What I thought was a wood had turned out to be a dark, round knoll. ‘Where on earth am I?’ I repeated again out loud, stopping for a third time and looking questioningly at my yellow English piebald, Diana, who was by far the most intelligent of all four-legged creatures. But this most intelligent of four-legged creatures only wagged her small tail, dejectedly blinked her tired little eyes and offered me no practical help. I felt ill at ease in front of her and strode wildly forward, as if I had suddenly realized which way to go, circled the knoll and found myself in a shallow hollow which had been ploughed over. A strange feeling took possession of me. The hollow had the almost exact appearance of a cauldron with sloping sides. Several large upright stones stood in the floor of the hollow – it seemed as if they had crept down to that spot for some mysterious consultation – and the hollow itself was so still and silent, the sky above it so flat and dismal that my heart shrank within me. A small animal of some kind or other squeaked weakly and piteously among the stones. I hurried to climb back on to the knoll. Up to that point I had not given up the hope of finding a way home, but now I was at last convinced that I had completely lost my way and, no longer making any effort to recognize my surroundings, which were almost totally obliterated by the darkness, I walked straight ahead of me, following the stars and hoping for the best… For about half an hour I walked on in this way, with difficulty, dragging one foot after another. Never in my life, it seemed, had I been in such waste places: not a single light burned anywhere, not a single sound could be heard: one low hillock followed another, field stretched after endless field and bushes suddenly rose out of the earth under my very nose. I went on walking and was on the point of finding a place to lie down until morning, when suddenly I reached the edge of a fearful abyss.
I hastily drew back my outstretched leg and, through the barely transparent night-time murk, saw far below me an enormous plain. A broad river skirted it, curving away from me in a semicircle; steely gleams of water, sparkling with occasional faint flashes, denoted its course. The hill on which I was standing fell away sharply like an almost vertical precipice. Its vast outlines could be distinguished by their blackness from the blue emptiness of the air and directly below me, in the angle formed by the precipice and the plain, beside the river, which at that point was a dark, unmoving mirror, under the steep rise of the hill, two fires smoked and flared redly side by side. Figures clustered round them, shadows flickered and now and then the front half of a small curly head would appear in the bright light.
At last I knew the place I had reached. This meadowland is known in our region as Bezhin Lea. There was now no chance of returning home, especially at night; moreover, my legs were collapsing under me from fatigue. I decided to make my way down to the fires and to await the dawn in the company of the people below me, whom I took to be drovers. I made my descent safely, but had hardly let go of my last hand-hold when suddenly two large, ragged, white dogs hurled themselves at me with angry barks. Shrill childish voices came from the fires and two or three boys jumped up. I answered their shouted questions. They ran towards me, at once calling off the dogs who had been astonished by the appearance of my Diana, and I walked towards them.
I had been mistaken in assuming that the people sitting round the fires were drovers. They were simply peasant boys from the neighbouring villages keeping guard over the horses. During hot summer weather it is customary in our region to drive the horses out at night to graze in the field, for by day the flies would give them no peace. Driving the horses out before nightfall and back again at first light is a great treat for the peasant boys. Bareheaded, dressed in tattered sheepskin jackets and riding the friskiest ponies, they race out with gay whoops and shouts, their arms and legs flapping as they bob up and down on the horses’ backs and roar with laughter. Clouds of fine sandy dust are churned up along the roadway; a steady beating of hooves spreads far and wide as the horses prick up their ears and start running; and in front of them all, with tail high and continuously changing his pace, gallops a shaggy chestnut stallion with burrs in his untidy mane.
I told the boys that I had lost my way and sat down among them. They asked me where I was from and fell silent for a while in awe of me. We talked a little about this and that. I lay down beside a bush from which all the foliage had been nibbled and looked around me. It was a marvellous sight: a reddish circular reflection throbbed around the fires and seemed to fade as it leaned against the darkness; a flame, in flaring up, would occasionally cast rapid flashes of light beyond the limit of the reflection; a fine tongue of light would lick the bare boughs of the willows and instantly vanish; and long sharp shadows, momentarily breaking in, would rush right up to the fires as if the darkness were at war with the light. Sometimes, when the flames grew weaker and the circle of light contracted, there would suddenly emerge from the encroaching dark the head of a horse, reddish brown, with sinuous markings, or completely white, and regard us attentively and gravely, while rapidly chewing some long grass and then, when again lowered, would at once disappear. All that was left was the sound as it continued to chew and snort. From the area of the light it was difficult to discern what was happening in the outer darkness, and therefore at close quarters, everything seemed to be screened from view by an almost totally black curtain; but off towards the horizon hills and woods were faintly visible, like long blurs. The immaculate dark sky rose solemnly and endlessly high above us in all its mysterious magnificence. My lungs melted with the sweet pleasure of inhaling that special, languorous and fresh perfume which is the scent of a Russian summer night. Hardly a sound was audible around us… Now and then a large fish would make a resounding splash in the nearby river and the reeds by the bank would faintly echo the noise as they were stirred by the outspreading waves… Now and then the fires would emit a soft crackling.
Around the fires sat the boys, as did the two dogs who had been so keen to eat me. They were still unreconciled to my presence and, while sleepily narrowing their eyes and glancing towards the fire, would sometimes growl with a special sense of their personal dignity; to start with these were only growls, but later they became faint yelps, as if the dogs regretted their inability to satisfy their appetite for me. There were five boys in all: Fedya, Pavlusha, Ilyusha, Kostya and Vanya. (I learned their names from their conversation and I now intend to acquaint the reader with each of them.)
The first of them, Fedya, the eldest, would probably have been fourteen. He was a sturdy boy, with handsome and delicate, slightly shallow features, curly fair hair, bright eyes and a permanent smile which was a mixture of gaiety and absent-mindedness. To judge from his appearance, he belonged to a well-off family and had ridden out into the fields not from necessity but simply for the fun of it. He was dressed in a colourful cotton shirt with yellow edging; a small cloth overcoat, recently made, hung open somewhat precariously on his small narrow shoulders and a comb hung from his pale-blue belt. His ankle-high boots were his own, not his father’s. The second boy, Pavlusha, had dishevelled black hair, grey eyes, broad cheekbones, a pale, pock-marked complexion, a large but well-formed mouth, an enormous head – as big as a barrel, as they say – and a thick-set, ungainly body. Hardly a prepossessing figure – there’s no denying that! – but I none the less took a liking to him: he had direct, very intelligent eyes and a voice with the ring of strength in it. His clothes gave him no chance of showing off: they consisted of no more than a simple linen shirt and much-patched trousers. The face of the third boy, Ilyusha, was not very striking: hook-nosed, long, myopic, it wore an expression of obtuse, morbid anxiety. His tightly closed lips never moved, his frowning brows never relaxed; all the while he screwed up his eyes at the fire. His yellow, almost white, hair stuck out in sharp little tufts from under the small felt cap which he was continually pressing down about his ears with both hands. He had new bast shoes and foot cloths; a thick rope wound three times round his waist drew smartly tight his neat black top-coat. Both he and Pavlusha appeared to be no more than twelve yea
rs old. The fourth, Kostya, a boy of about ten, aroused my curiosity by his sad and meditative gaze. His face was small, thin and freckled, and pointed like a squirrel’s; one could hardly see his lips. His large, dark, moistly glittering eyes produced a strange impression, as if they wanted to convey something which no tongue – at least not his tongue – had the power to express. He was small in stature, of puny build and rather badly dressed. The last boy, Vanya, I hardly noticed at first: he lay on the ground quietly curled up under some angular matting and only rarely poked out from under it his head of curly brown hair. This boy was only seven.
So it was that I lay down apart from them, beside the bush, and from time to time looked in their direction. A small pot hung over one of the fires, in which ‘taters’ were being cooked. Pavlusha looked after them and, kneeling down, poked the bubbling water with a small sliver of wood. Fedya lay, leaning on one elbow, his sheepskin spread round him. Ilyusha sat next to Kostya and continually, in his tense way, screwed up his eyes. Kostya, with his head slightly lowered, stared off somewhere into the distance. Vanya did not stir beneath his matting. I pretended to be asleep. After a short while the boys renewed their talk.
To start with, they gossiped about this and that – tomorrow’s work or the horses. But suddenly Fedya turned to Ilyusha and, as if taking up from where they had left off their interrupted conversation, asked him:
‘So you actually did see one of them little people, did you?’
‘No, I didn’t see him, and you can’t really see him at all,’ answered Ilyusha in a weak, croaky voice which exactly suited the expression on his face, ‘but I heard him, I did. And I wasn’t the only one.’
‘Then where does he live around your parts?’ asked Pavlusha.
‘In the old rolling-room.’*
‘D’you mean you work in the factory?’
‘Of course we do. Me and Avdyushka, my brother, we work as glazers.’
‘Cor! So you’re factory workers!’
‘Well, so how did you hear him?’ asked Fedya.
‘It was this way. My brother, see, Avdyushka, and Fyodor Mikheyevsky, and Ivashka Kosoy, and the other Ivashka from Redwold, and Ivashka Sukhorukov as well, and there were some other kids as well, about ten of us in all, the whole shift, see – well, so we had to spend the whole night in the rolling-room, or it wasn’t that we had to, but that Nazarov, the overseer, he wouldn’t let us off, he said: “Seeing as you’ve got a lot of work here tomorrow, my lads, you’d best stay here; there’s no point in the lot o’you traipsing off home.” Well, so we stayed and all lay down together, and then Avdyushka started up saying something about “Well, boys, suppose that goblin comes?” and he didn’t have a chance, Avdey didn’t, to go on saying anything when all of a sudden over our heads someone comes in, but we were lying down below, see, and he was up there, by the wheel. We listen, and there he goes walking about, and the floorboards really bending under him and really creaking. Then he walked right over our heads and the water all of a sudden starts rushing, rushing through the wheel, and the wheel goes clatter, clatter and starts turning, but them gates of the Keep* are all lowered. So we start wondering who’d raised them so as to let the water through. Yet the wheel turned and turned, and then stopped. Whoever he was, he went back to the door upstairs and began coming down the stairway, and down he came, taking his time about it, and the stairs under him really groaning from his weight… Well, so he came right up to our door, and then waited, and then waited a bit more – and then that door suddenly burst open, it did. Our eyes were poppin’ out of our heads, and we watch – and there’s nothing there… And suddenly at one of the tubs the form† started moving, rose, dipped itself and went to and fro just like that in the air like someone was using it for swilling, and then back again it went to its place. Then at another tub the hook was lifted from its nail and put back on the nail again. Then it was as if someone moved to the door and started to cough all sudden-like, like he’d got a tickle, and it sounded just like a sheep bleating… We all fell flat on the floor at that and tried to climb under each other – bloody terrified we were at that moment!’
‘Cor!’ said Pavlusha. ‘And why did he cough like that?’
‘Search me. Maybe it was the damp.’
They all fell silent.
‘Are them ’taters done yet?’ Fedya asked.
Pavlusha felt them.
‘Nope, they’re not done yet… Cor, that one splashed,’ he added, turning his face towards the river, ‘likely it was a pike… And see that little falling star up there.’
‘Now, mates, I’ve really got something to tell you,’ Kostya began in a reedy voice. ‘Just you listen to what my dad was talkin’ about when I was there.’
‘Well, so we’re listening,’ said Fedya with a condescending air.
‘You know that Gavrila, the carpenter in the settlement?’
‘Sure we know him.’
‘But d’you know why he’s always so gloomy, why he never says nothing, d’you know that? Well, here’s why. He went out once, my dad said – he went out, mates, into the forest to find some nuts. So he’d gone into the forest after nuts and he lost his way. He got somewhere, but God knows where it was. He’d been walkin’, mates, and no! he couldn’t find a road of any kind, and already it was night all around. So he sat down under a tree and said to himself he’d wait there till mornin’ – and he sat down and started to snooze. So he was snoozin’ and suddenly he hears someone callin’ him. He looks around – there’s no one there. Again he snoozes off– and again they’re callin’ him. So he looks and looks, and then he sees right in front of him a water-fairy sittin’ on a branch, swingin’ on it she is and callin’ to him, and she’s just killin’ herself laughin’… Then that moon shines real strong, so strong and obvious the moon shines it shows up everythin’, mates. So there she is callin’ his name, and she herself’s all shiny, sittin’ there all white on the branch, like she was some little minnow or gudgeon, or maybe like a carp that’s all whitish all over, all silver… And Gavrila the carpenter was just frightened to death, mates, and she went on laughin’ at him, you know, and wavin’ to him to come closer. Gavrila was just goin’ to get up and obey the water-fairy, when, mates, the Lord God gave him the idea to cross his-self… An’ it was terrible difficult, mates, he said it was terrible difficult to make the sign of the cross ’cos his arm was like stone, he said, and wouldn’t move, the darned thing wouldn’t! But soon as he’d managed to cross hisself, mates, that water-fairy stopped laughin’ and started in to cry… An’ she cried, mates, an’ wiped her eyes with her hair that was green and heavy as hemp. So Gavrila kept on lookin’ and lookin’ at her, and then he started askin’ her, “What’s it you’re cryin’ for, you forest hussy, you?” And that water-fairy starts sayin’ to him, “If you hadn’t crossed yourself, human being that you are, you could’ve lived with me in joy and happiness to the end of your days, an’ I’m cryin’ and dyin’ of grief over what that you crossed yourself, an’ it isn’t only me that’ll be dyin’ of grief, but you’ll also waste away with grievin’ till the end of your born days.” Then, mates, she vanished, and Gavrila at once comprehended-like – how to get out of the wood, that is; but from that day on he goes around everywhere all gloomy.’
‘Phew!’ exclaimed Fedya after a short silence. ‘But how could that evil forest spirit infect a Christian soul – you said he didn’t obey her, didn’t you?’
‘You wouldn’t believe it, but that’s how it was!’ said Kostya. ‘Gavrila claimed she had a tiny, tiny, voice, thin and croaky like a toad’s.’
‘Your father told that himself?’ Fedya continued.
‘He did. I was lyin’ on my bunk an’ I heard it all.’
‘What a fantastic business! But why’s he got to be gloomy? She must’ve liked him, because she called to him.’
‘Of course she liked him!’ Ilyusha interrupted. ‘Why not? She wanted to start tickling him, that’s what she wanted. That’s what they do, those water-fairies
.’
‘Surely there’ll be water-fairies here,’ Fedya remarked.
‘No,’ Kostya answered, ‘this is a clean place here, it’s free. ’Cept the river’s close.’
They all grew quiet. Suddenly, somewhere in the distance, a protracted, resonant, almost wailing sound broke the silence – one of those incomprehensible nocturnal sounds which arise in the deep surrounding hush, fly up, hang in the air and slowly disperse at last as if dying away. You listen intently – it’s as though there’s nothing there, but it still goes on ringing. This time it seemed that someone gave a series of long, loud shouts on the very horizon and someone else answered him from the forest with sharp high-pitched laughter and a thin, hissing whistle which sped across the river. The boys looked at each other and shuddered.
‘The power of the holy cross be with us!’ whispered Ilyusha.
‘Oh, you idiots!’ Pavlusha cried. ‘What’s got into you? Look, the ‘taters are done.’ (They all drew close to the little pot and began to eat the steaming potatoes; Vanya was the only one who made no move.) ‘What’s wrong with you?’ Pavlusha asked.
But Vanya did not crawl out from beneath his matting. The little pot was soon completely empty.
‘Boys, have you heard,’ Ilyusha began saying, ‘what happened to us in Varnavitsy just recently?’
‘On that dam, you mean?’ Fedya asked.
‘Ay, on that dam, the one that’s broken. That’s a real unclean place, real nasty and empty it is. Round there is all them gullies and ravines, and in the ravines there’s masses of snakes.’
‘Well, what happened? Let’s hear.’
‘This is what happened. Maybe you don’t know it, Fedya, but that’s the place where one of our drowned men is buried. And he drowned a long time back when the pond was still deep. Now only his gravestone can be seen, only there’s not much of it – it’s just a small mound… Anyhow, a day or so ago, the bailiff calls Yermil the dog-keeper and says to him: “Off with you and fetch the mail.” Yermil’s always the one who goes to fetch the mail ‘cos he’s done all his dogs in – they just don’t somehow seem to live when he’s around, and never did have much of a life no-how, though he’s a good man with dogs and took to it in every way. Anyhow, Yermil went for the mail, and then he mucked about in the town and set off home real drunk. And it’s night-time, a bright night, with the moon shining… So he’s riding back across the dam, ‘cos that’s where his route came out. And he’s riding along, this dog-keeper Yermil, and he sees a little lamb on the drowned man’s grave, all white and curly and pretty, and it’s walking about, and Yermil thinks: “I’ll pick it up, I will, ‘cos there’s no point in letting it get lost here,” and so he gets off his horse and picks it up in his arms – and the lamb doesn’t turn a hair. So Yermil walks back to the horse, but the horse backs away from him, snorts and shakes its head. So when he’s quieted it, he sits on it with the lamb and starts off again holding the lamb in front of him. He looks at the lamb, he does, and the lamb looks right back at him right in the eyes. Then that Yermil the dog-keeper got frightened: “I don’t recall,” he thought, “no lambs looking me in the eye like that afore.” Anyhow, it didn’t seem nothing, so he starts stroking its wool and saying “Sssh, there, sssh!” And that lamb bares its teeth at him sudden-like and says back to him: “Sssh, there, sssh!…”’