The Stray
The blacksmith Pilipp Nasedkin, a quiet man well-respected in the village, who worked hard without complaining, had suddenly taken to drink. That is, he hadn't really taken to drink at all, he'd just begun to take a drop now and then. It was his wife, Nyura the Fuss-Pot, who decided that Filya had taken to drink. And she was the one who went rushing to the collective farm office and raised such a commotion that everyone else was convinced that Filya had taken to drink. And they all decided that Filya had to be saved.
The thing that alarmed them all most was that Filya had taken up with Sanya Neverov. Sanya was a very strange man, so eaten away by illness that his body scarcely hung together (pleurisy, a perforated stomach ulcer, a bad liver, colitis and God knows what else, as well as piles). He lived for the day and let tomorrow look after itself. He said so himself. He didn't work, of course, but he got money from somewhere. They used to meet at his place for a drink. He welcomed anyone who came.
Sanya's hut stood at the edge of the village, above the river, squatting backwards into the steep slope of the bank, and its two little window-eyes stared far off into the distance, across the river to the blue mountains. There was a small fence, some bid logs, two live birch-trees... Inside that fence was a refuge for the weary soul.
It wasn't that Sanya knew such a great deal, or had seen so much in his lifetime (in any case, he didn't talk about himself, he didn't talk much at all), but he said- the wisest things about life and about death... And he was genuinely kind. People were attracted by the warmth of this lonely, fatally ill man. You could sit with him for ages on the warm old log and gaze at the mountains in the distance. Your thoughts were gentle and your heart felt light, as though somehow you had suddenly grown huge and free, and reached out to embrace the beginning and the end of your life, as though you had taken the measure of something valuable and understood everything. What of if? Everything's fine! These were the thoughts that came to you here.
The married women hated Sanya from the very first day he appeared in the village. He had turned up that spring, picked out the old ruin belonging to some gypsies, haggled out a price, bought it and moved in. As usual, he was immediately christened the Stray. They were even a bit afraid of him. But they were quite wrong. When Filya was at Sanya's be felt as though he was holding in his cupped palms a weak sparrow, still warm, with little drops of blood on its broken wings-" tiny, trembling bundle of life. And Filya could feel every emotion he possessed, good and bad, welling up inside him, whenever anyone said something bad about Sanya.
Filya told them what he thought at the collective farm office:
"He's alright. Lay off him. Don't bother him."
"A drunkard," put in the lady book-keeper, an elderly, but still attractive, social activist.
Filya glanced at her, and was astonished to realise that she still wore lipstick. Somehow he hadn't noticed it before.
"Idiot," he said to her.
"Filipp!" the collective-farm chairman shouted in a severe voice. "Choose your words more carefully!"
"I'm going, to keep on going to Sanya's," Filya repeated stubbornly, possessed by a furious energy.
"Why?"
"None of your business! "
"You'll go balmy there! He's got a year and a half left at-most, he doesn't care how he spends the rest of his time. But what about you?"
"He'll outlast you all," Filya said unexpectedly.
"Okay, perhaps he will. But why should you ruin your life with drink?"
"Jim try getting me drunk," chuckled Filya. "You'll be broke in a week. Have you ever seen me really drunk?"
"That's always the way it starts!" they all exclaimed together-the chairman, the book-keeper, the young female agronomist and the foreman Naum Sarantsev, who was a great lover of a "gargle" himself. "It starts with the thin end of the wedge."
"That's what's so dangerous about this poison, Pilipp," said the chairman, developping the idea. "It semis so harmless at tint, it actually seems very attractive. Did you ever play cards in the bazaar after the war?"
"No."
"Well, I did. I was travelling back from the front, carrying a few bits and pieces with me-a P.Bouret watch, an accordion... I had to change trains in Novosibirsk. To pass the time I went to the junk-market, and I saw them playing the three-card trick. Come on, soldier-lad, they said, fry your luck! I'd already heard from the other lads that they fleeched our kind. No, I said, you play without me.
Come on, they said, give it a fry! Well, I thought, what if I do lose thirty roubles or so?" The chairman brightened up. They were listening to him and smiling. Filya was twisting his cap between his knees. "Okay, I said. Only no cheating, you devils. What you had to do was guess one card... First he showed them to you, then he shuffled them as you watched and laid them out fate down. All three of them. You had to guess one-say, the ace of diamonds. And he did it all while you watched, the swine. So he showed me the three cards face up, and asked if I'd remembered them. I said I had. Then watch!.. Quick as a flash ho shuffled them this way and that. I followed the ace of diamonds. Which is it, he asked. I put my finger on it... We turned it over, and it was the ace of diamonds. I'd won. They let me win another three or four times... And that was it. By evening my accordion and my watch, and my money had all vanished - if they'd never existed, t lost everything. I tried to force them to give it back, but there turned out to be a lot of them. So I came back home empty-handed. That's the way any trouble starts, Filipp-you don't notice it. First they let me win, and then they cleaned me out. I wanted to win everything back, I kept on hoping ... and I got what I deserved. Vodka works just the same way: first I'll humour you, lull you into feeling safe, and then I'll set about you. So you be careful not to go too far, Filipp."
"I'm not eighteen years old."
"Vodka doesn't ask you to fill out any questionnaires! It doesn't care what age you are... You're a good worker, so far there's nothing wrong with your family life...We're just warning you. Don't go visiting that Sanya! He might be a good man, but just look at all the women he's upset!.."
"They're all idiots!" said Filya.
"You're like a woodpecker hammering away at the same spot-idiots! Idiots! Is your Nyura an idiot too, then?"
"Yes, my wife's an idiot too. Why kick up such a commotion?""Because she doesn't want her family broken up, that's why!""Nobody's breaking it up. She's running around breaking up herself."
"You just be careful. We've warned you. If need be, we'll just throw your friend Sanya out of the village, that's all... That's what I'll come to."
"You've no right, he's a sick man."
"We'll find a reason! If he's sick, he shouldn't drink. Off you go to work, Fillipp.""Did they call you in?" Sanya asked that evening, his left eyelid twitching nervously."Yes." Filya felt ashamed for his wife, for the chairman, for the entire collective-farm management."Did they tell you not to come any more?"
"They did... What am I, a child?"
"No, of course not," Sanya supported him. "Of course not." His eyelid was still fluttering. He was looking at the distant mountains, with an expression on his face as though he expected the sun to re-emerge from behind them, where it had set. "At night, around twelve o'clock, the nightingales sing. The little devils!.. They show off. Must be trying to impress each other."
"Trying to attract the females," Filya explained.
"They do it beautifully. It's beautiful. People can't do it that way. People use strength."
"So where's your strength?" Filya thought.
"I admire strong people," Sanya continued. "There was a lad who used to beat me when I was little-he was stronger then me. My father advised me to train by lifting something heavy, and in a month I'd be beating him. I started lifting the axle from a trolley. Did it for three days and ruptured myself. My belly-button burst."
"If you were weaker than him you should haw got a weight and tied it to a belt and hashed his head in with it. I used to be a quiet lad, too, and there was one boy who wouldn't leave me in peace. So I gave him a belt with the weight from a clock, and then he left me alone."
Sanya was getting drunk. His eyes were growing misty... They wandered from the distant mountains to the river, the road, the wild raspberry bush under the wattle-fence. He began to feel warm and happy.
"It's so good, Filipp... I'm fifty-two, take away twelve years before I was properly aware-that's forty... Forty times I've seen the spring, forty times!.. And I've only just understood how good it is, J kept on putting 'it off, I never seemed to have time, I was in a hurry to learn as much as I could, I wanted to make as big an impression as I could... Now the brakes are on! I want to take my time to look at each spring and enjoy it. And it's a good thing I don't have many left I understand so much now. Everything! It's not possible to understand any more than that. There's no need."
The cold was rising from the river below, but they could barely sense it drifting up... It was no more than a damp breath of decay, that was overpowered by the immense, calm warmth of the earth and the sky.
Filya didn't understand Sanya, and he didn't struggle to understand him. He felt how good it was to be alive, too. Life was good in general. He kept up the conversation out of politeness.
"Are you all on your own, then?"
"No, I have family, but I'm sick." Sanya was not complaining. There was not even the slightest hint of complaint. "And then I developed a liking for drink... I get in their way. Ifs-only natural..."
"You must have had a hard life..."
"Not all the time. Sometimes I used a weight too... Sometimes they used one on me. And now it's the end. Or rather, not the end... Now I can feel infinity. As soon as it starts to get dark, and it's warm-l can feel infinity."
Filya could make no sense of this. There was another man there, Yegor Sinkin, wearing a beard because he'd been wounded in the jaw during the war, and he could make no sense of it either.
"Did you spend a bit of time in jail, maybe?" Yegor inquired.
"Good grief, no! Now you want to make a convict out of me. I just lived without realising that life is beautiful. I had things to do... I loved art. I used to get excited all the time. But now I'm calm. I was an artist, if that's of any interest to you. But I was no artist really." Sanya laughed with a calm, happy sincerity. "Now, I've really confused you... Don't worry about it. There are plenty of cranks and strange people in the world!.. My brother sends me money. He's rich. Not actually rich, but he has enough. And he gives me some."
This was something the men understood-his brother was sorry for him.
"If only I could start all over again!" Sanya's cheek muscles bunched tightly under the dark skin of his thin face. His eyes glittered feverishly. He was agitated. "Like I told you, now I know that man is an accident, a beautiful, agonizing attempt by Nature to become aware of itself. A fruit's attempt, I assure you, because nature includes my piles as well as me. Death!.. It's inevitable, and none of us can understand it. Nature will never understand itself... It's furious now, taking its vengeance through man. So furious." The rest of Sanya's words were spoken to himself, mumbled under his breath. The men grew tired of straining to hear him and they began to talk about their own affairs.
"Love? Yes," mumbled Sanya, "but all it does is confuse everything and complicate matters. It just mates the attempt more agonizing, that's all. Long live death! Even if we're incapable of understanding it, it makes us understand that life is beautiful. And that's not sad at all...Meaningless, maybe... Yes, it's meaningless..."
The men realised that Sanya was already drunk. And they went off home.
Filya wondered through the dark lanes and alleyways, gradually dissipating the heat in his breast from the belief that life was beautiful.
All that was left was an agonizing pity for the man still fitting atone on the log... Mumbling indistinctly to himself something which he thought was important.
Sanya died a week later.He died sober. At night. Filya was with him.Sanya understood everything and he realised that he was dying. But sometimes he drifted away, as though he had fallen into deep thought, and stared at the wall without hearing what Filya said.
"Sanya!" Filya called him. "Don't think so much. It makes it worse. Why don't you get up and walk around a bit? Let me walk you round the hut... Sanya?"
"Mmm?"
"Move a bit... Stretch your legs."
"Filipp, go and get a raspberry branch... It grows under the fence. Only don't shake off the dust... Bring it to me."
Filya went out into the night, and it deafened him with its immensity. The impenetrable spring night was dark and terrible ... huge. Filya had never been afraid of anything in his life, but he suddenly felt frightened... He hastily broke off a young raspberry branch, still damp with the nighttime dew, and hurried back into the hut. He thought: "What dust can there be on it? There's no dust yet ...the roads are still muddy. How could there be any dust?"
Sanya raised himself on one elbow and stared fixedly at Filya. Waiting. Filya saw nothing but these eyes when he came into the hut. They blazed with pain, they implored, they called to him.
"I don't want it, Filipp!" Sanya said clearly. "I know everything... I don't want it!"
Filya dropped the branch.
Sanya, exhausted, dropped his head on to the pillow and went on in a quiet, hasty voice:
"Lord, Lord ... such infinity! Another year ... half a year! That's all I need."
Filya's heart was wrung with pain. He knew that Sanya would die that night. He would die soon. Filya said nothing.
"I'm not afraid," whispered Sanya hastily drawing on his last strength. 'There's nothing to be afraid of... But one more year, and I'd accept it. You have to be able to accept it! It can't just happen like that... It's not an execution! Why should it be like this?.."
"Have a drink of vodka, Sanya."
"Half a year! Summer... I don't need anything, I'll watch the sun... I won't break a single blade of grass. Who wants it if I don't want it?" Sanya wept. "Filipp..."
"What, Sanya?"
"Who wants it? It's stupid, so stupid!.. Death's an idiot! A kind of mowing-machine."
Filya wept too-he could feel the tears running down his cheeks. He wiped them away angrily with his sleeve.
"Sanya, don't call Death names, maybe she ... maybe it'll pass you by. Don't insult her."
"I'm not insulting her. But it's so stupid! So crude ... and there is no way to help! The idiot!"
Sanya closed his eyes and fell silent. He said nothing for a long, long time. Filya even thought that it was all over.
"Turn me over..." 'Sanya asked him. 'Turn me away from yon." Filya turned his friend to face the wall.
"The idiot," Sanya repeated, scarcely audibly. And he fell silent again.
Filya sat on the chair for about an hour without moving, waiting for Sanya to ask for something. Or say something. Sanya didn't speak again. He was dead.
Filya and the other men buried Sanya. They buried him quietly, without any superfluous words. They drunk to his memory.
Filya planted a Mrch-tree at the head of his grave. It thrived. And when the warm southern winds blew, the birch-tree bent down and rustled, rustling the small green palms of its numerous leaves, as though it were struggling to say something. Both couldn't.
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