Sketches from a Hunter's Album (25 page)

Yushka ran off.

‘What disorders there are!' repeated Mardary Apollonych. ‘It's terrible!'

The unfortunate chickens – as I recall it now, there were two speckled and one white one with a crest – continued walking under the apple trees with the utmost lack of concern, occasionally expressing their feelings by making prolonged duckings, when suddenly Yushka, hatless and armed with a stick, and three other house-serfs who were well on in years made a combined attack on them. A riot followed. The chickens squawked, flapped their wings, leapt about and cackled deafeningly; the house-serfs ran to and fro, stumbling and falling; and their master shouted from the balcony like one possessed: ‘Catch them, catch them! Catch them, catch them! Catch them, catch them, catch them! Whose are these chickens, whose are these chickens?' Finally, one of the house-serfs succeeded in catching the crested chicken by forcing its breast to the ground, and at that very moment a girl of about eleven years of age, thoroughly dishevelled and with a switch in her hand, jumped over the garden fence from the street.

‘So that's who the chickens belong to!' the landowner exclaimed triumphantly. ‘They're Yermila the coachman's! See, he's sent his little Natalya to drive them back! It's not likely he'd send Parasha,' the landowner interjected under his breath and grinned meaningfully. ‘Hey, Yushka! Forget the chickens and bring little Natalya here.'

But before the puffing Yushka could reach the terrified little girl, she was grabbed by the housekeeper, who had appeared from nowhere, and given several slaps on her behind.

‘That's right, that's right,' the landowner said, accompanying the slaps. ‘Yes, yes, yes! Yes, yes, yes! And mind you take the chickens off, Avdotya,' he added in a loud voice and turned to me with a shining face: ‘Quite a chase, my good fellow, what? I've even worked myself into a sweat –just look at me!'

And Mardary Apollonych rattled off into thunderous laughter.

We remained on the balcony. The evening was really unusually beautiful. Tea was served to us.

‘Tell me,' I began, ‘Mardary Apollonych, are they yours, those settlements out there on the road, beyond the ravine?'

‘They're mine. What of it?'

‘How could you allow such a thing, Mardary Apollonych? It's quite wrong. The tiny huts allotted to the peasants are horrible, cramped things; there's not a tree to be seen anywhere; there's nothing in the way of a pond; there's only one well, and that's no use. Surely you could have found somewhere else? And rumour has it that you've even taken away their old hemp-fields.'

‘But what's one to do about these redistributions of the land?' Mardary Apollonych asked me in turn. ‘This redistribution's got me right here.' He pointed to the back of his neck. ‘And I don't foresee any good coming from it. And as to whether I took away their hemp-fields and didn't dig out a pond for them there – about such matters, my good fellow, I haven't the foggiest. I'm just a simple man and I have old-fashioned ways. In my way of thinking, if you're the master, you're the master, and if you're a peasant, you're a peasant. And that's that.'

It goes without saying that such a lucid and convincing argument was unanswerable.

‘What's more,' he continued, ‘those peasants are a bad sort, not in my good books. Particularly two families over there. Even my late
father, God rest his soul in the Kingdom of Heaven, even he wasn't fond of them, not at all fond of them. And I'll tell you something I've noticed: if the father's a thief, then the son'll be a thief, it doesn't matter how much you want things to be otherwise… Oh, blood-ties, blood-ties – they're the big thing! I tell you quite frankly that I've sent men from those two families to be recruits out of their turn and shoved them around here, there and everywhere. But what's one to do? They won't give up breeding. They're so fertile, damn them!'

In the meantime, the air grew completely quiet. Only occasionally a light breeze eddied around us and, on the last occasion, as it died down around the house it brought to our ears the sound of frequent and regular blows which resounded from the direction of the stables. Mardary Apollonych had only just raised a full saucer to his lips and was already on the point of distending his nostrils, without which, as everyone knows, no true Russian can imbibe his tea, when he stopped, pricked up his ears, nodded his head, drank and, setting the saucer down on the table, uttered with the kindest of smiles and as if unconsciously in time with the blows: ‘Chooky-chooky-chook! Chooky-chook! Chooky-chook!'

‘What on earth is that?' I asked in astonishment.

‘It's a little rascal being punished on my orders. Do you by any chance know Vasya the butler?'

‘Which Vasya?'

‘The one who's just been waiting on us at dinner. He's the one who sports those large side-whiskers.'

The fiercest sense of outrage could not have withstood Mardary Apollonych's meek and untrammelled gaze.

‘What's bothering you, young man, eh?' he said, shaking his head. ‘You think I'm wicked, is that why you're staring at me like that? Spare the rod and spoil the child, you know that as well as I do.'

A quarter of an hour later I said goodbye to Mardary Apollonych. On my way through the village I saw Vasya the butler. He was walking along the street and chewing nuts. I ordered my driver to stop the horses and called to him.

‘Did they give you a beating today, my friend?' I asked him.

‘How do you know about it?' Vasya answered.

‘Your master told me.'

‘The master did?'

‘Why did he order you to be beaten?'

‘It served me right, good master, it served me right. You don't get beaten for nothing here. That's not how things are arranged here – oh, no. Our master's not like that, our master's… you won't find another master like ours anywhere else in the province.'

‘Let's go!' I told my driver.
Well, that's old-style Russia for you!
I thought as I travelled home.

As a consequence of all the above-said I've no need to inform the reader how, five years ago, I found myself in Lebedyan at the height of the horse fair. Hunters like us can set off one fine morning from their more or less ancestral estates with the intention of returning on the evening of the following day and little by little, without ceasing
for a moment to shoot snipe, can end up finally by reaching the blessed banks of the Pechora;
¹
additionally, anyone keen on gun and gun-dog is also likely to be a passionate admirer of the noblest animal on earth, the horse. So I arrived in Lebedyan, stopped at a hotel, changed my clothes and set off for the horse fair. (A waiter, a tall, lean fellow of twenty with a sweet nasal tenor voice had already managed to inform me that His Highness, Prince N., Remount Officer of such-and-such a regiment, had dined there, that many other gentlemen had arrived, that there were gypsy singers performing in the evenings and
Pan Tvardovsky
²
was being performed at the theatre and that the horses were fetching good prices because good horses had after all been brought to the fair.)

On the fairground endless rows of carts stretched away, and behind the carts horses of every description: trotters, stud horses, cart-horses, dray-horses, coach-horses and ordinary peasant horses. Some, sleek and well-fed, arranged according to their colour, covered with cloths of varying hues and tethered on short leashes to tall ladder-backs of waggons, glanced timidly behind them at the all-too-familiar whips of their owners and masters. Landowners' horses, dispatched by nobility of the steppes for a hundred and more miles in the charge of some decrepit coachman and two or three big-headed stableboys, waved their long necks, stamped their hoofs and gnawed their stakes out of boredom. Light-brown Vyatka horses pressed tightly against each other. In magnificent immobility, as if they were lions, stood the trotters with their broad hindquarters, wavy tails and shaggy manes, dappled grey, black and bay-coloured. Connoisseurs of horses stopped respectfully in front of them. In the thoroughfares created by the lines of carts were crowds of people of every calling, age and appearance: dealers in blue caftans and tall hats were craftily on the watch awaiting buyers; curly-haired gypsies with popping eyes rushed to and fro like mad things looking horses in the teeth, lifting their hoofs and tails, shouting, swearing, acting as go-betweens, making bets or swarming about some remount officer in his army cap and beaver-lined greatcoat. A hefty cossack perched on top of a gaunt gelding with a neck like a stag's was offering it ‘with the bloody lot', meaning with saddle and reins. Peasants in sheepskin jackets torn under the armpits desperately pushed their way through the crowds and poured in their dozens on to a cart to which a horse
had been harnessed for ‘trying-out' or, somewhere on the side, with the help of a shifty gypsy, engaged in trading to the point of exhaustion, slapping their hands together a hundred times over and each one insisting on their price while the object of their dispute, a wretched little nag covered in some warped matting, scarcely blinked her eyes as if the whole thing were no concern of hers… And in fact it didn't matter to her a damn who'd be beating her from now on! Broad-browed landowners with tinted whiskers and dignified expressions, in peakless, rectangular caps and camlet cloth jackets worn on one arm only, chatted condescendingly to stout merchants in fluffy hats and green gloves. Officers of various regiments crowded there as well. An unusually tall cuirassier, of German extraction, coldly asked a limping dealer how much he wanted for ‘zet chestnut'oss'. A fair-haired little hussar of about nineteen tried to match a side-horse to a sinewy pacer. A coachman in a low hat wound about with a peacock feather and in brown coat with leather sleeves inserted under a narrow greenish belt was searching for a shaft-horse. Drivers were plaiting the tails of their horses, moistening their manes and offering respectful advice to their masters. All those who'd done deals dashed to a hostelry or a pub, depending on their status…

And all this bustling and shouting and hassling and quarrelling and dealing and swearing and laughing was going on among men with mud up to their knees. I wanted to purchase a trio of decent horses for my carriage because my present ones were getting past their best. I found two, but couldn't pick up a third. After dinner, which I won't undertake to describe (after all Aeneas knew long ago how unpleasant it is to recall past misfortune),
³
I set off for the so-called coffee-house where each evening there were gatherings of remount men, horse-breeders and others. In the billiard-room, fuggy with leaden waves of tobacco smoke, there were about twenty men. Among them were dissolute young landowners in riding jackets and grey trousers, with long whiskers and waxed moustaches, looking grandly and boldly around them. Other members of the nobility in long frockcoats, with extraordinarily short necks and eyes swimming in fat, wheezed their way painfully about. Merchants sat to one side ‘on their tod', as they say, while officers chattered freely among themselves. A game was being played by Prince N., a young man of about twenty-two in an open jacket, red silk shirt and wide velvet
trousers, with a jolly and slightly condescending face. He was playing with a retired lieutenant, Victor Khlopakov.

Retired Lieutenant Victor Khlopakov, a small, dark, thin fellow of about thirty, with cropped black hair, brown eyes and a snouty turned-up nose, is an assiduous visitor of elections and fairs. He has a springy walk, a fancy way of moving his rounded hands about, a hat worn at a smart angle and turned-back sleeves of his military coat showing the grey calico lining. Mister Khlopakov possesses an ability for sucking up to rich St Petersburg men-about-town, smokes, drinks and plays cards with them and is always on familiar terms with them. Why they put up with him it is not all that easy to understand. He's not clever, nor is he even witty: he'd be no good as a jester. True, they treat him in a carelessly amiable way as a good-enough, empty-headed fellow whom they can knock around with for two or three weeks and then suddenly not even bow to, just as he doesn't bow to them. A peculiarity of Lieutenant Khlopakov is that, for a year, sometimes two, he constantly uses one and the same expression, appropriately and inappropriately, an expression in no way humorous which, God knows why, makes everyone laugh. Eight or so years ago he would say at every opportunity: ‘My honouring to you, sir, the very humblest gratitude,' and his patrons of those days would die laughing on each occasion and force him to repeat ‘My honouring to you, sir.' Later he took to using a more complex expression: ‘No, you're doing your
qu'est-ce que ça
, what's come out comes out,' and with the same brilliant success. A couple of years ago he came out with a new catchphrase: ‘Don't
vous
get hot
pas
, you man of God, you sheepskin clod!' and so on. So there it is! These, as you can see, wholly unimportant sayings are his food, drink and clothing. (He's long ago used up his own estate and now lives solely off his friends.) Take note that there are absolutely no other niceties associated with him. It's true that he smokes a hundred pipefuls of Zhukov tobacco a day and while playing billiards raises his right foot above his head and, in taking aim, makes a great show of playing with his cue – well, of course, not everyone's keen on such accomplishments. He also drinks like a fish, but it's hard to be remarkable for doing that in Russia. In a word, his success is to me a complete mystery. Maybe it's because he's careful, he doesn't spread dirt about people and never says a bad word about a soul…

‘Well,' I thought on seeing Khlopakov, ‘what's his latest expression, I wonder?'

The prince addressed the cue ball.

‘Thirty, love,' cried out a consumptive marker with a dark face and lead-grey bags under his eyes.

The prince sent a yellow ball banging into a far pocket.

‘Heck!' a stoutish merchant wheezed approvingly, his stomach quivering as he sat in a corner at a shaky, one-legged little table, wheezed and stopped in embarrassment. But fortunately no one took any notice. He sighed and stroked his beard.

‘Thirty-six and little chance!' cried the marker through his nose.

‘What d'you think of that, old chap?' the prince asked Khlopakov.

‘What do I think? It's a right old rrrrapscalliooon, a right old rrrrapscalliooon that is!'

The prince exploded with laughter.

‘What? What? Say it again!'

‘Rrrrapscalliooon!' the retired lieutenant repeated smugly.

‘So that's the new one!' I thought.

The prince pocketed a red ball.

‘Hey! Not like that, prince, not like that,' suddenly babbled a small, fair-haired officer with little bloodshot eyes, tiny nose and a childishly sleepy face. ‘Don't play like that! You shouldn't do that!'

‘What's that?' the prince asked him over his shoulder.

‘You should've played a triplet.'

‘Is that so?' the prince muttered through his teeth.

‘What about going to the gypsies this evening, prince?' the young man hurriedly asked in confusion. ‘Styeshka'll be singing… and Ilyushka…'

The prince didn't answer him.

‘Rrrrapscalliooon, old chap,' said Khlopakov, slyly screwing up his left eye.

And the prince burst into torrents of laughter.

‘Thirty-nine, love,' proclaimed the marker.

‘Love… Just look what I'll do to that yellow…'

Khlopakov made a great show with using his cue, took aim and missed.

‘Oh, rrrrapscalliooon!' he cried in annoyance.

The prince again laughed.

‘What? what? what?'

But Khlopakov didn't want to repeat his special word. He had to be sparing with his party piece.

‘You made a mis-hit,' remarked the marker. ‘Allow me to offer some chalk… Forty and very little!'

‘Yes, gentlemen,' the prince began, turning to the entire company and not looking at anyone in particular, ‘you know, today we must ensure an ovation for Verzhembitskaya in the theatre.'

‘Of course, of course, without doubt,' exclaimed several gentlemen in friendly rivalry, astonishingly flattered by the opportunity to respond to the prince's words. ‘For Verzhembitskaya…'

‘Verzhembitskaya is an outstanding actress, much better than Sopnyakova,' squeaked from one corner a shabby man with whiskers and glasses. Poor fellow, he secretly yearned after Sopnyakova, but the prince didn't deign so much as to give him a glance!

‘I say, a pipe!' pronounced into his cravat a tall man with regular features and the grandest of bearing, to all appearances a cardsharp.

A waiter dashed off to fetch him a pipe and, on returning, informed His Highness that Baklaga, the driver, had apparently been asking for him.

‘Ah! Well, tell him to wait and fetch him some vodka, there's a good chap.'

‘Yes, sir.'

Baklaga, as I was told later, was the nickname of a young, handsome and exceedingly spoiled driver. The prince was very fond of him, gave him gifts of horses, went racing with him and spent whole nights with him… This very same prince, former playboy and spendthrift, you wouldn't recognize now, so perfumed he's become, so stiff and proud! So busy he is now with his government service, but, chiefly, how extremely circumspect!

However, the tobacco smoke began to hurt my eyes. Having heard for the last time Khlopakov's exclamation and the prince's answering laugh, I went to my room where my manservant had made up a bed for me on a narrow, broken-down horsehair divan with a high bent back.

The next day I went to look at the horses in the various yards and began by going to the well-known dealer Sitnikov. By way of a gate I went into a yard spread with sand. Before the wide-open door of
the stables stood the proprietor himself, a man no longer young, tall and stout, in a hare-skin jacket with a raised, turned-back collar. Seeing me, he moved slowly in my direction, holding his hat above his head with both hands and pronouncing in a singsong voice:

‘Our respects to you, sir. Is it some horses you'll be after seein'?'

‘Yes, I've come to have a look at horses.'

‘What kind precisely, if I may ask?'

‘Show me what you have.'

‘With our pleasure.'

We went into the stables. Several small white dogs rose from the hay and ran towards us wagging their tails. An old goat with a long beard withdrew to one side in dissatisfaction. Three stable-boys in strong but greasy sheepskin coats bowed to us in silence. To left and right, in artificially raised stalls, stood about thirty horses cleaned and groomed to perfection. Among the rafters pigeons flew to and fro and cooed.

‘For what is it you'll be wantin' a horse, for ridin', is it, or for breedin'?' Sitnikov asked me.

‘Both for riding and for breeding.'

‘We get your meanin', sir, we get your meanin', sir, we do,' said the dealer, pausing between the words. ‘Petya, show Ermine to the gentleman.'

We went out into the yard.

‘Shall I have a bench brought out? You don't want it? As you wish…'

Hoofs resounded on the floorboards, there was a whip-crack and Petya, a fellow of about forty, with a pitted, swarthy complexion, jumped out of the stables with a grey, fairly stately stallion, made him rise up on his hind legs, ran him round the yard once or twice and skilfully halted him at a point for showing him off. Ermine stretched his neck, gave a whistling neigh, flourished his tail, moved his mouth and nostrils and gave us a sideways look.

‘He knows a thing or two,' I thought.

‘Let 'im be, let 'im be,' said Sitnikov and looked hard at me.

‘How d'you t'ink? Will he do, sir?' he asked eventually.

‘The horse is not bad, except that his forelegs are not quite right.'

‘'Tis fine legs he has!' Sitnikov retorted with conviction. ‘Look at his hindquarters, just look at 'em, broad as a stove they are, you could sleep on 'em!'