And quiet flows the Don; a novel (7 page)

"What's all this I hear? Eh?" he shouted looking Aksinya straight in the eyes. "Your husband hardly out of sight, and you already setting your cap at other men! I'll make Grisha's blood flow for this, and I'll write to your Stepan! Let him hear of it! You whore, haven't you been beaten enough! Don't set your foot inside my yard from this day on. Carrying on with a young man, and when Stepan comes, I'll have to.. .."

Aksinya listened with narrowed eyes. And suddenly she shamelessly swung the hem of her skirt, enveloped Pantelei in the smell of woman's clothes, and came breasting at him with writhing lips and bared teeth.

"What are you, my father-in-law? Eh? Who are you to teach me? Co and teach your own fat-bottomed woman! Keep order in your own yard! You limping, stump-footed devil! Clear out of here, you won't frighten me!"

"Wait, you daft hussy!"

"There's nothing to wait for! Get back where you came from! And if I want your Grisha, I'll eat him, bones and all, and answer for it myself! Chew that over! What if I love Grisha? Beat me, will you? Write to my husband? Write to the ataman if you like, but Grisha belongs to me! He's mine! Mine! I have him and I shall keep him!"

Aksinya pressed against the quailing Pantelei with her breast (it beat against her thin blouse like a bustard in a noose), seared him with the flame of her black eyes, overwhelmed him with more and more terrible and shameless words. His eyebrows quivering, the old man backed to the door, groped for the stick he had left in the comer, and waving his hand, pushed open the door with his bottom, Aksinya pressed him out of the passage, pantingly, frenziedly shouting:

"I'll have my love, I'll make up for all the wrongs I've suffered! And then kill me if you like! He's my Grisha! Mine!"

Muttering something into his beard, Pantelei limped off to his house.

He found Grigory in the room. Without saying a word, he brought his stick down over his son's back. Doubling up, Grigory hung on his father's arm.

"What's that for. Father?"

"For your goings-on, you son of a bitch!"

"What goings-on?"

"Don't wrong your neighbour! Don't shame your father! Don't run after women, you young buck!" Pantelei snorted, dragging Grigory, who had grabbed the stick, around the room trying to wrest it from him.

"I'm not going to let you beat me'" Grigory cried hoarsely, and setting his teeth, he tore the stick out of his father's hand. Across his knee it went, and-snap!

Pantelei Prokofyevich struck him on the neck with his hard fist.

"I'll whip you in public. You accursed son of the devil! I'll marry you to the village idiot! I'll geld you!" his father roared.

The noise brought the old mother running into the room.

"Pantelei, Pantelei! Cool down a little! Wait!"

But the old man had lost his temper in real earnest. He sent his wife flying, overturned the table with the sewing-machine on it, and victoriously flew out into the yard. Grigory, whose shirt had been torn in the struggle, had not had time to take it off when the door banged open again, and his father appeared once more like a storm-cloud on the threshold.

"I'll marry him off, the son of a bitch!" He stamped his foot like a horse and fixed his gaze on Grigory's muscular back. "I'll drive off tomorrow and arrange the match. To think that I should live to see people laugh in my face about my son."

"Let me get my shirt on first, then you can marry me off."

"I'll marry you to the village idiot!" The door slammed, and the old man clattered away down the steps.

XI

Beyond the village of Setrakov the carts with tarpaulin covers stretched in rows across the steppe. At unbelievable speed a neat, white-roofed little town had grown up, with straight streets and a small square in the centre, where a sentry stood guard.

The men lived the usual monotonous life of a training camp. In the morning the detachment of Cossacks guarding the grazing horses drove them into the camp. Then followed cleaning, grooming, saddling, the roll-call, and muster. The staff officer in command of the camp, Lieutenant-Colonel Popov, bawled stentoriously; the sergeants training the young Cossacks shouted their orders. They staged mock attacks on a hill, they cunningly encircled the "enemy." They fired at targets. The younger Cossacks eagerly vied with one another in the sabre exercises, and the old hands dodged as much of the training as they could.

While voices grew hoarse with the heat and the vodka, a fragrant exciting wind blew over the long lines of covered wagons, the susliks whistled in the distance, and the steppe beckoned away from the stuffiness and smoke of the whitewashed huts.

About a week before the break-up of the camp Andrei Tomilin's wife came to visit him. She brought him some home-made cracknel, an assortment of dainties and a sheaf of village news.

She left again very early in the morning, taking the Cossacks' greetings and instructions to their families and relations in the village. Only Stepan Astakhov sent no message back by her.

He had fallen ill the evening before, drunk vodka to cure himself and was incapable of seeing anything in the whole wide world, including Tomilin's wife. He did not turn up on parade; at his own request the doctor's assistant let his blood, setting a dozen leeches on his chest. Ste-pan sat in his undershirt against the wheel of his cart (making the white linen cover of his cap oily with cart grease) and stared sulkily at the leeches sucking at his barrel-like chest and swelling with dark blood.

The regiment medical orderly stood by smoking and letting the smoke filter through the wide gaps between his teeth.

"Feel any better?"

"They're drawing well. Easier for the heart somehow."

"Leeches are a great thing!"

Tomilin came up and gave Stepan a wink.

"Stepan, I'd like a word with you."

Stepan rose with a grunt and took Tomilin aside.

"My woman's been here on a visit. She left this morning."

"Well?"

"There's a lot of talk about your wife in the village."

"What?"

"Not pleasant talk, either."

"Well?"

"She's carrying on with Grigory Melekhov. Quite openly."

Turning pale, Stepan tore the leeches from his chest and crushed them underfoot. When he had crushed the last one, he buttoned up his shirt, and then, as though suddenly afraid, unbuttoned it again. His chalky lips moved incessantly. They trembled, slipped into an awkward smile, then shrivelled and gathered into a livid pucker. Tomilin thought Stepan must be chewing something hard and solid. Gradually the colour returned to his face, the lips, caught by his teeth, froze into immobility. He took off his cap, smeared the grease over the white cover with his sleeve, and said aloud: "Thanks for the news."

"I just wanted to warn you. ... You won't hold it against me."

Tomilin clapped his hands against his trousers in a gesture of sympathy, and went off to his horse. A sound of voices and shouting was heard from the camp, the Cossacks had returned from the sabre exercises, Stepan stood for a moment staring fixedly and sternly at the black smear on his cap.

A half-crushed, dying leech crawled up his boot.

In ten more days the Cossacks would be returning from camp. Aksinya lived in a frenzy of belated bitter love. Despite his father's threats, Grigory slipped out and went to her at night, coming home at dawn.

In two weeks he had drained his strength, like a horse striving beyond its powers. From lack of sleep his brown face was suffused under the high cheek-bones with a blue tinge, his tired eyes gazed wearily out of their sunken sockets. Aksinya went about with her face completely uncovered, the deep hollows under her eyes darkened funereally; her swollen, avid lips smiled with a restless challenge.

So extraordinary and open was their mad association, so ecstatically did they burn with a single, shameless flamie, neither conscience-stricken nor hiding their love from the world, becoming gaunt and dark before its very eyes, that people began to be ashamed to meet them in the street. Grigory's comrades, who previously had chaffed him about Aksinya, now kept silent and felt awkward and constrained in his company. In their hearts the women envied Aksinya, yet they condemned her, gloating at the prospect of Stepan's return, and pining with curiosity as to how it would all end.

91

If Grigory had made some show of hiding from the world his affair with this grass-widow, and if the grass-widow Aksinya had kept her relations with Grigory comparatively secret, without shunning others, the world would have seen nothing unusual in it. The village would have gossiped a little and then forgotten. But they lived together almost openly, they were bound by something greater, which had no likeness to any temporary association, and for that reason the villagers decided it was immoral and held their breath in peeping expectation. Stepan would return and cut the knot.

Over the bed in the Astakhovs' bedroom ran a string threaded with empty white and black cotton-reels. They hung there for decoration. The flies spent their nights on the reels, and spiders' webs stretched from them to the ceiling. Grigory was lying on Aksinya's bare, cool arm and gazing up at the chain of reels. With the toil-roughened fingers of her other hand Aksinya was playing with the thick strands of hair on his head. Her fingers smelt of warm milk; when Grigory turned his head, pressing his nose into Aksinya's armpit, the pungent, sweetish scent of woman's sweat flooded his nostrils.

In addition to the wooden, painted bedstead with pointed pine cones at the comers, the room contained a capacious iron-bound chest that stood close to the door, holding Aksinya's dowry and all her finery. In the corner was a table, an oleograph of General Skobelev riding towards a row of flapping banners dipped before him, two chairs, and above them icons in gawdy paper aureoles. Along the side wall hung fly-blown photographs. One was a grotip of Cossacks, with curly forelocks, swelling chests decorated with watch chains, and drawn swords-Stepan and his comrades on active service. On a hook hung Stepan's uniform, it had not been put away. The moon stared through the window and uncertainly fingered the two white sergeant's straps on the shoulder.

With a sigh Aksinya kissed Grigory on the bridge of his nose, between his eyebrows.

"Grisha, my love."

"What?"

"Only nine days left."

"That's not so soon."

"What am I to do, Grisha?"

"How should I know?"

Aksinya restrained a sigh and again smoothed and parted Grigory's matted hair.

"Stepan will kill me," she half-asked, half-declared.

Grigory was silent. He wanted to sleep. With difficulty he forced open his clinging eyelids and saw above him the glittering bluish blackness of Aksinya's eyes.

"When my husband comes back, you'll give me up, won't you? You'll be afraid?"

"Why should I be afraid of him? You're his wife, it's for you to be afraid."

"When I'm with you I'm not afraid, but when I think about it in the daytime I am."

Grigory yawned and said: "It doesn't matter so much about Stepan coming back. My father's talking of getting me married off."

He smiled and was going to add something, but he felt Aksinya's hand under his head suddenly wilt and soften, bury itself in the pillow, and after a moment harden again.

"Who has he got in mind?" she asked in a stifled voice,

"He's only talking about it. Mother says he's thinking of Korshunov's Natalya."

"Natalya . . . she's a good-looking girl. Very good-looking. . .. Well, go ahead and marry her. I saw her in church the other day. Dressed up she was. . . ." Aksinya spoke rapidly, but he could scarcely hear her, her voice was so lifeless and dull,

"I don't care two pins about her good looks. I'd like to marry you."

Aksinya sharply pulled her arm from undef Grigory's head and stared with dry eyes at the window. A frosty, yellow mist was in the yard. The shed cast a heavy shadow. The crickets were chirruping. Down by the Don the bitterns boomed; their deep sullen tones floated through the bedroom window.

"Grisha!"

"Thought of something?"

Aksinya seized Grigory's rough, unyielding hands, pressed them to her breast, and to her cold, almost lifeless cheeks, and cried:

"What did you take up with me for, curse you! What shall I do? Grisha! I'm finished. . . . Stepan is coming back, and what shall I tell him. . .? Who is there to help me?"

Grigory was silent. Aksinya gazed mournfully at his handsome eagle nose, his shadowed eyes, his dumb lips.. .. And suddenly a flood of feeling swept away the dam of restraint. Madly she kissed his face, his neck, his arms, the rough, curly black hair on his chest, and Grigory felt her body trembling as, gasping for breath, she whispered:

"Grisha. . . my dearest. . , beloved . . . let's go away. My darling! We'll throw up everything and go. I'll leave my husband and everything, so long as you're with me.... We'll go far away,

to the mines. I'll love you and care for you. I've got an uncle who is a watchman at the Paramo-nov mines: he'll help us.... Grisha! Oh, say something!"

Grigory lay thinking, then unexpectedly opened his burning foreign-looking eyes. They were laughing, gleaming derision.

"You're a fool, Aksinya, a fool! You talk away, but you say nothing worth listening to. How can I leave the farm? I've got to do my military service next year. . . . I'll never stir anywhere away from the land. Here there is the steppe, and something to breathe-but there? Last simimer I went with Father to the station. I nearly died. Engines roaring, the air all thick and heavy with burning coal. How people live there, I don't know; perhaps they're used to it!" Grigory spat and said again: "I'll never leave the village."

The night grew darker outside the window, a cloud passed over the moon. The frosty, yellow mist vanished from the yard, the shadows were washed away, and now there was no telling whether it was last year's faggots or some old bush that loomed darkly beyond the fence outside the window.

The room, too, grew darker. The stripes on Stepan's uniform faded, and in the grey, stagnant murk Grigory did not see the fine shiver that