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

his bones with contempt for the muzhiks, reminding them briefly and sternly, like one having authority, that it wouldn’t be a bad idea for them to wake up and stand aside. And the muzhiks hastily comply. Glowering like a bull from underneath his eyebrows at the officiating priests and the icons, he prays frenziedly and austerely until the very end of the mass, haughtily demonstrating to everybody that he is the only one who knows just the right time to bow and to make the sign of the cross. Just as austerely does he walk through the fair after the mass, proud of the fact that he had already had a drink or two, that he could approach some trader in his tent as an equal, shaking his hand and leaning over the counter, scooping up a handful of polly-seeds and bothering the trader with his conversations about the city, and about the state of trade.⁠ ⁠… He was also proud of the fact that he could at times yell at the droves of wenches, pressing one another against the counter, like sheep; or at some muzhik that, with a bag under his arm⁠—there would be a young pig squirming around in that bag⁠—has already tested all the penny whistles, all the mouth organs, and could not, for the life of him, decide which one to take. The people, pouring out of the church, have flooded the common; the belfries are pealing forth their chimes; the beggars are snufflingly clamorous; the livestock⁠—which is also bought and sold during the Kiriki⁠—bleats and hee-haws; and in the dense crowd, spitting out polly-seed shells and slipping up in the mire between the tents, there are already many intoxicated men. Shasha has already managed to drink some more, and feels that the right time has come. Having had his fill of talking with the traders, he goes with resolute steps toward the carrousels. A countless multitude of people has gathered there, watching, until their heads, too, begin to go ’round and ’round, the wooden horses and their riders. Almost all of Limovo is there, and, towering a head taller above everybody, is the soldier’s wife’s husband. Shasha’s hands grow cold; his lips quiver; but he pretends not to notice his foe. He approaches his acquaintances, pulls a bottle out of his pocket, regales anybody who comes along, and drinks himself. He talks a great deal, and loudly; he smokes, and laughs unnaturally and malevolently; but all the while he is on the alert, waiting.⁠ ⁠… And now, pretending to be hopelessly drunk, in a new cap with the store’s price tag still showing white upon it, clean shaven, well-fed, with sleepy blue eyes, the soldier advances straight upon Shasha, and with all his momentum, as though without seeing him, strikes him in the chest with his shoulder. Shasha, gritting his teeth, steps to one side and continues his conversation. But the soldier comes back, again passes him⁠—and once more hits him in the chest with his shoulder! Whereupon, as though unable to bear such insolence, Shasha distorts his face⁠—distorted enough without that⁠—and drawls out through his teeth:

“E-eh, young fellow! Watch out that I don’t shove you in my own way!”

And the soldier, instantly checking his headlong progress, suddenly staggers backward and roars out furiously:

“What’s ’at?”

Amid the hubbub and rumble of the fair, amid the clanging of the carrousel bells and the delighted, hypocritically-sympathizing shouts of the oh’ing and parting crowd, the soldier stuns Shasha and draws his blood with the very first blow. Shasha, trying to get his fingers into the soldier’s mouth, true to an old usage of the muzhiks, in order to tear his lips, pounces upon him like a beast⁠—and instantly falls down in the mire as if he were dead, underneath the iron-shod heels that beat heavily upon his chest, upon his shaggy head, upon his nose, upon his eyes⁠—already glazed, as in a ram with his throat cut. And all the folks “oh” and “ah” and wonder: “There’s a queer, incomprehensible fellow for you! Why, he knew, he knew beforehand how this matter would end! Why did he go into it, then?” And truly⁠—why did he? And toward what, in general, is he so insistently and undeviatingly heading, as he devastates his ruined dwelling from day to day, endeavouring to eradicate even to the last atom the very traces of that which was created, in such an unprecedented manner, by the uncouth genius of Roman, and ceaselessly thirsts after humiliations, disgrace, and beatings?

Within the church enclosure, on the way to the door of the chapel, there were some horrible specimens of humanity, standing ranged in two files. In her yearning for self-torture; in her yearning-loathing of the curbing bit, of toil, of her mode of existence; in her infatuation with all sorts of hideous visages (both those of the tragedian and of the scaramouche), in her dark, criminal desires, in her lack of will power, her eternal disquiet, in her misfortunes, sorrows and poverty⁠—Russia breeds these people from of old, and without end. In Limovo alone some half-hundred of them gather. And what faces are these, what heads! Just as if they had come out of the crude woodcuts made in Kiev, which depict both fiends and the striving anchorites of the Mother-Desert. There are ancients with such withered heads, with such scant locks of long gray hair, with such noses, as thin as thin can be, and with the slits of their unseeing eyes so deeply fallen in, that they seem to have lain for centuries in the caverns where they had been walled up still in the time of the Kiev princes.⁠ ⁠… And they had come out of there in half-rotted tatters; they had thrown upon their remains their beggars’ wallets, fastening them crosswise behind their shoulders with odd bits of rope, and had set off on their wanderings from one end of Russia to the other, through her forests, over her steppes, in the winds of her steppes.⁠ ⁠…

There