Old Izergil and other stories / Старуха Изергиль и другие рассказы. Книга для чтения на английском языке

“Hey you, loafers, you’ll be paying a fine for those spikes and clamps!”

“What for?” the ex-soldier demanded grimly.

“You can’t get away with that sort of thing all the time,” Osip calmly explained.

The carpenters grumbled and looked askance at me, and I was not at all sure that I would carry out my threat and whether, if I did, I would be doing right.

“I’m going to quit this job,” I said to Osip. “You can all go to the devil! I’ll be taking to thieving myself if I stay with you fellows much longer.”

Osip pondered this for a while, stroking his beard thoughtfully. Then he squatted down beside me and said softly:

“You know, lad, you’re quite right!”

“Eh?”

“You’ve got to clear out. What sort of a foreman or overseer are you? In a job like this a man must have respect for property, he’s got to have the soul of a watchdog to guard his master’s belongings like his own hide… A pup like you’s no good for a job like this, you haven’t any feeling for property. If Vassil Sergeich knew how you let us carry on he would take you by the scruff of your neck and throw you right out, he would! Because you’re not an asset to him, you’re a liability and a man has to be an asset to his master. See what I mean?”

He rolled a cigarette and handed it to me.

“Have a smoke, penpusher, it’ll clear your head. If you weren’t such a smart, handy lad, my advice to you would be: take the holy orders! But you haven’t got the character for that; you’re a stubborn, hard sort of chap, you wouldn’t give in to the abbot himself. With a character like yours you’ll never get on in the world. And a monk’s like a jackdaw, he don’t care what he pecks; so long as there are seeds he don’t care where they come from. I’m telling you all this from the bottom of my heart because I can see that you’re out of place here, a cuckoo’s egg in a strange nest…”

He took off his cap, as he always did when he was about to say something particularly important – stared up at the bleak sky and observed piously:

“God knows we’re a thieving lot and he won’t forgive us for it…”

“That’s true enough,” Mokei Budyrin trumpeted.

From that moment silver-haired Osip with his bright eyes and dusky soul had a pleasant fascination for me; a sort of friendship sprang up between us, although I noticed that his good relations with me embarrassed him somehow; in front of the others he looked at me vacantly, his corn-flower blue eyes darting this way and that, and his lips twisted in a false, unpleasant grimace as he addressed me: “Now then, keep you eyes peeled, earn your living, can’t you see Soldier over there chewing nails for all he’s worth…”

But when we were alone he spoke with a gentle wisdom and a clever little gleam played in his bright blue eyes as they looked straight into mine. I listened carefully to what this old man had to say, for his words were true and honestly weighed, although sometimes he spoke strangely.

“A man ought to be good,” I remarked once. “Yes, indeed!” he agreed. Then he chuckled and with downcast eyes, he went on softly:

“But what exactly do you mean by ‘good’? The way I see it, people don’t care a hang about your goodness or honesty so long as it doesn’t benefit them. No, it pays to be nice to them, amuse them, humour them… and someday perhaps it will bring you good returns! Of course, I don’t deny it must be a fine thing to look at yourself in the mirror and know you’re a good man. But as far as I can see it’s all the same to folks whether you’re a ruffian or a saint so long as you’re nice to them… That’s about the size of it, lad!”

I am in the habit of observing people carefully for I feel that each individual I come in contact with might help me fathom the secret of this mysterious, muddled, painful business called life; moreover, there is one question that has never ceased to torment me: What is the human soul?

It seems to me that some souls must be like brass globes fixed rigidly to the breast so that the reflection they cast back is distorted, ugly and repulsive. And then there are souls that are as flat as mirrors. Such souls might just as well not be there at all.

But most human souls I imagine to be formless as clouds, of an indeterminate opaqueness like the fickle opal always ready to change its hue to conform to whatever colour comes in contact with it.

I did not know, nor could I imagine what comely old Osip’s soul was like; it was something my mind could not fathom.

I pondered these things as I gazed out over the river to where the town clung to the hillside, vibrating with the peal of bells from all of its belfries that soared skywards like the white pipes of my beloved organ in the Polish church. The crosses on the churches, like blurred stars captured by the dreary sky, winked and trembled and seemed to be reaching out toward the clear sky behind the grey blanket of wind-torn clouds; but the clouds scurried along, effacing with dark shadows the gay colours down below, and each time the sunbeams emerged from the bottomless abysses between them to bathe the town in bright hues, they hastened to blot them out again, the dank shadows grew heavier, and after one instant of gladness all was gloomy and dreary again.

The buildings of the town were like heaps of soiled snow, the ground beneath them was black and bare, and the trees in the gardens were like clods of earth; the dull gleam of the windowpanes in the grey house walls reminded one of winter, and the poignant sadness of the pale northern spring spreads softly over the whole scene.

Mishuk Dyatlov, a tow-headed, broad-shouldered, gawky lad with a harelip, essayed a song:

She came to him in the morning,
But he died the night before…

“Shut up, you bastard,” the ex-soldier shouted at him, “have you forgotten what day it is?”

Boyev was also angry. He shook his fist at Dyatlov, hissing: “S-swine!”

“We’re a hardy, tough lot,” Osip said to Budyrin as he sat astride the top of the icebreak measuring its slant with narrowed eyes “Slip it out an inch to the left… that’s it! A savage lot, that’s what we are: Once I saw a bishop come along and the people crowded around him, fell on their knees and begged and implored him: ‘Your Reverence,’ they said, ‘drive away the wolves, the wolves are ruining us!’ And he towered over them and thundered: ‘You’re supposed to be Orthodox Christians? I’ll have you all severely punished!’ Very wrathful he was, why he even spat in their faces. A little old chap he was, with a kindly face, bleary-eyed…”

About fifty yards down the river from the ice aprons some boatmen and tramps were chopping the ice around the barges; the crowbars cracked into the ice, crushing the brittle, greyish-blue crust of the river, the slender handles of the boat-hooks swayed back and forth pushing the broken pieces under the solid ice, the current gurgled and from the sandy beach came the murmur of streamlets. On the ice apron planes cut into wood, saws screeched and hammers pounded, driving clamps into the yellow, smoothly planed wood – and all these sounds mingled with the ringing of the bells which, softened by the distance, stirred the soul. It was as if all the labour of the bleak day had been a paean to spring, urging her to descend upon the thawing but still naked and wretched earth…

“Call the German!” someone yelled hoarsely, “we need more men…”

From shore came the response:

“Where is he?”

“Look in the pub…”

The voices floated heavily in the moisture-laden air and echoed drearily over the broad river.

The men worked feverishly but carelessly; everyone was anxious to get to town, to the bathhouse and then to church as quickly as possible. Sashok Dyatlov a well-built, agile lad with a shock of curly hair bleached white like his brother’s was particularly worried. He kept glancing up-stream, saying softly to his brother:

“Don’t you hear it crackling?”

The ice had stirred the night before and the river police had been keeping the horses off the river ever since the morning before; a few pedestrians were still slipping across over the foot-bridges, like beads sliding on strings, and you could hear the boards smacking against the water as they bent under the weight.

“It’s cracking up,” said Mishuk, blinking his white lashes.

Osip, who had been scanning the river his eyes shaded with his hand, cut him short.

“It’s the sawdust in your noodle cracking!”’ he said. “You get on with the job, son of a sorceress! Overseer, take your nose out of your book and keep them at it!”

There was about two hours’ work left; the sides of the icebreak were already covered with gleaming planks as yellow as butter, and only the thick iron bands remained to be spiked on. Boyev and Sanyavin had out the grooves for the strips of iron but it was now discovered that they had made them too narrow.

“You blind bat, you!” Osip scolded the Mordvinian, clasping his head in despair. “Call that work?”

Suddenly a voice raised in a joyful shout was heard from the shore.

“It’s moving! Hoorray!”

As if in accompaniment to the howl, a faint crunching rustling sound came down the river; the gnarled claws of the pine-bough markers trembled and seamed to clutch at the air for support, and, waving their boat-hooks, the boatmen and tramps noisily clambered up rope ladders to board their barges.

It was strange to see the deserted river suddenly become crowded with people; they seemed to have popped up from under the ice and were now rushing back and forth like jackdaws scared by a gunshot, running hither and thither hauling boards and poles, dropping them and picking them up again.

“Get your tools together!” roared Osip. “Lively there, you… We’re going ashore!”

“There goes Easter Sunday!” exclaimed Sashok bitterly.

To us it seemed as if the river stood still, while the city shuddering and swaying, with the hill under it, began to sail slowly up the river. The grey sandy landslip about seventy feet ahead of us also stirred and floated away.