She went down from her room, through the sunny kitchen and out through the ironing-shed into the yard. She noticed the iron standing on the sheet as she had left it, and, lifting it up, looked at the angular heart-shaped burn on the linen. The sheet was not spoiled in Tatiana’s eyes; the mark was symmetrical, shapely, and of a fine sienna color. The thing, in fact, was simply branded with a signature of oddity. She left the iron tilted upright, and thought that it looked like a creature begging forgiveness for the sin of printing a private and unlicensed mark upon its world.
She leaned on the gate of her father’s yard, looking out at the valley, at the crisscrossing paths, the yellow mud-walled houses, the tree where she had parted from Piotr Isaev, the last of her lovers. She leaned one cheek on the top bar of the high gate, and looked at the world sideways, under the blurred arch formed by the bone of her nose and brow. Seen sideways, thus framed, everything in sight looked separate and significant—to be seen by itself. The barley looked as if it were being brushed upward by an impossible perpendicular wind. The soft hills changed their angles and were now built of precipices down which the clouds rolled like avalanches. And, as if the freshness of this sideways view quickened also her hearing, she could hear with a sudden urgency the starlings in the big tree preparing for autumn flight. They were making that curious wailing whistle—almost like a miniature howling—that starlings utter in their migratory restless mood. And as soon as Tatiana noticed this sound, she could see that almost every leaf in the tree had a bird behind it. The tree was as full of movement as a bonfire; whistling curled up from it like smoke.
Tatiana felt an arch tweak at her instep. She looked down and saw that all the chickens in the yard, thinking that her presence meant a meal, were gathered about her feet. Each hen looked incredulously at the unexpectedly uneatable dust about her feet, first with one eye and then with the other. Tatiana, watching them, putting thoughts into their narrow heads, presently became aware that, leaning on the gate, she had opened it a little, and the disappointed hens were wandering out into the road.
Tatiana, dancing on her toes as she always did, ran out after them, and as she did so, a further block of hens squeezed out with a rustle and a cackle. “Chok-chok-chok,” she called, throwing imaginary grain in the gateway. A few hens went in and a few more came out. “Supposing they were men,” thought Tatiana. “Men that I was trying to lead—like Joan of Arc—to some great enterprise. I should have to fail, with such silly rebels as these behind me.” Her supposings always promoted her to a first place. “Friend, go up higher” was always the note of her imaginative orgies, although in actual life she never asserted herself. But in her imagination she never knew herself as a mere Tanya.
In her mind, now, the indecision of the hens was as articulate as her own predicament. “What does she want us to do?” she thought for the hens. “This way—that way—which way? I’m trying to do right, but—what is right? Oh, what a puzzling world this is, outside our gate … !”
With a good deal of flurry and worry Tatiana drove the chickens—all of them but three—back into the yard. There they were, that group of cackling conservatives, trying to collect their wits after their daring excursion into novelty, scratching feverishly at the dust and, in their excitement, hardly looking at what their scratching had turned up. Tatiana thought they all must have that bathed, naked feeling that comes on getting safely home after a new experience. But she had no time to enjoy their relief, for the three exceptions were hurrying away into the world. They believed that they were being chased by a perfectly unconscious and absentminded donkey which was carrying a load along the track, side by side with its small boy tyrant. The three hens hurried from side to side of the track, confusedly flattering themselves that so far they had cleverly outwitted their pursuer.
Tatiana looked at the misunderstood donkey lovingly and wondered if all devils were devilish by mistake. She pulled the mild devil’s dusty ear as she ran by.
The hens redoubled their efforts. Two devils were evidently after them now, they thought. They had entirely forgotten which way the peaceful cabbage-stalks and fish-heads of home lay. Their lives had suddenly become one huge delirium. Tatiana giggled as she ran. Who would have thought that three hens could run so fast and so far. She imagined her mother saying to her father, “Where can our Tanya have got to, Pavlik? Can she have gone to weep on Sasha’s grave at Chi-tao-kou?” And then the efficient Japanese police telephoning, “Ano ne … ano ne … moshi—moshi—ano ne. Your daughter was last seen climbing the rocks of the Umi-Kongo in pursuit of three hens. …”
Every time Tatiana burst into a wily gallop, hoping to outrun the hens in one spurt, the hens did the same and outran her. It was a hopeless situation; Tatiana wasted a lot of breath in giggling.
Passersby were quite unhelpful. None of the Koreans on the road lifted a finger to shock the errant fowls into a return. The only Korean that helped at all did it unwittingly. He was lying
