net, on which fish glistened and crayfish crawled.
Emelyan, recently come back from church, sat next to Pantelei, waved his hand, and sang barely audibly in a hoarse little voice: ‘‘We praise Thee . . .’’ Dymov wandered about by the horses.
When they finished cleaning the fish, Kiriukha and Vasya put them and the live crayfish in the bucket, rinsed them, and poured them all from the bucket into the boiling water.
‘‘Shall I put in some lard?’’ asked Styopka, skimming the froth with his spoon.
‘‘Why? The fish’ll give off their own juice,’’ replied Kiriukha.
Before removing the cauldron from the fire, Styopka poured three handfuls of millet and a spoonful of salt into the broth; in conclusion, he tried it, smacked his lips, licked the spoon, and grunted with self-satisfaction—this meant that the kasha19 was ready.
Everybody except Pantelei sat down around the cauldron and went to work with their spoons.
‘‘You! Give the boy a spoon!’’ Pantelei observed sternly. ‘‘I s’pose he must be hungry, too!’’
‘‘Ours is peasant fare . . .’’ sighed Kiriukha.
‘‘And peasant fare may be all to your health, if you’ve got a liking for it.’’
They gave Egorushka a spoon. He started to eat, not sitting down, but standing just by the cauldron and looking into it as if into a hole. The kasha smelled of a fishy dampness, and fish scales kept turning up among the millet; the crayfish could not be picked up with a spoon, and the eaters took them straight from the cauldron with their hands; Vasya was especially unconstrained in this respect, wetting not only his hands but his sleeves in the kasha. But all the same the kasha seemed very tasty to Egorushka and reminded him of the crayfish soup his mother cooked at home on fast days. Pantelei sat to one side and chewed bread.
‘‘Why don’t you eat, grandpa?’’ Emelyan asked.
‘‘I don’t eat crayfish . . . Dash ’em!’’ the old man said and turned away squeamishly.
While they ate, a general conversation went on. From this conversation Egorushka understood that all his new acquaintances, despite their differences in age and character, had one thing in common, which made them resemble one another: they were all people with a beautiful past and a very bad present; all of them to a man spoke with rapture about their past, while they greeted the present almost with scorn. The Russian man likes to remember, but does not like to live; Egorushka still did not know that, and, before the kasha was eaten, he was already deeply convinced that the people sitting around the cauldron had been insulted and offended by fate. Pantelei told how, in the old days, when there were no railroads, he went with wagon trains to Moscow and Nizhny and made so much that he didn’t know what to do with the money. And what merchants there were in those days, what fish, how cheap everything was! Now the roads had become shorter, the merchants stingier, the people poorer, bread more expensive, everything had become petty and narrow in the extreme. Emelyan told how he used to work in the church choir at the Lugansk factory, had a remarkable voice, and read music very well, but now he had turned into a peasant and ate on the charity of his brother, who sent him out with his horses and took half his earnings for it. Vasya had once worked in a match factory; Kiriukha had served as a coachman for some good people and had been considered the best troika driver in the whole region. Dymov, the son of a well-to-do peasant, had lived for his pleasure, caroused, and known no grief, but as soon as he turned twenty, his strict, stern father, wishing to get him used to work and fearing he would be spoiled at home, began sending him off as a wagoner, like a poor peasant, a hired hand. Styopka alone said nothing, but you could see by his beardless face that before he used to live much better than now.
Remembering his father, Dymov stopped eating and frowned. He looked at his comrades from under his eyebrows and rested his gaze on Egorushka.
‘‘You, heathen, take your hat off !’’ he said rudely. ‘‘You don’t eat with your hat on! Some master you are!’’
Egorushka took off his hat and did not say a word, but he no longer tasted the kasha and did not hear how Pantelei and Vasya interceded for him. Anger against the prankster stirred heavily in his breast, and he decided at all costs to do him some bad turn.
After dinner they all plodded to the wagons and collapsed in the shade.
‘‘Will we go soon, grandpa?’’ Egorushka asked Pantelei.
‘‘When God grants, then we’ll go ... We can’t go now, it’s hot ... Oh, Lord, as Thou wilt, Holy Mother ... Lie down, lad!’’
Soon, snoring came from under the wagons. Egorushka was about to go to the village again, then thought a little, yawned, and lay down beside the old man.
VI
THE WAGON TRAIN stood by the river all day and set off at sundown.
Again Egorushka lay on a bale, the wagon softly creaked and rocked, Pantelei walked down below, stamped his feet, slapped his thighs, and muttered; in the air the steppe music trilled as the day before.
Egorushka lay on his back, his hands behind his head, and looked up into the sky. He saw how the evening glow lit up, how it then went out; guardian angels, covering the horizon with their golden wings, settled down for the night; the day had passed untroubled, quiet, untroubled night came, and they could peacefully stay at home in the heavens ... Egorushka saw how the sky gradually darkened and dusk descended on the earth, how the stars lit up one after another.
When you look for a long time into the deep sky, without taking your eyes away, your thoughts and soul merge for some reason in an awareness of loneliness. You begin to feel yourself irremediably alone, and all that you once considered close and dear becomes infinitely distant and devoid of value. The stars that have gazed down from the sky for thousands of years, the incomprehensible sky itself and the dusk, indifferent to the short life of man, once you remain face-to-face with them and try to perceive their meaning, oppress your soul with their silence; you start thinking about the loneliness that awaits each of us in the grave, and the essence of life seems desperate, terrible ...
Egorushka thought of his grandmother, who now slept in the cemetery under the cherry trees; he remembered how she lay in the coffin with copper coins on her eyes, how she was then covered with the lid and lowered into the grave; the dull thud of the lumps of earth against the lid also came back to him ... He imagined his grandmother in the narrow and dark coffin, abandoned by everyone and helpless. His imagination pictured his grandmother suddenly waking up and unable to understand where she was, knocking on the lid, calling for help, and, in the end, faint with terror, dying again. He imagined his mother, Father Khristofor, Countess Dranitsky, Solomon dead. But however
