Short Fiction, Ivan Bunin [reading women .TXT] 📗

construction of even a simple winnowing machine. He was always narrowing his morosely-ironic little eyes and pursing up his thin lips, never letting a pipe out of his teeth. He generally kept a portentous silence; but whenever he did speak, it was only to annihilate somebody or something with a comment or a nickname. He scoffed at absolutely everything: at sense and folly, at simplicity and slyness, at despondency and laughter; at God and his own mother, at the gentry and the muzhiks. The nicknames he bestowed were absurd and incomprehensible, but he uttered them with such an enigmatic air that it seemed to everybody that they had both a meaning and a caustic aptness. He had not spared even himself, and had given himself a nickname: “Rogojkin,”7 he had said once in reference to himself, hinting at something so weightily, so maliciously, that everybody rolled from laughter, and afterwards he was never known as anything but Rogojkin. He had christened the high school student as well, had said something nonsensical about him as well: “Veretenkin.”

The schoolboy⁠—so he thought⁠—had come to know these people well during the summer, had become attached to all of them in different ways⁠—even to Ivan, who unmercifully made fun of him. He was learning one thing or another from them, was adapting their pronounciation⁠—absolutely, as it proved, unlike the speech of the muzhiks in books; adopting their unexpected, absurd, but unshakable conclusions, the uniformity of their ready wisdom, their coarseness and indifference, their capacity for work and their dislike of it. And, had he gone to the city after the vacation, without reverting to his infatuation for the life of the muzhiks during the next summer, he would all his life have thought that he had observed the common people of Russia very well⁠—if, by accident, a lengthy, frank conversation had not sprung up among the farm hands on this night.

It was started by the old man who was lying alongside of the schoolboy and who was scratching more than anybody else.

“Pestering the life out of you, young master, hey? They’re nothing but a misery, Khomut!” said he⁠—the word “Khomut” he used to characterize not only his entire existence, but also all its weariness, all its unpleasantness.

“Can’t stand it,” replied the schoolboy. “The women and wenches now, the devil take them, they won’t touch. But who would you think they ought to be biting if not them?”

“Main thing is, whether a body wear drawers or no, it makes no difference to them fleas,” indifferently agreed the old man, giving off, as he tossed about, a strong odour⁠—of a body long unwashed, and of a worn peasant’s coat that had become permeated with the smoke of a chimneyless hut.

The others kept silence. Usually, they were jocose before falling asleep, questioning Pashka about his conjugal life, while he answered them with such unperturbed and gay shamelessness that even the schoolboy, who was constantly entranced by him, never taking his eyes off his intelligent and animated face, was vexed over anyone’s being able to speak so of one’s own young wife. Now no one seemed about to begin questioning, and the student wanted to do so himself, in order to excite his imagination, forever empoisoned by the widow, and to hear the self-assured voice of Pashka⁠—when the latter stretched himself, sat up, and began rolling a crude cigarette. The old man raised up his head, covered with a cap, and shook it.

“Eh, but you’ll burn this place down some day, young fellow!” said he. “Watch out. It don’t take much to bring on trouble.”

“Well, I’ll get out of it by blamin’ the young master,” answered Pashka, a trifle hoarse from a cold; and, having cleared his throat, he started laughing. “He’s smoking all the time himself. Wonderful night tonight, young master,” said he, changing his tone to a serious one and turning around to the schoolboy. “What’s the only thing lacking on this night, you might say? Why, the moon.”

They all felt that he wanted to tell something. And, truly, having kept silent for a while, without eliciting any reply, he suddenly added:

“Are you asleep, young master? What hour might it be now?”

The schoolboy raised himself up, pulled his silver watch out of his trouser’s-pocket, and began inspecting it by the light of the stars.

“Half-past ten,” said he, bending over.

“Well, now, I just knew it was that,” concurred Pashka, gaily and self-assuredly, lighting his cigarette, which was rolled somewhat in the form of a pipe; it was gripped in one corner of his mouth between his teeth, and he lit it with a stinking sulphur match flaming within his cupped hands. “Just exactly at this time last year I killed a man.”

And the schoolboy at once straightened up, letting his hands drop⁠—and he seemed to be turned to stone during all the time that the others talked. At rare intervals he would put in a word, but it was as though it were not he, but some other who was talking in his stead. Then everything within him began to shiver in an icy ague fit inducive of senseless laughter, and his face began to burn, as though it were aflame.

II

Ivan, as always, maintained a portentous silence. Kiriushka was not at all interested in whatever they were talking about; he lay thinking his own thoughts⁠—mostly about an accordion, the purchase of which was his most cherished dream. Theodot, too, who lay leaning upon his elbow, was silent for a long while. He was a strong, flat-chested muzhik, who at the beginning of the summer had not been considered by the farm hands as one of them, because he wore a short sheepskin coat, without a waistline and without folds in its skirts⁠—which was the kind worn by the Tartars of Kazan. He had seemed a stranger to the schoolboy as well. Just as he liked the cheerful composure of Pashka, the smoothness of his mannerisms, his sunburned face, so he was