And suddenly, out of smoke-colored blankness, Seryozha returned. With a sudden loud breathless laugh he walked out of the water, towering tall in the dusk, clasping a large fish to his stomach. The fish cramped itself in curves from side to side, goggling voiceless o‑o‑o‑s at the sky.
“Yist this most big fish catched outside the net,” gasped Seryozha. “The nets have catched him by his skin. He has bited me.”
He threw the fish on the rocks, where it whipped and lashed itself about, taut and terrible, mouthing its suffocated appeal. “I think,” said Seryozha, pulling his trousers on, “that we shall soon be biting him. Fkuzna! Good biting, yes—no?”
“I did not know,” said Wilfred Chew, examining the dying fish gravely, “that salmon could be plucked out of rivers by hand in this way. In England, I have heard, people fish for such fish with tame flies tied to rods.”
Seryozha spouted river water out of his mouth, hawking crudely in his throat. He then sucked his bleeding finger and spat a little diluted blood. “In China,” he said, shrugging himself and dancing a little to make his clothes hang easily on his wet body, “salmons are rare to be caught so, round their waist. Never before, I think. This was a misfortune to salmon—the net have catched such little cracks of his skin—so.” He touched the straining gills and then stood up and looked down, feeling, as he always felt after such deeds were done, that he had spoiled a joke. A smiling salmon in the water had become solemn and sorry now on land—because of him. “He bited me,” he murmured in doubtfulness and obstinacy. “Now I shall be biting him.”
“Such a fish would indeed make a successful dish,” said Wilfred, who had no such qualms. He did not really know that animals were alive. To him they were either ambulant food or else inferior substitutes for wheels. Sometimes they were just things with a smell, like dogs. “Yet, Mr. Malinin, legally the fish does not belong to us.”
Seryozha began arguing with the innkeeper, whose nets, it seemed, had originally detained the fish. The fish, one gathered, was not for sale at all; perhaps the innkeeper had been considering having it stuffed for his wife’s delight; perhaps he would have given it to the pigs. Seryozha, however, expressed the opinion that the fish should not only be sold to him, but sold very cheap, since he had gone to the trouble of bringing it out of the water (thus saving the innkeeper a trip in his boat), and had, in addition, been actually injured by the fish. Seryozha suggested that the innkeeper was lucky not to be asked to pay for the damage caused by his dangerous and uncontrolled fish. It then appeared that the fish, on second thoughts, might be sold as supper for the travelers—but at an immense price. Argument continued. The price began shrinking, like a flower from which the petals were being plucked. I buy it—I buy it not—I sell it—I sell it not. … Finally Seryozha said, “I have buy the half of this fish for eighty sen.”
“Which half?” asked Wilfred.
“Is this important—which half?” exclaimed Seryozha, surprised but willing to be informed.
“Very important,” answered Wilfred, judicially.
A new argument began between Seryozha and the innkeeper. After about ten minutes Seryozha said, “I have buy the behinder half of the fish for seventy-five sen. The before half shall cost ninety sen.”
“The behind is better for our purpose,” said Wilfred. “You can clean the fish and I will cook it.”
The fish was divided by lantern-light, on the inn kang, in the presence of about thirty witnesses.
“Take the heart and the liver and the gall,” said Wilfred, “and put them up safely.”
“Nyet good,” said Seryozha, wrinkling his nose at the mess in question.
“Please do as I advise,” said Wilfred, sharply. “It is most important.”
Seryozha, making a slightly mutinous noise in the back of his nose, wrapped the heart, the liver, and the gall of the fish in a piece of newspaper. “It shall smell,” he said.
“Some smells are good.”
“This smell nyet.”
“Goodness is a comparative term.”
“Oi-oi!” said Seryozha.
The fish, as Wilfred began to cook it, became a kind of trysting-place for all the delicacies of the village. Water chestnuts, garlic, sweet corn, peppers, young greens, tender white roots were brought in by businesslike outsiders and bought by Wilfred for a few sen. The smell of cooking became a smell that ought certainly not to be omitted from Paradise.
What would heaven be like, in fact, without happy empty stomachs and the smell of a good supper getting ready? thought Seryozha, as he sat in the doorway and watched the stars of heaven. A half-moon was rising above the rice-fields; its reflection swam like a fish in the water of the rice-fields, appearing and disappearing, striped and coy, among the blades of rice—a fish swimming very deeply and secretly. There was enough light to show the rice, bleached of its jewel-like green, all upright, all still, brushing the sight upward like soft fur. Softer than the softest fur, pearly pale like a Persian kitten’s fur.
Seryozha stared at the lovely world, feeling cooler and cooler after his hot busy day, thinking of nothing. Yet all his senses, all his limbs and members, were straining after rapture; his ears were open for a great harmony; his eyes for some light they would never see; his tongue and his throat were tense to utter some unspeakably true word; his feet on tiptoe for a leap beyond the starriest athlete’s dream; his stomach was hungry for some super-food, his
