Fifty-Two Stories

WHEN I WAS LIVING in the S——m district, I often used to go to the Dubovsky kitchen gardens, tended by the gardener Savva Stukach, or simply Savka. These gardens were my favorite place for so-called “general” fishing, when, on leaving home, you do not know the day and hour of your return, and you take along all your fishing gear and a stock of provisions. In fact, I was not as interested in fishing as I was in carefree loafing, eating at odd times, talking with Savka, and prolonged encounters with the quiet summer nights. Savka was a lad of about twenty-five, tall, handsome, strong as flint. He was reputed to be a reasonable and sensible person, was literate, drank vodka rarely, but as a worker this young and strong fellow was not worth a red cent. Along with strength, his taut, rope-like muscles were filled with inert, invincible laziness. He lived, like all of us, in the village, in his own cottage, had a plot of land, but did not plow, did not sow, and did not practice any craft. His old mother went begging under people’s windows, and he himself lived like a bird of the air: he did not know in the morning what he would eat at noon. It was not that he was lacking in willpower, energy, or pity for his mother, but simply so, one sensed no wish to work in him and no awareness of its benefit…His whole figure had an aura of serenity, of an inborn, almost artistic passion for living idly, any old way. When Savka’s young, healthy body felt a physiological need for muscle work, for a short while the lad would give himself up entirely to some free but worthless occupation, like whittling totally useless pegs or running races with the village women. His favorite position was concentrated immobility. He was able to stand in one place for hours at a time, not budging and gazing at one spot. He moved by inspiration, and then only when the chance presented itself for making some sort of quick, impetuous movement: grabbing a running dog by the tail, tearing the kerchief off a woman, jumping over a wide ditch. Needless to say, being so sparing in movement, Savka was poor as a church mouse and lived worse than any pauper. In the course of time he accumulated arrears, and, healthy and young as he was, the village sent to him an old man’s post, as a watchman and scarecrow over the common kitchen gardens. However much people laughed at his premature old age, he did not give a hoot. That spot, quiet, good for motionless contemplation, exactly suited his nature.

I happened to be with this same Savka one fine May evening. I remember I was lying on a tattered, shabby travel rug almost up against a hutch, which gave off a dense and stifling smell of dry grass. Putting my hands behind my head, I looked straight in front of me. At my feet lay a wooden pitchfork. Beyond it was the sharply outlined black patch of Savka’s little dog Kutka, and no more than fifteen feet from Kutka the ground fell away into the steep riverbank. Lying there, I could not see the river. All I saw were the tops of the willows growing thickly on this bank, and the meandering, as if gnawed-away, edge of the bank opposite. Far beyond the bank, on a dark knoll, like frightened young partridges, the cottages of the village where my Savka lived huddled together. Beyond the knoll the evening sunset was dying out. Only a pale crimson strip was left, and it was beginning to be covered by small clouds, like coals with ash.

To the right of the kitchen gardens a dark alder grove softly whispered, shuddering occasionally under chance gusts of wind; to the left stretched a boundless field. There, where in the darkness the eye could no longer distinguish field from sky, a bright light glimmered. A short distance from me sat Savka. His legs tucked under Turkish fashion, and his head hanging, he pensively gazed at Kutka. Our hooks with live bait had long been dropped in the river, and we had nothing left to do but give ourselves up to rest, which the never-tiring and ever-resting Savka loved so much. The evening glow had not quite died out, but the summer night was already enveloping nature with its tender, lulling caress.

Everything was lapsing into the first deep sleep, only some night bird, unknown to me, drawlingly and lazily kept repeating in the grove a long, articulate sound, resembling the phrase: “Is Ni-ki-ta here?” and immediately answered himself: “He is! He is! He is!”

“Why isn’t the nightingale singing now?” I asked Savka.

He slowly turned to me. The features of his face were large, but clean-cut, expressive, and soft, like a woman’s. Then he looked with his meek, pensive eyes at the grove, at the willow thicket, slowly drew a reed pipe from his pocket, put it to his lips, and peeped like a female nightingale. And at once, as if in response to his peeping, a corncrake on the opposite bank crexed.

“There’s your nightingale…” Savka laughed. “Crex-crex! Crex-crex! Just like a door creaking, but he must think he’s singing, too.”