Olesya

I

Yarmola the woodman – my servant, cook, and hunting companion – came into the room, bending under a bundle of wood, crashed it down on the floor, and breathed upon his frozen fingers to warm them up.

“Some wind outside, master,” he said, squatting in front of the stove-door. “I must heal the stove well. May I use your lighter?”

“So we shan’t go hare-shooting tomorrow, eh? What do you think, Yarmola?”

“No chance of that – hear how it goes on? The hare are lying low now. You won’t see a single track tomorrow.”

I chanced to spend six long months in Perebrod, a little God-forsaken village in the Volhynian borderland of Polesye, where game-shooting was my sole occupation and pastime. To be frank, I did not imagine, when I was offered to go to the country, that it would be so unbearably dull. Indeed, I was quite pleased to go. “Polesye, an out-of-the-way corner – nature at its best – simple manners – primitive characters,” I said to myself on the train. “People I know absolutely nothing about, with strange customs and peculiar speech – and a wealth of poetic legends and traditions and songs, no doubt.” You see (having started I might as well go all the way), by then I had had a short story published in a small newspaper, describing two murders and a suicide, and I knew at least in theory that a writer should study customs.

However, either because the Perebrod peasants were distinguished by a special, obstinate sort of unsociability, or because I did not know how to go about it, my relations with them never went beyond the fact that, on seeing me from a distance, they would take off their caps and, as they came alongside, would mutter sullenly “Speedjue,” which was supposed to mean “God speed you.” And when I attempted to get into conversation with them they would stare at me in surprise, refusing to understand the simplest questions I asked and trying again and again to kiss my hands, an old custom dating from the time of Polish serfdom.

Before long I had read the few books I had with me. Out of boredom I tried – though at first the idea did not appeal to me – to make the acquaintance of the local intellectuals, to wit: a Polish priest living ten miles from my place, the organist assigned to him, the local uryadnik and a clerk of the neighbouring estate, a retired non-commissioned officer; but nothing came of it.

Then I had a go at doctoring the Perebrod people. I had at my disposal castor oil, carbolic acid, boric acid, and iodine. But, apart from the scantiness of my knowledge, I was handicapped by the complete impossibility of making any diagnosis, for my patients all had one and the same complaint: “It hurts inside” and “I can’t eat or drink.”

Along comes, say, an old woman. Embarrassed, she wipes her nose with her right forefinger, takes a couple of eggs from her bosom – I catch a glimpse of her brown skin – and puts them on my desk. Then she tries to get hold of my hands in order to stamp a kiss upon them. I pull them back and admonish her, “Stop it, Grandmother, don’t! I’m not a priest, that sort of thing isn’t for me. What’s ailing you?”

“It hurts inside, master, right inside me – I can’t eat or drink.”

“When did that come?”

“How should I know?” she asks me in her turn. “It burns and burns. I can’t eat or drink.”

And no matter how hard I try I fail to bring out any more specific symptoms of her illness.

“Don’t you bother,” the retired non-com, suggested one day, “they’ll get over it by themselves. Like dogs do. You know, I only use one medicine – salammoniac. A muzhik comes along. ‘What d’you want?’ I ask him. ‘I’m ill,’ he says. So I poke up a bottle of ammonia to his nose. ‘Smell this!’ says I. And smell he does. ‘Smell some more – harder!’ I says. He smells again. ‘Feeling better?’ I says. ‘A bit better, I s’pose,’ he says. ‘Well, run along in peace,’ says I.”

Besides, that hand-kissing revolted me – some of my patients even threw themselves at my feet and tried to osculate my boots. What urged them to do so was not an impulse of a grateful heart but a fulsome habit inculcated by centuries of slavery and violence. I looked with sheer amazement on the retired non-com, and the uryadnik, who thrust their huge red paws into the villagers’ lips with unruffled gravity.

I was left no choice but game-shooting. But late in January the weather grew so bad as to make even that impossible. A violent wind blew every day, and during the night a hard, icy crust would form on the snow, over which the hare would scamper without leaving any tracks. Shut in and listening to the howling wind, I was bored to death. And that is why I took up so eagerly the innocent pastime of teaching Yarmola to read and write.

It began in rather an unusual way. One day as I was writing a letter I felt that there was someone standing behind me. I turned and saw Yarmola, who had walked up, noiselessly as always, in his soft bast shoes.

“What is it, Yarmola?” I asked.

“Oh, I’m just looking. I wish I could write like you do. No, no, I didn’t mean like you,” he hastened to explain in abashment as he saw me smile. “I meant just my name.”

“What for?” I asked in surprise. I ought to note here that Yarmola was considered the poorest and laziest peasant in all Perebrod; he spent his woodman’s wages and whatever his crops brought him on drink; his team of oxen was the worst in the neighbourhood. It seemed to me that he could have no need for literacy. Doubtfully I asked him again, “What do you want to know how to write your name for?”

“You see, master,” he replied, in an exceedingly bland tone, “nobody in this village can read or write. When it comes to signing some paper, or seeing to some business in the volost, there’s nobody can do it. The elder sets the seal, but he doesn’t know what the paper says. So it would be lucky for everybody if someone could sign his name.”

Yarmola was a notorious poacher, a happy-go-lucky tramp whose opinion the villagers would never have thought of taking into account; yet somehow his solicitude for the public weal of his native village moved me. I offered to give him lessons. But what a hard job it was trying to teach him to read and write! He knew every path in his forest, with nearly every tree in it, he knew his way about anywhere by day or night, and could tell by their tracks all the wolves and hares and foxes in the neighbourhood; but he could not for the life of him understand why m and a, for example, make up ma. He would sit for ten minutes or more brooding painfully over a problem like that, with the greatest mental strain showing in his deep-set black eyes and his dark lean face, smothered in the coarse black beard and large moustache.

“Come on, Yarmola – say ma. Just say ma,” I would urge him. “Don’t stare at the paper, look at me – that’s it. Now say ma.”

Yarmola would draw a deep sigh, put the pointer on the table, and say with sad determination, “No, I can’t.”

“But why not? It’s so easy. Simply say ma as I do.” “No, I can’t, master. I forget.”

Every method, every comparison was defeated by his monstrous dullness. But his thirst for enlightenment did not diminish.

“If only I could sign my name!” he would coax me. “I ask no more. Just my name – Yarmola Popruzhuk – and nothing else.”

I finally gave up the idea of teaching him to read and write intelligently, and began to teach him to sign mechanically. To my great surprise the new method proved easier for him, so that by the end of the second month he had almost taken the hurdle of writing his surname. As to his first name, we decided to leave it out altogether to lighten his task.

In the evenings, when he had finished heating the stoves, Yarmola would wait impatiently for me to call him.

“Well, Yarmola, let’s study,” I would say.

He would sidle up to the table, prop his elbows on it, push the pen between his black, stiff, horny fingers, and ask me with raised eyebrows, “Shall I start?”

“Yes.”

He would trace the first letter, P – we called it “a stick with a loop” – rather confidently, then look up, a question on his face.

“Why did you stop? Have you forgotten?”

“Yes.” He would shake his head in vexation.

“What a queer one you are! All right put down a wheel.”

“That’s it – a wheel! Now I know!” He would brighten and carefully draw a figure very much like the Caspian Sea in outline. Then lie would admire his work for a while in silence, cocking his head to the left, then again to the right, and screwing up his eyes.

“What’s the matter? Go on.”

“Wait a bit, master, wait just a moment.”

He would ponder for two minutes or so, and then ask timidly, “It’s like the first one, ain’t it?”

“Yes. Come on.”

In this manner we gradually made our way to K, the last letter, which we described as “a stick with a crook and a tail.”

“You know, master.” he said sometimes, looking with proud, loving eyes at his finished job, “if I studied another five or six months I’d be pretty good at it. What do you say?”

II

Yarmola squatted in front of the stove, stirring the charcoal inside, while I walked up and down in my room. Of the twelve rooms of the big landlord’s mansion, I occupied only one, the former “sofa room.” The other rooms were locked, and mould gathered on the antique furniture upholstered with damask, the outlandish bronze fixtures, and the eighteenth-century portraits.

Outside the mansion, the wind was raging like a shivering old devil, its roar punctuated by groans, screams, and wild laughter. Towards nightfall the snowstorm grew worse. Someone seemed to be hurling handfuls of fine, dry snow against the panes. The nearby forest murmured and hummed with an unceasing, hidden menace.

The wind would get into the empty rooms and drone in chimneys, and then the old tumbledown house, shaky, and draughty, would suddenly come alive with strange sounds, to which I listened in involuntary alarm. There would be a sigh in the white hall – a deep, broken, mournful sigh. Then the rotten dry floor-boards would give way and creak under someone’s heavy footsteps. The next moment I would fancy that in the passage adjoining my room someone was cautiously but doggedly pushing the door-knob, and then he in a sudden fury would start to race about the house, angrily shaking all the shutters and doors, or crawling into the chimney and whining there with a dull, never-ending plaint rising, sometimes to a pitiful scream and then dropping to a beast’s snarl. At times, coming from nowhere, the terrible visitor would burst into my own room, rush suddenly down my spine in a cold breath, and shake the flame of the lamp shining dimly under a green paper shade with a scorched top.

I was overcome by a strange, uncertain anxiety. “Here I am,” I thought, “sitting on a dark, stormy winter night in a ramshackle house, in a village lost in woods and snow-drifts, hundreds of miles from town life, society, women’s laughter, human conversation.” And I had a feeling that the stormy night would drag on for years and decades, till my death, and the wind would roar outside just as dismally, the lamp under the shabby green shade would burn just as dimly. I would pace my room just as uneasily, and the silent, brooding Yarmola would squat in front of the stove in the same way, a strange being alien to me and indifferent to everything on earth: to the fact that his family had nothing to eat, to the raging wind, to my uncertain, corroding melancholy.

Suddenly I longed to have the oppressive silence broken by some semblance of a human voice, and so I asked, “Where do you think this horrible wind comes from, Yarmola?”

“The wind?” Yarmola looked up lazily. “Why, don’t you know, master?”

“Of course not. How could I know such a thing?”

“Don’t you, really!” Yarmola was roused. “I’ll tell you,” he went on, a shade mysteriously. “Either a witch has been born, or a wizard’s making merry.”

I pounced eagerly on this. “Who knows,” I thought, “perhaps I may worm out of him some interesting story of magic, hidden treasures, or werewolves.”

“Have you got any witches here in Polesye?” I asked.

“I don’t know. There might be,” he replied with his former indifference, and bent over the stove-door again. “Old folk say there were some once. But perhaps that ain’t true.”

I was disappointed. I knew how stubbornly untalkative Yarmola was, land I lost all hope of drawing anything else out of him on that interesting subject. To my surprise, however, he suddenly began to speak with his lazy carelessness, as if he were talking to the roaring stove and not to me.

“We had a witch here about five years ago. But the lads drove her away.”

“Where to?”

“Why, to the forest, of course. Where else? And they pulled down her house, they did, so that not a chip would be left of her accursed nest. They took her beyond the cherry orchards and kicked her out.”

“But why did they treat her like that?”

“She did a lot of harm: she quarrelled with everybody, cast evil spells on houses, plaited the stalks in the sheaves. Once she asked a young wife for a zloty. The young woman says, ‘I haven’t got one, lay off.’ ‘All right!’ says the witch, ‘some day you’ll be sorry you refused me a zloty.’ And what do you think happened, master? The woman’s baby fell ill just after that. It was ill for a long time, and then it died altogether. That was when the lads kicked out the witch, blast her eyes!”

“And where is the witch now?” I went on to ask.

“The witch?” he echoed slowly, as he was wont to. “How should I know?”

“Did she leave no kin here?”

“No, she didn’t. She was a stranger – a Katsap, or a Gypsy. I was a boy when she came. She had a little lass with her: her daughter or granddaughter. The lads drove both of them away.”

“Does nobody go to her any longer – to have his fortune told or ask for some potion?”

“The womenfolk do,” he drawled contemptuously.

“Oh, so they know where she lives?”

“I don’t know. People say she lives somewhere near Devil’s Nook. You know that marsh beyond Irinovo Road? That’s where she’s living, the accursed hag!”

The news of a witch only a few miles away – a real, live Polesye witch – thrilled and excited me.

“I say, Yarmola, how could I meet her – the witch, I mean?” I asked.

“Bah!” He spat out indignantly. “A fine acquaintance she’d make.”

“I mean to see her, fine or not. I’ll go to her place as soon as it gets a bit warmer. You’ll show me the way, won’t you?”

Yarmola was so struck by my last words that he jumped to his feet.

“Me?” he cried indignantly. “Not for all the gold! I won’t go, no matter what.”

“Nonsense – of course you will.”

“No, master, I won’t, not for the world. Me go?” he cried again, overcome by a fresh access of anger, “Me go to a witch’s nest? God forbid! And I wouldn’t advise you to go either, master.”

“As you like, but I’ll go just the same. I’m very curious to take a look at her.”

“There’s nothing curious about it,” Yarmola grumbled, shutting the stove-door with an angry bang.

An hour later, when Yarmola had had his tea in the dark passage and was about to go home, I asked, “What’s the witch’s name?”

“Manuilikha,” he replied gruffly.

Although he never showed it I had a feeling that he had become strongly attached to me. That was due to our common passion for game-shooting, to my simple manner towards him, to the help which I gave to his eternally-starving family once in a while, but above all to the fact that I was the only person who never censured him for his addiction to drink, something which he hated. That was why my determination to meet the witch put him in an exceedingly bad temper, which he indicated by sniffing hard, and by giving his dog Ryabchik a vicious kick in the ribs when he walked out on to the porch. Ryabchik gave a blood-curdling screech and darted aside, but then immediately ran whimpering after Yarmola.