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

still. The chill wind was rustling; a cluster of chill autumn stars showed white above his very head, while from beyond the hillock of rustling straw came the measured, low-pitched voice of Theodot.

“I sat in the barn for two days under guard, and saw the whole thing through a little window.⁠ ⁠… How they cut him up, that is. The people flocked in from all the villages, to have a look at this murdered man⁠—and me too, for that matter. They used to shove their way right up to the very barn. Two benches was carried out on the common, placed right near the barn, and the murdered man put upon them. A log of wood was put under his head; chairs and a table were brought out for the coroner and the sawbones. The sawbones walks up to him; he tears off his shirt, tears off his drawers⁠—and I see a corpse lying all naked, already stiff; yellow here and green there, while his face was all like wax; the red beard had become thin, and simply stood out. The sawbones put a burdock over you know what place. Right at hand, as usual, there was a box with all sorts of contraptions. The sawbones walks up, parts his hair from ear to ear, makes a cut, and begins to take off the scalp together with the hair, in halves. Where it was thin, he scraped with a little knife. He tore away a half to either side⁠—soon as he gets one piece off, he pulls it down over the eye. The whole skull became visible⁠—like some kind of a little pot, it was.⁠ ⁠… And there’s a black spot on it, near the right ear⁠—black clotted blood; where the blow had come, that is. The sawbones says something to the coroner, and the coroner writes: ‘Three cracks on such and such parts.’ Then the sawbones starts in sawing through the skull all around. The saw don’t work, so he takes a little hammer and a small chisel, see, and goes over the marks that he’d made with the saw, breaking through with the little chisel. And the top of the skull just fell away, like a cup⁠—the brain was all plain to be seen.⁠ ⁠…”

“What don’t they do, the murdering cutthroats!” hoarsely remarked the old man, who had just dozed off.

But Theodot was firmly finishing his say:

“Then he took out a heavy knife, and starts cutting the chest, right through the gristle. He hacks out a three cornered piece, and starts pulling it away⁠—it even started cracking.⁠ ⁠… All the stomach came to view, and the blue lungs, and all the innards.⁠ ⁠…”

Deafened by the beating of his own heart, the student got up on his feet, standing up to the full of his great height⁠—in his cap, shoved back on the nape of his neck, in his light uniform overcoat, which was already too short for him. Gray, huge, dreadful in his Mongolian calmness, Theodot was speaking in measured tones, his pipe gripped between his teeth; but the student was no longer listening to him. With all his eyes he was looking at all these men⁠—so familiar and yet so unknown, so incomprehensible⁠—who had made his whole soul so sick on this night. Pitiful in his vice and his meekness, in all his pastoral primitiveness, Kiriushka was sleeping, covered with his great coat, one thick leg, swathed in white foot-cloths, and twisted at the knee, sticking out from underneath it. Ivan, too, was sleeping; Ivan of the morose, disdainful face, whose mother, a horrible, black old woman, had been dying for three years now, in his black mud hut, standing near the ditches at the edge of the bare village, in the darkness and the dirt, underneath the low ceiling, underneath the low roof of sods, and yet cannot in anyway die, to her grief; while his buck-toothed thin wife feeds at her dark-yellow, hanging dry breast a bare-bellied, clear-eyed child, with its nose running, and its lips bitten into blood by the countless flies in the hut. The happy Pashka was sleeping his heavy, healthy sleep in the fresh wind, in his soldier’s cap, heavy boots, and his new short coat. As for Khomut, the old man, who has not got even a short coat (he has only a long coat, frayed and with a large hole through the shoulder), whose drawers always hung so low upon his flabby thighs⁠—he was sitting with his back to the wind, bareheaded, stripped to the waist. He, senilely emaciated, yellow of body, with his shoulders elevated at a slant, with his twisted prominent backbone glistening in the light of the stars, was sitting with his big tousled head, ruffled by the fresh wind, bowed down, bending his neck which was already scrawny and all in coarse wrinkles. He was intently examining the shirt he had taken off, and, as he listened to Theodot, he would at times squeeze its collar band between his thumbnails.

The student jumped down upon the hard and smooth autumnal earth, and, stooping, quickly walked toward the dark, murmurous garden, toward home.

All three dogs also arose, and, showing dimly white, started running sideways after him, with their tails curled tightly.

Elijah, the Prophet

There was a fire that Spring at Semyon Novikov’s, who lived with his thin-armed brother, Nikon, at Ovsiany Brod. Then the brothers decided to divide their property, and Semyon was to build a new house for himself, farther down on the high road.

On the night before St. Elijah’s day, the carpenters asked permission to go home. So Semyon himself had to spend the night in the unfinished building. He had his supper with his brother’s large family, in the little room full of flies and noise, lit his pipe, threw a coat over his shoulders, and said to his wife:

“It’s too stuffy here. I guess I’ll go to the new house and spend the night there. Somebody might steal the tools.”

“Take the dogs with you, at