Fifty-Two Stories

A big old sheepdog of a dirty white color, shaggy, with clumps of fur around its eyes and nose, trying to seem indifferent to the presence of strangers, calmly circled the horse three times and suddenly, unexpectedly, with a vicious old dog’s wheezing, attacked the overseer from behind. The other dogs could not control themselves and jumped up from their places.

“Shush, damn you!” the old man shouted, rising on his elbow. “Ah, go burst, you fiendish creature!”

When the dogs calmed down, the old man assumed his former pose and said in a calm voice:

“And in Kovyli, right on Ascension Day, Efim Zhmenya died. Shouldn’t say it before sleep, it’s a sin to think of such people—he was a vile old man. You must have heard.”

“No, I haven’t.”

“Efim Zhmenya, Styopka the blacksmith’s uncle. Everybody around here knew him. Oh, yes, a cursed old man! Some sixty years I knew him, ever since the tsar Alexander, the one who drove the French out, was being brought from Taganrog to Moscow in a wagon.³ We went together to meet the dead tsar, and back then the high road didn’t go through Bakhmut, but from Esaulovka to Gorodishche, and where Kovyli is now there were bustards’ nests—you take a step and there’s a bustard’s nest. I noticed then that Zhmenya had given up his soul, and there was an unclean spirit in him. I’ve observed: if a man of the peasant order mostly keeps quiet, is interested in old women’s things, and prefers to live by himself, there’s little good in it, and this Efim, it so happens, was always silent, silent, ever since childhood, and looked askance at you, and kept pouting and puffing himself up, like a rooster in front of a hen. So that going to church, or hanging out with the lads in the street, or in a pot-house, just wasn’t his style, and he mostly sat alone or gossiping with old women. He was young, but already hired himself out to the beekeepers and melon-growers. It so happened good people would come to him at the melon patches, and his watermelons and muskmelons would whistle. Or once he caught a pike in front of people, and—ho-ho-ho!—it burst out laughing…”

“It happens,” said Pantelei.

The young shepherd turned on his side and, raising his black eyebrows, looked intently at the old man.

“Did you ever hear watermelons whistle?” he asked.

“Me, no, God spared me,” the old man sighed, “but people tell about it. It’s no great wonder…If unclean powers want to, they’ll whistle in a stone. Before the freedom,⁴ we had a rock humming for three days and three nights. I heard it myself. And the pike laughed because Zhmenya caught a demon, not a pike.”

The old man remembered something. He quickly got up on his knees and, huddling as if from the cold, nervously tucking his hands into his sleeves, murmured through his nose an old woman’s patter:

“God save us and have mercy! Once I was going along the riverbank to Novopavlovka. A thunderstorm was gathering, and there was such a gale, save us, Queen of Heaven, Holy Mother…I’m hurrying as fast as I can, and I see a white ox going down the path among the blackthorn bushes. The blackthorns were in bloom then. And I think: Whose ox is it? What ill wind brought him here? He goes along, swinging his tail and moo-o-o! Only this same ox, brothers, when I caught up with him, got close, and looked!—it was no ox now, it was Zhmenya. Holy, holy, holy! I made the sign of the cross, and he looks at me and mutters, his eyes bugging out. I was frightened, terribly! We walked side by side, I’m afraid to say a word to him—thunder rolls, lightning streaks the sky, the pussywillows bend down right to the water—suddenly, brothers, God punish me, so I die without repentance, a hare runs across our path…He runs, stops, and says in human language: ‘Hello, boys!’ Away, damn you!” the old man yelled at the shaggy dog, who was circling the horse again. “Ah, go croak!”

“It happens,” the overseer said, still leaning against the saddle and not stirring; he said it in a soundless, muted voice, the way people speak who are sunk in thought.

“It happens,” he repeated meaningfully and with conviction.

“Ohh, a fiendish old man he was!” the old man went on, not so heatedly now. “Five years after the freedom, we all flogged him in the village office, and to show his anger, he sent a throat ailment to everybody in Kovyli. A host of people died then, no counting them, like from cholera…”

“How did he send this ailment?” the young shepherd asked after a pause.

“As if we don’t know. No need for great wisdom here, if there’s the will. Zhmenya did people in with viper fat. It’s such stuff that, not just the fat itself, but even the smell kills people.”

“That’s right,” Pantelei agreed.