“Good-bye, Yegor Vlasych!” she says, mechanically accepting the rouble.
He walks down the long road straight as a stretched-out belt … She stands pale, motionless as a statue, and catches his every step with her eyes. But now the red color of his shirt merges with the dark color of his trousers, his steps can no longer be seen, the dog is indistinguishable from his boots. Only his visored cap can still be seen, but … suddenly Yegor turns sharply to the right in the clearing and the cap disappears into the greenery.
“Good-bye, Yegor Vlasych!” Pelageya whispers and stands on tiptoe so as at least to see the white cap one more time.
JULY 1885
THE MALEFACTOR
Before the examining magistrate stands a puny, exceedingly scrawny little peasant in a calico shirt and patched trousers. His face is overgrown with hair and eaten with pockmarks, and his eyes, barely visible through his thick, beetling brows, have an expression of sullen sternness. On his head a whole mop of long-uncombed, matted hair, which endows him with a still greater spiderlike sternness. He is barefoot.
“Denis Grigoriev!” the magistrate begins. “Come closer and answer my questions. On the seventh day of July instant the railroad watchman Ivan Semyonovich Akinfov, proceeding along the line in the morning, at the ninety- first mile post found you unscrewing one of the nuts by means of which the rails are fastened to the ties. Here is that nut! … With which nut he also detained you. Is that how it went?”
“Wha?”
“Did it all go as Akinfov explains?”
“Sure it did.”
“Good. Now, why were you unscrewing the nut?”
“Wha?”
“Drop this ‘wha?’ of yours and answer the question: why were you unscrewing the nut?”
“If I didn’t need it, I wouldn’t have been unscrewing it,” croaks Denis, looking askance at the ceiling.
“And why did you need this nut?”
“That nut there? We make sinkers out of ’em …”
“We who?”
“Us folk … the Klimovo peasants, that is.”
“Listen, brother, don’t play the idiot here. Talk sense. There’s no point in lying about sinkers!”
“Never lied in all my born days, so now I’m lying …” mumbles Denis, blinking his eyes. “Could we do without a sinker, Your Honor? If you put a live worm or a minnow on a hook, how’ll it ever go down without a sinker? Lying …” Denis smirks. “Who the devil needs live bait if it floats up top! Your perch, your pike, your burbot always bites on the bottom, and if the bait floats up top, it’s only good for catching gobies, and even that’s rare … Gobies don’t live in our river … It’s a fish that likes space.”
“What are you telling me about gobies for?”
“Wha? But you asked yourself! The gentry here fish the same way, too. Not even the merest lad would go fishing without a sinker. Of course, if somebody’s got no sense at all, he’ll try and fish without a sinker. A fool is as a fool does …”
“So you tell me that you were unscrewing this nut in order to make a sinker out of it?”
“What else? Can’t play knucklebones with it!”
“But you could use a bit of lead for a sinker, a bullet … a nail of some sort…”
“You won’t find lead lying about, you’ve got to buy it, and a nail’s no good. There nothing better than a nut … It’s heavy, and it’s got a hole in it.”
“He pretends to be such a fool! As if he was born yesterday or fell from the moon! Don’t you understand, dunderhead, what this unscrewing leads to? If the watchman hadn’t spotted it, a train might have gone off the rails, people might have been killed! You’d have killed people!”
“God forbid, Your Honor! Why kill? Are we heathens or villains of some kind? Thank the Lord, my good sir, we’ve lived our life without any killing, such thoughts never even enter our head … Queen of Heaven, save us and have mercy … How could you, sir!”
“And what do you think causes train accidents? Unscrew two or three nuts, and you’ve got yourself an accident!”
Denis smirks and squints his eyes mistrustfully at the magistrate.
“Well! All these years the whole village has been unscrewing nuts and the Lord’s preserved us, so now it’s an accident … killing people … If I took away the rail or, let’s say, put a log across the tracks, well, then the train might go off, but this … pah! a nut!”
“But you must understand, the nuts fasten the rail to the tie!”
“We understand that … We don’t unscrew all of them … we leave some … We don’t do it mindlessly … we understand …”
Denis yawns and makes a cross over his mouth.
“Last year a train went off the rails here,” says the magistrate, “now I see why …”
