“We won’t be staying in town. In Varykino.”
“I know. Your wife told me. Never mind. You’ll come to town on errands. I guessed who she was at first sight. The eyes. The nose. The forehead. The image of Kruger. Her grandfather all over. In these parts everybody remembers Kruger.”
Tall, round-sided oil tanks showed red at the ends of the field. Industrial billboards perched on tall posts. One of them, which twice crossed the doctor’s eye, had written on it: “Moreau and Vetchinkin. Seeders. Threshers.”
“It was a solid firm. Produced excellent agricultural implements.”
“I didn’t hear. What did you say?”
“The firm, I said. Understand? The firm. Produced agricultural implements. A joint-stock company. My father was a shareholder.”
“You said he kept an inn.”
“An inn’s an inn. The one doesn’t interfere with the other. And he was no fool, he placed his money in the best enterprises. Invested in the Giant picture house.”
“It seems you’re proud of it?”
“Of my father’s shrewdness? What else!”
“And what about your social democracy?”
“What’s that got to do with it, may I ask? Where is it said that a man who reasons as a Marxist has to be a mush-minded driveler? Marxism is a positive science, a teaching about reality, a philosophy of the historical situation.”
“Marxism and science? To argue about that with a man I hardly know is imprudent, to say the least. But come what may. Marxism has too little control of itself to be a science. Sciences are better balanced. Marxism and objectivity? I don’t know of a movement more isolated within itself and further from the facts than Marxism. Each of us is concerned with testing himself by experience, but people in power, for the sake of the fable of their own infallibility, turn away from the truth with all their might. Politics says nothing to me. I don’t like people who are indifferent to truth.”
Samdevyatov considered the doctor’s words the whimsicalities of a witty eccentric. He merely chuckled and did not contradict him.
Meanwhile the train was being shunted. Each time it reached the exit switch by the semaphore, an elderly switchwoman with a milk jug tied to her belt shifted the knitting she was doing from one hand to the other, bent down, turned the disk of the shunting switch, and made the train back up. While it slowly moved backwards, she straightened up and shook her fist at it.
Samdevyatov took her movement to his own account. “Who is she doing it to?” he fell to thinking. “There’s something familiar. Isn’t she Tuntseva? Looks like her. But what’s with me? It’s hardly her. She’s too old for Glasha. And what have I got to do with it? There are upheavals in Mother Russia, confusion on the railways, the dear heart’s probably having a hard time, and it’s my fault, I get a fist shaken at me. Ah, well, devil take her, why should I rack my brains over her!”
Finally, after waving the flag and shouting something to the engineer, the switchwoman let the train pass the semaphore and go freely on its way, and when the fourteenth freight car sped by her, she stuck her tongue out at the babblers on the floor of the car, who were such an eyesore to her. And again Samdevyatov fell to thinking.
5
When the environs of the burning city, the cylindrical tanks, the telegraph poles and advertisements dropped behind and disappeared and other views came along, woods, hills, between which the windings of the highway frequently appeared, Samdevyatov said:
“Let’s get up and go our ways. I get off soon. And you, too, one stop later. Watch out you don’t miss it.”
“You must know this area thoroughly?”
“Prodigiously. A hundred miles around. I’m a lawyer. Twenty years of practice. Cases. Travels.”
“And up to the present?”
“What else.”
“What sort of cases can be tried now?”
“Anything you like. Old unfinished deals, operations, unfulfilled obligations—up to the ears, it’s terrible.”
“Haven’t such relations been abolished?”
“Nominally, of course. But in reality there’s a need at the same time for mutually exclusive things. The nationalization of enterprises, and fuel for the city soviet, and wagon transport for the provincial council of national economy. And along with all that everybody wants to live. Peculiarities of the transitional period, when theory doesn’t coincide with practice yet. Here there’s a need for quick-witted, resourceful people with my kind of character. Blessed is the man who walketh not, who takes a heap and ignores the lot.4 And a punch in the nose, and so it goes, as my father used to say. Half the province feeds off me. I’ll be coming to see you on the matter of wood supplies. By horse, naturally, once he’s on his feet. My last one went lame. If he was healthy, I wouldn’t be jolting around on this old junk. It drags along, curse it, an engine in name only. I’ll be of use to you when you get to Varykino. I know your Mikulitsyns like the palm of my hand.”
“Do you know the purpose of our trip, our intentions?”
“Approximately. I can guess. I have a notion. Man’s eternal longing for the land. The dream of living by the work of your own hands.”
“And so? It seems you don’t approve? What do you say?”
“A naive, idyllic dream. But why not? God help you. But I don’t believe in it. Utopian. Homemade.”
“How will Mikulitsyn treat us?”
