Fifty-Two Stories

“Exactly right, Y’ronor!” testifies the village headman. “We’re all complaining. It’s impossible to live with him! We’re carrying icons, or there’s a wedding, or, say, some other occasion, everywhere he’s shouting, clamoring, demanding order all the time. He boxes the children’s ears, keeps an eye on the women like a father-in-law, lest there be some mischief…The other day he went around the cottages, giving orders not to sing songs or burn candles. There’s no law, he says, that allows you to sing songs.”

“Wait, you’ll have your chance to give evidence,” says the justice of the peace. “Now let Whompov continue. Continue, Whompov!”

“Yes, sir,” croaks the corporal. “You, Your Honor, are pleased to say I have no business dispersing folk…Very well, sir…But if there’s disorder? Can folk be allowed to act outrageously? Is it written somewhere in the law that folk can do as they like? I can’t allow it, sir. If I don’t disperse them and punish them, who will? Nobody in the whole village knows about real order except me alone, you might say, Your Honor, I know how to deal with people of lower rank, and, Your Honor, I can understand it all. I’m not a peasant, I’m a corporal, a retired quartermaster, I served in Warsaw, at headquarters, sir, and after that, if you care to know, in civilian life, I became a fireman, sir, and after that, weakened by illness, I left the fire department and for two years worked in a boys’ classical primary school as a porter…I know all about order, sir. But your peasant is a simple man, he understands nothing and has to obey me, because—it’s for his own good. Take this case, for example…I disperse the folk, and there on the bank in the sand lies the drowned corpse of a dead man. On what possible grounds, I ask you, is he lying there? Is there any order in that? Where is the constable looking? ‘Why is it, constable,’ I say, ‘that you don’t inform the authorities? Maybe this drowned dead man drowned on his own, and maybe it has a whiff of Siberia. Maybe it’s a criminal homicide…’ But Constable Zhigin pays no attention, he just smokes his cigarette.

“ ‘Who have we got giving orders here?’ he says. ‘Where,’ he says, ‘did he come from? Don’t we know,’ he says, ‘how to behave without him?’ ‘Meaning you don’t know, fool that you are,’ I say, ‘since you’re standing here paying no attention.’ ‘I,’ he says, ‘already informed the district superintendent yesterday.’ ‘Why the district superintendent?’ I ask. ‘By what article of the legal code? In such a case, when there’s a drowning or a hanging or the like—in such a case, what can the superintendent do? Here,’ I say, ‘we have a criminal case, a civil case…Here,’ I say, ‘you must quickly pass the torch to the honorable prosecutors and judges, sir. And first of all,’ I say, ‘you must draw up a report and send it to the honorable justice of the peace.’ But he, the constable, listens to it all and laughs. And the peasants, too. They all laughed, Your Honor. I’ll testify to it under oath. This one laughed, and that one laughed, and Zhigin laughed. ‘Why bare your teeth?’ I say. And the constable says, ‘The justice of the peace,’ he says, ‘doesn’t judge such cases.’ At those words I even broke into a sweat. Didn’t you say that, Constable?” The corporal turned to Constable Zhigin.

“I did.”