Fifty-Two Stories

IVAN ABRAMYCH ZHMUKHIN,¹ a retired Cossack officer, who had once served in the Caucasus and now lived on his farmstead, who had once been young, healthy, strong, and was now old, dry, and bent, with shaggy eyebrows and a greenish-gray moustache, was coming back from town to his farmstead on a hot summer day. In town he went to confession and wrote a will at the notary’s (he had had a slight stroke two weeks earlier), and now, all the while he rode on the train, sad, serious thoughts about the imminence of death, about the vanity of vanities, about the transience of all earthly things never left him. At the Provalye station—there is such a station on the Donetsk line²—a fair-haired gentleman entered the car, middle-aged, plump, with a scuffed briefcase, and sat down across from him. They fell to talking.

“Yes, sir,” Ivan Abramych said, pensively looking out the window. “It’s never too late to marry. I myself married when I was forty-eight. People said it was late, but as it turned out it was neither late nor early, but it would have been better not to marry at all. Everybody soon gets bored with his wife, but not everybody will tell you the truth, because, you know, people are ashamed of unhappy family life and they hide it. Around his wife it’s ‘Manya this’ and ‘Manya that,’ but if he had his way, he’d stuff this Manya in a sack and drown her. With a wife it’s boredom, sheer stupidity. And with the children it’s no better, I hasten to assure you. I’ve got two of them, the scoundrels. There’s nowhere to educate them here in the steppe. I’ve got no money to send them to Novocherkassk,³ so they live here like wolf cubs. Look out or they’ll knife somebody on the high road.”

The fair-haired gentleman listened attentively, answered questions briefly and in a low voice, and was apparently a man of quiet, modest character. He said he was an attorney and was going to the village of Duyevka on business.

“Lord God, that’s six miles from me!” Zhmukhin said, sounding as if someone were arguing with him. “Sorry, but you won’t find any horses at the station. I think the best thing for you, you know, would be to come to my place now, spend the night, and in the morning go with God on my horses.”

The attorney thought it over and accepted.

When they arrived at the station, the sun already stood very low over the steppe. They were silent all the way to the farmstead: the jolting drive hindered speaking. The tarantass bounced, squeaked, and seemed to sob, as if the bouncing caused it great pain, and the attorney, who was seated very uncomfortably, looked ahead in anguish to see if the farmstead was in sight. They drove for about five miles and in the distance a low house appeared, with a yard surrounded by a dark flagstone wall; the roof of the house was green, the stucco was chipping off, and the windows were small and narrow, like squinting eyes. The farmstead stood open to the heat of the sun, and no water or trees could be seen anywhere around. The neighboring landowners and peasants called it “the Pecheneg’s Farmstead.” Many years earlier some passing surveyor, staying overnight at the farmstead, had spent the whole night talking with Ivan Abramych, ended up displeased, and in the morning, on leaving, said to him sternly: “You, my good sir, are a Pecheneg.” Hence “the Pecheneg’s Farmstead,” and the nickname became still more entrenched when Zhmukhin’s children grew up and started raiding the neighboring orchards and melon patches. Ivan Abramych himself was called “You Know,” because he habitually talked a great deal and often used the phrase “you know.”

In the yard by the shed stood Zhmukhin’s sons: one about nineteen years old, the other younger, both barefoot, without hats; and just as the tarantass drove into the yard, the younger one tossed a chicken up high; it clucked and flew, describing an arc in the air, the older one fired his gun, and the killed chicken went crashing to the ground.

“It’s my boys learning to shoot on the wing,” said Zhmukhin.

In the front hall the arrivals were met by a woman, small, thin, with a pale face, still young and pretty; from her clothes she might have been taken for a servant.

“And this, allow me to introduce her,” said Zhmukhin, “is the mother of my sons-of-a-bitch. Well, Lyubov Osipovna,” he turned to her, “get a move on, old girl, see to our guest. Serve supper! Look lively!”