VII

I slept soundly and probably long, but suddenly it seemed that something jostled me and I found myself sitting up bent on one side. Still half asleep, I wanted to right myself, but noticed that something shoved me back. There was howling all around – what had happened? I wanted to see, but I had nothing to see with, for my eyes would not open. I called to my savage.

“Hi, you, friend! Where are you?”

He shouted into my very ear:

“Wake up, Bachka, wake up quickly! You’ll freeze.”

“What has happened? I can’t open my eyes.”

“Directly, Bachka, you’ll open them.”

And with these words – what do you think he did? He spat in my eyes and then rubbed them with the sleeve of his reindeer coat.

“What are you about?”

“Rubbing your eyes, Bachka.”

“Get along, you fool…”

“No, wait a moment, Bachka – I’m not a fool. You’ll soon see again.”

It was quite true, when he rubbed my face with his fur coat sleeve, my frozen eyelashes thawed and my eyelids opened. But on what? What was to be seen? I do not know if it can be even more terrible in hell: all around there was profound impenetrable darkness – and it seemed alive, it trembled and cracked like a monster whose body was a compact mass of frozen dust and whose breath was life-destroying cold. Yes, it was death in one of its most awful shapes, and meeting it face to face, I was terrified.

The only thing I was able to say was to ask about Kiriak, Where was he? But it was so difficult to speak that the savage did not hear me. Then I noticed that when he spoke to me, he bent down and shouted under the lappets of my fur cap, straight into my ear, and I also shouted under his fur cap:

“Where is the other sledge?”

“Don’t know, Bachka, we have been separated.”

“How separated?”

“Separated, Bachka.”

I did not want to believe this; I wanted to look round, but I could not see anything in any direction; all around us was hell, dark and terrible. Under my side and close to the sledge something moved like a ball, but it was impossible to see what it was. I asked the savage what it could be, and he answered:

“The dogs, Bachka, have lost their way and are trying to warm themselves.”

Shortly after he made a movement in the darkness and said:

“Fall down, Bachka.”

“Fall down where?”

“Here, Bachka – fall into the snow.”

“Wait,” I said.

I could not yet believe that I had lost my Kiriak, and wanted to stand up in the sledge and call to him, but at the same moment I felt smothered, as if I had been choked with all this frozen dust, and I fell down into the snow, giving my head a somewhat severe blow on the edge of the sledge. I had no strength to rise again, and even if I had had the strength, my savage would not have allowed me to do so. He held me fast and said:

“Lie still, Bachka, lie quiet; you will not die. The snow will cover us up, it will be warm. Otherwise you will perish. Lie still.”

There was nothing else to be done. I had to obey him, and he pulled the reindeer skins off the sledge, threw them over me, and then crawled under them too.

“Now, Bachka, it’ll be nice.”

But this “nice” was so nasty, that I instantly had to turn away as far as possible from my neighbour, because his presence at a short distance was unbearable. The corpse of Lazarus, that had lain four days in the grave of Bethany, could not have stunk more than this live man did. It was worse than the stench of a corpse; it was a mixture of the fetid smell of the reindeer skins, the strong odour of human sweat, smoke, damp rottenness, dried fish, fish fat and dirt… “O, God,” I cried, “what a miserable man am I! How loathsome this brother, created after Thine image, is to me.” Oh, how gladly would I have escaped from this stinking grave, in which he had placed me next to himself; if I had only had strength and power to stand in this hellish drifting chaos! But nothing resembling such a possibility could be expected – and I had to submit.

My savage noticed that I had turned away, and said:

“Stop, Bachka, you have turned your snout the wrong way – put your snout here – we will blow together – it will soon get warmer.”

Even to hear this seemed terrible.

I pretended not to hear him, but suddenly he hopped on to me, like a bug, rolled over me, lay down with his nose touching mine, and began to breathe into my face with terrible sniffs and stench. He blew extraordinarily loud, like a blacksmith’s bellows. I could not bear it, and tried to make him stop.

“Breathe in a quieter way,” I said.

“Why? It does not matter, Bachka, I’m not tired; I can warm your snout, Bachka.”

Of course his having said “snout” did not offend me, because I had no ambition at that moment, and I repeat that for the expression of useless niceties such as making a distinction between an animal’s snout and a man’s face, no separate words existed in their language. Everything was snout; he himself had a snout, his wife had a snout, his reindeer had a snout, his god Shigemony had a snout. Why should a bishop not have a snout too? My grace could put up with this easily, but the difficulty was to endure his breath, the stink of dried fish, and some other disgusting odour – probably the stench of his own stomach – I could not stand it.

“It’s enough,” I said. “Stop, you have warmed me; now, don’t blow any more.”

“No, Bachka, we must blow, it will be warmer.”

“No, please don’t; you’ve bored me enough with it – I don’t want it.”

“Well, Bachka, if you don’t want it, we needn’t. Now we can go to sleep.”

“Go to sleep.”

“And you, Bachka, go to sleep.”

A second after he had said this, like a well-trained horse, that at once starts at a gallop, he instantly fell asleep, and began to snore. Yes, how the rascal snored! I must confess to you, that from my childhood I have been a great enemy of all who snore in their sleep, and if even one snoring man is in the room I am a martyr, and it is impossible for me to get to sleep. As we had many snorers in the seminary and the academy, I often could not help listening to them attentively, and I am not joking when I tell you that I worked out a theory about snoring. By his snores, I assure you, I can judge of a man’s character and temperament as well as you can by his voice, or his walk. I assure you, it is so; a passionate man snores passionately just as if even in his sleep he was in a rage. I had a comrade in the academy who was gay and a dandy, so he snored in a dandified way, – so gaily, with a sort of whistle, just as if he were going to the cathedral of his own town for the first time in a new gown. It often happened that they came from the other dormitories to listen to him and admire his art. But now my savage neighbour started such music as I had never heard before, nor had I ever observed or heard such an extensive diapason, nor such rapid time; it was just as if a large swarm of bees was humming and knocking gently on the sides of a dry, resonant, bee-hive. Beautifully, gravely, rhythmically, and in time thus: ou-ou-ou-ou – bum-bum-bum, ou-ou-ou-ou – bum, bum-bum. According to my observations, I could have concluded that this was produced by a punctual and reliable man, but unfortunately I could make no observations: that brigand quite overpowered me with his noise. I suffered, I suffered long, – at last could bear it no more, and poked him in the ribs.

“Don’t snore,” I said.

“Why, Bachka? Why shouldn’t I snore?”

“You snore horribly, you don’t let me sleep.”

“You ought to snore too.”

“I don’t know how to snore.”

“And I know how to, Bachka,” and he instantly started droning at full speed.

What could you do with such an artist? How could you argue with such a man, who in every way was your superior; he knew more about baptism than I did, and how many times one could be baptized, he was learned in names, and knew how to snore, and I did not know how to – in everything he had the advantage – he must be given all due honour and precedence.

I drew back from him as far as I could, and a little to the side, and with difficulty getting my hand under my cassock, pressed my repeater; the watch struck only three and three-quarters. That meant it was still day; the blizzard, would, of course, last the whole night, perhaps even longer… Siberian blizzards are of long duration. You can imagine what it was to have all this before one. In the meantime my position became more and more terrible; we had certainly been well covered up with snow, and in our lair it was, not only warm, but stuffy; but, on the other hand, the horrible sickening exhalations became more dense – my breath was taken away by this suffocating stench, and it was a pity it had not finished me quite, because I would then not have experienced a hundredth part of those sufferings which I felt, when I remembered that with Father Kiriak not only my bottle with brandy and water, but all our provisions had been lost. I clearly saw that if I was not suffocated here as in the Black Hole, I was certainly threatened with the most terrible, the most painful of all deaths – the death from starvation and thirst, which had already begun its torments on me. Oh, how I regretted that I had not remained above to freeze, but had crawled into this snowy coffin, where we two were lying so close together and under such a weight, that all my efforts to raise myself and get up were quite useless.

With the greatest trouble I was able to get from under my shoulder some small pieces of snow, and greedily swallowed them, one after the other, but – alas! this did not alleviate my sufferings at all – on the contrary, it only aroused in me nausea and an unbearable burning in the throat and stomach, and especially near the heart; my head was ready to split: I had ringing in the ears and my eyes burnt, and stood out of their sockets. While all the time the tiresome swarm of bees hummed louder and louder, and knocked more sonorously on the sides of the hive. This horrible condition lasted until my repeater struck seven – after which I don’t remember anything more, as I lost consciousness.

This was the greatest good luck, that could have befallen me in this disastrous position. I do not know if I rested physically during that time, but in any case I did not suffer from the thoughts of what I had before me, the horrors of which must in reality greatly exceed all the representations that an alarmed fantasy could conjure up.