forest.
Others, the stronger ones, gave examples of endurance and courage unknown to men. Svirid had many more things to report. He wanted to warn the chief about the danger of a new insurrection hanging over the camp, more threatening than the one that had been crushed, but found no words, because the impatience of Liberius, who hurried him irritably, completely deprived him of the gift of speech. And Liberius interrupted Svirid every moment, not only because people were waiting for him on the road and nodding and shouting to him, but because in the last two weeks he had been constantly addressed with such considerations and knew all about it.
“Don’t hurry me, comrade chief. I’m no talker as it is. The words stick in my teeth, I choke on them. What am I saying to you? Go to the refugee train, talk some sense into these runaway women. It’s all gone haywire with them there. I ask you, what is it with us, ‘All against Kolchak!’ or female slaughter?”
“Make it short, Svirid. See, they’re calling me. Don’t lay it on thick.”
“Now there’s this demon woman, Zlydarikha, deuce knows who the wench is. Sign me up to look after the cattle, she says, I’m a vitalinarian …”
“Veterinarian, Svirid.”
“Like I said—a vitalinarian, to treat animals in their vitals. But now you can forget your cattle, she’s turned out to be a heretic witch from the Old Believers,2 serves cow liturgies, leads the refugee women astray. It’s your own fault, she says, see where you get when you go running after the red flag with your skirts pulled up. Next time don’t do it.”
“I don’t understand what refugees you’re talking about. Our partisan wives, or some others?”
“Others, sure enough. The new ones, from different parts.”
“But there was an order for them to go to the Steadings, to the Chilim mill. How did they wind up here?”
“The Steadings, sure. There’s nothing but ashes left of your Steadings, it’s all burned down. The mill and the whole place is in cinders. They got to Chilimka and saw a barren waste. Half of them lost their minds, howled away, and went back to the Whites. The others swung around and are coming here, a whole train of them.”
“Through the thicket, through the bog?”
“Ever heard of axes and saws? Our men were sent to protect them—they helped out. Some twenty miles of road have been cut. With bridges, the hellcats. Talk about wenches after that! They do such things, the shrews, it takes you three days to figure it out.”
“A fine goose you are! Twenty miles of road, you jackass, what’s there to be glad about? It plays right into Vitsyn and Quadri’s hands. The way into the taiga is open. They can roll in their artillery.”
“Cover them. Cover them. Send a covering detachment, and that’s the end of it.”
“By God, I could have thought of that without you.”
6
The days grew shorter. By five o’clock it was getting dark. Towards dusk Yuri Andreevich crossed the road in the place where Liberius had wrangled with Svirid the other day. The doctor was heading for the camp. Near the clearing and the mound on which the rowan tree grew, considered the camp’s boundary marker, he heard the mischievous, perky voice of Kubarikha, his rival, as he jokingly called the quack wisewoman. His competitor, with loud shrieks, was pouring out something merry, rollicking, probably some folk verses. There were listeners. She was interrupted by bursts of sympathetic laughter, men’s and women’s. Afterwards everything became quiet. They all probably left.
Then Kubarikha began to sing differently, to herself and in a low voice, thinking she was completely alone. Taking care not to step into the swamp, Yuri Andreevich slowly made his way in the darkness down the footpath that skirted the boggy clearing in front of the rowan tree, then stopped as if rooted to the spot. Kubarikha was singing some old Russian song. Yuri Andreevich did not know it. Might it be her own improvisation?
A Russian song is like water in a mill pond. It seems stopped up and unmoving. But in its depths it constantly flows through the sluice gates, and the calm of its surface is deceptive.
By all possible means, by repetitions, by parallelisms, it holds back the course of the gradually developing content. At a certain limit, it suddenly opens itself all at once and astounds us. Restraining itself, mastering itself, an anguished force expresses itself in this way. It is a mad attempt to stop time with words.
Kubarikha was half singing, half speaking:
A little hare was running over the white world,
Over the white world, aye, over the white snow.
He ran, little flop-ears, past a rowan tree,
He ran, little flop-ears, and complained to the rowan.
Me, I’m a hare, and my heart’s all timid,
My heart’s all timid, it’s so easily frightened.
I’m a hare and I’m scared of the wild beast’s track,
Of the wild beast’s track, of the hungry wolf’s belly.
Have pity on me, rowan bush,
Rowan bush, beautiful rowan tree.
Don’t give your beauty to the wicked enemy,
To the wicked enemy, to the wicked raven.
Strew your red berries in handfuls to the wind,
To the wind, over the white world, over the white snow,
Roll them, scatter them to the place I was born in,
To the last house there by the village gate,
To the last window there, aye, in the last room,
Where my little recluse has hidden away,
My dearest one, my longed-for one.
Speak into the ear of the one I long for
A hot word, an ardent word for me.
I languish in chains, a soldier-warrior,
I lose heart, a soldier, in this foreign land.
But I’ll escape yet from this bitter bondage,
Escape to my berry, to my beautiful one.3
7
The army wife Kubarikha was putting a spell on a sick cow belonging to Pamphil’s wife, Agafya Fotievna, known as Palykha or, in simple speech, Fatevna. The cow had been taken from the herd and put in the bushes, tied to a tree by the horns. The cow’s owner sat by its front legs on a stump, and by the hind legs, on a milking stool, sat the sorceress.
The rest of the countless herd was crowded into a small clearing. The dark forest stood around it in a wall of triangular firs, tall as the hills, which seemed to sit on the ground on the fat behinds of their broadly spread lower branches.
In Siberia they raised a certain prize-winning Swiss breed. Almost all of the same colors, black with white spots, the cows were no less exhausted than the people by the privations, the long marches, the unbearable crowding. Squeezed together side by side, they were going crazy from the crush. In their stupefaction, they forgot
