Sketches from a Hunter's Album (17 page)

‘And it's a good thing, sir, that you're going with him. He's one of those holy men, you know, sir, and he's nicknamed The Flea. I don't know how you were able to understand him…'

I was about to comment to Yerofey that so far Kasyan had seemed to me to be a man of very good sense, but my driver at once continued in the same tone of voice:

‘You just watch out and see that he takes you where he should. And make sure you yourself choose the axle, the stouter the better… What about it, Flea,' he added loudly, ‘is there anywhere here to find a bite to eat?'

‘Seek and it shall be found,' answered Kasyan, giving the reins a jerk, and we rolled away.

His little horse, to my genuine surprise, went far from badly. Throughout the entire journey Kasyan maintained a stubborn silence and answered all my questions peremptorily and unwillingly. We quickly reached the clearings, and once there we made our way to the office, a tall hut standing by itself above a small ravine which had been haphazardly dammed and turned into a pond. I found in this office two young clerks working for the merchants, both of them with teeth as white as snow, sugary sweet eyes, sugary sweet, boisterous chatter and sugary sweet, clever little smiles, did a deal with them for an axle and set off for the clearings. I thought that Kasyan would stay by the horse and wait, but he suddenly approached me.

‘And is it that you're after shooting the wee birds?' he ventured. ‘Is that it?'

‘Yes, if I find them.'

‘I'll go along with you. D'you mind?'

‘Please do, please do.'

And we walked off. The area of felled trees extended for less than a mile. I confess that I looked at Kasyan more than at my dog. He had been aptly nicknamed the Flea. His black and hatless little head (his hair, by the way, was a substitute for any cap) bobbed up and down among the bushes. He walked with an extraordinarily sprightly step and literally took little jumps as he went, ceaselessly bending down, plucking herbs, stuffing them under his shirt, muttering words through his nose and shooting glances at me and my dog, giving us such keen and unusual looks. In the low bushes, the ‘underbush' and in the clearings there are often little grey birds which all the time switch from sapling to sapling and emit short whistling sounds as they dive suddenly in their flight. Kasyan used to tease them, exchanging calls with them; a young quail would fly up shrilly from under his feet and he would call shrilly after it; a lark might start rising above him, fluttering its wings and pouring out its song – Kasyan would at once catch up its refrain. But to me he said not a word.

The weather was beautiful, still more beautiful than it had been before; yet there was still no lessening of the heat. Across the clear sky drifted, with scarcely a movement, a few distant clouds, yellowish-white, the colour of a late snowfall in the spring, flat in shape and elongated like furled sails. Their feathered edges, light and wispy as cotton, altered slowly but obviously with each passing instant; they were as if melting, these clouds were, and they cast no shadow. For a long while Kasyan and I wandered through the clearings. Young shoots which had not yet succeeded in growing more than a couple of feet high spread their thin, smooth stems round the blackened and squat stumps of trees; round, spongy fungoid growths with grey edges, the kind which they boil down to make tinder, adhered to these tree-stumps; wild strawberries spread their wispy pink runners over them; mushrooms were also ensconced there in tight family clusters. One's feet were continually becoming entangled and caught by the tall grass, drenched in the sun's heat; in all directions one's eyes were dazzled by the sharp, metallic flashes of light from the young, reddish leaves on the saplings; everywhere in gay abundance appeared sky-blue clusters of vetch, the little golden
chalices of buttercups, the partly mauve, partly yellow flowers of St John and Mary daisies; here and there, beside overgrown tracks, in which the traces of cart-wheels were marked by strips of short-stemmed red grass rose piles of firewood, stacked in six-foot lengths and darkened by the wind and rain; slight shadows extended from them in slanting rectangles – otherwise there was no shade of any kind. A light breeze sprang up occasionally and then died. It would blow suddenly straight into one's face and caper around, as it were, setting everything happily rustling, nodding and swaying about, making the supple tips of the fern bow gracefully, so that one was delighted at it; but then it would again fade away, and everything would once more be still. Only the grasshoppers made a combined whirring, as if infuriated – such an oppressive, unceasing, insipid, dry sound. It was appropriate to the unabating, midday heat, as if literally engendered by it, literally summoned by it out of the sun-smelted earth.

Without coming across a single covey, we finally reached some new clearings. Here, recently felled aspens were stretched sadly on the ground, pressing down both grass and undergrowth beneath their weight; on some of them the leaves, still green but already dead, hung feebly from the stiff branches; on others they had already withered and curled up. A special, extraordinarily pleasant acrid scent came from the fresh, golden-white chips of wood which lay in heaps about the moistly bright tree-stumps. Far off, closer to the wood, there could be heard the faint clatter of axes and from time to time, solemnly and quietly, as if in the act of bowing and spreading out its arms, a curly-headed tree would fall.

For a long while I could find no game; finally, a landrail flew out of an extensive oak thicket which was completely overgrown with wormwood. I fired: the bird turned over in the air and fell. Hearing the shot, Kasyan quickly covered his face with his hand and remained stock-still until I had reloaded my gun and picked up the shot bird. Just as I was preparing to move farther on, he came up to the place where the bird had fallen, bent down to the grass which had been sprinkled with several drops of blood, gave a shake of the head and looked at me in fright. Afterwards I heard him whispering: ‘A sin! 'Tis a sin, it is, a sin!'

Eventually the heat forced us to find shelter in the wood. I threw
myself down beneath a tall hazel bush, above which a young and graceful maple had made a beautiful spread of its airy branches. Kasyan seated himself on the thick end of a felled birch. I looked at him. Leaves fluttered slightly high above, and their liquid, greenish shadows glided calmly to and fro over his puny figure, clad somehow or other in a dark cloth coat, and over his small face. He did not raise his head. Bored by his silence, I lay down on my back and began admiringly to watch the peaceful play of the entwined leaves against the high, clear sky. It is a remarkably pleasant occupation, to lie on one's back in a forest and look upwards! It seems that you are looking into a bottomless sea, that it is stretching out far and wide
below
you, that the trees are not rising from the earth but, as if they were the roots of enormous plants, are descending or falling steeply into those lucid, grassy waves, while the leaves on the trees glimmer like emeralds or thicken into a gold-tinted, almost jet-black greenery. Somewhere high, high up, at the very end of a delicate branch, a single leaf stands out motionless against a blue patch of translucent sky, and, beside it, another sways, resembling in its movements the ripplings upon the surface of a fishing reach, as if the movement were of its own making and not caused by the wind. Like magical underwater islands, round white clouds gently float into view and pass by, and then suddenly the whole of this sea, this radiant air, these branches and leaves suffused with sunlight, all of it suddenly begins to stream in the wind, shimmers with a fugitive brilliance, and a fresh, tremulous murmuration arises which is like the endless shallow splashing of oncoming ripples. You lie still and you go on watching: words cannot express the delight and quiet, and how sweet is the feeling that creeps over your heart. You go on watching, and that deep, clear azure brings a smile to your lips as innocent as the azure itself, as innocent as the clouds passing across it, and as if in company with them there passes through your mind a slow cavalcade of happy recollections, and it seems to you that all the while your gaze is travelling farther and farther away and drawing all of you with it into that calm, shining infinity, making it impossible for you to tear yourself away from those distant heights, from those distant depths…

‘Master, eh, master!' Kasyan suddenly said in his resonant voice.

I raised myself up in surprise; until that moment he had hardly
answered any of my questions and now he had suddenly started talking of his own accord.

‘What do you want?' I asked.

‘Why is it now that you should be killing that wee bird?' he began, looking me directly in the face.

‘How do you mean: why? A landrail is a game bird. You can eat it.'

‘No, it wasn't for that you were killing it, master. You won't be eating it! You were killing it for your own pleasure.'

‘But surely you yourself are used to eating a goose or a chicken, for example, aren't you?'

‘Such birds are ordained by God for man to eat, but a landrail – that's a bird of the free air, a forest bird. And he's not the only one; aren't there many of them, every kind of beast of the forest and of the field, and river creature, and creature of the marsh and meadow and the heights and the depths – and a sin it is to be killing such a one, it should be let to live on the earth until its natural end… But for man there is another food laid down; another food and another drink; bread is God's gift to man, and the waters from the heavens, and the tame creatures handed down from our fathers of old.'

I looked at Kasyan in astonishment. His words flowed freely; he did not cast around for them, but spoke with quiet animation and a modest dignity, occasionally closing his eyes.

‘So according to you it's also sinful to be killing fish?' I asked.

‘A fish has cold blood,' he protested with certainty, ‘it's a dumb creature. A fish doesn't know fear, doesn't know happiness: a fish is a creature without a tongue. A fish doesn't have feelings, it has no living blood in it… Blood,' he continued after a pause, ‘blood is holy! Blood does not see the light of God's sun, blood is hidden from the light… And a great sin it is to show blood to the light of day, a great sin and cause to be fearful, oh, a great one it is!'

He gave a sigh and lowered his eyes. I must admit that I looked at the strange old man in complete amazement. His speech did not sound like the speech of a peasant: simple people did not talk like this, nor did ranters. This language, thoughtfully solemn and unusual as it was, I had never heard before.

‘Tell me, please, Kasyan,' I began, without lowering my eyes from his slightly flushed face, ‘what is your occupation?'

He did not answer my question immediately. His gaze shifted uneasily for a moment.

‘I live as the Lord ordains I should,' he said eventually, ‘but as for an occupation, no, I don't have an occupation of any kind. 'Tis a poor mentality I have, right from when I was small. I work so long as I can, but it's a poor worker I'm being. There's nothing for me to do! My health's gone and my hands're all foolish. In the springtime, though, I catch nightingales.'

‘You catch nightingales? Then why were you talking about not touching the beast of the forest and the field and other creatures?'

‘Not to be killing 'em, that's the point; death will take what's due to it. Now there's Martin the carpenter: he lived his life, Martin the carpenter did, and he didn't have long and he died; and now his wife's grieving over her husband and her little ones… It's not for man nor beast to get the better of death. Death doesn't come running, but you can't run away from it, neither; nor must you be helping it along. I don't kill the nightingales, Good Lord preserve us! I don't catch them to cause them pain, nor to put their lives in any peril, but for man's enjoyment, for his consolation and happiness.'

‘Do you go into the Kursk region to catch them?'

‘I go into Kursk and I go farther, depending how things are. I sleep in the swamplands, and also I sleep in the woodlands, and I sleep all alone in the fields and in the wild places: that's where snipe do their whistling, where you can hear the hares crying, where the drakes go hissing…At eventide I take note where they are, and come morning I listen out for them, at dawn I spread my net over the bushes. There's a kind of nightingale sings real piteously, sweetly and piteously, it does…'

‘Do you sell them?'

‘I give 'em away to good people.'

‘What d'you do apart from this?'

‘What do I do?'

‘What keeps you busy?'

The old man was silent for a moment.

‘Nothing keeps me busy. ‘Tis a poor worker I am. But I understand how to read and write.'

‘So you're literate?'

‘I understand how to read and write. The Lord God helped me, and some kind people.'

‘Are you a family man?'

‘No, I've got no family.'

‘Why's that? They've all died, have they?'

‘No, it's just like it wasn't my task in life, that's all. Everything's according to the will of God, we all live our lives according to the will of God; but a man's got to be righteous – that's what! That means he must live a fitting life in God's eyes.'

‘And you haven't any relatives?'

‘I have… I have, yes.' The old man became confused.

‘Tell me, please,' I began. ‘I heard my driver asking you, so to speak, why you hadn't cured Martin the carpenter? Is it true you can heal people?'

‘Your driver's a just man,' Kasyan answered me thoughtfully, ‘but he's also not without sin. He says I have the power of healing. What power have I got! And who is there has such power? It all comes from God. But there… there are herbs, there are flowers: they help, it's true. There's marigold, there's one, a kindly herb for curing human beings; there's the plantains, too; there's nothing to be ashamed of in talking about them – good clean herbs are of God's making. But others aren't. Maybe they help, but they're a sin and it's a sin to talk about them. Perhaps they might be used with the help of prayer… Well, of course, there are special words… But only he who has faith shall be saved,' he added, lowering his voice.