Having walked nearly four miles, the police deputies and the tramp sit down on a little hill to have a rest.
“Even a dog knows his name,” Ptaha mutters. “My name’s Andryushka, his is Nikandr; every man shall have his own holy name, and it ain’t to be forgot. No way.”
“Who’d have any need to know my name?” sighs the tramp and sets his cheek on his fist. “And what good will it do me? If they allowed me to go where I want, but it would be even worse than now. I know the law, my Christian brethren. Now I am a tramp who-don’t-remember-his-name, and at the very least they will send me to Eastern Siberia and give me thirty or forty lashes; but if it happens that I tell them my real name and calling they’ll send me back to hard labor, I know it!”
“You have been in hard labor, have you?”
“I was, my friend. I had a shaved head and irons on my legs for four years.”
“What for?”
“Murder, good fellow! When I was still a boy of eighteen or so, my mamma had an accidental oversight. She dropped some arsenic into the master’s glass instead of soda and acid. There were all sorts of boxes in the storeroom, lots of them; it was very easy to have made a mistake over them.”
The tramp sighs, shakes his head, and says:
“She was very good in her heart, but—who knows?—another man’s soul is always dark. She mayn’t have know’d, or she may’ve had this insult in her heart that the master preferred another servant…. She may’ve put it in on purpose, God knows! I was so small at that time as I didn’t understand it all … now I remember it, our master did reveal a favor to another mistress and Mamma was very much upset. And then they sent us to trial for two years or so…. Mamma was condemned to hard labor for twenty years, and I, being a infant, only for seven.”
“And why did they condemn you?”
“As an accomplice. You see, it was I that handed the glass to the master. It’s always been that way: Mamma’d prepare the soda and I handed it to him. But look here, brothers, I tell it all to you now as a good Christian, like before the Lord. You don’t tell anybody.”
“Well, nobody’s gonna ask us, be sure,” says Ptaha. “So you’ve run away from the labor, right?”
“I have, my friend. It was about fourteen of us. Those folks—Lord bless them!—ran away themselves and took me with them. Now you tell me, good man, in all honesty, is this a fair reason for me to hide my calling? They will send me back to hard labor in the blink of an eye, you know! And I am no hard laborer! I am timid and given to sickness, and I have a preference for eating and sleeping in a tidy place. When I pray to God I like to light a little icon-lamp or a candle, and not to hear noise around me. And when I bow down before Christ I want the floor be clean and not spit upon. And I do forty bows for my mamma every morning and evening.”
The tramp takes off his cap and crosses himself.
“And let them send me to Eastern Siberia,” he says “I am not afeared of that.”
“You think it’s better?”
“That’s pretty much a different thing. You are like a crab in a basket at the labor: it’s all crowd and crush, no room to catch your breath there; it’s absolute hell, such a hell as may the queen of heaven spare us from it! You are a bandit and they treat you like a bandit, worse than a dog. You don’t eat, you don’t sleep, you don’t even pray to God. But the settlement ain’t like that at all. The first thing I’ll do in the settlement is that I make myself a member of society like all other folks. The chiefs must give me a piece of land as the law says, that’s exactly how it is! And they say the land there don’t cost anything, no more than snow; you can take as much you like! So they’ll give me my field land, and my garden land, and my house land. I shall plough my field like other people, and sow seed, and I shall have cattle and stock of all kinds, and bees, and sheep, and dogs. A Siberian cat so rats and mice don’t spoil my goods. I’ll put up a house, and buy all sorts of icons, and get married and have children, God willing.”
The tramp is muttering, looking sideways. Although his dreaming appears unrealistic, the tramp’s voice sounds so sincere and affectionate that it is hard not to believe in what he is saying. The tramp’s little mouth is distorted in a smile, while his whole face, his eyes, and his little nose have become frozen still and blank with blissful anticipation of distant happiness. The police deputies are listening to him, their faces quite serious and rather sympathetic. They, too, believe him.
“I ain’t afeared of Siberia,” the tramp is muttering on. “Siberia is the same Russia as here, with the same Lord and tsar, and they talk there in the same orthodox way like you and me. But it’s more easier there and folks are better off. Everything’s better there. Take the rivers there, they are so much better than ours here. And astonishing crowds of fishes and all sorts of game. And I, dear brothers, I’m particularly fond of fishing. Sit me down with a hook, and I ask no more. Yes, indeed! I fish with a hook and a reel, and I set traps, and on ice I fish with a net. See, I ain’t got that strength to fish with a net, so I’d hire a man for a fiver. And, Lord, how wonderful it is! You catch an eelpout or a chub of some sort and you are so happy like you’ve met your own brother. And, you won’t believe it, there’s particular wisdom for catching every fish: you catch one with a little fish, you catch another with a worm, and for the third you prepare a frog or a grasshopper. And you ought to understand it all! Take the eelpout for example. The eelpout has no particular respect, it can even take a ruff; and the pike loves to have gudgeon, the snapper likes butterfly. If you fish for a chub in a quick river it is no trout pleasure. You throw the line for, like, twelve meters without a sinker, with a butterfly or a beetle, so that the bait floats atop; you stand in the water without pants and let it go with the current, and here comes the pull! But here you need to be tricky so that he, the cursed thing, won’t tear off. Once he pulls at your line you strike right away; no time to wait. Unbelievable how much fish I’ve caught in my time. When we were on the run, the other convicts would sleep in the woods, but I wouldn’t, the river lures me! And the rivers there are wide and fast, and the banks are steep—astonishing! It’s all slumbering forests along the bank. The trees are so high so that if you look at their tops it makes you giddy. Every pine would cost, like, ten rubles by the prices here.”
Pressed by the confusion of disorderly daydreams, of artistic representations of the past and a sweet presentiment of happiness, the poor man falls silent, merely moving his lips as if he were whispering to himself. The stupid blissful smile won’t leave his face. The police deputies are silent. Absorbed in reflection, they have lowered their heads. In the autumn stillness, when a cold, stern fog rises from the earth and covers your heart, when it stands before your eyes like a prison wall, and reminds man of the limits of his liberty, it feels so sweet to think of broad, rapid rivers with wild steep banks, of primeval forests and endless steppes. Slowly and peacefully the imagination pictures an early morning with the flush of dawn still on the sky and a man—like a tiny spot—making his way along a steep deserted bank; the ancient mast pines that tower in terraces on both sides of the torrent watch the free-willed man gravely and grumble gloomily; roots, huge stones, and thorny bushes lie in his way, but the man is strong in body and good in spirit and fears neither pines nor stones, nor his solitude, nor the reverberating echo that repeats the sound of every step he takes.
The police deputies are imagining the images of the life happy and free, the one that they have never lived; God knows whether they are vaguely recalling what they heard long ago or whether the notions of liberty have been passed down to them by some distant free-willed ancestor along with their flesh and blood.
Nikolai Sapozhnikov, who has not uttered a word so far, is the first to break the silence. He may have envied the tramp’s illusory happiness or he may have felt deep in his heart that daydreaming of happiness has nothing to do with the gray fog and the blackish-brown mud; anyhow, he casts a stern eye on the tramp and says:
“It’s all very we
ll, to be sure, only that you won’t make it to those benevolent locations, old fellow, you won’t. Before you go two hundred miles you’ll yield up the ghost. Look how very puny you are! Here, you’ve hardly gone five miles and you can’t get your breath.”
The tramp turns slowly toward Nikandr, and the blissful smile vanishes from his face. He stares with fear and guilt at the man’s sedate face, apparently recalls something, and lowers his head. Silence falls again. All the three are reflecting. The minds of the police deputies are straining to embrace in the imagination what can be grasped by God alone, that is, that awful expanse separating them from the land of liberty. Meanwhile, images that are quite clear and distinct, and even more awful than that vast expanse, are filling the tramp’s mind. Pictures of legal procrastination, of transit and convict prisons, of weary stops on the way and bitter-cold winters, of the illnesses and deaths of his companions all stand vividly before his eyes. The tramp blinks guiltily, wipes the tiny drops of sweat from his forehead with his sleeve, and takes a deep breath as if he has just leaped out of a very hot bathhouse, then wipes his forehead with the other sleeve and looks around with fear.
“Sure, you’ll never make it there!” Ptaha agrees. “You ain’t much of a walker! Look at yourself—nothing but skin and bones! You’ll die, old fellow!”
“Of course he’ll die! What else could he do?” says Nikandr. “And now, too, he’ll go to a hospital. That’s for sure!”
He-who-doesn’t-remember-his-name looks in awe at the strict and passionless faces of his sinister companions and, keeping his cap on, his eyes open wide, hurriedly crosses himself…. He trembles, his head shakes, and his whole body starts twitching like a caterpillar when it is stepped upon.
“Well, it’s time to go,” says Nikandr, getting up; “we’ve had a rest.”
A minute later the travelers are marching on along the muddy road. The tramp is more bent than ever, his hands thrust deeper into his sleeves. Ptaha keeps silence.
A CRIME: A DOUBLE MURDER CASE
A terrible crime was committed over there, in that ravine behind the woods.
It happened on the day when my father had to deliver a large amount of money to the landlord; he had fifty thousand rubles on him. Several of the local farmers were tenants, and my father had to collect and deliver the payment for their leases of this land for the last six months.
He was a God-fearing man who respected the law, never stole so much as a kopeck in his life, and never cheated anyone. So, everyone knew that he was an honest man, and the local farmers always sent him as their representative whenever anyone had to send something into the city: money, documents, whatever.
However, my father did have one weakness—he liked to drink, and every time he saw a pub or a tavern, he could not pass it by without stopping for a glass of wine. He was aware of this weakness of his, and so, whenever he had to carry other people’s money, he used to take a companion with him—either me or my little sister Anna.
To tell you the truth, this habit runs in our family. People say that vodka is the blood of Satan. Look at me—my face is always red from my own constant drinking, and I slur my words, and even though I had a pretty decent education, I have to work as a cabbie, like some sort of ignoramus.
So, my dad carried the money and my little sister Anna went with him, sitting beside him in his cart. She was seven or eight years old at the time, and she was very short and not all that bright. They got about halfway to the city without any difficulty, but as soon as he spotted Moses’ Pub, he dropped in, had a few glasses of wine, got himself drunk, and started to brag:
“Hey, you guys, look at me! I’m just a little guy, a nothing farmer, but I have a ton of money with me—all in cash. If I wanted to, I could buy this whole tavern, including Moses, his wife and kids, and the cat. I can buy anything with this money, you name it!”
He made all kinds of jokes, boasting about the money he had, and at the end he complained,
“Listen boys, it’s not so easy being rich. If you have no money, you have nothing to worry about. But if you have a lot of money, you have to take care of it, and you’ve got to be careful that nobody steals it from you.”
The pub was filled with people at the time, and most of them were drunk, but they all heard what he said. There were all kinds of people, including bums, tramps, and robbers, in this pub on that highway. All of a sudden, my dad realized that he had said too much, and he got scared. He left the pub in a hurry and went on his way. As he was reaching the forest, he could hear the sounds of a chase—several horses were galloping behind him.
“They’re after me,” my dad said to little Anna. “I should have held my tongue in that pub. I think I’m in trouble.”
He thought for a while and then he said, “They are definitely after me, that’s for sure. Here dear, Anna, take this bundle with the money and go hide in the bush. If something bad happens to me, give this money to your mother, and tell her to give it back to the farmers. Go, child, go, right across the forest, and don’t talk to anybody.”
So he gave her the money, and she hid herself in a thick bush. She saw that shortly, three riders came to her dad. One of them was a big-faced tall man in a red silk shirt, and the other two were day laborers from the railroad, the local bandits. They stopped their horses, and spoke roughly to my dad:
“Hey you, wait! Where’s the money?”
“What are you talking about? What money? Let me go!”
“The money that you’re bringing to your landlord for the leases. Give us the money, or we’re going to kill you!”
And so they started tormenting my father, and instead of asking for mercy, he was laughing and mocking them,
“Hey, you bums, get out of here! You’re a bad lot. You don’t deserve any money, just a good beating, enough to make your back ache for the next three years. Let me go, or I’ll defend myself. I have a revolver in my pocket!”
The robbers lost their patience when he said this, and they started beating him as hard as they could.
They searched him and the whole carriage, and they even took his boots; when my father went on scolding them after this, they started to torture him in other ways. Little Anna was so scared that she ran away through the thick forest. She ran for several hours, and it got dark. All by herself, deep in the forest, she was very frightened.
Suddenly she saw a little light in the distance. She went closer and saw that it was a forest ranger’s hut. She knocked at the door, and a woman opened it and let her in.
Little Anna gave her the money to keep and told her the whole story.
The old woman put her to bed to sleep.
In the middle of the night, a man came into the house.
Anna saw that this was the same tall robber in the red shirt. He said,
“Listen, wife, I think that we killed a man needlessly. We murdered him, but there was no money on him.”
My sister understood that the man in the red shirt was the forest ranger, and the woman was his wife.
“We just killed a man for nothing,” his two rugged friends said. “We have sinned, killing that guy for no reason at all.”
The forest ranger’s wife looked at them and smiled.
“Why are you laughing, you stupid old woman?”
“I’m laughing because I have not sinned, and I have not killed anyone, and yet I got all the money.”
“What money? You are a liar!”
“Look here, and then you can say whether I am a liar or not.”
The woman untied the bundle, and showed them the money, and then she told them how little Anna came to her, and what she said and all that. The killers got happy and started arguing about how to share the money; they almost started a fight, but then they sat down at the table to eat.
Little Anna lay in bed. She heard everything that they said to each other, and she was very scared. What could she do? She had learned from their conversation that her father was already dead; he was lying in the middle of the road, and she
imagined that the wolves and wild dogs were eating him, and that their only horse had escaped far into the forest and was also being eaten by the wolves, and that she too would be punished and beaten by the police because she did not save the money.
When the robbers finished eating, they sent the woman for vodka and wine. They had a lot of money now, and they could afford it. So they drank and sang songs and then they sent the woman for more wine. One of them said,
“We can drink all night, until morning. We have lots of money now, and we don’t have to count our kopecks. Go ahead, drink like a fish!”
By midnight, they were thoroughly trashed. The woman had just been sent to fetch more wine, for the third time. The forest ranger stood up and paced across the room, trying to keep his balance.
“Listen, boys, we have to deal with that little girl somehow. We’ve got to get rid of her. If we leave her here, she’ll be the first one to turn us in.”
Their discussion was short. Anna could not be allowed to live. She should be stabbed. And yet, it is not so easy to take a butcher knife to a sleeping child—only a drunk or a madman can do this. The argument about who should kill her lasted for almost an hour. They almost started another fight; no one would agree to do it, and they ended up casting lots. It fell to the forest ranger. He downed another glass of vodka, heaved a deep sigh, stood up, and went outside to find his axe.
But little Anna was not so stupid. Maybe she was a bit slow at that age, but this time she did a smart thing. Maybe it was God who gave her this idea, or maybe you just get smart if your life depends on it.
She stood up quietly from the bed, took the fur coat that the forest ranger’s wife had given to her, and covered their daughter who lay next to her on the bed with this coat. Quietly, she took the other girl’s cardigan and put it on. Then, she pulled the hood over her head and face and walked across the room, past the two drunken labourers, and outside. They thought that she was the forest ranger’s daughter and they never gave her a second glance. She was lucky that the woman was out at the moment—she had gone for more wine; she would have known whether it was her daughter or not.