1
OLD PROVINCIAL towns have tumbledown outskirts, and people come straight from nature to live there. A man appears, with a keen-eyed face that has been worn to an extreme of sadness, a man who can fix up or equip anything but who has himself lived through life unequipped. There was not one artifact, from a frying pan to an alarm clock, that had not at some time passed through the hands of this man. Nor did he ever refuse to resole shoes, to cast shot for wolf hunting, or to turn out counterfeit medals for sale at old-time village fairs. But he had never made anything for himself—neither a family, nor a dwelling. In summer he simply lived out in nature, keeping his tools in a sack and using the sack as a pillow—more for the tools’ safety than for softness. He protected himself from the early sun by placing a burdock leaf over his eyes when he lay down in the evening. In winter he lived on what remained from his summer’s earnings, paying the warden for his lodging by ringing the hours through the night. He had no particular interest in people or nature, only in man-made artifacts of every kind. And so he treated people and fields with an indifferent tenderness, not infringing on their interests. During winter evenings he would sometimes make things for which there was no need: towers out of bits of wire, ships from pieces of roofing iron, airships out of paper and glue, and so on—all entirely for his own pleasure. Often he even delayed a chance commission; he might, say, have been asked to rehoop a barrel, but he would be busy fashioning a wooden clock, thinking it should work without a mechanism, from the earth’s turning.
The warden didn’t like these unpaid activities. “You’ll be begging in your old age, Zakhar Pavlovich! That barrel’s been sitting there for days, and you just keep stroking the ground with a bit of wood. Goodness knows what you’re up to!”
Zakhar Pavlovich said nothing. To him the human word was like the noise of the forest to the forest’s inhabitants—something you don’t hear. The warden went on calmly watching and smoking—from frequent attendance at services he had lost his faith in God, but he knew for sure that Zakhar Pavlovich wouldn’t get anywhere; people had been living in the world for a long time and they had already thought everything up. Zakhar Pavlovich, however, saw things differently: there were a great many things to be thought up, since there was still natural substance living untouched by human hands.
Every fifth year, half the village would go to the mines and cities, and the other half into the nearby forest: the harvest had failed. From time immemorial it has been known that, even in dry years, grasses, roots, and grains do well in forest clearings. The villagers who had stayed behind would rush out to these clearings—to save their vegetables from instant plundering by hordes of greedy wanderers. But this time there was a drought the following year too. The village bolted up its huts and set out onto the highway in two columns. One column set off to Kyiv to beg, the other to Luhans'k in search of work;1 a few people turned off into the forest and overgrown gullies, where they took to eating raw grass, clay, and bark, and lived wild. The people who left were nearly all adults—the children had either taken care to die in advance or had run off to live as beggars. As for the unweaned babies, their mothers had let them gradually wither away, not allowing them to suck their fill.
There was one old woman, Ignatievna, who cured infants of hunger: she gave them an infusion of mushrooms mixed with sweet herbs, and the children fell peacefully silent with dry foam on their lips. A mother would kiss her child on its now aged, wizened forehead and whisper, “He’s done with suffering, the dear. Praise the Lord!”2
Ignatievna was standing beside her. “He’s passed on. He’s at peace now—better off than the living. He’s in paradise, listening to the silver winds.”
The mother wondered at her child, believing its sad lot had been eased. “Take my old skirt, Ignatievna, I’ve nothing else to give you. Thank you!”
Ignatievna would hold the skirt up to the light and say, “You have a little cry, Mitrevna
—that’s right and proper. But your skirt’s in tatters, you must throw in a kerchief too—or how about an iron?”
Zakhar Pavlovich was left alone in the village—he found he liked the absence of people. But he spent most of the time in the forest, sharing a dugout with an old loner and living on a brew of herbs whose uses the loner had studied beforehand.
Zakhar Pavlovich worked all the time, to forget his hunger, and he taught himself to make from wood everything he had previously made from metal. As for the loner—he had been doing nothing all his life, and now all the more so; until the age of fifty he had just looked around him, wondering what was what and waiting for something finally to emerge from the world’s turmoil, so he could begin to act after a general calming and clarification; he was not in any way gripped by life and he couldn’t bring himself to encroach on a woman in marriage or get up to any generally useful activity. He had felt surprised at birth and had remained surprised, his eyes light blue in his youthful face, until he was an old man. While Zakhar Pavlovich was making an oak frying pan, the loner would say in astonishment that he would never be able to fry anything in it. But Zakhar Pavlovich would pour water into the wooden frying pan and get the water to boil over a slow flame without the pan catching fire. The loner would stand stock-still with surprise. “That’s mighty fine! But how, my friend, can a man ever figure out everything?”
These overwhelming universal mysteries made the loner lose heart. Nobody had ever explained to him the simplicity of events—or else the loner was entirely muddleheaded. And indeed, when Zakhar Pavlovich tried to tell him what makes the wind blow rather than stay in one place, the loner expressed still more surprise and was unable to understand a thing, although he sensed the origin of the wind with precision.
“I don’t believe it! Say that again! From the rays of the sun, you say? What a story!”
Zakhar Pavlovich explained that the sun’s rays were not a story, but simply heat.
“Heat?” the loner repeated in surprise. “E-e-e-h, the witch!”
The loner’s surprise
merely shifted from one object to another, changing nothing in his consciousness. What kept him going was not mind, but a sense of trustful respect.
By the end of the summer Zakhar Pavlovich had fashioned from wood every man-made artifact he had ever come across. The dugout and the adjacent space were filled with the products of his technical skills—a whole collection of agricultural tools, machines, instruments, arrangements, enterprises, and everyday appliances, all made entirely of wood. Strangely, there was not one object that repeated nature: a horse, for example, or a pumpkin.
One day in August the loner went into the shade, lay down on his stomach, and said, “Zakhar Pavlovich, I’m dying, yesterday I ate a lizard. I brought you two little mushrooms, but I fried myself a lizard. Wave a burdock leaf up above—I love the wind.”
Zakhar Pavlovich waved a burdock leaf over him, fetched some water, and gave it to the dying man. “You’re not really going to die. You just think you are.”
“I will die, Zakhar Pavlovich, really and truly I will,” said the loner, afraid to lie. “My innards don’t hold anything, there’s a huge worm living inside me, it’s sucked up all my blood.” The loner turned over onto his back. “What do you think—should I be afraid or not?”
“Don’t be afraid,” Zakhar Pavlovich answered positively. “I’d die myself, straightaway, but, you know, there’s always artifacts keeping me busy. . .”
The loner was glad of this sympathy and he died toward evening without fear. At the time of his death Zakhar Pavlovich had gone to bathe in the stream and he found the loner already dead, suffocated by his own green vomit. The vomit was compact and dry, it had settled into a paste around the loner’s mouth, and white small-caliber worms were at work in it.
During the night Zakhar Pavlovich woke up listening to rain—the second rain since April. “That would have given the loner a surprise,” he thought. But the loner was soaking alone in the torrents pouring evenly down from the sky, and he was quietly swelling up.
Through the sleepy, windless rain something sang out sadly, in a muffled voice, from so far away that it was probably day where it was singing, and with no rain. Zakhar Pavlovich immediately forgot the loner, the rain, and his hunger. He got to his feet. It was the whistle of a distant machine, a living, working steam engine. Zakhar Pavlovich went outside and stood in the moisture of the warm rain that was quietly humming about a peaceful life, about the vastness of the long-lasting earth. The dark trees were dozing, their gnarled trunks embraced by the caress of the calm rain; their pleasure made them almost tremble, and they were rustling their branches without the least wind.
Zakhar Pavlovich paid no attention to the joy of nature; what excited him was the unknown, now-silent locomotive. “Even the rain acts,” he said to himself as he lay down again, “while you just sleep and hide away in the forest to no purpose. The loner’s died—and you’ll die too. The loner never made a single artifact in all his life— all he ever did was watch, and try to get the hang of things. He was surprised by everything, he saw marvels in the simplest matters, and he never lifted a finger lest he encroach or do harm. All he did was pick mushrooms—not that he knew how to find them—and now he’s died, without having ever harmed nature in any way.”
In the morning there was a big sun and the forest sang with all the density of its voice, letting the morning wind pass beneath its underleaves. What Zakhar Pavlovich noticed was not so much morning as a change of shift. The rain had gone to sleep in the soil and the sun had taken its place; and now, because of the sun, the wind had begun to fuss about; the trees were bristling; bushes
and grasses had begun to mutter; and even the rain itself, having hardly had any rest, was getting back onto its feet, aroused by the tickling warmth, and gathering its body into clouds.
Zakhar Pavlovich put his wooden artifacts into his sack—as many as there was room for—and set off into the distance, along the women’s mushroom trail. He did not look at the loner: the dead are unprepossessing, although Zakhar Pavlovich had known one man, a fisherman from Lake Mutevo, who had questioned many people about death and whose curiosity had filled him with anguish.3 This fisherman had loved fish not as food but as a special being that most probably knew the secret of death. He would show the eyes of dead fish to Zakhar Pavlovich and say, “Look—true wisdom! A fish stands between life and death, that’s why it’s mute and why it stares without expression. Even a calf thinks, but a fish doesn’t—it knows everything already.” Contemplating the lake for years on end, the fisherman had gone on thinking about one and the same thing: the interest of death. Zakhar Pavlovich had tried to talk him out of it: “It’s nothing so very special—just somewhere a bit cramped.” A year after that, the fisherman couldn’t bear it any longer and threw himself into the lake from a boat, having bound his legs with a rope so as not to start swimming inadvertently. Secretly he simply didn’t believe in death. What he really wanted was to have a look and see what was there; it might be a great deal more interesting than life in a village or on the shore of a lake. He saw death as another province, situated beneath the sky, as if at the bottom of the cool water, and it had an attractive pull.4 A few of the men whom he had told about his intention to live for a while in death and then return had tried to dissuade him, but others had agreed. “Well, Dmitry Ivanich, nothing ventured, nothing gained. Go on, give it a try—then you can tell us about it.” Dmitry Ivanich gave death a try; three days later he was dragged out of the lake and buried beside the fence in the village churchyard.
Now Zakhar Pavlovich was walking past the churchyard, and he began to look amid the thicket of crosses for the fisherman’s grave. There was no cross standing over it; no lips had prayed for the fisherman, and his death had not distressed a single heart, since he had died not from some illness but because of his own inquisitive mind. The fisherman had not left a wife behind him—he was a widower, and he had a little son who had been living with other people. At the funeral, Zakhar Pavlovich had taken the boy by the hand. He was an affectionate, intelligent little boy—it was hard to say whether he took more after his mother or after his father. What had become of him? As an orphan, he had probably been among the first to die during these years of famine. The boy had followed his father’s coffin with dignity and with no show of grief.
“Uncle Zakhar, did Father really mean to lie down like this?”
“No, it was a foolish whim. And he’s not done you any favors, Sasha. It’ll be a
while before he catches any fish now.”
“And why are the aunties all weeping?”
“Because they’re humbugs.”
When they placed the coffin beside the pit of the grave, no one wished to say goodbye to the dead man. Zakhar Pavlovich knelt down and touched the fisherman’s fresh, bristly cheek, which had been washed clean at the bottom of the lake. Then he said to the boy, “Say goodbye to your father now. He’s died forever and a day. Have a good look at him—you’ll be remembering.”
The boy pressed himself against his father’s body, against his old shirt, which smelled of living, familiar sweat, because his shirt had been put on him specially for the coffin—it was not the shirt his father had drowned in. The boy felt his father’s hands; they gave off a smell of fishy damp, and a tin wedding ring had been put on one finger, in honor of the forgotten mother. The little boy turned his head toward the other people, felt suddenly frightened of all these strangers, and began crying pathetically, gathering his father’s shirt into folds as if to defend himself with it. His grief was wordless, lacking any consciousness of the rest of life and therefore inconsolable; the way he sorrowed for his dead father, the dead man might well have felt happy. And all the people by the coffin began crying too, out of pity for the boy and premature compassion for themselves, since each would have to die and be mourned in the same way.
For all his sorrow, Zakhar Pavlovich was able to think about the future. “That’s enough of you and your wailing, Nikiforovna!” he said to one woman, who was sobbing and muttering hurried lamentations. “You’re not howling with grief—you just want people to cry when you’re dead and gone yourself. Take the boy in. You’ve got six mouths to feed as it is—you’ll hardly notice one more.”
Nikiforovna immediately recovered her peasant woman’s reason, and her face was dry and fierce; she had been crying without tears, just with her wrinkles. “Hardly notice?” she replied. “I like that! The boy may not need much now, but wait till he starts growing. He’ll be guzzling away, his trousers will always need darning . . . Nothing will be enough for him.”
The boy was taken in by another of the women, Mavra Fetisovna Dvanova, who had seven children. The boy gave her his hand, and the woman wiped his face with her skirt, blew his nose, and took the orphan off to her hut.
The boy remembered the fishing rod his father had made for him; he had thrown the rod into the lake and forgotten about it. By now it must have caught a fish. He could go and eat the fish, so strangers wouldn’t scold him for eating their food. “Auntie,” he began, “I’ve caught a fish in the water. Let me go and look for it. I can eat
it—then you won’t have to feed me.”
Mavra inadvertently puckered her face, blew her nose on the tip of her kerchief, and did not let go of the boy’s hand.
Zakhar Pavlovich fell into thought and wanted to become a barefoot wanderer, but he remained in place. He felt deeply moved by grief and orphanhood. Some unknown conscience now apparent in his chest made him wish to walk over the earth without rest, to encounter grief in every village and weep over the coffins of strangers. But he was stopped by the artifacts that kept coming his way; the village elder gave him a clock to repair and the priest asked him to tune his grand piano. Zakhar Pavlovich had never heard real music; once, in the district town, he had seen a gramophone, but men had tormented it and it no longer played. It had stood in a tavern; people had broken the sides of its outer case in order to see through the trickery and find the man singing inside, and a darning needle had been stuck through the diaphragm. ...
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