished, and suddenly our yard-dog Volchok appeared from heaven knows where and rushed up to me. With Volchok by my side I felt perfectly safe, and turned round to Marey for the last time. I couldn’t make out his face clearly any more, but I felt that he was still smiling at me with the same gentle look, nodding his head. I waved to him, he waved back and started his little mare.
 
 ‘Giddy up!’ I heard his cry in the distance once more, and the mare tugged at the plough again.
 
All this came back to me at once, I don’t know why; and I recalled it in astonishingly accurate detail. I pulled myself together and sat up on my bunk, and I remember that I found myself still smiling at the memory. I went on remembering it for another minute.
 
When I got home from Marey that day, I told no one about my ‘adventure’. What sort of adventure was it, anyway? And I very soon forgot Marey too. On the few occasions when I met him after that, I never spoke to him – not about the wolf, nor anything else. And yet now, twenty years later in Siberia, I remembered that whole episode so clearly, down to the last detail. So it had taken root in my heart of its own accord, unnoticed and with no help from me; and now it had come back to me when I needed it, and I remembered that poor serf’s gentle, motherly smile, and the way he made the sign of the cross, and shook his head: ‘Dear, dear, what a fright you’ve had, little one!’  And especially that plump, earthy finger which he softly, timidly and tenderly brought up to touch me on my quivering lips. Of course, anyone would have cheered up the child, but here, in this solitary encounter, something quite different seemed to have happened. Even if I had been his own son, he couldn’t have looked at me with eyes that shone with greater love. What forced him to do that? He was our property, our own peasant and serf, and I was his little master. No one would ever know how gentle he had been to me, nor reward him for it. Could he have just been so fond of very little children? Some are. We were on our own when we met in that empty meadow, and only God on high, perhaps, could look down and see what deep, humane, enlightened feeling, what delicate, almost feminine tenderness could fill the heart of a coarse, brutally uncouth Russian serf, with no expectations nor any inkling of his coming freedom. Tell me – was this not what Konstantin Aksakov had in mind when he wrote about the high degree of culture in our common people?
 
And now, climbing down from my bunk and looking round me, I remember I suddenly felt that I could see these unhappy wretches with new eyes. In that moment, by some miracle, all the hatred and fury was lifted from my heart. I walked on, looking closely at the faces that I met. This shaven-headed, disgraced, tipsy peasant, with a convict’s brand on his face, with his hoarse voice bellowing a drunken song – he could be that very same Marey; I couldn’t look into his heart. That evening I met M—cki again. Poor man! He couldn’t have any memories of peasants like Marey, nor any view of these people, beyond Je hais ces brigands! No, those Polish prisoners had more to bear than I did.