The Cossacks (12 page)

“What do
you
think? Come on, drink!” he shouted, handing Olenin another cup of wine with a broad smile.

“What was I saying?” Eroshka continued, trying to remember. “Yes, that’s the kind of man I am! I’m a hunter! There was none like me in the whole regiment. I can find and show you every single beast, every bird. I know what’s where. And I have dogs, two rifles, nets, a blind, and a hawk—I have everything, thank God. If you’re a real hunter and not just full of talk, I’ll show you everything! What kind of man am I? The moment I see a track, I know what animal it was, where it will lie, where it will drink, where it will wallow in the mud. I make myself a perch and wait there all night. What’s the point of sitting around at home? You only fall into sin, get roaring drunk, and then the women’s
tongues start wagging, the boys start catcalling, and you only get crazier. It’s much better to go out at dusk, look for a nice little place, press down the reeds, and sit and sit, waiting, like a good hunter. You know everything that’s going on in the forest. You look up at the sky, the stars come out, you watch them and they tell you how much time has passed. You look around—the forest is rustling, you wait and wait, suddenly there’s a sound, a boar has come to wallow in the mud. You hear the young eagles call, cocks crowing in the distant village, geese cackling. If it’s geese, it isn’t midnight yet. All this I know. You hear a rifle shot somewhere far away, and you think to yourself: Who fired that? A Cossack hunter lying in wait like me? Did he kill the beast or just injure the poor thing, its blood dripping onto the reeds, all for nothing. Oh, I don’t like that! I don’t like that at all! Why did he just injure the beast? The fool! The fool! Or you think: Maybe a Chechen warrior killed some silly Cossack boy! All this goes through your head.

“Once I was sitting by the edge of the river, I look, and I see a cradle floating downstream! A nice cradle, only the top edge crushed. The thoughts that came to my head! Whose cradle is that? Those damn Russian soldiers must have raided a Chechen village, grabbed the women, and some devil must have killed the child, seized it by its little feet, and flung it against the wall. You think they don’t do such things? Some men have no soul! Those thoughts came to my head, and I was filled with pity. I thought: They threw away the cradle, hunted down the mother, burnt the house, and then the Chechen warrior comes over to our side of the river and pillages us. You sit there all night and think. And when you hear a litter of boars come breaking through the reeds, your heart pounds in your chest. Come here, my sweethearts! They’ll smell my scent, you suddenly think. You sit still, not moving a hair, and your heart goes thump, thump, thump, hard enough to throw you into the air. This spring I came across a really good litter, there was a shimmer of black in the reeds. I was ready to shoot and whispered ‘In the name of the Father and the Son,’ when the sow grunts to her litter: ‘Disaster, my children! A man is lying in wait!’ and the whole litter flees into the bushes. I was so furious I could have eaten her alive!”

“How could the sow tell her litter that a man is lying in wait?” Olenin asked.

“Why, you think these beasts are fools? No, my friend, a beast is cleverer than a man, even though you might call the beast a sow. A beast knows everything. A man might walk along a sow’s track without noticing, but the moment a sow comes across your track she takes one sniff and runs away. She knows you cannot smell her scent, but she can smell yours. And there’s this to be said: You want to kill her, but she wants to roam through the forest. You have your law, she has hers. She’s a sow, but that does not make her baser than you—she too is a creature of God. Ha! Man is a fool, a fool, such a fool!” Eroshka said and hung his head, deep in thought.

Olenin was also deep in thought. He climbed down from the porch and paced the yard in silence, with one arm behind his back.

Rousing himself from his thoughts, Eroshka looked up and peered intently at the moths circling and tumbling into the candle’s flickering flame.

“You silly things!” he said. “Look where you’re flying! So silly! So silly!”

He got up and began waving the moths away with his fat fingers.

“You’ll burn, you silly things! Here, fly this way, there’s so much space there!” he said tenderly, his fingers carefully trying to catch a moth by its wings and then release it away from the flame. “You’re flying to your own ruin, and I pity you.”

Eroshka sat talking and drinking from the bottle, while Olenin paced up and down the yard. Suddenly a whisper by the gate caught Olenin’s attention. Holding his breath despite himself, he heard a woman’s laughter, a man’s voice, and the sound of a kiss. He walked to the other side of the yard, rustling the grass under his feet on purpose. The wicker gate creaked. A Cossack in a dark Circassian coat and white sheepskin hat (it was Lukashka) was going along the fence, and a tall woman in a white kerchief walked past Olenin. Maryanka’s assured step seemed to say, “I have nothing to do with you, and you have nothing to do with me.” Olenin followed her with his eyes until she reached the porch of her house, and through the window he even saw her take off her kerchief and sit down on the bench. Suddenly Olenin was gripped by the anguish of loneliness, a dim yearning and hope, and a vague feeling of jealousy.

The last lights went out in the houses. The last sounds in the village fell silent. The wicker fences, the cattle shimmering in the yards, the roofs of the houses, and the stately poplar trees all seemed immersed in the healthy, quiet sleep of toil. Only the endless croaking of frogs came from far away in the wet marshes. In the east, the stars faded and seemed to diffuse in the growing light, but above Olenin’s head they became more dense. The old man was sleeping, his head resting on his arm. A cock crowed in the courtyard across the street. But Olenin kept pacing the yard, deep in thought. A song sung by a few voices wafted into the courtyard. He walked over to the fence and listened. Young Cossack voices were singing cheerfully, one voice standing out sharply in its strength.

“Do you know who that is, singing there?” the old man asked, waking up. “It’s Lukashka, a true warrior! He killed a Chechen—how he’s rejoicing! But why is he rejoicing? The fool, the fool!”

“Have you ever killed anyone?” Olenin asked.

The old man suddenly raised himself on both elbows and turned to look at him.

“Damn it!” he shouted. “What kind of question is that? One doesn’t talk about such things! Killing a man is a difficult matter, ah, how difficult it is! Good-bye, my friend, I’m filled with food and drink. Shall I take you hunting tomorrow?”

“Yes.”

“Get up early—if you oversleep, there’ll be a fine to pay.”

“I might well get up earlier than you,” Olenin replied.

The old man left. The song fell silent. Olenin heard steps and lively talk. A few moments later the singing started up again, but further away, and Eroshka’s loud bass had joined the other voices.

“What people, what a life!” Olenin thought. He sighed and returned alone to his lodgings.

Uncle Eroshka lived alone, retired from active service in the Cossack Regiment. Some twenty years earlier his wife had converted from the Old Beliefs to the Russian Orthodox faith, run away, and married a
Russian sergeant major. Eroshka had no children. He was not bragging when he said that in the old days he had been the most dashing young man of the village. Everyone in the Cossack Regiment still knew him from his old feats. He had more than one dead Chechen or Russian on his conscience. He had gone horse rustling in the mountains, stolen from the Russians, and twice been thrown in prison. The greatest part of his life had been spent hunting in the forest, where for days he lived off a single piece of bread and drank only water. But when he got back to the village, he did nothing but carouse from morning to night.

After returning from Olenin’s lodgings, Eroshka slept for two hours and woke up before dawn. He lay in bed and weighed the man he had met the evening before. He liked Olenin’s straightforwardness—straightforwardness in the sense that Olenin did not begrudge him his wine. And he liked Olenin himself. He was surprised that all Russians were so straightforward and so rich, and could not understand why they knew absolutely nothing, even though they were all so educated. He thought about these questions and what he might be able to get out of Olenin.

Uncle Eroshka’s house was quite large and new, but the absence of a woman was evident. In contrast to the Cossacks’ usual meticulous cleanliness, Eroshka’s room was filthy and untidy. He had thrown his bloodstained coat on the table, and next to it lay a half-eaten piece of flatcake and a plucked, mangled jackdaw, which he had been feeding his hawk. Strewn on the benches were his rawhide shoes, rifles, his dagger, his sack, and a tangle of rags and wet clothes. Another pair of rawhide shoes was soaking in a tub of stinking, dirty water in the corner, next to which stood his hunting blind and his rifle. On the floor lay a net and a few dead pheasants. A hen with a foot tied was pecking in the dirt near the table. A dented pot filled with some sort of milky liquid stood on the unlit stove, and next to it a screeching falcon was trying to break free of its tether. A molting hawk sat calmly on the edge of the stove, watching the hen out of the corner of its eye, bending its head from time to time right and left.

Uncle Eroshka lay on his back in his short bed, which he had set up between the wall and the stove, and was picking at the scabs on his hands from the beak of the hawk, which he always carried without
gloves. He was wearing a shirt, and his strong legs were propped up against the stove. The air in all the rooms, and particularly around Eroshka, was filled with that strong yet not unpleasant blend of smells that always accompanied him.

“Are you home, Uncle?” came a strong voice in Tatar through the window. Eroshka immediately recognized it as that of Lukashka.

“I’m home, I’m home, come in,” Eroshka called back in Tatar. “So, Luka Marka, you’ve come to visit your uncle? Are you off to the checkpoint?”

The hawk started up at its master’s booming voice, fluttered its wings, and tugged at its cord.

The old man liked Lukashka, the only one among the young generation of Cossacks he excluded from his contempt. Furthermore, Lukashka and his mother were neighbors and gave the old man wine and produce, like clotted cream. But Uncle Eroshka always looked at things from a practical standpoint. “Why not? These people are well enough off,” he would say to himself. “I give them fresh meat or a bird, and they don’t forget me either, and bring me a pie or a nice piece of flatcake.”

“Hello, Marka! I’m glad to see you,” the old man called out cheerfully, nimbly swinging his bare feet off the bed and jumping up. He took a few steps over the creaking floor, looked down at his turned-out feet, and suddenly found them funny. He smiled and stamped his heel on the floor, stamped it again, and then did a little jig.

“That was pretty good, wasn’t it?” he said, his small eyes twinkling.

Lukashka smiled faintly.

“So you’re off to the checkpoint?” the old man repeated.

“I brought the Chikhir I promised you the other day.”

“May Christ smile upon you!” the old man said. He picked up the trousers and the quilted coat that were lying on the floor, put them on, and tied a strap around his waist. He poured some water on his hands from a pot, wiped them on his trousers, and then smoothed out his beard with a broken piece of comb.

“I’m ready,” he said, going up to Lukashka, who took a mug, wiped it clean, poured the wine into it, and sitting down on a stool, handed it to him.

“To your health! In the name of the Father and the Son!” the old man said, solemnly taking the wine. “May you always get what you desire, may you always be valiant and earn yourself that medal!”

Lukashka also uttered a benediction, drank some wine, and put the mug down on the table. The old man got up, placed some dried fish on the doorstep, and began pounding it with a stick to soften it. He picked up the fish with his coarse hands, placed it on his only plate, and put it on the table.

“I lack for nothing, God be praised, I even have tasty things to eat,” he said proudly. “So what’s all this about Mosyev?”

Lukashka, eager for the old man’s opinion, told him how Sergeant Mosyev had taken the rifle that was rightfully his.

“Forget the rifle,” the old man said. “If you don’t let him keep it there won’t be any rewards.”

“But, Uncle, they say if you’re not yet a mounted Cossack, you can’t expect much of a reward—and the rifle’s a good one. It’s Crimean, worth a good eighty rubles!”

“Forget it! That’s how I once got into a fight with a lieutenant—he wanted my horse. ‘Give me your horse,’ he tells me, ‘and I’ll have you made a cornet.’ I wouldn’t give it to him, and so I didn’t get to be a cornet.”

“But, Uncle, I have to buy myself a horse, and they say you can’t get one across the river for less than fifty rubles, and Mother hasn’t sold the wine yet!”

“Ha! In my day we never bothered paying for horses,” the old man said. “When Uncle Eroshka was your age, he had rustled whole herds of horses from the Nogai and driven them over the Terek. I’d sometimes give a man a good horse for no more than a jug of vodka or a nice cloak.”

“You would hand over a horse for so little?”

“Marka, Marka, what a fool you are!” the old man said dismissively. “A man steals so that he doesn’t have to be a miser. I doubt you boys have ever seen how horses are rustled. Have you?”

“What can I say, Uncle,” Lukashka replied. “We are not the kind of Cossacks you were.”

“Marka, Marka, what a fool you are! ‘Not the kind of Cossacks you
were’!” the old man said, mimicking Lukashka. “You’re definitely not the kind of Cossack I was at your age!”

“What do you mean?”

The old man shook his head contemptuously. “Your uncle Eroshka was straightforward, and never asked the price of anything. That is why I was a blood brother to every Chechen. A blood brother would come visit me, I’d get him drunk on vodka, go carousing with him, give him a bed for the night—and when I’d go visit him, I’d always bring him a present, a
peshkesh
. That’s how things should be done, not the way they’re done nowadays! The only fun you boys know is cracking sunflower seeds and spitting out the shells,” the old man said scornfully, miming young Cossacks cracking seeds and spitting out shells.