XII

The day after that meeting happened to be Trinity Sunday. That year the feast fell upon the day of Timothy the Martyr when, according to popular legend, signs of crop failure appear. The village of Perebrod had a church but no priest, and the rare services – at Lent and on major feasts – were held by a visiting priest from the village of Volchye.

That day I had to go to the neighbouring town on business, and I set out on horseback about eight o’clock in the morning, when it was still cool. I had long before bought for my trips a small stallion about six or seven years old. It was of an ordinary local breed but had been carefully groomed by its former owner, a land surveyor. Its name was Taranchik. I had taken a great fancy to the likeable beast with its strong, shapely legs, its shaggy forelock under which gleamed an angry and distrustful eye, and its vigorously compressed lips. Its colour was rather a rare and amusing one: it was mouse-grey, except that the rump was dappled with white and black spots.

I had to ride through the village from end to end. The large green square spreading between the church and the tavern was completely taken up by long rows of carts in which peasants from the neighbouring villages of Volosha, Zulnya and Pechalovka had arrived with wives and children for the feast. People were bustling among the carts. Despite the early hour and strict regulations some of them were already drunk. (On holidays and at night, vodka could be got on the sly from the former publican, Srul.) The morning was windless and sultry. The air was humid, and the day promised to be unbearably hot. Not the smallest cloud could be seen in the torrid sky, which seemed to be veiled in silvery dust.

After settling my business in town, I went to the inn for a hurried meal of pike, stuffed Jewish fashion, washed it down with abominable, muddy beer, and started homewards. But as I was riding by the smithy I recalled that Taranchik’s left foreshoe had been loose for some time, and I halted to have it attended to. That took me another hour and a half, so that I rode up to Perebrod some time between four and five o’clock in the afternoon.

The square was teeming with drunken, boisterous people. Customers jostling and crushing each other had literally flooded the courtyard and the porch of the tavern; Perebrod peasants were mixed with arrivals from the neighbourhood, sitting on the grass in the shade of carts. Heads tipped back and upraised bottles could be seen everywhere. There was not a single man left sober. The general intoxication had reached the point where the muzhik begins impetuously and boastfully to exaggerate his drunkenness, where he begins to move with a heavy, flabby swing, so that instead of, say, nodding his head he sags from the thighs, bends his knees and, suddenly losing his equilibrium, lurches helplessly back. Children were romping and screaming at the feet of horses impassively chewing hay. Here and there a wailing, swearing woman, who could scarcely stand up herself, tugged at the sleeve of her balking, disgustingly drunken husband, trying to get him home. In the shade of a fence, a group of about twenty peasant men and women formed a close ring round a blind hurdy-gurdy player, whose quaking tenor, accompanied by monotonous humming, came out sharply above the general uproar. I heard the familiar words of a ballad:

 

Ho, the evening sun went down,

The dark night quickly fell.

Ho, the Turkish horde swept down

Like a black cloud from hell.

 

The ballad goes on to tell how the Turks, unable to take the Pochayev Monastery by assault, resorted to a ruse. They sent as a gift to the monastery a huge candle stuffed with gunpowder. The candle was delivered by a team of twelve pairs of oxen and the overjoyed monks were about to light it before the icon of the Pochayev Virgin, but God did not allow the heinous crime to be committed.

 

A vision then the lector had —

He was cautioned by Our Lord

To take the candle to the field

And smite it with his sword.

And the monks did so:

Then they took out into the field

And smote the candle down,

And balls and bullets from inside

They scattered all around.

 

The hot air seemed to be pervaded through and through by the sickening mixed smell of vodka, onions, sheepskin coats, strong home-grown tobacco, and dirty, sweating human bodies. Carefully threading my way through the crowd and with difficulty holding back the restless Taranchik, I met unceremonious, inquisitive and hostile looks as I rode along. Contrary to custom no one took off his cap, but the noise seemed to subside a little at my appearance. Suddenly a drunken hoarse shout rang out somewhere in the middle of the crowd; I could not make out the words, but it was greeted by subdued laughter. A frightened woman’s voice tried to check the shouter.

“Shut up, you fool! What are you yelling for? He might hear you.”

“What if he does?” the man cried boldly. “Is he my boss or something? It’s only in the woods, with his – ”

A long, foul, terrible sentence rent the air, together with a burst of uproarious laughter. I swiftly turned my horse about and clutched the handle of my whip, seized with that mad fury which is blind to everything, which does not reason and fears no one. And suddenly a strange, painful thought crossed my mind: “All this has happened to me before – many, many years ago. The sun was just as hot. The huge square was flooded with a noisy, excited crowd as it is now. I turned about just as now in a fit of frenzied anger. But where was that? When?” I lowered my whip and galloped off homewards.

Yarmola came slowly out of the kitchen. He took over the horse, and said roughly, “There’s the steward from Marinovka Estate waiting for you in your room, master.”

I fancied that he was about to add something – something very important and disagreeable to me – indeed I thought I saw the shadow of a malicious smirk flit across his face. I lingered purposely in the doorway and looked back at him defiantly. But he was already pulling at the bridle, with his face turned away, and the hose was gingerly following him with outstretched neck.

I found in my room Nikita Mishchenko from the neighbouring estate. He wore a short grey jacket with enormous russet checks, narrow trousers of cornflower blue and a flaming necktie. His greased hair was parted in the middle, and he gave off a fragrance of Persian Lilac. The moment he saw me he jumped up from his seat and began to scrape, doubling up at the waist rather than bowing, with a grin that bared the pallid gums of both jaws.

“My compliments,” he chattered amiably. “Very happy to see you. I’ve been waiting for you since mass. It’s such a long time since I saw you last that I thought I’d drop in. Why don’t you ever come and see us? The young ladies are making fun of you.”

And suddenly, remembering something, he burst out laughing uncontrollably.

“Some fun we had today, I can tell you!” he cried, choking with laughter. “Ha-ha-ha! I just split my sides!”

“What do you mean? What fun?” I cut in rudely, making no effort to conceal my displeasure.

“There was a row after mass here,” he continued, punctuating his speech with peals of laughter. “Some Perebrod girls – no, by God, I can’t! Some Perebrod girls caught a witch in the square. I mean, they consider her a witch, the ignorant rustics. Well, they gave her a nice shake-up! They were going to tar her, but she slipped away somehow.”

A terrible conviction flashed upon me. I rushed to the clerk and clutched at his shoulder, beside myself with anxiety.

“What are you talking about?” I roared in a frenzy. “Stop laughing, damn you! What witch do you mean?”

He at once broke off his laughter and stared at me, his eyes bulging with fright.

“I – er – I really don’t know, sir,” he spluttered in confusion. “I think her name’s Samuilikha, or Manuilikha – wait a second, she’s the daughter of a Manuilikha, it seems. The muzhiks were talking about it, but I forgot what they said, honestly.”

I made him tell me from the beginning all he had seen and heard. He spoke stupidly, incoherently, mixing up details, and every moment I interrupted him by impatient questions or exclamations, all but swearing at him. I gleaned very little from his story, and it was not until about two months later that I reconstructed the accursed event in its entirety from what the forester’s wife, who had been at mass that day, told me.

Presentiment had not deceived me. Olesya had overcome her fear and gone to church; she had arrived when, mass was half finished, and placed herself at the back of the aisle, but all the peasants who were there at once noticed her. Throughout the service the women whispered among themselves and kept on looking back.

Nevertheless, Olesya mustered up courage enough to remain in church till the end of mass. Perhaps she had misunderstood the meaning of the hostile looks, or had ignored them out of pride. But when she walked out of the church, a bunch of women surrounded her by the fence, growing from minute to minute and closing in on her. At first they only stared rudely at the helpless girl, who was casting terrified glances about her. Then came a shower of coarse jeers, salty words, oaths accompanied by laughter, and then the various cries merged into a continuous ear-splitting noise that excited the women to an even greater fury. Olesya made several attempts to break out of the terrible live ring, but she was pushed back into the centre again and again. Suddenly an old woman screeched from behind the crowd, “Tar her, the hussy!” (In the Ukraine tarring, even of the gate of the house in which a girl lives, is a great, indelible disgrace to her.) Almost instantly a pail with tar and brush appeared above the heads of the raging women, and was passed on from hand to hand.

Then Olesya, in a fit of anger, terror and despair, flew at one of her tormentors so violently that she knocked her down. A scuffle ensued, with dozens of women in a bawling, struggling mass on the ground. By some miracle Olesya succeeded in wriggling out of the tangle, and she started to run down the road, her kerchief gone, her dress torn to rags and her naked flesh showing in many places. The crowd swore and laughed and hooted, and hurled stones at her. But she was chased by only a few, who soon fell back. Having run about fifty feet away, Olesya stopped, turned her pale, scratched and bleeding face to the brutal mob, and shouted so loudly that every word could be heard in the square, “All right! You’ll remember this! You’ll cry your eyes out yet!”

The threat, as the eyewitness told me, was uttered with such passionate hatred, in such a resolute, prophetic tone, that for an instant the whole crowd seemed to freeze with fear; but it only lasted an instant, for the next moment there came a fresh burst of oaths.

I repeat that I did not learn many details of the incident until much later. I had neither the strength nor the patience to hear Mishchenko’s story to the end. I thought that Yarmola had probably not had time to unsaddle the horse, and I hurried out into the courtyard without a word to the dumbfounded clerk. And so it was – Yarmola was still walking Taranchik back and forth along the fence. I quickly bridled the horse, tightened the saddle-girth, and galloped off to the forest by a roundabout way, so as not to have to go through the drunken crowd again.