Behind the white mare, kicking up his wobbly, soft-boned legs, ran a curly-headed foal, black as night, looking like a hand-carved toy.
Sitting at the sides of the cart, which jolted over the potholes in the road, the travelers clung to the edges so as not to fall. There was peace in their souls. Their dream was coming true, they were nearing the goal of their journey. With generous largesse and luxury, the pre-evening hours of the wonderful, clear day lingered, delayed.
The road went now through forest, now through open clearings. In the forest, the bumping over snags threw the travelers into a heap, and they huddled, frowned, pressed close to each other. In the open places, where it was as if space itself doffed its hat out of fullness of feeling, they straightened up, settled more freely, shook their heads.
It was mountainous country. The mountains, as always, had their own look, their physiognomy. They stood dark in the distance, mighty, arrogant shadows, silently scrutinizing the people in the cart. A comforting rosy light followed the travelers across the field, reassuring them and giving them hope.
They liked everything, were surprised at everything, and most of all at the incessant babble of their whimsical old driver, in which traces of vanished old Russian forms, Tartar layers, and regional peculiarities were mixed with unintelligibilities of his own invention.
When the foal lagged behind, the mare stopped and waited for him. He smoothly overtook her in wavy, splashing leaps. With awkward steps of his long, close-set legs, he came to the cart from the side and, thrusting his tiny head on its long neck behind the shaft, sucked at his mother.
“I still don’t understand,” Antonina Alexandrovna shouted to her husband, her teeth chattering from the jolts, spacing out the words so as not to bite off the tip of her tongue at an unforeseen bump. “Is it possible that this is the same Vakkh mama told us about? Well, you remember, all sorts of balderdash. A blacksmith, his guts hurt in a fight, fashioned new ones for himself. In short, the blacksmith Vakkh Iron Belly. I understand it’s all just a tall tale. But can it be a tale about him? Can he be the same one?”
“Of course not. First of all, you say yourself it’s just a tall tale, folklore. Second, in mama’s time this folklore was already over a hundred years old, as she said. But why so loud? The old man will hear and get offended.”
“He won’t hear anything—he’s hard of hearing. And if he does hear, he won’t make sense of it—he’s a bit off.”
“Hey, Fyodor Nefyodych!” the old man urged the mare on, addressing her with a masculine name for no apparent reason, knowing perfectly well, and better than his passengers, that she was a mare. “What anathematic heat! Like the Hebrew youths in the Persian furnace! Hup, you unpastured devil. I’m talking to you, Mazeppa!”8
He would unexpectedly strike up snatches of popular songs composed in the local factories in former times.
Farewell to the central office,
Farewell to the pit yard and boss,
I’m sick to death of the master’s bread,
I’ve drunk my fill of stagnant water.
A swan goes swimming by the shore,
Paddling the water with his feet.
It isn’t wine that makes me tipsy,
Vanya’s been taken for a soldier.
But me, Masha, I’m a bright one,
But me, Masha, I’m no fool.
I’ll go off to Selyaba town,
Get hired by the Sentetyurikha.
“Hey, little sod, you’ve forgotten God! Look, people, at this carrion of a beast! You give her the whip, she gives you the slip. Hup, Fedya-Nefedya, where’ll that get ya? This here forest’s called the taiga, there’s no end to it. There’s a force of peasant folk in it, ho, ho! There’s the Forest Brotherhood in it. Hey, Fedya-Nefedya, stopped again, you devil, you goblin!”
Suddenly he turned around and, looking point-blank at Antonina Alexandrovna, said:
“What notion’s got into you, young’un, think I don’t sense where you come from? You’re a simple one, ma’am, I must say. Let the earth swallow me up, but I recognize you! That I do! Couldn’t believe my blinkers, a live Grigov!” (The old man called eyes “blinkers” and Kruger “Grigov.”) “You wouldn’t happen to be his granddaughter? Ain’t I got an eye for Grigov? I spent my whole life around him, broke my teeth on him. In all kinds of handiwork, all the jobs. As a pit-prop man, a winch man, a stable man. Hup, shake a leg! She’s stopped again, the cripple! Angels in China- land, I’m talking to you, ain’t I?
“Here you’re asking what Vakkh is he, that blacksmith maybe? You’re real simple, ma’am, such a big-eyed lady, but a fool. Your Vakkh, he was Postanogov by name. Postanogov Iron Belly, it’s fifty years he’s been in the ground, between the boards. And us now, on the contrary, we’re Mekhonoshin. Same name, namesakes, but the last name’s different—Efim, but not him.”
The old man gradually told his passengers in his own words what they already knew about the Mikulitsyns from Samdevyatov. He called him Mikulich and her Mikulichna. The manager’s present wife he called the second-wed, and of “the little first, the deceased one,” he said that she was a honey-woman, a white cherub. When he got on to the partisan leader Liberius and learned that his fame had not yet reached Moscow, that seemed incredible to him:
“You haven’t heard? Haven’t heard of Comrade Forester? Angels in China-land, what’s Moscow got ears for?”
Evening was beginning to fall. The travelers’ own shadows, growing ever longer, raced ahead of them. Their way lay across a wide empty expanse. Here and there, sticking up high, grew woody stalks of goosefoot, thistles, loosestrife, in solitary stands, with clusters of flowers at their tips. Lit from below, from the ground, by the rays of the sunset, their outlines rose up ghostly, like motionless mounted sentinels posted thinly across the field.
Far ahead, at the end, the plain came up against the transverse ridge of a rising height. It stood across the road like a wall, at the foot of which a ravine or river could be surmised. As if the sky there were surrounded by a fence, with the country road leading to its gates.
At the top of the rise appeared the elongated form of a white, one-story house.
“See the lookout on the knob?” Vakkh asked. “That’s your Mikulich and Mikulichna. And under them there’s a split, a ravine, it’s called Shutma.”
Two gunshots, one after the other, rang out from that direction, generating multiple fragmented echoes.
“What’s that? Can it be partisans, grandpa? Shooting at us?”
