money . . . the merchant, that is . . . a good man, all right . . . So then we drove on and stopped to spend the night at an inn. And the inns in Russia are not like in these parts. They’ve got covered yards like cowsheds, or, say, like threshing barns in good farmsteads. Only threshing barns are higher. Well, we stopped, and everything was all right. My merchant was in a little room, I was with the horses, and all was as it should be. So then, brothers, I prayed to God—before sleep, I mean—and went for a stroll in the yard. The night was pitch dark, you couldn’t see a thing, no use looking at all. I strolled a little, about as far as from here to the wagons, and I see a light glimmering. What’s the story? It seemed the landlords went to bed long ago, and there were no other lodgers besides me and the merchant ... Where was the light coming from? Suspicion took hold of me ... .. I went closer . . . to the light, that is ... Lord have mercy and save me, Queen of Heaven! I looked, and right on the ground there was a little window with bars ... in the house, that is ... I lay on the ground and looked; and the moment I looked, a chill ran through my whole body . . .’’
Kiriukha, trying not to make noise, stuck a bunch of weeds into the fire. The old man waited till the weeds stopped crackling and hissing, and went on:
‘‘I looked inside, and there’s a cellar there, a big one, dark and suspicious ... A lantern is burning on a barrel. In the middle of the cellar stand some ten men in red shirts, their sleeves rolled up, sharpening long knives . . . Aha! Well, so we’d fallen in with a band of robbers ... What to do? I ran to the merchant, woke him up quietly, and said: ‘Don’t you get frightened, merchant,’ I say, ‘but things look bad for us ... We’ve fallen,’ I say, ‘into a den of robbers.’ His face changed, and he asked: ‘What do we do now, Pantelei? I have a lot of orphans’ money with me ... As regards my life,’ he says, ‘it’s as God wills, I’m not afraid to die,’ he says, ‘but it’s terrible to lose orphans’ money ...’ What’s to be done? The gate’s locked, there’s no getting out by foot or carriage ... If there was a fence, you could climb over the fence, but it’s a covered yard! ... ‘Well, merchant,’ I say, ‘don’t you get frightened, but pray to God. Maybe the Lord won’t want to hurt the orphans. Stay here,’ I say, ‘and don’t give any sign, and meanwhile maybe I’ll think up something ...’ All right ... I prayed to God, and God put reason into me ... I climbed onto my tarantass and quietly ... quietly, so that nobody could hear, I started pulling thatch from the eaves, made a hole, and got out. Outside, that is ... Then I jumped off the roof and ran down the road as fast as I could. I ran and ran, got dead tired ... Ran maybe five miles at one go, maybe more ... Thank God, I see—there’s a village standing there. I ran up to a cottage and started knocking on the window. ‘Good Orthodox people,’ I say, ‘thus and so, don’t let a Christian soul perish ...’ I woke them all up ... The muzhiks assembled and went with me ... Some with ropes, some with sticks, some with pitchforks ... We broke down the gates of the inn and went straight to the cellar ... And the robbers had finished sharpening their knives and were about to stick the merchant. The muzhiks took every last one of them, tied them up, and brought them to the authorities. The merchant was so glad, he donated three hundred roubles to them, and gave me a fiver, and wrote down my name to be prayed for. People say afterwards they found no end of human bones in the cellar. Bones, that is ... So it means they robbed folk, and then buried them so there’d be no traces . . . Well, afterwards they were punished in Morshansk by the executioners.’’
Pantelei finished the story and glanced around at his listeners. They were silent and looked at him. The water was already boiling, and Styopka was skimming the froth.
‘‘Is the lard ready?’’ Kiriukha asked in a whisper.
‘‘Wait a little ... Just a minute.’’
Styopka, not taking his eyes off Pantelei, and as if fearing he would start a story without him, ran to the wagons; he soon came back with a small wooden bowl and started mashing lard in it.
‘‘Another time I also drove with a merchant . . .’’ Pantelei went on in a low voice as before, and without blinking his eyes. ‘‘His name, I remember as if it were now, was Pyotr Grigoryich. A good man he was ... the merchant, that is ... We stopped at an inn the same way . . . He was in a room, and I was with the horses . . . The landlords, a husband and wife, seemed to be good people, kindly, gentle, the workers also looked all right, and yet, brothers, I couldn’t sleep, my heart senses something! Senses it, that’s all. The gates were open, and there were many people around, and yet I was afraid, not myself. Everyone had long gone to sleep, it was deep night, soon it would be time to get up, and I alone was lying in my kibitka with my eyes open, like some sort of owl. Only this is what I hear, brothers: tup! tup! tup! Somebody’s stealing up to the kibitka. I poke my head out, look—a woman’s standing there in nothing but her shift, barefoot ... ‘What do you want, woman?’ I say. And she trembles all over, that one, she looks awful ... ‘Get up, good man!’ she says. ‘Trouble ... The landlords have decided on an evil thing . . . They want to do your merchant in. I heard the master and mistress whispering about it,’ she says ... Well, it was not for nothing my heart ached! ‘And who are you?’ I ask. ‘I’m their cook,’ she says ... All right ... I got out of the kibitka and went to the merchant. I woke him up and said: ‘Thus and so,’ I say, ‘Pyotr Grigoryich, there’s dirty business afoot ... You can sleep some other time, Your Honor, but now, while there’s still time, get dressed,’ I say, ‘and run for all you’re worth out of harm’s way ...’ He’d just started to get dressed when the door opened, and hello! ... I look—Mother of God!—the master, the mistress, and three workers come walking into the room on us ... Meaning they’d put the workers up to it ... The merchant had a lot of money, so they thought, we’ll divide it up ... . . Each of the five is holding a long knife . . . a knife, that is ... The master locked the door and said: ‘Pray to God, travelers . . . And if you start shouting, we won’t let you pray before you die ...’ As if we could shout! We had our throats stopped up with fear, we were beyond shouting ... The merchant weeps and says: ‘Good Orthodox people!’ he says. ‘You’ve decided to kill me, because my money has seduced you. So be it, I’m neither the first nor the last; there have been many merchants killed at inns. But why,’ he says, ‘Orthodox brothers, why kill my driver? What’s the need of him suffering because of my money?’ And he says it so pitifully! And the master answers: ‘If we let him live,’ he says, ‘he’ll be the first witness against us. It’s all the same,’ he says, ‘to kill one man or two. In for a penny, in for a pound ... Pray to God, and that’s it, there’s no point talking!’ The merchant and I knelt beside each other, wept, and started praying to God. He remembered his little children, but I was young then, I wanted to live ... We look at the icons and pray so pitifully, even now the tears pour from my eyes ... But the mistress, she’s a woman, she looks at us and says: ‘Good people,’ she says, ‘don’t remember evil of us in the other world, and don’t heap prayers on our heads, because we do it out of need.’ We prayed and prayed, wept and wept, and God heard us. Took pity on us, I mean ... Just as the master seized the merchant by the beard to slash his throat with the knife, somebody suddenly knocked so-o-o hard on the window from the yard outside! We all just jumped, and the master lowered his hands ... Somebody knocked on the window and shouted: ‘Pyotr Grigoryich, are you here? Get ready, we’re going!’ The landlords saw that somebody had come to fetch the merchant, they got frightened, and off they ran ... And we rushed out to the yard, harnessed up—and that was the last they saw of us . . .’’
‘‘Who was it knocked on the window?’’ asked Dymov.
‘‘On the window? Must have been a saint or an angel. Because there was nobody else ... When we drove out of the yard, there wasn’t a single person in the street ... It was God’s doing!’’
Pantelei told some other stories, and in all of them ‘‘long knives’’ played the same role, and there was the same made-up feeling. Had he heard these stories from someone else, or had he invented them himself in the distant past and then, when his memory weakened, mixed his experience with fiction and become unable to distinguish one from the other? That all may have been so, but the strange thing was that now and throughout the entire journey, whenever he happened to tell stories, he gave clear preference to the made up and never spoke of what he had experienced. Egorushka took everything at face value now and believed every word, but afterwards it seemed strange to him that a man who had traveled all over Russia in his lifetime, who had seen and known so much, whose wife and children had burned up, devalued his rich life so much that, whenever he sat by the campfire, he either kept silent or spoke of something that had never been.
Over the kasha they were all silent and thought about what they had just heard. Life is fearful and wondrous, and therefore, however fearful a tale you tell in Russia, however you adorn it with robbers’ dens, long knives, and
