Fifty-Two Stories

GRIEF

THE WOODTURNER Grigori Petrov, long known as an excellent craftsman and at the same time as the most good-for-nothing peasant in the whole Galchinsky district, is taking his sick old wife to the local hospital. He has to drive some twenty miles, and moreover the road is terrible, hard enough for a government postman to deal with, not to mention such a lazybones as the woodturner Grigori. A sharp, cold wind blows right in his face. In the air, wherever you look, big clouds of snowflakes whirl, so that it is hard to tell whether the snow is coming from the sky or from the earth. Neither the fields, nor the telegraph poles, nor the forest can be seen through the snowy mist, and when an especially strong gust of wind hits Grigori, he cannot even see the shaft bow. The decrepit, feeble little nag barely trudges along. All her energy is spent on pulling her legs out of the deep snow and tossing her head. The woodturner is in a hurry. He fidgets restlessly on the box and keeps whipping the horse’s back.

“Don’t you cry, Matryona…,” he mutters. “Hold out a little longer. God grant we’ll get to the hospital, and in a flash you’ll be, sort of…Pavel Ivanych will give you some little drops, or order a blood-letting, or maybe he’ll be so kind as to rub you with some sort of spirits, and that will…ease your side. Pavel Ivanych will do his best. He’ll scold, stamp his feet, but he’ll do his best…He’s a nice gentleman, well-mannered, God grant him good health…

“As soon as we get there, he’ll come running out of his quarters and start calling up all the devils. ‘What? How’s this?’ he’ll shout. ‘Why don’t you come at the right time? Am I some sort of dog, to bother with you devils all day long? Why didn’t you come in the morning? Out! So there’s no trace of you left! Come tomorrow!’ And I’ll say: ‘Doctor, sir! Pavel Ivanych! Your Honor!’ Get a move on, devil take you! Hup!”

The woodturner whips his nag and, not looking at the old woman, goes on muttering under his breath:

“ ‘Your Honor! Truly, as before God himself…I swear, I set out at daybreak. How could I make it here on time, if the Lord…the Mother of God…turned wrathful and sent such a storm? Kindly see for yourself…A nobler horse wouldn’t even have made it, and mine, kindly see for yourself, isn’t a horse, it’s a disgrace!’ Pavel Ivanych will frown and shout: ‘We know your kind! You always find some excuse! Especially you, Grishka! I’ve known you a long time! No doubt you stopped off maybe five times at a pot-house!’ And I say to him: ‘Your Honor! What am I, some sort of villain or heathen? The old woman’s rendering up her soul to God, she’s dying, and I should go running around to the pot-houses? Mercy, how can you? Let them all perish, these pot-houses!’ Then Pavel Ivanych will have you carried into the hospital. And I’ll bow down to him…‘Pavel Ivanych! Your Honor! I humbly thank you! Forgive us, cursed fools that we are, don’t take offense at us peasants! You should have kicked us out, but you kindly went to the trouble and got your feet covered with snow!’ And Pavel Ivanych will glance at me as if he’s about to hit me and say: ‘Instead of bowing at my feet, you’d do better, you fool, to stop guzzling vodka and pity your old woman. You could use a good whipping!’ ‘Exactly so, Pavel Ivanych, a good whipping, God strike me dead, a good whipping! And how can I not bow at your feet, if you’re our benefactor and dear father? Your Honor! I give you my word…as if before God…spit in my face if I’m lying: as soon as my Matryona here recovers and is her old self again, anything Your Grace cares to order from me, I’ll be glad to make! A cigar box of Karelian birch, if you wish…croquet balls, I can turn bowling pins just like the foreign ones…I’ll do it all for you! I won’t take a kopeck for it! In Moscow a cigar box like that would cost you four roubles, but I won’t take a kopeck.’ The doctor will laugh and say: ‘Well, all right, all right…I get it! Only it’s too bad you’re a drunkard…’ I know, old girl, how to talk with gentlemen. There’s no gentleman I couldn’t talk with. Only God keep us from losing our way. What a blizzard! My eyes are all snowy.”

And the woodturner mutters endlessly. He babbles away mechanically, so as to stifle his heavy feeling if only a little. He has many words on his tongue, but there are still more thoughts and questions in his head. Grief has come suddenly, unexpectedly, and taken the woodturner by surprise, and now he cannot recover, come to his senses, figure things out. Up to then he had lived serenely, as if in a drunken half-consciousness, knowing neither grief nor joy, and now he suddenly feels a terrible pain in his soul. The carefree lazybones and tippler finds himself all at once in the position of a busy man, preoccupied, hurrying, and even struggling with the elements.

The woodturner remembers that the grief began the previous evening. When he came home the previous evening, a bit drunk as usual, and from inveterate habit began cursing and shaking his fists, the old woman glanced at her ruffian as she had never done before. Usually the expression of her old-woman’s eyes was martyred, meek, as with dogs that are much beaten and poorly fed, but now she looked at him sternly and fixedly, as saints on icons or dying people do. It was with those strange, unhappy eyes that the grief began. The dazed woodturner persuaded a neighbor to lend him a horse, and he was now taking his old wife to the hospital, hoping that Pavel Ivanych, with his powders and ointments, would restore the old woman’s former gaze.

“And you, Matryona, well…,” he mutters. “If Pavel Ivanych asks you if I beat you or not, say: ‘No, never!’ And I won’t beat you anymore. I swear to God. Do you think I beat you out of spite? I beat you just so, for nothing. I pity you. Another man wouldn’t care much, but see, I’m driving…I’m trying hard. And the blizzard, what a blizzard! Lord, Thy will be done! Only grant we get there and don’t lose our way…What, your side hurts? Matryona, why don’t you say anything? I’m asking you: does your side hurt?”

It seems strange to him that the snow does not melt on the old woman’s face, that the face itself has become somehow peculiarly long, acquired a pale-gray, dirty-wax color, and become stern, serious.

“What a fool!” mutters the woodturner. “I speak to you in all conscience, like to God…and you…What a fool! I just won’t take you to Pavel Ivanych!”

The woodturner lets go of the reins and falls to thinking. He cannot bring himself to turn and look at the old woman: scary! To ask her something and not get an answer is also scary. Finally, to put an end to the uncertainty, without turning to look, he feels for the old woman’s cold hand. The raised hand drops back limply.

“So she died! What a chore!”

And the woodturner weeps. Not so much from pity as from vexation. He thinks: how quickly it all gets done in this world! His grief had barely begun, and the ending was already there waiting. He had barely begun to live with his old wife, to talk with her, to pity her, when she up and died. He had lived with her for forty years, but those forty years had passed as if in a fog. With all the drinking, fighting, and poverty, life had not been felt. And, as if on purpose, the old woman died just at the very moment when he felt that he pitied her, could not live without her, was terribly guilty before her.

“And she went begging,” he recalls. “I sent her out myself to ask people for bread—what a chore! She should have lived a dozen more years, the fool, but she probably thinks this is how I really am. Holy Mother of God, where the devil have I got to? It’s not treatment she needs now, it’s burial. Turn around!”

The woodturner turns around and whips up his nag with all his might. The road gets worse and worse every moment. Now he cannot see the shaft bow at all. Occasionally the sledge rides over a young fir tree, a dark object scratches his hands, flashes before his eyes, and the field of vision again becomes white, whirling.

“To live life over again…,” thinks the woodturner.

He remembers that forty years ago Matryona was young, beautiful, cheerful, from a rich family. They gave her to him in marriage because they were seduced by his craftsmanship. There were all the makings for a good life, but the trouble was that he got drunk after the wedding, dropped off, and it was as if he never woke up until now. The wedding he remembers, but of what came after the wedding—for the life of him, he cannot remember anything, except maybe that he drank, slept, fought. So forty years vanished.

The white snowy clouds gradually begin to turn gray. Darkness falls.

“Where am I going?” The woodturner suddenly rouses himself. “I’ve got to bury her, not go to the hospital…I must be in a daze!”

He turns around again and again whips up the horse. The mare strains with all her might and, snorting, trots along. The woodturner whips her on the back again and again…He hears some sort of knocking behind him, and though he does not turn around, he knows that it is the deceased woman’s head knocking against the sledge. And it grows darker and darker around him, the wind turns colder and sharper…

“To live it all over again,” thinks the woodturner. “To get new tools, take orders…give the money to the old woman…yes!”

And here he drops the reins. He feels for them, wants to pick them up and cannot; his hands no longer obey him…

“Never mind…,” he thinks. “The horse will go by herself, she knows the way. I could do with some sleep now…till the funeral or the memorial service.”

The woodturner closes his eyes and dozes off. A short while later he hears that the horse has stopped. He opens his eyes and sees something dark in front of him, like a hut or a haystack…

He ought to climb down from the sledge and find out what it is, but there is such laziness in his whole body that he would rather freeze to death than move from his place…And he falls peacefully asleep.

He wakes up in a big room with painted walls. Bright sunlight pours through the windows. The woodturner sees people around him and wants first of all to show that he is a man of dignity and understanding.

“What about a little Panikhida, brothers, for the old woman?” he says. “The priest should be told…”

“Well, enough, enough! Just lie there!” Someone’s voice interrupts him.

“Good Lord! Pavel Ivanych!” The woodturner is surprised to see the doctor before him. “Y’ronor! My benefactor!”

He wants to jump up and throw himself at the feet of medicine, but feels that his arms and legs do not obey him.

“Your Honor! Where are my legs? My arms?”

“Say goodbye to your arms and legs…They got frozen. Now, now…what are you crying for? You’ve lived, thank God for that! You must have lived some sixty years—that will do you!”

“Grief!…Y’ronor, it’s such grief! Kindly forgive me! Another five or six little years…”

“What for?”

“I borrowed the horse, I’ve got to return it…Bury the old woman…How quickly it all gets done in this world! Your Honor! Pavel Ivanych! A cigar box of the best Karelian birch! Croquet balls…”

The doctor waves his hand and walks out of the ward. Woodturner—amen!

1885