The Cossacks (9 page)

“What are you waiting for? Take the Chechen away!” Lukashka shouted with authority at the Cossacks, who grudgingly picked up the body, as if Lukashka were their commander. They dragged the body a few steps, then let its legs drop lifelessly to the ground. They stepped aside and stood for a few moments in silence. Nazarka walked up to the corpse and straightened its head, which had slumped to the side, so that the dead man’s face and the bloody bullet wound above his temple could be seen.

“Look at the mark it made! Right in the brain!” he said. “But at least his people will still recognize him when they come for him.”

The Cossacks said nothing, the angel of silence flying over them. The sun had already risen and lit the dew-covered grass with its splintered rays. The river was seething nearby. From throughout the awakened forest, pheasants were greeting the morning. The Cossacks stood silent and motionless around the dead man. The brown body, bare except for the wet, blue trousers girdled by a sash over the taut stomach, was handsome and strong. His muscular arms lay straight by his sides, and his bluish and freshly shaven head with its clotted wound was thrown back, his smooth, sunburnt forehead standing out sharply against the shaven part of the head. His glassy, wide-open eyes stared blankly upward with sunken pupils. His delicate lips, drawn out at the edges and prominent beneath his red, well-trimmed mustache, seemed set in an easy, good-natured smile. His slender hands were covered in reddish hairs, and the nails on his clenched fingers were painted red. Lukashka had not yet dressed and was still wet, his neck more flushed and his eyes brighter than usual. His broad cheekbones
quivered. Faint steam was rising from his white, healthy body in the fresh morning air.

“He too was a man!” Lukashka said, evidently admiring the dead Chechen.

“Yes, but if it had been up to him, he wouldn’t have shown
you
any mercy,” one of the Cossacks replied.

The angel of silence flew away. The Cossacks began bustling and talking. Two men set out to cut some brushwood to cover the body. Others strolled off toward the checkpoint. Lukashka and Nazarka hurried to get ready to go to the village, and within half an hour were making their way through the thick forest, almost running, and talking continually.

“But don’t tell Dunaika I sent you!” Lukashka was saying in a sharp voice. “Just go find out if her husband is home.”

“I’ll also drop in to see Yamka, maybe we can all carouse and have some fun!” Nazarka said.

“When should we carouse, if not today!” Lukashka replied.

Lukashka and Nazarka arrived at the village, drank a little, and then lay down to sleep till nightfall.

On the third day after the events just described, two companies of the Caucasus Infantry were stationed in the village of Novomlinskaya. Army carts were standing around the square unharnessed. The company cooks dug a pit, stole some loose firewood from nearby yards, and began boiling kasha. The sergeant majors were busy calling the roll. The men from the cart units were hammering tethering posts into the ground. The quartermasters walked the streets as if they were from the village and showed officers and soldiers where their lodgings were. Green boxes stood in rows. There were carts and horses everywhere, and caldrons of boiling kasha. The captain, the lieutenant, and Onisim Mikhailovich, the sergeant major, were standing around. The companies had been ordered to quarter in this village, so they made themselves at home. No one told the Cossack villagers why these
soldiers were being stationed here, where they were from, or whether they were Old Believers, nor were the villagers asked if they minded the soldiers being billeted on them.

Off duty, exhausted, and covered in dirt, the soldiers fill the streets and squares like a noisy and disordered swarm of bees. Completely ignoring the villagers’ hostility, they enter the houses in twos and threes, chatting merrily, their rifles jangling, hang up their bullet belts, unpack their sacks, and make coarse remarks to the women. A large group of them is standing around the soldier’s favorite spot, the caldron filled with boiling food. They smoke pipes and watch the steam rising faintly into the hot sky, where it thickens into a white cloud, and the flames of the fires quiver in the air like melting glass. They make fun of the Cossack villagers for their un-Russian ways. Soldiers appear in every yard. One can hear their laughter, one can hear the angry, piercing cries of the Cossack women defending their homes, refusing to give the soldiers water or kitchenware. Boys and girls, clinging to their mothers’ aprons and each other, watch the soldiers’ every move with terror and excitement—these are the first soldiers they have ever seen—and run after them, keeping a careful distance. Old Cossacks come out of their huts, sit on the earthen mounds that encircle every Cossack abode, and in somber silence, as if they neither knew nor cared what would come of all of this, watch the soldiers go about their business.

Olenin, who had signed up three months earlier as a cadet in the Caucasus Regiment, was billeted on one of the best houses in the village, the house of Cornet Ilya Vasilyevich—in other words, Old Ulitka’s house.

“I wonder where all this will end, Dmitri Andreyevich!” Vanyusha called, catching his breath. Olenin, sporting a Circassian coat, had just ridden into the courtyard on a horse he had bought in Grozny and was in the best of spirits after the regiment’s five-hour march.

“Why, what’s the matter, Ivan Vasilich?” Olenin asked, patting his horse and looking cheerfully at Vanyusha, who had ridden in on a baggage cart and who, sweating and disheveled, was now anxiously unloading Olenin’s bags and trunks. By all appearances, Olenin was
very much a changed man. A youthful mustache and beard covered his formerly clean-shaven face, and a healthy, reddish tan on his cheeks, forehead, and neck had replaced the yellowish pallor of late nights and revelry. He now carried a rifle, and his new black tailcoat had been replaced by a dirty white Circassian coat with wide folds. Instead of a fresh, stiff collar, the thin red band of a quilted silk shirt girded his sunburnt neck. He wore Circassian clothes, but he did not wear them well. It was plain to see that he was Russian, not a Circassian warrior. Everything was right—but not quite. And yet, his whole appearance exuded health, cheerfulness, and self-satisfaction.

“You seem to think this is all a joke,” Vanyusha said, “but just try speaking to these people! They don’t give you a chance, not a chance! You can’t squeeze a word out of them!” Vanyusha angrily hurled an iron bucket down on the doorstep. “Somehow these people aren’t Russian!”

“You should have a word with the village chief.”

“How can I if I don’t know where his … his locationality is!” Vanyusha spluttered in an offended tone.

“Who has upset you?” Olenin asked, looking around.

“The Devil only knows! Damn! There’s no real master in this house—they say he’s gone off to a
kriga
*
or something. And the old woman inside is such a devil that only God can save us!” Vanyusha said, clutching his head. “I don’t know how we’ll live here. These people call themselves Christians, but they’re worse than Tatars! Even a Tatar is more noble. ‘He’s gone off to the
kriga
’! Not that I have the slightest idea what a damn
kriga
is!” Vanyusha turned away.

“You mean, things here aren’t quite what they are back home?” Olenin asked mockingly, still in his saddle.

“Can I please take your horse now?” Vanyusha asked, visibly distraught at the new order of things but resigning himself to his fate.

“So, even a Tatar is more noble, is he?” Olenin said, dismounting and tapping the saddle with his hand.

“You’re laughing, you think this is funny!” Vanyusha said angrily.

“Come now, don’t be angry, Ivan Vasilich!” Olenin said, still smiling. “I’ll go speak to the people in the house right away and arrange everything. Don’t worry, we are going to have a wonderful time here!”

Vanyusha did not answer. He narrowed his eyes, shook his head, and contemptuously watched his master walk toward the house. Vanyusha thought of Olenin only as his master, and Olenin saw Vanyusha only as his servant, and both men would have been taken aback had anyone suggested that they were friends. And yet they were friends, even though they did not know it. Vanyusha had been taken into Olenin’s house when he was eleven and Olenin too was eleven. When Olenin was fifteen, he had spent some time teaching Vanyusha to read French, of which Vanyusha was extremely proud. And now, whenever Vanyusha was in a good mood he dropped French words, always laughing foolishly when he did so.

Olenin hurried onto the porch of the house and pushed open the door to the front room. Maryanka, wearing the kind of pink Tatar smock that Cossack women usually wear in the house, jumped back startled from the door and shrank against the wall, covering her nose and mouth with her wide sleeve. Olenin opened the door further and in the dim light saw the young Cossack woman’s tall, shapely figure. With the quick and hungry curiosity of youth, he noticed despite himself the strong, virginal lines that stood out beneath the thin calico smock, and her beautiful black eyes that were fixed on him with childish terror and wild curiosity. “She is the one!” Olenin thought. “And yet I’m sure there are many more around here like her” was the thought that immediately followed, and he completely opened the door. Old Ulitka, also in a smock, was bent over with her back toward him, sweeping the floor.

“Greetings, I’ve come about my lodgings,” he began.

Without straightening up, the Cossack woman turned her severe but still beautiful face toward him. “What have you come for, to scoff at us? I’ll teach you scoffing, may the Black Plague strike you down!” she shouted, glaring at him venomously from the corner of her eyes.

Olenin had imagined that the gallant, battle-worn Caucasus Infantry, to which he belonged, would be welcomed enthusiastically everywhere, particularly by the Cossacks, who were, after all, brothers-in-arms.
He was therefore quite taken aback at this reception. Not to be put off, he began explaining that he was perfectly willing to pay for the lodgings, but the old woman would not let him speak. “What have you come for? Who needs a plague like you, may the pox rot your ugly mug!” she shrieked. “Wait till my husband comes home, he’ll show you your place! I don’t need your dirty money—as if I don’t have my own! He wants to foul up my house with his tobacco, and then give me money! You think I need such a plague? A bullet into your bowels!”

“I see Vanyusha is right,” Olenin thought. “Even a Tatar is more noble.” And followed by Old Ulitka’s curses, he went outside. As he walked out the door, Maryanka, still in her pink smock but now wearing a kerchief that covered her whole face except for her eyes, unexpectedly slipped past him out of the front room, her bare feet pattering nimbly over the porch. She stopped for an instant and looked back with laughing eyes before disappearing around the corner of the house. Her strong, youthful step, the untamed look in the flashing eyes peering over the edge of the white kerchief, and her strong, shapely body struck Olenin with even more force than before. “She is the one!” he thought, and went out into the yard to Vanyusha, looking back at Maryanka and thinking even less than before about his lodgings.

“You see, here even the young girls are wild!” Vanyusha said, still bustling about the cart, but now a little more cheerfully. “She’s just like a wild little mare!
La femme!
” he added in a loud, portentous voice, and then burst out laughing.

Toward evening the cornet came home from fishing, and hearing that he was going to be paid for billeting Olenin, calmed his wife down and quickly provided Vanyusha with everything he needed. Ulitka and the cornet moved to the older, heated house, while Olenin was given the new, still unheated one for three rubles a month.

Olenin ate and took a nap. He woke up toward evening, washed and tidied himself, and ate dinner. Lighting a cigarette, he sat by the window that looked out onto the street. The heat had subsided. The slanted shadow of the house with its ornately carved gables lay across
the dusty street and fell onto the lower part of the house across the way, whose thatched roof was glowing in the rays of the setting sun. The air grew fresher. The village had fallen silent. All the soldiers had settled quietly into their lodgings. The herds had not yet been driven back to the cowsheds, and the villagers had not returned from the fields and orchards.

Olenin’s lodgings were almost at the edge of the village. From time to time dull gunshots echoed from far across the Terek, from the Chechen and Kumik lands through which the army had marched. After three months of hard bivouacking, Olenin felt comfortable. His face felt clean and fresh, and his rested body and limbs, not used to cleanliness during the long months of the campaign, felt calm and strong. His soul too was fresh and clear. He thought of the campaign and the dangers that were now past. He thought how well he had carried himself, that he had not behaved worse than the next man, and how the valiant Cossacks had accepted him as a comrade. By now his thoughts of Moscow had all but disappeared. His old life had been wiped away, and a life that was new, completely new, had begun, and there had not yet been time for mistakes. A new man among new men, he could acquire a new reputation. He experienced a youthful feeling of irrational joy in life, and as he looked out the window at little boys chasing hoops in the shadows by the house, and looked around his tidy new lodgings, he thought how well he was going to settle into this new way of life in the Cossack village. He also looked at the mountains and the sky, and a stern feeling of the majesty of nature mingled with all his memories and dreams. His new life had not begun the way he had imagined it would on his journey from Moscow, but it had begun unexpectedly well. Mountains, mountains, and more mountains were at the heart of everything he thought and felt.

“He kissed his dog good-bye, he licked the barrel dry!” the children who had been chasing hoops suddenly began chanting, peering around the corner into the side street. “He kissed his dog good-bye!” they shouted and began edging backward.