Selected Stories of Anton Chekhov

THE MALEFACTOR

Before the examining magistrate stands a puny, exceedingly scrawny little peasant in a calico shirt and patched trousers. His face is overgrown with hair and eaten with pockmarks, and his eyes, barely visible through his thick, beetling brows, have an expression of sullen sternness. On his head a whole mop of long-uncombed, matted hair, which endows him with a still greater spiderlike sternness. He is barefoot.

“Denis Grigoriev!” the magistrate begins. “Come closer and answer my questions. On the seventh day of July instant the railroad watchman Ivan Semyonovich Akinfov, proceeding along the line in the morning, at the ninety-first mile post found you unscrewing one of the nuts by means of which the rails are fastened to the ties. Here is that nut! … With which nut he also detained you. Is that how it went?”

“Wha?”

“Did it all go as Akinfov explains?”

“Sure it did.”

“Good. Now, why were you unscrewing the nut?”

“Wha?”

“Drop this ‘wha?’ of yours and answer the question: why were you unscrewing the nut?”

“If I didn’t need it, I wouldn’t have been unscrewing it,” croaks Denis, looking askance at the ceiling.

“And why did you need this nut?”

“That nut there? We make sinkers out of ’em …”

“We who?”

“Us folk … the Klimovo peasants, that is.”

“Listen, brother, don’t play the idiot here. Talk sense. There’s no point in lying about sinkers!”

“Never lied in all my born days, so now I’m lying …” mumbles Denis, blinking his eyes. “Could we do without a sinker, Your Honor? If you put a live worm or a minnow on a hook, how’ll it ever go down without a sinker? Lying …” Denis smirks. “Who the devil needs live bait if it floats up top! Your perch, your pike, your burbot always bites on the bottom, and if the bait floats up top, it’s only good for catching gobies, and even that’s rare … Gobies don’t live in our river … It’s a fish that likes space.”

“What are you telling me about gobies for?”

“Wha? But you asked yourself! The gentry here fish the same way, too. Not even the merest lad would go fishing without a sinker. Of course, if somebody’s got no sense at all, he’ll try and fish without a sinker. A fool is as a fool does …”

“So you tell me that you were unscrewing this nut in order to make a sinker out of it?”

“What else? Can’t play knucklebones with it!”

“But you could use a bit of lead for a sinker, a bullet … a nail of some sort…”

“You won’t find lead lying about, you’ve got to buy it, and a nail’s no good. There nothing better than a nut … It’s heavy, and it’s got a hole in it.”

“He pretends to be such a fool! As if he was born yesterday or fell from the moon! Don’t you understand, dunderhead, what this unscrewing leads to? If the watchman hadn’t spotted it, a train might have gone off the rails, people might have been killed! You’d have killed people!”

“God forbid, Your Honor! Why kill? Are we heathens or villains of some kind? Thank the Lord, my good sir, we’ve lived our life without any killing, such thoughts never even enter our head … Queen of Heaven, save us and have mercy … How could you, sir!”

“And what do you think causes train accidents? Unscrew two or three nuts, and you’ve got yourself an accident!”

Denis smirks and squints his eyes mistrustfully at the magistrate.

“Well! All these years the whole village has been unscrewing nuts and the Lord’s preserved us, so now it’s an accident … killing people … If I took away the rail or, let’s say, put a log across the tracks, well, then the train might go off, but this … pah! a nut!”

“But you must understand, the nuts fasten the rail to the tie!”

“We understand that … We don’t unscrew all of them … we leave some … We don’t do it mindlessly … we understand …”

Denis yawns and makes a cross over his mouth.

“Last year a train went off the rails here,” says the magistrate, “now I see why …”

“Beg pardon, sir?”

“Now, I said, I see why a train went off the rails last year … I understand!”

“That’s what you get educated for, so you’ll understand, most merciful judges … The Lord knew who to give understanding to … And here you’ve considered how and what, but a watchman’s the same as a peasant, he’s got no understanding, he just grabs you by the scruff of the neck and drags you off… Reason first, and then drag! Like they say—peasant head, peasant thoughts … Write this down, too, Your Honor, that he hit me twice in the teeth and the chest.”

“When they searched your place, they found a second nut … When and where did you unscrew it?”

“You mean the one that was under the little red trunk?”

“I don’t know where it was, I only know they found it. When did you unscrew it?”

“I didn’t unscrew it, it was Ignashka, the son of one-eyed Semyon, gave it to me. I mean the one that was under the little trunk, and the one that was in the sledge in the yard I unscrewed along with Mitrofan.”

“Which Mitrofan?”

“Mitrofan Petrov … You’ve never heard of him? He makes nets and sells them to the gentry. He needs a lot of these same nuts. Reckon maybe a dozen for each net …”

“Listen … Article one thousand and eighty-one of the Criminal Code says that any deliberate damage to the railways, in case it endangers the transport availing itself of those railways, and with the perpetrator’s knowledge that the consequences thereof will be an accident—understand? knowledge! And you couldn’t help knowing what this unscrewing would lead to—will be punishable by a term at hard labor.”

“Of course, you know best … We’re ignorant folk … what do we understand?”

“You understand everything! You’re lying and dissembling!”

“Why lie? Ask in the village, if you don’t believe me … Without a sinker you only get bleak. You won’t even get gudgeon, the worst of the lot, without a sinker.”

“Next you’ll be talking about gobies again!” the magistrate smiles.

“We’ve got no gobies here … If we fish on top without a sinker, using butterflies for bait, we get chub, and even that’s rare.”

“Well, be quiet …”

Silence ensues. Denis shifts from one foot to the other, stares at the table covered with green baize, and blinks his eyes strenuously, as if what he sees before him is not baize but the sun. The magistrate is writing rapidly.

“Can I go?” asks Denis, after some silence.

“No. I must put you under arrest and send you to prison.”

Denis stops blinking and, raising his thick eyebrows, looks questioningly at the official.

“That is, how do you mean—to prison? Your Honor! I haven’t got time, I have to go to the fair, and also get three roubles from Yegor for the lard …”

“Quiet, don’t disturb me …”

“To prison … If it was for something, I’d go, but like this … for a fleabite … Why? Seems I didn’t steal, I didn’t fight … And if you’ve got doubts about the arrears, Your Honor, don’t believe the headman … Better ask mister permanent member … An ungodly fellow, that headman …”

“Quiet!”

“I’m quiet as it is …” mutters Denis. “I’ll swear an oath the headman’s accounts are a pack of lies … We’re three brothers: Kuzma Grigoriev, that is, and Yegor Grigoriev, and me, Denis Grigoriev…”

“You’re disturbing me … Hey, Semyon!” shouts the magistrate. “Take him away!”

“We’re three brothers,” mutters Denis, as two stalwart soldiers take him and lead him from the chamber. “Brother’s not answerable for brother. Kuzma doesn’t pay and you, Denis, have to answer … Judges! Our late master, the general, died, may he rest in peace, otherwise he’d show you judges something … You’ve got to judge knowingly, not just anyhow… Give a whipping, even, but so as it’s for a reason, in all fairness …”

JULY 1885