And quiet flows the Don; a novel Read online

  They poured Grandfather Grishaka a large glass of vodka, and succeeded in sending half of it into his beard-mildewed mouth and half down the stiff collar of his uniform. Glasses were clinked together. The company drank and drank. The hubbub was like the noise of a market. A distant relation of the Korshunovs, Nikifor Koloveidin, who was sitting at the far end of the table, raised his glass and roared the traditional words:

  "It's bitter!"

  "Bitter! Bitter!" the guests seated around the table clamoured after him.

  "Oh, bitter!" came the response from the crowded kitchen.

  Scowling, Grigory kissed his wife's insipid lips and sent a hunted glance round the room. A crimson fever of faces. Coarse, drunkenly muddy glances and smiles. Mouths chewing greedily, slobbering on the embroidered tablecloth. A howl of voices.

  Koloveidin opened wide his gap-toothed mouth.

  "It's bitter!" the long-service badges on the sleeve of his blue Guards uniform wrinkled as he raised his glass.

  "Bitter!" the cry was taken up once more.

  Grigory stared with hatred into Koloveidin's mouth and noticed the livid tongue between his teeth as he cried, "Bitter!"

  "Kiss, little chicks!" Pyotr spluttered, twitching his vodka-soaked moustache.

  In the kitchen Darya, flushed and intoxicated, began a song. It was taken up by the others and passed into the best room. The voices blended, but above all the rest rose Christonya's rumble, shaking the window-panes.

  The song ended and eating was resumed.

  "Here's to a good time, good people...!"

  "Try this mutton!"

  "Take your paw away, my husband's looking!"

  "Bitter! Bitter!"

  "No, I don't want any of your mutton. Maybe I like sterlet better. Yes, I do .. . it's juicy.''

  "Cousin Proshka, let's have another one."

  "Ah, that warms the cockles of your heart. . . ."

  In the kitchen the floor groaned and shook, heels clattered, and a glass fell to the floor, but the crash was lost in the general uproar. Across the heads of those sitting at the table Grigory glanced into the kitchen. The women were dancing now, to the accompaniment of shouts and whistles. They shook their ample bottoms (there was not a thin one there, for each was wearing five or six skirts), waved lace handkerchiefs, and worked their elbows in the dance.

  The grating notes of the accordion sounded imperatively. The player began the tune of the Cossack dance. A shout went up:

  "A circle! Form a circle!"

  "Squeeze up a bit!" Pyotr begged, pushing the perspiring women aside.

  Grigory roused himself and winked at Natalya:

  "Pyotr's going to dance the 'Cossack'! You watch him!"

  "Who with?"

  "Don't you see? With your mother."

  Marya Lukinichna set her arms akimbo, her handkerchief in her left hand. Pyotr went up to her with mincing steps, cut a fine caper and retreated to his place. Lukinichna picked up her skirt as though about to step over a puddle, picked out the rhythm with her toe, and danced amid a roar of approbation, kicking out her legs like a man.

  The accordion player rushed out a volley of low notes that swept Pyotr into action, and with a shout he dropped to a squatting position and danced round, smacking the palms of his hands against the legs of his boots and biting the tip of his moustache in the corner of his mouth. He swung his feet in and out at great speed; his damp forelock tossed wildly on his head, but could not keep up with his feet.

  Grigory's view was blocked by the crowd at the door. He heard only the shouts of the drunken guests and the drumming of iron-shod heels, like the crackle of a burning pine-board.

  Then Miron danced with Ilyinichna; he stepped out seriously and with his accustomed businesslike air. Pantelei stood on a stool to watch them, dangling his lame leg and clicking his tongue. Instead of his legs his lips and ear-ring danced.

  The dance was taken up by experts and by

  others who could not even bend a leg properly. All of them were shouted at:

  "Go it!"

  "Smaller steps! Oh, you. . . "

  "His legs are light enough, but his bottom gets in his way."

  "Oh, get on with it!"

  "Our side's winning."

  "Come on!"

  "Tired, are you? I'll crack a bottle over your head if you don't dance."

  Grandfather Grishaka was completely drunk. He embraced the bony back of his neighbour on the bench, and buzzed like a mosquito in his ear:

  "What year did you first see service?"

  His neighbour, an old man bent like an ancient oak, replied:

  "1839, my son!"

  "When?" Grishaka stuck out his ear.

  "1839, I told you."

  "What's your name? What regiment did you serve in?"

  "Maxim Bogatiryov. I was corporal in Baklanov's regiment."

  "Are you related to the Melekhovs?"

  "What?"

  "I asked, are you related?"

  "Uh-huh! I'm the bridegroom's grandfather on his mother's side."

  "In Baklanov's regiment, did you say?"

  The old man, vainly munching a piece of bread with his toothless gums, gazed at Grishaka with faded eyes, and nodded.

  "So you must have been through the Caucasian campaign?"

  "I served under Baklanov himself, may he rest in heaven, helped to conquer the Caucasus. We had some rare Cossacks in our regiment. They were as tall as the guards, though they weren't so straight. Great, long-armed, broad-shouldered fellows, not like the ones nowadays. That's the men we had, my son! His excellency the late general was good enough to give me the cat for stealing a carpet. . . ."

  "And I was in the Turkish campaign. Eh? Yes, I was there."

  Old Grishaka puffed out his sunken chest jingling with medals.

  "We took a village at dawn, and at mid-day the bugler sounded the alarm."

  "We were fighting around Rossitz and our regiment, the Twelfth Don Cossack, was engaged with the janissaries."

  "The bugler sounded that alarm. . . ."

  "Yes," Grishaka went on, beginning to get annoyed and angrily waving his hand. "The

  Turkish janissaries serve their tsar and wear white sacks on their heads. Huh? White sacks on their heads."

  ", .. The bugler sounded the alarm, and I said to my comrade: 'We'll have to retreat, Timofei, but first we'll have that carpet off the wall.' "

  "I have been decorated with two Georges, awarded for heroism under fire. I took a Turkish major alive." Grandfather Grishaka began to weep and to bang his withered fist on his neighbour's spine. But the latter, dipping a piece of chicken in the cherry jelly, lifelessly stared at the soiled tablecloth and mumbled:

  "And just listen to what sin the evil spirit led me into, my son!" The old man's eyes stared fixedly at the white creases of the tablecloth as if they saw not a tablecloth soaked in vodka and soup but the dazzling snowy folds of the Caucasian mountains. "I'd never before taken anything that wasn't mine, but now I happened to see that carpet, and I thought, 'That would make a good horsecloth.' "

  "I've seen those parts myself. I've been in lands across the sea as well," Grishaka tried to look his neighbour in the eyes, but the deep sockets were overgrown with shaggy thickets of eyebrows and beard. So he resorted to craft. He wanted to win his neighbour's atten-

  tion for the climax of his story, and he plunged into the middle of it without any preliminaries: "And the captain gives the order: 'In troop columns at the gallop! Forward!'"

  But the old Baklanov regiment Cossack threw back his head like a charger at the sound of the trumpet and, dropping his fist on the table, whispered:

  "Lances at the ready! Draw sabres, Bakla-nov's men!" His voice suddenly grew stronger, his faded eyes glittered and blazed. "Baklanov's boys!" he roared, opening wide his toothless yellow jaws. "Into attack-forward!"

  And he gazed at Grishaka with a youthful and intelligent look, and let the tears trickling over his beard fall unwiped.

  Grishak
a also grew excited:

  "He gave us this command, and waved his sword. We galloped forward, and the janissaries were drawn up like this," he drew a square on the tablecloth with a shaky finger, "and firing at us. Twice we charged them. Each time they beat us back. Whenever we tried, their cavalry came out of a little wood on their flank. So our troop commander gave the order and we turned and went at them. We smashed them. Rode them down. What cavalry in the world can stand up against Cossacks? They fled into the wood. I saw

  their officer just in front of me, riding on a bay. A good-looking officer, black whiskers he had. He looked back at me and drew his pistol. Bang! But he missed me. I spurred my horse and caught up with him. I was going to cut him down, but then I thought better of it. After all, he was a man too. So I grabbed him round the waist with my right arm, and he flew out of the saddle. He bit my arm, but I took him all the same. . . ."

  Grishaka glanced triumphantly at his neighbour, but the old man's great angular head had fallen on to his chest, and he was snoring contentedly.

  PART TWO

  S

  ergei Platonovich Mokhov could trace his ancestry a long way back.

  During the reign of Peter the First a state barge had been travelling down the Don to Azov with a cargo of biscuit and gunpowder. The Cossacks of the little rebel town of Chigo-naki, nestling on the bank of the upper Don, fell on the barge by night, destroyed the sleepy guards, pillaged the biscuit and gunpowder and sank the vessel.

  The tsar ordered out soldiers from Voronezh, and they burned down the town of Chigonaki, ruthlessly put the guilty Cossacks to the sword, and hanged forty of them on a floating gallows, which, as warning to the unruly villages, was sent sailing down the Don.

  12—1933 m

  Some ten years later the spot where the hearths of the Chigonaki huts had smoked began again to be inhabited by Cossack settlers and those who had survived the sacking. The stanitsa grew up again with defensive ramparts round it. At the same time, a secret agent of the tsar, a Russian peasant named Mokhov, was sent to Chigonaki from Voronezh. He traded in knife-hafts, tobacco, flints, and the other odds and ends necessary to the Cossacks' everyday life. He bought up and resold stolen goods, and twice a year journeyed to Voronezh, ostensibly to replenish his stocks, but in reality to report to the authorities that the stanitsa was for the time being quiet and the Cossacks were not contemplating any fresh mischief.

  It was from this Russian peasant Nikita Mokhov that the merchant family of Mokhovs was descended. They took deep root in the Cossack earth; they multiplied and grew into the district like sturdy roadside weeds, reverently preserving the half-rotten credentials given to their ancestor by the governor of Voronezh. The credentials might have been preserved until this day had they not been burned in their wooden box behind the icon during a great fire which occurred in the lifetime of Sergei Mokhov's grandfather. This

  Mokhov had already ruined himself once by card-playing, but was getting on to his feet again when the fire engulfed everything. After burying his paralytic father, Sergei had to begin afresh, starting by buying bristles and feathers. For five years he lived miserably, swindling and squeezing the Cossacks of the district out of every kopeck, then he suddenly jumped from "peddler Seryozhka" to "Sergei Platonovich," opened a little drapery shop, married the daughter of a half-demented priest, from whom he got a sizeable dowry, and set up as a linen draper. Sergei Platonovich began to trade in textiles at just the right moment. On the instructions of the army authorities, about this time the Cossacks were migrating in entire villages from the left bank of the Don, where the ground was unproductive and sandy, to the right bank. Buildings sprang up round the young stanitsa of Krasnokutskaya; new villages hatched out on the edge of former estates, on the banks of the rivers Chir, Chomaya and Frolovka, and over valleys and ravines in the steppe, side by side with Ukrainian settlements. And instead of having to journey fifty versts or more for goods they found Sergei Mokhov's shop, its fresh deal shelves packed with attractive commodities, right on the spot. Sergei flung his business

  wide, like a full-size accordion, and traded in everything requisite to simple village life-hides, salt, kerosene, haberdashery. He even began to supply agricultural machinery. Reapers, seeders, ploughs, winnowers from the Aksaisk factory were drawn up in neat order outside the shop, whose cool green shutters kept it well protected from the summer's heat. It is hard to count the money in another's purse, but it seems that the quick-witted Sergei's trading yielded him considerable profit, for within three years he had opened a grain elevator, and the following year after the death of his first wife he began the construction of a steam flour-mill.

  He squeezed Tatarsky and the neighbouring villages tightly in his swarthy fist with its sparse covering of glossy black hairs. There was not a home that was not in debt to Sergei Mokhov: a green slip with an orange border saying that a reaper had been given on credit to so-and-so, a bride's outfit for the daughter to someone else (time to marry the girl off and the Paramonovo elevator was cutting its prices on wheat-"Put it on my account, Mokhov"), and so it went on. Nine hands were employed at the mill, seven in the shop, and four labourers: altogether twenty mouths dependent on the merchant's pleasure for their daily bread.

  He had two children by his first wife: the girl Liza and a boy two years younger, the sluggish, scrofulous Vladimir. His second wife, Anna, a dry, sharp-nosed creature, was childless. All her belated mother-love and accumulated spleen (she had not married until the age of thirty-four) were poured out on the children. Her nervous temperament had a bad influence on them, and their father paid them no more attention than he gave his stable-hand or cook. His business activities occupied all his time. The children grew up uncontrolled. His insensitive wife made no attempt to penetrate into the secrets of the child mind, the affairs of her large household took too much of her time, and the brother and sister grew up alien to each other, different in character, as though they were not related. Vladimir was sullen, sluggish, with a sly look and unchildish seriousness. Liza, who lived in the society of the maid and the cook (the latter a dissolute, much too experienced woman), early saw the seamy side of life. The women aroused an unhealthy curiosity in her, and while still an angular and bashful adolescent, left to her own devices, she had grown as wild as the true-love flower in the forest.

  The unhurrying years flowed by. The old girew older and the young grew green of leaf,

  One evening Sergei Platonovich glanced at his daughter across the tea-table, and was startled, Liza, who had just left high school, had grown into a slender good-looking girl. He looked at her and the saucer filled with amber-coloured tea trembled in his hand. How like her mother she was! God, her very image! "Liza, turn your head sideways!" He had never before noticed how amazingly his daughter resembled her mother.

  Vladimir Mokhov, a narrow-chested, sickly-yellow lad now in the fifth form at school, was walking through the mill yard. He and his sister had recently returned home for the summer vacation, and, as usual, he had gone along to look at the mill, jostle among the flour-sprinkled crowd and listen to the steady rumble of cog-wheels and rollers, and the hiss of whirling belts. It ministered to his vanity to hear the respectful murmur of the Cossack customers: "The master's heir. . . ."

  Carefully picking his way among the wagons and the heaps of dung, Vladimir reached the gate. Then he remembered he had not been to see the engine room, and turned back.

  Close to the red oil-tank, at the entrance to the engine room, the mill-hand Timofei, a scalesman nicknamed "Knave," and Timofei's

  m

  assistant David were kneading a great ring of clay with bare feet, their trousers rolled up above their knees.

  "Ah! The master!" the scalesman greeted him jokingly,

  "Good-afternoon. What are you doing?"

  "Mixing clay," David said with an unpleasant smile, dragging his feet out of the clinging mass, which smelled of dung. "Your father's careful of the rubles, and won't hire women to do it. Your father's a scr
ew, that he is," he added, making a squelching noise with his feet.

  Vladimir flushed. He felt an unconquerable dislike for the ever-smiling David and his contemptuous tone, even for his white teeth.

  "What do you mean, 'a screw'?"

  "He's terribly mean, he'd eat his own dirt if it paid him," David explained with a smile.

  The others laughed approvingly. Vladimir felt all the smart of the insult. He stared coldly at David.

  "So you're .., dissatisfied?"

  "Come into this mess and mix it yourself, and then you'll know. What fool would be satisfied? It would do your father good to do some of this. Take some of the fat off his belly," David replied. He trod heavily around the ring of clay, kneading it with his feet, now smiling gaily. Foretasting a sweet revenge,

  Vladimir turned over a fitting reply in his mind.

  "Good!" he said slowly. "I'll tell Papa you're not satisfied with your work."

  He glanced sidelong at the man's face, and was startled by the impression he had caused. David's lips were twisted in a forced pitiful smile, and the faces of the others were clouded over. All three went on kneading the clay for a moment in silence. Then David tore his eyes away from his muddy feet, and said in a wheedling, bitter tone: "I was only joking, Volodya."

  "I'll tell Papa what you said." With tears of injury in his eyes for his father and himself, and for David's miserable smile, Vladimir walked away.

  "Volodya! Vladimir Sergeyevich!" David called after him in alarm, and stepped out of the clay, letting his trousers fall over his bespattered legs.

  Vladimir halted. David ran to him breathing heavily.

  "Don't tell your father! Forgive me, fool that I am. Honest to God, I just said it to tease you."

  "All right, I won't tell him," Vladimir replied with a grimace, and walked on towards the gate. Pity for David had won. He walked along by