The Duel

VI

They’d agreed to travel seven versts from the town heading south, stopping near the dukhan, at the convergence of two rivers—the Black and the Yellow—and stew ukha there. They’d set out at the top of the sixth hour. Samoylenko and Laevsky rode ahead of everyone, in a charabanc; behind them, in a carriage harnessed to a troika, were Maria Konstantinovna, Nadezhda Fyodorovna, Katya and Kostya, a basket of provisions and dishes with them. In the next carriage rode police captain Kirilin and young Achmianov, son of that very same shop owner whom Nadezhda Fyodorovna owed three hundred rubles to, and across from them, on a little bench, squirming with his knees at his chest, sat Nikodim Aleksandrich, small, neat, with his hair swept up at the temples. Behind everyone else rode Von Koren and the deacon; at the deacon’s feet stood the basket of fish.

“To the rrright!” Samoylenko yelled, whenever an oxcart or an Abkhazian atop a donkey crossed their path.

“In two years’ time, when I’ve raised the funds and the people, I’ll set off on an expedition,” Von Koren was telling the deacon. “I’ll walk the shore from Vladivostok to the Bering Straits and then from the Straits to the estuary of the Yenisei. We’ll draw a map, learn the flora and fauna and will study the geology comprehensively, the anthropological and ethnographical population. It’s up to you to decide whether you’re traveling with me or not.”

“It isn’t possible,” the deacon said.

“Why?”

“I’m a man whom others depend on, a family man.”

“The deaconess will let you go. We’ll make provisions for her. It would be even better if you’d convince her that it would be in everyone’s best interest for her to cut her hair and join a convent; this would give you the opportunity to cut your own hair and travel with the expedition as a monk. I can arrange this for you.”

The deacon was silent.

“Do you know your theology well?” asked the zoologist.

“Not too good.”

“Hmmm … I can’t give you any advice about that, because I too am poorly acquainted with theology. You’ll give me a little list of books that you require, and I’ll send them to you from Petersburg this winter. You’ll also have to read the journals of theologian travelers; you’ll find good ethnologies and a connoisseurship of the Eastern languages among them. Once you’ve acquainted yourself with their ways, you’ll find it easier to apply yourself to the task at hand. Well, since you don’t have books yet, so as not to waste time, come visit me, and we’ll occupy ourselves with the compass, we’ll explore meteorology. This is all vital.”

“And that’ll be that …” muttered the deacon, and began laughing. “I requested a position in the middle of Russia, and my uncle the archpriest promised to accommodate me. Don’t you see that if I go with you, I would have troubled them for no reason at all.”

“I don’t understand your hesitation. To continue being an ordinary deacon who is only required to serve on the holidays, while the rest of your days are spent idling away the time, you’ll remain exactly as you are in ten years’ time, the same person that you are right now, and the only new addition to you will be whiskers and a beard perhaps. Whereas, in that very same ten years’ time as someone returning from an expedition, you’ll be a new man, your consciousness will be enriched by the thing or two that you’ve accomplished.”

Screams of shock and excitement could be heard coming from the women’s carriage. The carriages drove along a road that fell away to a completely vertical cliff down to the shore, and it seemed to everyone that they were galloping along a narrow shelf, situated upon a high wall, and at that very minute the carriages would fall away into nothingness. On the right, the sea was outspread. On the left, a jagged brown wall with black spots, red sinew and creeping roots, while above, certainly out of fear and curiosity, tufts of acerose foliage bent over, peering down below. In another minute more shrieks and laughter: they had to pass beneath a gargantuan hanging rock.

“I don’t understand why the hell I’m riding with you all,” said Laevsky. “How foolish and trivial! I need to go north, to run, I should be saving myself, but for some reason, I’m going on this ridiculous picnic.”

“Will you just look at that panorama!” Samoylenko said to him, when the horses had turned left and the Yellow River Valley opened before them, and the river itself sparkled, yellow, turbid, insane …

“Sasha, I don’t see the good in this,” answered Laevsky. “To be perpetually excited by nature is to reveal the poverty of your own imagination. Compared to what my imagination has to offer, all of these little streams and cliffs are rubbish and nothing more.”

The carriages rode narrowly along the banks of a rivulet. The high mountainous banks slowly but surely began to join with the narrowed vale and transformed into a gorge before them; the rocky mountain, alongside which they traveled, consisted of gargantuan rocks bound together by flora, pressing against one another with such frightening force that at the very sight of them Samoylenko involuntarily groaned. Damp and mystery fluttered at the passengers from narrow fissures and gorges that sliced the shadowy and beautiful mountain in places; other mountains could be seen, brown, pink, lilac, smoke-colored or awash in bright light through the gorges. As the road passed the gorges the sound of water was heard occasionally falling from above, slapping against the rocks.

“Oh, these damned mountains,” Laevsky sighed, “how tired I am of them!”

At the point where the Black River fell into the Yellow, and black water resembling India ink sullied the yellow and struggled with it, across the road stood Tartar Kerbalay’s dukhan with a Russian flag on the roof and a signboard on which “The Pleasant Dukhan” was written in chalk. Near that was a smallish garden enclosed by a wicker fence; there stood a table and chairs, and in the center of pitiful prickly shrubbery rose a single solitary cypress tree, dark and beautiful.

Kerbalay was a small, clever Tartar, in a blue shirt and white apron, he stood in the road and, holding his stomach, bowed low in greeting to the carriages and, smiling, displayed his shiny white teeth.

“Greetings, Kerbalayka!” Samoylenko called out to him. “We’ll ride a bit further, and you drag the samovar and chairs over! Be lively now!”

Kerbalay nodded assent with his closely cropped head and muttered something, and only those sitting at the back of the carriage could make out: “We have trout, Your Excellency.”

“Bring it over, bring it over!” Von Koren said to him.

Driving five hundred paces from the dukhan, the carriage stopped. Samoylenko selected a meadow that wasn’t too big, that was peppered with rocks, comfortable for sitting on, and where a tree fallen by a gale lay with upturned knotted roots and dried-out yellow needles. There was a sparse bridge of timber thrown across the little river, and on the other shore, exactly opposite them, on four not very tall pylons stood a little wooden shed used for drying corn, reminiscent of the cabin that stood on chicken legs in the folktale about Baba Yaga; a ladder had been lowered from its door.

Everyone had the same first impression, that they would never find their way out of this place. Wherever you looked, in every direction, mountains towered and closed in around them, and from the direction of the dukhan and the dark cypress the evening dusk quickly, quickly raced at them, and as a result the narrow, crooked Black River Valley became even more narrow and the mountains even higher. They could hear the roaring river and the cicadas’ ceaseless cries.

“How charming!” Maria Konstantinovna said, inhaling deeply in excitement. “Children, just look how good this all is! What quiet!”

“Yes, as a matter of fact, it is good,” agreed Laevsky, who had liked the view but for some reason, as he looked up at the sky and at the bluish smoke rising from the chimney pipe of the dukhan, suddenly became sad. “Yes, it’s good!” he repeated.

“Ivan Andreich, describe this view!” Maria Konstantinovna said, teary-eyed.

“What for?” Laevsky asked. “Your impression is better than some description. This wealth of color and sound that many experience in nature by means of their impressions, writers garble into a shameful, indecipherable scene.”

“Is that so?” Von Koren coldly asked, selecting the largest rock for himself near the water and attempting to climb atop it to have a seat. “Is that so?” he repeated, staring at Laevsky point-blank. “What about Romeo and Juliet? What about Pushkin’s Ukrainian night, for example? Nature is expected to arrive, bent low at the knee.”

“I suppose so …” agreed Laevsky, who didn’t have the energy to conceptualize or contradict. “By the way,” he said, after a moment had passed, “what is Romeo and Juliet in actuality? A beautiful, poetic sacred love, a bed of roses beneath which is hidden, rot. Romeo is the same kind of beast as anyone else.”

“No matter what anyone says to you, it all comes back to …”

Von Koren glanced at Katya and did not finish speaking.

“What do I come back to?” asked Laevsky.

“For instance, someone says to you: ‘What a lovely bunch of grapes!’ But you: ‘Yes, although it will look so disgraceful once chewed and digested in the stomach.’ What does this speak to? It’s nothing new but it’s a strange habit.”

Laevsky knew that Von Koren had no love for him. He feared him for this reason, and in his presence, he felt as though everyone were encumbered and that someone was looking over his shoulder. He did not give a reply, walked off to the side and regretted ever having come on the trip.

“Ladies and gentlemen, march! Find kindling for the fire!” commanded Samoylenko.

They all dispersed in every which direction, and the only ones to remain were Kirilin, Achmianov and Nikodim Aleksandrich. Kerbalay had brought over chairs, spread a rug out on the ground and put out several bottles of wine. The police captain, Kirilin, a tall, stately man, who wore his greatcoat over his service jacket regardless of the weather, with a proud gait and a deep albeit hoarse voice, resembled a typical young provincial chief of police. His countenance was sad and sleepy, as though he had just been awoken against his wishes.

“What did you bring us, you dolt?” he asked Kerbalay, slowly pronouncing each word. “I ordered you to bring Kvareli, and you, Tartar-face, what did you bring? Well? What?”

“We have plenty of our own wine, Igor Alekseich,” Nikodim Aleksandrich noted timidly and politely.

“What’s that? Well, I want my wine served here too. I’m participating in this picnic and I think it’s only proper that I contribute my rightful share. On-ly pro-per! Bring us ten bottles of Kvareli!”

“Why so many?” Nikodim Aleksandrich was taken aback, knowing that Kirilin had no money.

“Twenty bottles! Thirty!” cried Kirilin.

“Forget it, let him,” whispered Achmianov to Nikodim Aleksandrich. “I’ll pay for it.”

Nadezhda Fyodorovna was in a cheerful, mischievous mood. She wanted to hop around, laugh at the top of her lungs, yell, tease, play the coquette. In her cheap calico print dress with little blue eyelets, in little red shoes and in that very same straw hat, she perceived herself as being petite, simple, light and ethereal, like a butterfly. She ran across a weak little bridge and stared into the water for a minute so her head would start spinning, then uttered a little cry and ran off laughing to the opposite bank toward the shed where grain was dried. It seemed to her that all the men and even Kerbalay were admiring her. Then, in the fast approaching darkness, the trees merged with the mountains, the horses with the carriages, and lights began to shimmer in the windows of the dukhan; she walked along the little path that wound through boulders and thorny bushes, she made her way up a mountain and sat down on a rock. Below her a campfire had already been lit. The deacon, his shirtsleeves rolled up, milled about near the fire, and his long black shadow formed a radius that circled around the fire. He was adding kindling and stirring the contents of the cauldron with a spoon tied to a long stick. Samoylenko, with a coppery-red face, plodded around near the fire, as he would in his own kitchen, and shouted ferociously:

“Ladies and gentlemen, where is the salt? For heaven’s sake, have we forgotten it? Why has everyone settled in as though they were the lords of the manor while I alone toil?”

Laevsky and Nikodim Aleksandrich sat next to one another on a fallen tree and stared at the fire lost in thought. Maria Konstantinovna, Katya and Kostya were removing a tea service and plates from a basket. Von Koren stood at the bank nearly at the water’s edge, his arms crossed and one leg lifted up on a rock, his thoughts on something. Red spots from the fire joined with the shadows, meandered along the earth near the darkened human forms, quivered upon the mountains, upon the trees, upon the bridge, upon the drying shed. On the opposite shore the precipitous, pitted little bank was fully illuminated, it glimmered and was reflected in the river, and the speeding turbulent river tore its reflection to shreds.

The deacon went to get the fish that Kerbalay had been cleaning and washing on the shore, but halfway there he stopped and looked all around him.

My lord, how good it is here! he thought. The people, the rocks, the fire, the twilight, that disfigured tree—that’s all there is, but how good it is!

Strangers appeared on the opposite bank near the drying shed. Because of the fading light and the smoke of the campfire wafting to the opposite shore, it was not possible to make out all the people immediately. They came into view in parts, here a shaggy hat and a gray beard, there a blue shirt, here rags from shoulders to the knees and a dagger across the stomach, there a young swarthy face with black eyebrows so bushy and gruff, they appeared to have been drawn with charcoal. Five of them sat on the ground in a circle around the campfire, while the other five continued on to the drying shed. One of them stood in the doorway with his back to the campfire, hands folded behind his back, and began to tell a story that must have been very interesting, because when Samoylenko added kindling to the fire it flared up shooting off sparks and brightly illuminating the drying shed; two tranquil countenances appearing to pay close attention became visible in the doorway, likewise those sitting in the circle turned and began to listen to the story. Not long after, those seated in the circle began to sing, something drawn-out, melodic, similar to the hymn of receiving the host, the deacon realized what would become of him in ten years’ time when he had returned from the expedition—he, the young Hieromonk-missionary, an author with a name and a remarkable past. He’s been granted the appointment of Archimandrite, then Architrave. He presents the liturgy in a cathedral-esque church. In a golden mitre with the Panagia he steps out onto the ambo with the trikerion and the dikerion and makes the sign of the cross before a mass of people. He proclaims: “Look down from Heaven, O God, and behold this vineyard, as it was Your right hand that planted it!” While children with angelic voices sing a response of: “Holy God …”

“Deacon, where’s the fish?” Samoylenko’s voice was heard.

Returning to the fire, the deacon imagined a pageant procession along a dusty road on a hot July day following the path of the cross. The men carry a gonfalon up ahead, and the women and girls, icons. Next the choirboys and the sexton, his jaw tied and straw in his hair. Next, according to sequence, comes he, the deacon. Behind him the priest in a skull-cap and cross, and behind him a crowd of men, women and little boys fill the air with dust. There in the crowd are the priest’s wife and the deaconess, their heads covered by shawls. The singing of the choir, the wails of the children, the cries of the quail, the skylarks’ warble … Now they stop and the flock is doused with holy water … They proceed and in genuflection pray for rain. Later a snack, conversation …

And that’s good too …, the deacon thought.