Collected Shorter Fiction, Volume 2

‘Tell me where my horses are,’ began Stepan, pale with anger and glaring now at the ground, now straight into Ivan’s face.

Ivan Mironov denied all knowledge of them. Then Stepan struck him in the face and broke his nose, from which the blood started to trickle.

‘Tell me, or I’ll kill you!’

Ivan Mironov bent his head but said nothing. Stepan struck him again with his long arm – once, then a second time. Ivan still did not speak, just swung his head from side to side.

‘Come, all of you – beat him!’ shouted the village elder. And they all began to beat him. Ivan Mironov fell silently to the ground, then cried out: ‘You barbarians, you devils, beat me to death then. I’m not scared of you.’

Then Stepan took hold of a stone from a pile he had ready, and he smashed Ivan Mironov’s head in.

XV

Ivan Mironov’s murderers were brought to justice. Stepan Pelageyushkin was among them. The charge brought against him was particularly grave because they had all testified that he was the one who had smashed Ivan Mironov’s head in with a stone. At his trial Stepan did not try to conceal anything, but explained how when his last pair of horses had been stolen he had reported it at the police station, and they could probably have tracked the horses down with the help of the gypsies, but the district police officer had not even seen him, and had made no effort to organize a search.

‘What were we supposed to do with a man of his sort? He’d ruined us.’

‘So why didn’t the others beat him? Why just you?’ asked the prosecutor.

‘That’s not true. They all beat him, the village community decided to do away with him. I was just the one who finished him off. Why make him suffer more than necessary?’

The judges were struck by Stepan’s utterly calm expression as he described what he had done and how they had beaten Ivan Mironov to death and how he had finished him off.

Stepan did not indeed see anything very dreadful in this murder. When he was on his military service he had happened to be one of the firing-squad when a soldier was executed, and then, as also now at the murder of Ivan Mironov, he had seen nothing dreadful in it. If you killed a man, you killed a man. It’s his turn today, tomorrow it may be mine.

Stepan’s sentence was a light one: a year in prison. His peasant’s clothes were taken away from him and put in the prison stores with a number attached to them, and they made him put on a prison overall and some slippers.

Stepan had never had much respect for the authorities, but now he was utterly convinced that everyone in authority, all the masters – apart from the Tsar, who pitied the common people and treated them justly – were all of them robbers, sucking the life-blood of the people. The stories told by the exiles and the hard-labour convicts he met in prison confirmed his view of things. One had been sentenced to exile with hard labour for having denounced the thievery of the local authorities, another for striking an official who was trying unlawfully to seize the property of some peasants, and a third, for forging banknotes. The gentry and the merchants, whatever they did, could get away with it, whereas the muzhiks who had nothing got sent off to prison to feed the lice on account of any little thing whatever.

Stepan’s wife came to visit him from time to time in prison. With him away from home things had already been bad enough, but now she was ruined and destitute, and was reduced to begging with the children. The calamities afflicting his wife made Stepan even more bitter. His behaviour was vicious towards everyone he came into contact with in prison, and on one occasion he almost killed one of the cooks with an axe, for which he got an extra year on his sentence. During the course of that year he heard that his wife had died and his household no longer existed …

When Stepan had served his time he was summoned to the prison stores, and the clothes he had arrived in were taken down from a little shelf and given back to him.

‘Where am I to go now?’ he asked the quartermaster-sergeant as he put on his own clothes again.

‘Home, of course.’

‘I haven’t got a home. I reckon I shall just have to go on the road. And rob people.’

‘If you start robbing people, you’ll soon be back in here again.’

‘Well, what will be, will be.’

And Stepan went on his way. Despite what he had said, he set off in the direction of his home. He had nowhere else to go.

On his way there he happened to stop for the night at a coaching inn with a pothouse attached, which he knew.

The inn was kept by a fat tradesman from Vladimir. He knew Stepan. And he knew that Stepan had got himself into prison through bad luck. So he let him stay the night.

This rich tradesman had run off with the wife of a peasant neighbour and was living with her as his wife and business partner.