A Night in the Cemetery

DREAMS

Two police deputies: one is black-bearded and stocky, with legs so short that if you looked at him from behind you would think his legs began much lower than in other people; the other is long, thin, and upright as a stick, with a sparse beard of a dark, reddish color. They are escorting a tramp who doesn’t remember his name into town. The stocky deputy struts, looking from side to side, and chewing now a straw, now his own sleeve; at times he slaps himself on the hips and hums a tune. He appears completely unconcerned and flippant. The other, despite his gaunt face and narrow shoulders, looks reliable, serious, and thorough. The way he is built and the expression of his whole body reminds one of the Old Believers or the warriors painted on icons. “For his wisdom God has added to his forehead”; in other words, he is bald, which only increases the above likeness. The first is called Andrei Ptaha, the latter Nikolai Sapozhnikov.

The appearance of the man they are escorting does not correspond in the least to the standard conception of a tramp. He is a small, frail man, feeble-bodied and sickly, his features faint, colorless, and extremely indefinite. His eyebrows are sparse, his eyes submissive and pale, and he has hardly any facial hair, although he is over thirty. He walks timidly, with his shoulders bent forward and his hands thrust into his sleeves. The collar of his threadbare wool overcoat, too nice for a tramp, is turned up to the very edge of his cap, so that nothing but his little red nose dares to peep out into the big, wide world. He has an inaudible, ingratiating tenor voice, and he coughs lightly now and again. It is exceedingly difficult to take him for a tramp who won’t reveal his own name. He looks more like a penniless priest’s son, a God-forgotten loser, a scribe fired for drinking, or the son or nephew of a merchant, who, having tried his scanty talent in the theatrical world, is now walking home to play the last act of the parable of the prodigal son; or, perhaps, judging by the dull patience with which he struggles through the thick autumn mud, he could be a fanatic crawling from one monastery to another, endlessly seeking a life that is peaceful, holy, and free from sin, and never finding it …

The travelers have been walking quite a while now but they never seem to advance beyond the same small patch of land. About thirty feet of the blackish-brown muddy road still lies ahead of them, about the same is seen behind, and farther ahead, as far as your eyes can see, there is an impenetrable wall of white fog. They march on and on, but the land remains the same, the wall will not move closer, and the same patch of ground is forever there. From time to time they glimpse a craggy white stone, a gully, or a bundle of hay dropped by a passerby. A large, dirty puddle will glimmer, or a shadow with vague outlines will suddenly come into view ahead of them; the nearer they come to it the smaller and darker it becomes; still nearer, and there in front of them stands a leaning milestone with its illegible number, or a miserable birch tree, drenched and bare, like a wayside beggar. The birch tree will whisper something with its last yellow leaves, and one leaf will break off and float lazily to the ground. And then again the same fog, mud, the brown grass along the edges of the road. Dim tears are hanging on the grass. These are not the tears of tender joy that the earth sheds when welcoming and parting from the summer sun, and that she gives at dawn for the quails, corncakes, and slender, long-beaked curlews to drink. The travelers’ feet get stuck in a heavy, sticky mud. Every step takes effort.

Andrei Ptaha is somewhat excited. He keeps examining the tramp, trying to figure out how on earth a man, alive and sober, could happen to forget his name.

“Are you Christian at all?” he asks.

“I am,” the tramp answers timidly.

“Hmm … then you’ve been baptized?”

“Well, to be sure! I’m no Turk. I go to church and I observe the fasts, and I don’t eat meat when not allowed. And I do exactly what the pastor says….”

“So what’s your name, then?”

“Call me whatever you like, chap.”

Completely at a loss, Ptaha shrugs his shoulders and slaps himself on the hips. His partner, Nicholas Sapozhnikov, maintains a significant silence. He is not as simple-minded as Ptaha and apparently knows very well the reasons that could induce an orthodox Christian to conceal his name. His expressive face remains cold and stern. He walks a little bit apart from the others and does not condescend to idle chatter. He seems to be trying to demonstrate to everyone, the fog included, his gravity and reason.

“God knows what to make of you,” Ptaha keeps nagging. “Common man you are not, and gentleman you are not, you are sort of in the middle or so…. I was washing a sieve in the pond the other day and up comes this viper, you know, long as a finger, with gills and a tail. First I thought it was a fish, and then I had a good look at it—and, plague upon it! The thing had legs. Maybe it was a fish, or something else, deuce only knows. So that’s like you. What’s your calling?”

“I’m a common man and of a peasant family,” sighs the tramp. “My mother was a house serf. I don’t look like a serf, I don’t, as my family were of a different kind, good men. They kept my mamma as a nurse with the gentlemen, and she had every comfort, and I being of her flesh and blood, I used to live with her in the master’s house. She petted and pampered me, and did her best to take me out of my humble condition and make a gentleman of me. I’d sleep in a bed and eat a real dinner every day, and I wore breeches and half-boots like any other gentleman boy. What my mamma ate she’d give me to eat, too; they gave her money to buy herself new clothes, and she’d buy clothes for me. A good life it was! So many sweets and cakes I was eating as a boy that if I’d sold them all now I could’ve got a good horse. Mamma took me in hand in my learning, and taught me fear of God from my early days.”

The tramp bares his head, and the hair on it looks like a toothless old brush; he turns his eyes upward and crosses himself twice.

“Grant her, dear Lord, a place plenteous and benevolent.” He pronounces this in a drawl, sounding more like an old woman than a man. “Teach Thy servant Ksenia Thy justifications. My beloved mamma had such a good heart that without her I would’ve been the most commonest sort of man with no understanding. And now, chap, you can ask me about whatever you wish and I know it all: scriptures secular and holy, and prayers of all kinds, and catechism. And I live accordingly. I don’t harm anyone, I keep my flesh clean and chaste, I observe the fasts, I eat at the appropriate time. Another man may be the slave of vodka and fish, and I—whenever I have some time—I’d sit in a corner and read a book. I’d read and I’d weep and weep.”

“And why would you weep?”

“They write most pitiful! You can give just a five-kopeck piece for a book, and yet you’ll weep and sigh uncommonly over it.”

“Is your father dead?” asked Ptaha.

“I don’t know, fellow. I don’t know my father; I shall be sincere with you. I think I was Mamma’s illegitimate child. My mamma lived with the gentry all her life and didn’t want to marry a muzhik.”

“Aye, and got mixed up with the master,” Ptaha grins.

“She gave in to temptation, she did. She was very goodhearted, and God-fearing, but she didn’t keep herself chaste. It is vicious, of course, very vicious, but now maybe I have some genteel blood in me and maybe they only call me a muzhik but in nature I am a noble gentleman.”

This speech is delivered by the “noble gentleman” in a quiet and sugary little tenor, his narrow forehead wrinkled up and his chilled little nose emitting squeaking sounds. Ptaha listens to what he is saying, looks at him with surprise, and continually shrugs his shoulders.

Having walked nearly four miles, the police deputies and the tramp sit down on a little hill to have a rest.

“Even a dog knows his name,” Ptaha mutters. “My name’s Andryushka, his is Nikandr; every man shall have his own holy name, and it ain’t to be forgot. No way.”

“Who’d have any need to know my name?” sighs the tramp and sets his cheek on his fist. “And what good will it do me? If they allowed me to go where I want, but it would be even worse than now. I know the law, my Christian brethren. Now I am a tramp who-don’t-remember-his-name, and at the very least they will send me to Eastern Siberia and give me thirty or forty lashes; but if it happens that I tell them my real name and calling they’ll send me back to hard labor, I know it!”

“You have been in hard labor, have you?”

“I was, my friend. I had a shaved head and irons on my legs for four years.”

“What for?”

“Murder, good fellow! When I was still a boy of eighteen or so, my mamma had an accidental oversight. She dropped some arsenic into the master’s glass instead of soda and acid. There were all sorts of boxes in the storeroom, lots of them; it was very easy to have made a mistake over them.”

The tramp sighs, shakes his head, and says:

“She was very good in her heart, but—who knows?—another man’s soul is always dark. She mayn’t have know’d, or she may’ve had this insult in her heart that the master preferred another servant…. She may’ve put it in on purpose, God knows! I was so small at that time as I didn’t understand it all … now I remember it, our master did reveal a favor to another mistress and Mamma was very much upset. And then they sent us to trial for two years or so…. Mamma was condemned to hard labor for twenty years, and I, being a infant, only for seven.”

“And why did they condemn you?”

“As an accomplice. You see, it was I that handed the glass to the master. It’s always been that way: Mamma’d prepare the soda and I handed it to him. But look here, brothers, I tell it all to you now as a good Christian, like before the Lord. You don’t tell anybody.”

“Well, nobody’s gonna ask us, be sure,” says Ptaha. “So you’ve run away from the labor, right?”

“I have, my friend. It was about fourteen of us. Those folks—Lord bless them!—ran away themselves and took me with them. Now you tell me, good man, in all honesty, is this a fair reason for me to hide my calling? They will send me back to hard labor in the blink of an eye, you know! And I am no hard laborer! I am timid and given to sickness, and I have a preference for eating and sleeping in a tidy place. When I pray to God I like to light a little icon-lamp or a candle, and not to hear noise around me. And when I bow down before Christ I want the floor be clean and not spit upon. And I do forty bows for my mamma every morning and evening.”

The tramp takes off his cap and crosses himself.

“And let them send me to Eastern Siberia,” he says “I am not afeared of that.”

“You think it’s better?”

“That’s pretty much a different thing. You are like a crab in a basket at the labor: it’s all crowd and crush, no room to catch your breath there; it’s absolute hell, such a hell as may the queen of heaven spare us from it! You are a bandit and they treat you like a bandit, worse than a dog. You don’t eat, you don’t sleep, you don’t even pray to God. But the settlement ain’t like that at all. The first thing I’ll do in the settlement is that I make myself a member of society like all other folks. The chiefs must give me a piece of land as the law says, that’s exactly how it is! And they say the land there don’t cost anything, no more than snow; you can take as much you like! So they’ll give me my field land, and my garden land, and my house land. I shall plough my field like other people, and sow seed, and I shall have cattle and stock of all kinds, and bees, and sheep, and dogs. A Siberian cat so rats and mice don’t spoil my goods. I’ll put up a house, and buy all sorts of icons, and get married and have children, God willing.”

The tramp is muttering, looking sideways. Although his dreaming appears unrealistic, the tramp’s voice sounds so sincere and affectionate that it is hard not to believe in what he is saying. The tramp’s little mouth is distorted in a smile, while his whole face, his eyes, and his little nose have become frozen still and blank with blissful anticipation of distant happiness. The police deputies are listening to him, their faces quite serious and rather sympathetic. They, too, believe him.

“I ain’t afeared of Siberia,” the tramp is muttering on. “Siberia is the same Russia as here, with the same Lord and tsar, and they talk there in the same orthodox way like you and me. But it’s more easier there and folks are better off. Everything’s better there. Take the rivers there, they are so much better than ours here. And astonishing crowds of fishes and all sorts of game. And I, dear brothers, I’m particularly fond of fishing. Sit me down with a hook, and I ask no more. Yes, indeed! I fish with a hook and a reel, and I set traps, and on ice I fish with a net. See, I ain’t got that strength to fish with a net, so I’d hire a man for a fiver. And, Lord, how wonderful it is! You catch an eelpout or a chub of some sort and you are so happy like you’ve met your own brother. And, you won’t believe it, there’s particular wisdom for catching every fish: you catch one with a little fish, you catch another with a worm, and for the third you prepare a frog or a grasshopper. And you ought to understand it all! Take the eelpout for example. The eelpout has no particular respect, it can even take a ruff; and the pike loves to have gudgeon, the snapper likes butterfly. If you fish for a chub in a quick river it is no trout pleasure. You throw the line for, like, twelve meters without a sinker, with a butterfly or a beetle, so that the bait floats atop; you stand in the water without pants and let it go with the current, and here comes the pull! But here you need to be tricky so that he, the cursed thing, won’t tear off. Once he pulls at your line you strike right away; no time to wait. Unbelievable how much fish I’ve caught in my time. When we were on the run, the other convicts would sleep in the woods, but I wouldn’t, the river lures me! And the rivers there are wide and fast, and the banks are steep—astonishing! It’s all slumbering forests along the bank. The trees are so high so that if you look at their tops it makes you giddy. Every pine would cost, like, ten rubles by the prices here.”

Pressed by the confusion of disorderly daydreams, of artistic representations of the past and a sweet presentiment of happiness, the poor man falls silent, merely moving his lips as if he were whispering to himself. The stupid blissful smile won’t leave his face. The police deputies are silent. Absorbed in reflection, they have lowered their heads. In the autumn stillness, when a cold, stern fog rises from the earth and covers your heart, when it stands before your eyes like a prison wall, and reminds man of the limits of his liberty, it feels so sweet to think of broad, rapid rivers with wild steep banks, of primeval forests and endless steppes. Slowly and peacefully the imagination pictures an early morning with the flush of dawn still on the sky and a man—like a tiny spot—making his way along a steep deserted bank; the ancient mast pines that tower in terraces on both sides of the torrent watch the free-willed man gravely and grumble gloomily; roots, huge stones, and thorny bushes lie in his way, but the man is strong in body and good in spirit and fears neither pines nor stones, nor his solitude, nor the reverberating echo that repeats the sound of every step he takes.

The police deputies are imagining the images of the life happy and free, the one that they have never lived; God knows whether they are vaguely recalling what they heard long ago or whether the notions of liberty have been passed down to them by some distant free-willed ancestor along with their flesh and blood.

Nikolai Sapozhnikov, who has not uttered a word so far, is the first to break the silence. He may have envied the tramp’s illusory happiness or he may have felt deep in his heart that daydreaming of happiness has nothing to do with the gray fog and the blackish-brown mud; anyhow, he casts a stern eye on the tramp and says:

“It’s all very well, to be sure, only that you won’t make it to those benevolent locations, old fellow, you won’t. Before you go two hundred miles you’ll yield up the ghost. Look how very puny you are! Here, you’ve hardly gone five miles and you can’t get your breath.”

The tramp turns slowly toward Nikandr, and the blissful smile vanishes from his face. He stares with fear and guilt at the man’s sedate face, apparently recalls something, and lowers his head. Silence falls again. All the three are reflecting. The minds of the police deputies are straining to embrace in the imagination what can be grasped by God alone, that is, that awful expanse separating them from the land of liberty. Meanwhile, images that are quite clear and distinct, and even more awful than that vast expanse, are filling the tramp’s mind. Pictures of legal procrastination, of transit and convict prisons, of weary stops on the way and bitter-cold winters, of the illnesses and deaths of his companions all stand vividly before his eyes. The tramp blinks guiltily, wipes the tiny drops of sweat from his forehead with his sleeve, and takes a deep breath as if he has just leaped out of a very hot bathhouse, then wipes his forehead with the other sleeve and looks around with fear.

“Sure, you’ll never make it there!” Ptaha agrees. “You ain’t much of a walker! Look at yourself—nothing but skin and bones! You’ll die, old fellow!”

“Of course he’ll die! What else could he do?” says Nikandr. “And now, too, he’ll go to a hospital. That’s for sure!”

He-who-doesn’t-remember-his-name looks in awe at the strict and passionless faces of his sinister companions and, keeping his cap on, his eyes open wide, hurriedly crosses himself…. He trembles, his head shakes, and his whole body starts twitching like a caterpillar when it is stepped upon.

“Well, it’s time to go,” says Nikandr, getting up; “we’ve had a rest.”

A minute later the travelers are marching on along the muddy road. The tramp is more bent than ever, his hands thrust deeper into his sleeves. Ptaha keeps silence.