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Through Russia

M >> Maxim Gorky >> Through Russia




Everything amid the purple gloom was still. Even the flies were
forbearing to buzz. Only from the street was there grating
through the shaded window the strong, roguish voice of Felitzata
as it traced the strange, lugubrious word-pattern:

With my bosom pressed to the warm, grey earth,
To thee, grey earth, to thee, 0h my mother of old,
I beseech thee, I who am a mother like thee,
And a mother in pain, to enfold in thy arms
This my son, this my dead son, this my ruby,
This my drop of my heart's blood, this my--

Suddenly I caught sight of Antipa standing in the doorway. He
was wiping his eyes with the back of his hand. Presently in a
gruff and unsteady voice he said:

"It is all very fine for you to weep, good woman, but the
present is not the right moment to sing such verses as
those--they were meant, rather, to be sung in a graveyard at the
side of a tomb. Well, tell me everything without reserve.
Important is it that I should know EVERYTHING."

Whereafter, having crossed himself with a faltering hand, he
carefully scrutinised the corpse, and at last let his eyes halt
upon the lad's sweet features. Then he muttered sadly:

"How extraordinarily he has grown! Yes, death has indeed
enlarged him! Ah, well, so be it! Soon I too shall have to be
stretching myself out. Oh that it were now!"

Then with cautious movements of his deformed fingers he
straightened the folds of the lad's smock, and drew it over the
legs. Whereafter he pressed his flushed lips to the hem of the
garment.

Said I to him at that moment:

"What is it that you have been wanting of him? Why is it that
you have been trying to teach him strange words?"

Straightening himself, and glancing at me with dim eyes, Antipa
repeated:

"What is it that I have been wanting of him?" To the repetition
he added with manifest sincerity, though also with a
self-depreciatory movement of the head:

"To tell the truth, I scarcely know WHAT it is that I have been
wanting of him. By God I do not. Yet, as one speaking the truth
in the presence of death, I say that never during my long
lifetime had I so desired aught else. . . . Yes, I have waited
and waited for fortune to reveal it to me; and ever has fortune
remained mute and tongueless. Foolish was it of me to have
expected otherwise, to have expected, for instance, that some
day there might occur something marvellous, something
unlooked-for."

With a short laugh, he indicated the corpse with his eyes, and
continued more firmly:

"Yes, bootless was it to have expected anything from such a
source as that. Never, despite one's wishes, was anything
possible of acquisition thence. . . This is usually the case.
Felitzata, as a clever woman indeed (albeit one cold of heart),
was for having her son accounted a God's fool, and thereby
gaining some provision against her old age."

"But you yourself were the person who suggested that? You
yourself wished it? "

"I?"

Presently. thrusting his hands up his sleeves, he added dully
and brokenly:

"Yes, I DID wish it. Why not, indeed, seeing that at least it
would have brought comfort to the poor people of this place?
Sometimes I feel very sorry for them with their bitter,
troublous lives--lives which may be the lives of rogues and
villains, yet are lives which have produced amongst us a
pravednik," [A "just person," a human being without sin].

All the evening sky was now aflame. Upon the ear there fell the
mournful lament:

When snow has veiled the earth in white,
The snowy plain the wild wolves tread.
They wail for the cheering warmth of spring
As I bewail the bairn that's dead.

Vologonov listened for a moment. Then he said firmly:

"These are mere accesses of impulse which come upon her. And
that is only what might be expected. Even as in song or in vice
there is no holding her, so remorse, when it has fastened upon
such a woman's heart, will know no bounds. I may tell you that
on one occasion two young merchants took her, stripped her stark
naked, and drove her in their carriage down Zhitnaia Street,
with themselves sitting on the seats of the vehicle, and
Felitzata standing upright between them--yes, in a state of
nudity! Thereafter they beat her almost to death."

As I stepped out into the dark, narrow vestibule, Antipa, who
was following me, muttered:

"Such a lament as hers could come only of genuine grief."

We found Felitzata in front of the hut, with her back covering
the window. There, with hands pressed to her bosom, and her
skirt all awry, she was straining her dishevelled head towards
the heavens, while the evening breeze, stirring her fine auburn
hair, scattered it promiscuously over her flushed,
sharply-defined features and wildly protruding eyes. A bizarre,
pitiable, and extraordinary figure did she cut as she wailed in
a throaty voice which constantly gathered strength:

0h winds of ice, winds cruel and rude,
Press on my heart till its throbbings fail!
Arrest the current of my blood!
Turn these hot melting tears to hail!

Before her there was posted a knot of women, compassionate
contemplators of the singer's distracted, grief-wrought
features. Through the ravine's dark opening I could see the sun
sinking below the suburb before plunging into the marshy forest
and having his disk pierced by sharp, black tips of pine trees.
Already everything around him was red. Already, seemingly, he
had been wounded, and was bleeding to death.



THE CEMETERY

In a town of the steppes where I found life exceedingly dull, the
best and the brightest spot was the cemetery. Often did I use to
walk there, and once it happened that I fell asleep on some
thick, rich, sweet-smelling grass in a cradle-like hollow
between two tombs.

From that sleep I was awakened with the sound of blows being
struck against the ground near my head. The concussion of them
jarred me not a little, as the earth quivered and tinkled like a
bell. Raising myself to a sitting posture, I found sleep still
so heavy upon me that at first my eyes remained blinded with
unfathomable darkness, and could not discern what the matter
was. The only thing that I could see amid the golden glare of
the June sunlight was a wavering blur which at intervals seemed
to adhere to a grey cross, and to make it give forth a
succession of soft creaks.

Presently, however--against my wish, indeed--that wavering blur
resolved itself into a little, elderly man. Sharp-featured, with
a thick, silvery tuft of hair beneath his under lip, and a bushy
white moustache curled in military fashion, on his upper, he
was using the cross as a means of support as, with his
disengaged hand outstretched, and sawing the air, he dug his
foot repeatedly into the ground, and, as he did so, bestowed
upon me sundry dry, covert glances from the depths of a pair of
dark eyes.

"What have you got there?" I inquired.

"A snake," he replied in an educated bass voice, and with a
rugged forefinger he pointed downwards; whereupon I perceived
that wriggling on the path at his feet and convulsively
whisking its tail, there was an echidna.

"Oh, it is only a grassworm," I said vexedly.

The old man pushed away the dull, iridescent, rope-like thing
with the toe of his boot, raised a straw hat in salute, and
strode firmly onwards.

"I thank you," I called out; whereupon, he replied without
looking behind him:

"If the thing really WAS a grassworm, of course there was no
danger."

Then he disappeared among the tombstones.

Looking at the sky, I perceived the time to be about five
o'clock.

The steppe wind was sighing over the tombs, and causing long
stems of grass to rock to and fro, and freighting the heated air
with the silken rustling of birches and limes and other trees,
and leading one to detect amid the humming of summer a note of
quiet grief eminently calculated to evoke lofty, direct thoughts
concerning life and one's fellow-men.

Veiling with greenery, grey and white tombstones worn with the
snows of winter, crosses streaked with marks of rain, and the
wall with which the graveyard was encircled, the rank vegetation
served to also conceal the propinquity of a slovenly, clamorous
town which lay coated with rich, sooty grime amid an atmosphere
of dust and smells.

As I set off for a ramble among the tombs and tangled grass, I
could discern through openings in the curtain of verdure a
belfry's gilded cross which reared itself solemnly over crosses
and memorials. At the foot of those memorials the sacramental
vestment of the cemetery was studded with a kaleidoscopic sheen
of flowers over which bees and wasps were so hovering and
humming that the grass's sad, prayerful murmur seemed charged
with a song of life which yet did not hinder reflections on
death. Fluttering above me on noiseless wing were birds the
flight of which sometimes made me start, and stand wondering
whether the object before my gaze was really a bird or not: and
everywhere the shimmer of gilded sunlight was setting the
close-packed graveyard in a quiver which made the mounds of its
tombs reminiscent of a sea when, after a storm, the wind has
fallen, and all the green level is an expanse of smooth,
foamless billows.

Beyond the wall of the cemetery the blue void of the firmament
was pierced with smoky chimneys of oil-mills and soap factories,
the roofs of which showed up like particoloured stains against
the darker rags and tatters of other buildings; while blinking
in the sunlight I could discern clatter-emitting, windows which
looked to me like watchful eyes. Only on the nearer side of the
wall was a sparse strip of turf dotted over with ragged,
withered, tremulous stems, and beyond this, again, lay the site
of a burnt building which constituted a black patch of
earth-heaps, broken stoves, dull grey ashes, and coal dust. To
heaven gaped the black, noisome mouths of burning-pits wherein
the more economical citizens were accustomed nightly to get rid
of the contents of their dustbins. Among the tall stems of
steppe grass waved large, glossy leaves of ergot; in the
sunlight splinters of broken glass sparkled as though they were
laughing; and, from two spots in the dark brown plot which formed
a semicircle around the cemetery, there projected, like teeth,
two buildings the new yellow paint of which nevertheless made
them look mean and petty amid the tangle of rubbish, pigweed,
groundsel, and dock.

Indolently roaming hither and thither, a few speckled hens
resembled female pedlars, and some pompous red cockerels a
troupe of firemen; in the orifices of the burning-pits a number
of mournful-eyed, homeless dogs were lying sheltered; among the
shoots of the steppe scrub some lean cats were stalking
sparrows; and a band of children who were playing hide-and-seek
among the orifices above-mentioned presented, a pitiful sight as
they went skipping over the filthy earth, disappearing in
the crevices among the piles of heaped-up dirt.

Beyond the site of the burnt-out building there stretched a
series of mean, close-packed huts which, crammed exclusively
with needy folk, stood staring, with their dim, humble eyes of
windows, at the crumbling bricks of the cemetery wall, and the
dense mass of trees which that wall enclosed. Here, in one such
hut, had I myself a lodging in a diminutive attic, which not
only smelt of lamp-oil, but stood in a position to have wafted
to it the least gasp or ejaculation on the part of my landlord,
Iraklei Virubov, a clerk in the local treasury. In short, I
could never glance out of the window at the cemetery on the
other side of the strip of dead, burnt, polluted earth without
reflecting that, by comparison, that cemetery was a place of
sheer beauty, a place of ceaseless attraction.

And ever, that day, as though he had been following me, could
there be sighted among the tombs the dark figure of the old man
who had so abruptly awakened me from slumber; and since his
straw hat reflected the sunlight as brilliantly as the disk of a
sunflower as it meandered hither and thither, I, in my turn,
found myself following him, though thinking, all the while, of
Iraklei Virubov. Only a week was it since Iraklei's wife, a
thin, shrewish, long-nosed woman with green and catlike eyes,
had set forth on a pilgrimage to Kiev, and Iraklei had hastened
to import into the hut a stout, squint-eyed damsel whom he had
introduced to me as his " niece by marriage."

"She was baptised Evdokia," he had said on the occasion
referred to. "Usually, however, I call her Dikanka. Pray be
friendly with her, but remember, also, that she is not a person
with whom to take liberties."

Large, round-shouldered, and clean-shaven like a chef, Virubov
was for ever hitching up breeches which had slipped from a
stomach ruined with surfeits of watermelon. And always were his
fat lips parted as though athirst, and perpetually had he in his
colourless eyes an expression of insatiable hunger.

One evening I overheard a dialogue to the following effect.

"Dikanka, pray come and scratch my back. Yes, between the
shoulder-blades. O-o-oh, that is it. My word, how strong you
are!"

Whereat Dikanka had laughed shrilly. And only when I had moved
my chair, and thrown down my book, had the laughter and unctuous
whispering died away, and given place to a whisper of:

"Holy Father Nicholas, pray for us unto God! Is the supper kvas
ready, Dikanka?"

And softly the pair had departed to the kitchen--there to grunt
and squeal once more like a couple of pigs....

The old man with the grey moustache stepped over the turf with
the elastic stride of youth, until at length he halted before a
large monument in drab granite, and stood reading the
inscription thereon. Featured not altogether in accordance with
the Russian type, he had on a dark-blue jacket, a turned-down
collar, and a black stock finished off with a large bow--the
latter contrasting agreeably with the thick, silvery, as it were
molten, chin-tuft. Also, from the centre of a fierce moustache
there projected a long and gristly nose, while over the grey
skin of his cheeks there ran a network of small red veins. In
the act of raising his hand to his hat (presumably for the
purpose of saluting the dead), he, after conning the dark
letters of the inscription on the tomb, turned a sidelong eye
upon myself; and since I found the fact embarrassing, I frowned,
and passed onward, full, still, of thoughts of the street where
I was residing and where I desired to fathom the mean existence
eked out by Virubov and his "niece."

As usual, the tombs were also being patrolled by Pimesha,
otherwise Pimen Krozootov, a bibulous, broken-down ex-merchant
who used to spend his time in stumbling and falling about the
graves in search of the supposed resting-place of his wife. Bent
of body, Pimesha had a small, bird-like face over-grown with
grey down, the eyes of a sick rabbit, and, in general, the
appearance of having undergone a chewing by a set of sharp
teeth. For the past three years he had thus been roaming the
cemetery, though his legs were too weak to support his
undersized, shattered body; and whenever he caught his foot he
fell, and for long could not rise, but lay gasping and fumbling
among the grass, and rooting it up, and sniffing with a nose as
sharp and red as though the skin had been flayed from it. True,
his wife had been buried at Novotchevkassk, a thousand versts
away, but Pimen refused to credit the fact, and always, on being
told it, stuttered with much blinking of his wet, faded eyes:
"Natasha? Natasha is here."

Also, there used to visit the spot, well-nigh daily, a Madame
Christoforov, a tall old lady who, wearing black spectacles and
a plain grey, shroudlike dress that was trimmed with black
velvet, never failed to have a stick between her abnormally long
fingers. Wizened of face, with cheeks hanging down like bags,
and a knot of grey, rather, grey-green, hair combed over her
temples from under a lace scarf, and almost concealing her ears,
this lady pursued her way with deliberation, and entire
assurance, and yielded the path to no one whom she might
encounter. I have an idea that there lay buried there a son who
had been killed in a roisterers' brawl.

Another habitual visitor was thin-legged, short-sighted Aulic
Councillor Praotzev, ex-schoolmaster. With a book stuffed into
the pocket of his canvas pea-jacket, a white umbrella grasped in
his red hand, and a smile extending to ears as sharp and pointed
as a rabbit's, he could, any Sunday after dinner, be seen
skipping from tomb to tomb, with his umbrella brandished like a
white flag soliciting terms of peace with death.

And, on returning home before the bell rang for Vespers, he
would find that a crowd of boys had collected outside his garden
wall; whereupon, dancing about him like puppies around a stork,
they would fall to shouting in various merry keys:

"The Councillor, the Councillor! Who was it that fell in love
with Madame Sukhinikh, and then fell into the pond? "

Losing his temper, and opening a great mouth, until he looked
like an old rook which is about to caw, the Councillor would
stamp his foot several times, as though preparing to dance to
the boys' shouting, and lower his head, grasp his umbrella like
a bayonet, and charge at the lads with a panting shout of:

"I'll tell your fathers! Oh, I'll tell your mothers!"

As for the Madame Sukhinikh, referred to, she was an old
beggar-woman who, the year round, and in all weathers, sat on a
little bench beside the cemetery wicket, and stuck to it like a
stone. Her large face, a face rendered bricklike by years of
inebriety, was covered with dark blotches born of frostbite,
alcoholic inflammation, sunburn, and exposure to wind, and her
eyes were perpetually in a state of suppuration. Never did
anyone pass her but she proffered a wooden cup in a suppliant
hand, and cried hoarsely, rather as though she were cursing the
person concerned:

"Give something for Christ's sake! Give in memory of your
kinsfolk there!"

Once an unexpected storm blew in from the steppes, and brought a
downpour which, overtaking the old woman on her way home, caused
her, her sight being poor, to fall into a pond, whence Praotzev
attempted to rescue her, and into which, in the end, he slipped
himself. From that day onwards he was twitted on the subject by
the boys of the town.

Other frequenters of the cemetery I see before me--dark, silent
figures, figures of persons whom still unsevered cords of memory
seemed to have bound to the place for the rest of their lives,
and compelled to wander, like unburied corpses, in quest of
suitable tombs. Yes, they were persons whom life had rejected,
and death, as yet, refused to accept.

Also, at times there would emerge from the long grass a homeless
dog with large, sullen eyes, eyes startling at once in their
intelligence and in their absolute Ishmaelitism-- until one
almost expected to hear issue from the animal's mouth reproaches
couched in human language.

And sometimes the dog would still remain halted in the cemetery
as, with tail lowered, it swayed its shelterless, shaggy head to
and fro with an air of profound reflection, while occasionally
venting a subdued, long-drawn yelp or howl.

Again, among the dense old lime trees, there would be scurrying
an unseen mob of starlings and jackdaws whose young would,
meanwhile, maintain a soft, hungry piping, a sort of gently
persuasive, chirruping chorus; until in autumn, when the wind
had stripped bare the boughs, these birds' black nests would
come to look like mouldy, rag-swathed heads of human beings
which someone had torn from their bodies and flung into the
trees, to hang for ever around the white, sugarloaf-shaped
church of the martyred St. Barbara. During that autumn season,
indeed, everything in the cemetery's vicinity looked sad and
tarnished, and the wind would wail about the place, and sigh
like a lover who has been driven mad through bereavement . . . .

Suddenly the old man halted before me on the path, and, sternly
extending a hand towards a white stone monument near us, read
aloud:

"'Under this cross there lies buried the body of the respected
citizen and servant of God, Diomid Petrovitch Ussov,'" etc.,
etc.

Whereafter the old man replaced his hat, thrust his hands into
the pockets of his pea-jacket, measured me with eyes dark in
colour, but exceptionally clear for his time of life, and said:

"It would seem that folk could find nothing to say of this man
beyond that he was a 'servant of God.' Now, how can a servant
be worthy of honour at the hand of 'citizens'?"

"Possibly he was an ascetic," was my hazarded conjecture;
whereupon the old man rejoined with a stamp of his foot:

"Then in such case one ought to write--"

"To write what?"

"To write EVERYTHING, in fullest possible detail."

And with the long, firm stride of a soldier my interlocutor
passed onwards towards a more remote portion of the
cemetery--myself walking, this time, beside him. His stature
placed his head on a level with my shoulder only, and caused his
straw hat to conceal his features. Hence, since I wished to look
at him as he discoursed, I found myself forced to walk with head
bent, as though I had been escorting a woman.

"No, that is not the way to do it," presently he continued in
the soft, civil voice of one who has a complaint to present.
"Any such proceeding is merely a mark of barbarism--of a complete
lack of observation of men and life."

With a hand taken from one of his pockets, he traced a large
circle in the air.

"Do you know the meaning of that?" he inquired.

"Its meaning is death," was my diffident reply, made with a
shrug of the shoulders.

A shake of his head disclosed to me a keen, agreeable, finely
cut face as he pronounced the following Slavonic words:

"'Smertu smert vsekonechnie pogublena bwist.'" [Death hath
been for ever overthrown by death."]

"Do you know that passage?" he added presently.

Yet it was in silence that we walked the next ten paces--he
threading his way along the rough, grassy path at considerable
speed. Suddenly he halted, raised his hat from his head, and
proffered me a hand.

"Young man," he said, "let us make one another's better
acquaintance. I am Lieutenant Savva Yaloylev Khorvat, formerly
of the State Remount Establishment, subsequently of the
Department of Imperial Lands. I am a man who, after never having
been found officially remiss, am living in honourable
retirement--a man at once a householder, a widower, and a person
of hasty temper."

Then, after a pause, he added:

"Vice-Governor Khorvat of Tambov is my brother--a younger
brother; he being fifty-five, and I sixty-one, si-i-ixty one."

His speech was rapid, but as precise as though no mistake was
permissible in its delivery.

"Also," he continued, "as a man cognisant of every possible
species of cemetery, I am much dissatisfied with this one. In
fact, never satisfied with such places am I."

Here he brandished his fist in the air, and described a large
arc over the crosses.

"Let us sit down," he said, "and I will explain things."

So, after that we had seated ourselves on a bench beside a white
oratory, and Lieutenant Khorvat had taken off his hat, and with
a blue handkerchief wiped his forehead and the thick silvery
hair which bristled from the knobs of his scalp, he continued:

"Mark you well the word kladbistche." [The word, though
customarily used for cemetery, means, primarily, a
treasure-house.] Here he nudged me with his elbow--continuing,
thereafter, more softly: "In a kladbisiche one might reasonably
look for kladi, for treasures of intellect and enlightenment.
Yet what do we find? Only that which is offensive and insulting.
All of us does it insult, for thereby is an insult paid to all
who, in life, are bearing still their 'cross and burden.' You
too will, one day, be insulted by the system, even as shall I.
Do you understand? I repeat, 'their cross and burden'--the sense
of the words being that, life being hard and difficult, we ought
to honour none but those who STILL are bearing their trials, or
bearing trials for you and me. Now, THESE folk here have ceased
to possess consciousness."

Each time that the old man waved his hat in his excitement, its
small shadow, bird-like, flew along the narrow path, and over
the cross, and, finally, disappeared in the direction of the
town.

Next, distending his ruddy cheeks, twitching his moustache, and
regarding me covertly out of boylike eyes, the Lieutenant
resumed:

"Probably you are thinking, 'The man with whom I have to deal
is old and half-witted.' But no, young fellow; that is not so,
for long before YOUR time had I taken the measure of life.
Regard these memorials. ARE they memorials? For what do they
commemorate as concerns you and myself? They commemorate, in
that respect, nothing. No, they are not memorials; they are
merely passports or testimonials conferred upon itself by human
stupidity. Under a given cross there may lie a Maria, and under
another one a Daria, or an Alexei, or an Evsei, or someone
else--all 'servants of God,' but not otherwise particularised. An
outrage this, sir! For in this place folk who have lived their
difficult portion of life on earth are seen robbed of that
record of their existences, which ought to have been preserved
for your and my instruction. Yes, A DESCRIPTION OF THE LIFE
LIVED BY A MAN is what matters. A tomb might then become even
more interesting than a novel. Do you follow me?"

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