The narrator had hardly uttered this last sound when the dogs sprang up and with convulsive barks dashed from the fire, disappearing into the night. The boys were terrified. Vanya even jumped out from beneath his mat. Shouting, Pavlusha followed in hot pursuit of the dogs. Their barking quickly retreated into the distance. There was a noisy and restless scurrying of hoofs among the startled horses. Pavlusha gave loud calls: ‘Gray! Beetle!’ After a few seconds the barking ceased and Pavlusha’s voice sounded far away. There followed another short pause, while the boys exchanged puzzled looks as if anticipating something new. Suddenly a horse could be heard racing towards them: it stopped sharply at the very edge of the fire and Pavlusha, clutching hold by the reins, sprang agilely from its back. Both dogs also leapt into the circle of light and at once sat down, their red tongues hanging out.
‘What’s there? What is it?’ the boys asked.
‘Nothing,’ Pavlusha answered waving away the horse. ‘The dogs caught a scent. I thought,’ he added in a casual tone of voice, his chest heaving rapidly, ‘it might have been a wolf.’
I found myself full of admiration for Pavlusha. He was very fine at that moment. His very ordinary face, enlivened by the swift ride, shone with bold courageousness and a resolute firmness. Without a stick in his hand to control the horse and in total darkness, without even so much as blinking an eye, he had galloped all by himself after a wolf… ‘What a marvellous boy!’ was my thought, as I looked at him.
‘And you saw them, did you, those wolves?’ asked the cowardly Kostya.
‘There’s plenty of them round here,’ answered Pavlusha, ‘but they’re only on the prowl in the winter.’
He again settled himself in front of the fire. As he sat down he let a hand fall on the shaggy neck of one of the dogs and the delighted animal kept its head still for a long while as it directed sideward looks of grateful pride at Pavlusha.
Vanya once again disappeared under his mat.
‘What a lot of horrible things you’ve been telling us, Ilyusha,’ Fedya began. As the son of a rich peasant, it was incumbent upon him to play the role of leader (though for his own part he talked little, as if for fear of losing face). ‘And it could’ve been some darned thing of the sort that started the dogs barking… But it’s true, so I’ve heard, that you’ve got unclean spirits where you live.’
‘In Varnavitsy, you mean? That’s for sure! It’s a really creepy place! More than once they say they’ve seen there the old squire, the one who’s dead. They say he goes about in a coat hanging down to his heels, and all the time he makes a groaning sound, like he’s searching for something on the earth. Once grandfather Trofimych met him and asked him: “What’s it you are searching for on the earth, good master Ivan Ivanych?” ’
‘He actually asked him that?’ broke in the astonished Fedya.
‘He asked him that.’
‘Well, good for Trofimych after that! So what did the other say?’
‘ ”Split-grass,” he says. “That’s what I’m looking for.” And he talks in such a hollow, hoarse voice: “Split-grass. And what, good master Ivan Ivanych, do you want split-grass for?” “Oh, my grave weighs so heavy,” he says, “weighs so heavy on me, Trofimych, and I want to get out, I want to get away…” ’
‘So that’s what it was!’ Fedya said. ‘He’d had too short a life, that means.’
‘Cor, stone me!’ Kostya pronounced. ‘I thought you could only see dead people on Parents’ Sunday.’
‘You can see dead people at any time,’ Ilyusha declared with confidence. So far as I could judge, he was better versed in village lore than the others. ‘But on Parents’ Sunday you can also see the people who’re going to die that year. All you’ve got to do is to sit down at night in the porch of the church and keep your eyes on the road. They’ll all go past you along the road – them who’re going to die that year, I mean. Last year, grandma Ulyana went to the church porch in our village.’
‘Well, did she see anyone?’ Kostya asked him with curiosity.
‘Sure she did. To start with she just sat there a long, long time, and didn’t see no one and didn’t hear nothing. Only there was all the time a sound like a dog starting to bark somewhere. Then suddenly she sees there’s someone coming along the road – it’s a little boy in nothing but a shirt. She looked close and she saw it was Ivashka Fedoseyev walking along.’
‘Is that the boy who died in the spring!’ Fedya broke in.
‘That’s the one. He walks along and doesn’t even raise his head. But Ulyana recognized him. But then she looks again and sees a woman walking along, and she peers and peers and – God help us! – it’s she herself, Ulyana herself, walking along.’
‘Was it really her?’ asked Fedya.
‘God’s truth. It was her.’
‘But she hasn’t died yet, has she?’
‘No, but the year’s not over yet either. You take a close look at her and then ask yourself what sort of body she’s got to carry her soul around in.’
Again they all grew quiet. Pavlusha threw a handful of dry sticks on the fire. They blackened in sharp outline against the instantly leaping flames, and began to crackle and smoke and bend, curling up their burned tips. The reflections from the light, shuddering convulsively, struck out in all directions, but particularly upwards. Suddenly, from God knows where, a small white pigeon flew directly into the reflections, fluttered around in terror, bathed by the fierce light, and then vanished with a clapping of its wings.
‘Likely it’s lost its way home,’ Pavlusha remarked. ‘Now it’ll fly until it meets up with something, and when it finds it, that’s where it’ll spend the night till dawn.’
‘Look, Pavlusha,’ said Kostya, ‘mightn’t that be the soul of some good person flying up to heaven, eh?’
Pavlusha threw another handful of sticks on the fire.
‘Maybe,’ he said after a pause.
‘Pavlusha, tell us, will you,’ Fedya began, ‘were you able to see that heavenly foreboding* in Shalamavo?’
‘You mean, when you couldn’t see the sun that time? Sure.’
‘Didn’t you get frightened then?’
‘Sure, and we weren’t the only ones. Our squire, tho’ he lets us know beforehand that “Well, there’ll be a foreboding for you,” but soon as it gets dark they say he got real scared. And in the servants’ hut, that old granny, the cook, well – soon as it’s dark, listen, she ups and smashes all the pots in the oven with a pair of tongs. “Who’s going to need to eat now it’s the end of the world,” she says. The cabbage soup ran out all over everywhere. And, boy! What rumours there were going about in our village, such as there’d be white wolves and birds of prey coming to eat people, and there’d be Trishka* himself for all to see.’
‘What’s this Trishka?’ asked Kostya.
‘Don’t you know about Trishka?’ Ilyusha started up heatedly. ‘You’re a dumb cluck, mate, if you don’t know who Trishka is. It’s just dunces you’ve got in your village, nothing but dunces! Trishka – he’ll be a real astonishing person, who’ll be coming, and he’ll be coming when the last times are near. And he’ll be the sort of astonishing person you won’t be able to catch hold of, you won’t be able to do nothing to him: that’s the sort of astonishing person he’ll be. The peasants, say, will want to try to catch him, and they’ll go out after him with sticks and surround him, but what he’ll do is lead their eyes astray – he’ll lead their eyes astray so that they start beating each other. Say they put him in prison and he asks for some water in a ladle; they’ll bring him the ladle and he’ll jump right into it and vanish clean away, all trace of him. Say they put chains on him, he’ll just clap his palms together and they’ll fall right off him. So then this Trishka’ll go walking through the villages and the towns; and this smart fellow, this Trishka, he’ll tempt all Christian folk… but there won’t be a thing you can do to him… That’s the sort of astonishing, real cunning person he’ll be.’
‘Yes, that’s the one,’ Pavlu
sha continued in his unhurried way. ‘He was the one that we were all waiting for. The old men said that soon as the heavenly foreboding begins, Trishka’ll be coming. So the foreboding began, and everyone poured out into the street and into the field to see what’ll happen. As you know, our place is high up and open so you can see all around. Everyone’s looking – and suddenly down from the settlement on the mountain there’s a man coming, strange-looking, with an astonishing big head… Everyone starts shouting: “Oy, oy, it’s Trishka coming! Oy, oy, it’s Trishka!” and they all raced for hiding, this way and that! The elder of our village, he crawled into a ditch and his wife got stuck in a gate and let out such a howling noise that she fair terrified her own watch-dog, and it broke its chain, rushed through the fence and into the wood. And Kuzka’s father, Dorofeyich, jumped in among the oats, squatted down there and began to make cries like a quail, all ’cos he thought to himself: “For sure that soul-destroying enemy of mankind’ll spare a poor wee birdie!” Such a commotion they were all in!… But all the time that man who was coming was simply our barrel-maker Vavila, who’d bought himself a new can and was walking along with that empty can perched on his head.’
All the boys burst out laughing and then once again fell quiet for an instant, as people talking out in the open air frequently do. I looked around me: the night stood guard in solemn majesty; the raw freshness of late evening had been replaced by midnight’s dry mildness, and it still had a long time to lie like a soft quilt over the dreaming fields; there was still a long time to wait until the first murmur, the first rustlings and stirrings of morning, the first dew-beads of dawn. There was no moon in the sky: at that season it rose late. Myriads of golden stars, it seemed, were all quietly flowing in glittering rivalry along the Milky Way, and in truth, while looking at them, one sensed vaguely the unwavering, unstoppable racing of the earth beneath…
A strange, sharp, sickening cry resounded twice in quick succession across the river, and, after a few moments, was repeated farther off…
Kostya shuddered: ‘What was that?’
‘That was a heron’s cry,’ Pavlusha answered calmly.
‘A heron,’ Kostya repeated. ‘Then what was it, Pavlusha, I heard yesterday evening?’ he added after a brief pause. ‘Perhaps you know.’
‘What did you hear?’
‘This is what I heard. I was walkin’ from Stone Ridge to Shashkino, and at first I went all the way along by our nut trees, but afterwards I went through that meadow – you know, by the place where it comes out like a narrow file,* where there’s a tarn.† You know it, the one that’s all overgrown with reeds. So, mates, I walked past this tarn an’ suddenly someone starts makin’ a groanin’ sound from right inside it, so piteous, piteous, like: Oooh – oooh… oooh – oooh! I was terrified, mates. It was late an’ that voice sounded like somebody really sick. It was like I was goin’ to start cryin’ myself… What would that have been, eh?’
‘In the summer before last, thieves drowned Akim the forester in that tarn,’ Pavlusha remarked. ‘So it may have been his soul complaining.’
‘Well, it might be that, mates,’ rejoined Kostya, widening his already enormous eyes. ‘I didn’t know that Akim had been drowned in that tarn. If I’d known, I wouldn’t have got so terrified.’
‘But they do say,’ continued Pavlusha, ‘there’s a kind of little frog makes a piteous noise like that.’
‘Frogs? No, that wasn’t frogs… what sort of…’ (The heron again gave its cry over the river.) ‘Listen to it!’ Kostya could not refrain from saying. ‘It makes a noise like a wood-demon.’
‘Wood-demons don’t make a cry, they’re dumb,’ Ilyusha inserted. ‘They just clap their hands and chatter…’
‘So you’ve seen one of them, a wood-demon, have you?’ Fedya interrupted him scornfully.
‘No I haven’t, and God preserve that I should see one. But other people have seen one. Just a few days ago one such overtook one of our peasants and was leading him all over the place through the wood and round and round some clearing or other… He only just managed to get home before it was light.’
‘Well, did he see him?’
‘He saw him. Big as big he was, he said, and dark, all wrapped up, just like he was behind a tree so you couldn’t see him clearly, or like he was hiding from the moon, and looking all the time, peering with his wicked eyes, and winking them, winking…’
‘That’s enough!’ exclaimed Fedya, shuddering slightly and convulsively hunching his shoulders. ‘Phew!’
‘Why should this devilish thing be around in the world?’ commented Pavlusha. ‘I don’t understand it at all!’
‘Don’t you scold it! It’ll hear you, you’ll see,’ Ilyusha said.
Again a silence ensued.
‘Look up there, look up there, all of you!’ the childish voice of Vanya suddenly cried. ‘Look at the little stars of God, all swarming like bees!’
He had stuck his small, fresh-complexioned face out from beneath the matting, was leaning on one little fist and slowly looking up with his large, placid eyes. The boys all raised their eyes to the sky, and did not lower them until quite a while had passed.
‘Tell me, Vanya,’ Fedya began to say in a gentle voice, ‘is your sister Anyutka well?’
‘She’s well,’ Vanya answered, with a faint lisp.
‘You tell her she ought to come and see us. Why doesn’t she?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Tell her that she ought to come.’
‘I’ll tell her.’
‘Tell her that I’ll give her a present.’
‘And you’ll give one to me, too?’
‘I’ll give one to you, too.’
Vanya sighed. ‘No, there’s no need to give me one. Better you give it to her, she’s so good to us.’
And once more Vanya laid his head on the ground. Pavlusha rose and picked up the little pot, now empty.
‘Where are you going?’ Fedya asked him.
‘To the river, to get some water. I’d like a drink.’
The dogs got up and followed him.
‘See you don’t fall in the river!’ Ilyusha called after him.
‘Why should he fall?’ asked Fedya. ‘He’ll be careful.’
‘All right, so he’ll be careful. Anything can happen, though. Say he bends down, starting to dip up the water, but then a water-sprite grabs him by the hand and pulls him down below. They’ll start saying afterwards that, poor boy, he fell in the water… But what sort of a fall is that? Listen, listen, he’s in the reeds,’ he added, pricking up his ears.
The reeds were in fact moving, ‘hushing’, as they say in our parts.
‘Is it true,’ asked Kostya, ‘that that ugly woman, Akulina, has been wrong in the head ever since she went in the water?’
‘Ever since then… And look at her now! They say she used to be real good-looking before. The water-sprite did for her. Likely he didn’t expect they’d drag her out so soon. He corrupted her down there, down in his own place at the bottom of the water.’
(I had come across this Akulina more than once. Covered with tatters, fearsomely thin, with a face as black as coal, a vacant gaze and permanently bared teeth, she used to stamp about on the same spot for hours at a time, at some point on the road, firmly hugging her bony hands to her breast and slowly shifting her weight from one foot to the other just like a wild animal in a cage. She would give no sign of understanding, no matter what was said to her, save that from time to time she would break into convulsions of laughter.)
‘They do say,’ Kostya went on, ‘that Akulina threw herself in the river because her lover deceived her.’
‘Because of that very thing.’
‘But do you remember Vasya?’ Kostya added sadly.
‘What Vasya?’ asked Fedya.
‘The one who drowned,’ Kostya answered, ‘in this very river. He was a grand lad, a really grand lad! That mother of his, Feklista, how she loved him, how she used to love Vasya! And she sort of sens
ed, Feklista did, that ruin would come to him on account of water. That Vasya used to come with us boys in the summer when we went down to the river to bathe – and she’d be all bothered, his mother would. The other women wouldn’t care, going waddling by with their washtubs, but Feklista would put her tub down on the ground and start calling to him: “Come back, come back, light of my life! O come back, my little falcon!” And how he came to drown, God alone knows. He was playing on the bank, and his mother was there, raking hay, and suddenly she heard a sound like someone blowing bubbles in the water – she looks, and there’s nothing there ‘cept Vasya’s little cap floating on the water. From then on, you know, Feklista’s been out of her mind: she goes and lies down at that place where he drowned, and she lies down, mates, and starts singing this song – you remember the song Vasya used to sing all the time – that’s the one she sings, plaintive-like, and she cries and cries, and complains bitterly to God…’