great had he grown in the ground; and if he had done it, he would have overturned the Carpathians, the Seven Cities, and the land of the Turks; he stirred just slightly, and the quaking from it went all over the world. And many houses fell. And many people were crushed.
A swishing is often heard in the Carpathians, the sound as of a thousand mill wheels turning in the water. It is the dead men gnawing the dead man, in the abyss without issue, which no man has ever seen, fearing to pass near it. It happens not seldom in the world that the earth shakes from one end to the other: learned people say it is because somewhere by the sea there is a mountain out of which flames burst and burning rivers flow. But the old men who live in Hungary and the land of Galicia know better and say that the earth shakes because there is a dead man grown great and huge in it who wants to rise.
XVI In the town of Glukhov people gathered around the old bandore player and listened for an hour as the blind man played his bandore. No bandore player had ever sung such wonderful songs or sung them so well. First he sang about the old hetmans, about Sagaidachny and Khmelnitsky. 13 Times were different then: the Cossacks were in their glory; their steeds trampled down their enemies, and no one dared to mock them. The old man sang merry songs, too, and kept glancing around at the people as if he could see; and his fingers, with little bone picks attached to them, flew like flies over the strings, and it seemed the strings played of themselves; and the people around him, the old ones with their heads hanging, and the young ones looking up at the old man, dared not even whisper to one another.
'Wait,' said the old man, 'I'll sing to you about a deed of yore.' The people moved closer still, and the blind man sang:
Under Master Stepan, 14 prince of the Seven Cities-and the prince of the Seven Cities was also king of the Polacks- there lived two Cossacks, Ivan and Petro. They lived as brother lives with brother. 'Look, Ivan, whatever you gain, it's all half and half: when one of us is merry, the other is merry; when one of us grieves, we both grieve; if one of us gets some plunder, the plunder's divided in two; if one falls into captivity, the other sells everything and pays the ransom, or else he, too, goes into captivity.' And truly, whatever the Cossacks got, they divided everything in two; and if they stole cattle or horses, they divided everything in two.
King Stepan made war on the Turks. For three weeks he fought the Turks and was still unable to drive them off. And the Turks had a pasha, one who with a dozen janissaries could cut down a whole regiment. So King Stepan announced that if some brave man could be found who would bring him this pasha dead or alive, he would pay him alone as much as he paid his whole army. 'Let's go after the pasha, brother!' said brother Ivan to Petro. And the Cossacks went, one in one direction, the other in another.
Petro might still have caught him or he might not have, but Ivan already came back leading the pasha to the king himself with a noose around his neck. 'Brave fellow!' said King Stepan and ordered that he be paid as much as the whole army; and he ordered that he be given lands wherever he himself chose and as much cattle as he wanted. As soon as Ivan got his payment from the king, that same day he divided everything equally between himself and Petro. Petro took half of the king's pay, but he could not bear that Ivan should be so honored by the king, and he kept revenge hidden deep in his heart.
The two knights went to the lands granted by the king, beyond the Carpathians. The Cossack Ivan seated his son on his horse and tied him to himself. It was dark-they were still riding. The child fell asleep, and Ivan himself began to doze. Do not doze, Cossack, the mountain roads are dangerous!… But a Cossack's horse is such that it knows its way everywhere, never stumbles and never trips. Between the mountains is a chasm; no one has ever seen the bottom of this chasm; as far as the earth is from the sky, so far is it to the bottom of this chasm. On the very edge of this chasm runs the road-two men can ride abreast on it, but three never. The horse with the dozing Cossack began to step carefully. Petro rode beside him all atremble and holding his breath for joy. He looked around and pushed his sworn brother into the chasm. And into the chasm fell the horse with the Cossack and the child.
But the Cossack seized hold of a branch and only the horse fell to the bottom. He began to climb out, his son on his back; there was still a short way to go, he raised his eyes and saw that Petro was aiming his lance at him so as to push him back. 'Righteous God, better not to have raised my eyes than to see my own brother aiming a lance to push me back… My dear brother! pierce me with the lance, if such is my lot, but take my son! How is the innocent child to blame, that he should die such an evil death?' Petro laughed and pushed him with the lance, and Cossack and child both fell to the bottom. Petro took all the property for himself and began to live like a pasha. No one had such herds of horses as Petro. Nowhere had so many sheep and rams been seen. And Petro died.
When Petro died, God summoned the souls of the two brothers, Petro and Ivan, for judgment. 'This man is a great sinner!' God said. 'Ivan! I will not easily find a punishment for him; you choose how he shall be punished!' Ivan thought for a long time, devising the punishment, and said at last: 'This man did me a great offense: he betrayed his brother like Judas and deprived me of my honorable name and my descen- dants on earth. And a man without an honorable name and descendants is like a grain of wheat cast into the ground and lost there for nothing. No sprouts-no one will even know that the seed was sown.
'Make it so, God, that his descendants have no happiness on earth! that the last one of the family be such an evildoer as the world has never seen! that after each of his evil deeds his grandparents and great-grandparents, finding no peace in the coffin, and suffering torments unknown to the world, rise out of their graves! And that the Judas Petro be unable to rise, and suffer still greater torments from that, and eat dirt in a frenzy and writhe under the ground!
'And when the hour comes that fulfills the measure of this man's evildoings, raise me, God, on my horse, from that chasm up to the highest mountain, and let him come to me, and I will hurl him from that mountain into the deepest chasm, and let all the dead men, his grandfathers and great-grandfathers, wherever they lived when alive, be drawn from all ends of the earth to gnaw on him for the torments he caused them, and gnaw on him eternally, and I will rejoice looking at his torment! And let the Judas Petro be unable to rise from the ground, and let him strain to gnaw, but gnaw only on himself, and let his bones keep growing bigger, that through this his pain may become greater. This torment will be the most terrible for him: for there is no greater torment for a man than to desire revenge and be unable to get it.'
'Terrible is the punishment you have devised, man!' said God. 'Let it all be as you have said, but you, too, will sit there eternally on your horse, and as long as you sit there on your horse, there will be no Kingdom of Heaven for you!' And it all happened as was said: to this day a wondrous knight stands on horseback in the Carpathians, gazing on the dead men gnawing the dead man in the bottomless chasm, and he feels the dead man lying under the ground growing and gnawing his own bones in terrible torment and shaking all the earth terribly…
The blind man finished his song; he began to strum on the strings again; he began to sing funny little verses about Khoma and Yerema, about Stklyar Stokoza… but old and young still could not come to their senses and stood for a long time, their heads bowed, pondering the terrible deed that had happened in olden times.
Ivan Fyodorovich Shponka and His Aunt
There was a story to do with this story: it was told us by Stepan Ivanovich Kurochka, who used to come over from Gadyach. You should know that my memory's rotten beyond words: tell me something or not, it's all the same. Just like pouring water through a sieve. Knowing this fault of mine, I asked him purposely to write it down in a notebook. Well, God grant him good health, he was always kind to me, he did write it down. I put it into a little
