The Cossacks (17 page)

Lukashka did not tell anybody how he got the horse. When asked, he answered evasively or simply said that he had bought it. Back in the village, however, everyone soon knew the truth. When Maryanka, Cornet Ilya Vasilyevich, Lukashka’s mother, and the other Cossacks found out about the puzzling gift Olenin had made, their suspicions grew, and they began to fear him. And yet, notwithstanding their fear, his action also awakened in them great respect for his “simplicity” and wealth.

“You heard?” one of the Cossacks said. “The cadet billeted on Ilya Vasilyevich has thrown away a good fifty-ruble horse on Lukashka! He must be rich!”

“Yes, I heard!” another Cossack replied. “Lukashka must have done him some great service. Let’s wait and see what will become of the boy. What luck Lukashka the Snatcher has!”

“But these cadets are a devilish bunch!” a third said. “Just watch him set fire to the house or something.”

Olenin’s life went on placidly. He had few dealings with his commanding officers or fellow soldiers, and was not sent out for work or training. In this way, being a wealthy cadet in the Caucasus Regiment was particularly advantageous. As a result of the campaign, he had been put up for a commission and so was left in peace, and as the officers considered him an aristocrat, they behaved in a dignified way before him. Their card games and evenings of drinking and song, which he had experienced while on the campaign, did not attract him, and so he avoided their company while they were quartered in the village. The life of an officer in a Cossack village has always had its own special character. While every soldier stationed at a fort will drink stout, play cards, and discuss the honors to be won on a campaign, in a Cossack village he will drink Chikhir with his hosts, treat girls to tasty morsels of food and honey, and tag along after a Cossack woman, with whom he will fall in love and sometimes even marry.

Olenin had an instinctive aversion to following the crowd and had always lived in his own way. Here in the village too he did not follow the well-trodden path of the Caucasus officer. He woke up at dawn of his own accord, drank tea, and sat on his porch admiring the mountains, the morning, and Maryanka. Then he put on his tattered ox-skin coat and his rawhide shoes, slipped a dagger into his belt, took his rifle and a bag with some lunch and tobacco, called his dog, and by six in the morning was already on his way into the forest surrounding the village. He returned in the evening around seven, tired, hungry, and with five or six pheasants hanging from his belt. Sometimes he also brought back an animal he had shot. His lunch and the cigarettes in his bag lay untouched. Had the thoughts in his head lain like the cigarettes in his bag, it would have been clear that throughout the day not a single thought had moved. He returned home refreshed, strong, and utterly happy. He would not have been able to say what he had been thinking about all that time, for what flitted through his head were not thoughts, or memories, or dreams, but fragments of all three. If he suddenly stopped and asked himself what he was thinking about, he might find himself imagining that he was a Cossack working in an
orchard with his Cossack wife, or a Chechen warrior in the mountains, or a boar trying to escape from Olenin the hunter. And all the while he would be watching and listening for a pheasant, a boar, or a deer.

Uncle Eroshka now came over every evening. Vanyusha brought them a jug of Chikhir, and the two men would quietly chat, drink, and then contentedly go to sleep. The next day there was more hunting, more healthy tiredness, and more conversation, drink, and contentment. Sometimes, on a feast day or a Sunday, Olenin would spend the whole day at home. Then his main occupation was Maryanka. He eagerly watched her every move from his window or porch, though he was unaware he was doing this. He looked at her and was in love with her (or thought he was), the way he was in love with the beauty of the mountains and the sky, and had no thought of trying to enter into any sort of rapport with her. He felt that he could not have the relationship that Lukashka had with her, and even less the kind that was possible between a rich Russian officer and a Cossack girl. He was sure that were he to take the approach some of his comrades had, he would trade his delightful contemplation for an abyss of suffering, disappointment, and remorse. He had already managed a feat of selflessness in not approaching Maryanka, and this gave him much pleasure. But the main reason he did not approach her was that he was frightened of her, and under no circumstances would he have ventured to address a playful word of love to her.

One day during the summer—Olenin was at home, not having gone out hunting—a Moscow acquaintance, a very young man he had met in society, knocked quite unexpectedly at his door.

“I say,
mon cher
, my dear fellow! How pleased I was when I heard you were here!” the young man said in Moscow French, peppering his speech with more French words as he continued. “They told me Olenin is here! Which Olenin, say I. As you can imagine, I was overjoyed! Well, so Fate has thrown us together again! Tell me how you are—all the tos and fros.” But then Prince Beletsky went on to tell Olenin his own story: how he thought it might be fun to join the regiment for a while, how the commander in chief had asked him to be his aide-de-camp, and how he might well take him up on the offer after the campaign, though he had to confess he was not in the least interested.
“Serving here in this godforsaken place one at least has to make a career for oneself, get a medal, rank, a transfer to the Guards,” Prince Beletsky said. “All that is quite obligatory,
mon cher
, if not for oneself then for one’s family and one’s friends. I must say, the commander received me very well; a decent fellow indeed!” he continued, without pausing for breath. “He’s put me up for a St. Anna Medal for the expedition. So I think I’ll stay here till we set out on the campaign. This is a marvelous place, though. What women! So, how is life treating you here? I was told by our captain—you know, that poor old fool Startsev, nice fellow, though—he told me that you are living the life of the savage, and that the fellows here have seen neither hide nor hair of you. Not that I blame you,
mon cher
, for not wanting to have too much to do with the officers here. Though I am happy that we will see one another! I’m staying at the local sergeant’s house. There’s a girl there—a Ustenka—marvelous, I tell you!” And more and more French and Russian words poured forth from the world that Olenin thought he had abandoned forever.

Beletsky was considered by all a pleasant and good-natured fellow. And perhaps that is precisely what he was. But notwithstanding his handsome, agreeable face, to Olenin he seemed extremely unpleasant. Beletsky exuded all the vileness that Olenin had renounced. What vexed him most was that he could not, that he simply did not have the strength to, push away this man who had come from that other world. It was as if that former world had an irrefutable hold on him. He was angry with Beletsky and with himself, and involuntarily peppering his conversation with French words and phrases, he found himself interested in the affairs of the commander in chief and their Moscow acquaintances. Because he and Beletsky were the only two men in this village who spoke that special Moscow brand of French, Olenin looked down on the other officers and the Cossacks and was cordial to Beletsky, promising to drop by at his place and inviting him to come over again. But Olenin did not go to visit him. Vanyusha approved of Beletsky, saying that he was a true gentleman.

Beletsky immediately settled into the life of the rich officer stationed in a Cossack village. Within a month he had become like a local resident: he plied the old Cossacks with wine, had parties and went to
parties that the village girls arranged, bragged of feats, so much so that the womenfolk for some reason called him Grandpa. The Cossacks could relate to a man like him who loved women and wine. They got used to him, and even liked him better than Olenin, who remained a mystery to them.

It was five in the morning. Vanyusha was out on the porch, fanning the flames beneath a samovar with a boot. Olenin had already ridden off to the river to bathe. (He had recently come up with a new diversion, riding with his horse into the river.) His landlady was already lighting the stove in the milk shed, and thick black smoke was rising from its chimney. Maryanka was in the shack milking one of the cows. “She won’t stand still, damn her!” came her impatient voice, followed by the rhythmic sound of milking. The lively clatter of hooves sounded in the street outside, and Olenin rode up to the gate, bareback on his handsome gray horse that was still glistening and wet. Maryanka’s pretty head, covered in a red kerchief, poked out of the shack and disappeared again. Olenin was wearing a red silk shirt, a tall sheepskin hat, and a white Circassian coat belted with a strap from which his dagger hung. He sat with self-conscious elegance on his well-fed horse and, with his rifle slung behind him, leaned forward to open the gate. His hair was still wet, and his face shone with youth and vigor. He thought himself handsome and stylish, and felt that he resembled a Chechen warrior. But he was wrong. Anyone from these regions could see in an instant that he was just a Russian soldier. When he noticed Maryanka’s head poking out of the shack, he leaned forward with added bravura, swung the gate open, and holding the reins tightly, rode into the courtyard flourishing his whip.

“Is the tea ready, Vanyusha?” he called out cheerfully, without looking toward the shack. With pleasure he felt his handsome steed tensing its rear, pulling at its bridle, every muscle quivering, ready to leap. Its hooves clattered on the hardened clay of the yard.

“C’est prêt!”
Vanyusha called back. Olenin thought Maryanka’s pretty head might still be peering out of the shack, but he did not turn to look. As he jumped from his horse, his rifle banged against the
porch, and he slipped but caught himself. He quickly threw a frightened glance toward the shack but saw nothing. All he could hear was the rhythmic sound of milking.

He went into the house and after a while came out again with a book and a pipe of tobacco and sat down to drink tea in a corner of the porch that was still shaded from the slanting rays of the morning sun. That day he had decided to stay home until lunch in order to write some long-postponed letters. And yet for some reason he could not bring himself to leave his comfortable little corner on the porch. He resisted going back inside, as if the house were a prison. His landlady, Old Ulitka, had lit the stove, and Maryanka had let the cattle out and was now gathering up the cow dung and piling it along the fence. Olenin was reading, but without taking in a single word. He kept looking up from his book to gaze at the strong young woman moving about before him. He was afraid that he might miss a single movement as she entered the damp morning shadows cast by the house, or walked into the middle of the yard, lit by the sun’s cheerful, young rays, her shapely figure in its bright smock shining as it cast a black shadow. He watched with delight how freely and gracefully she leaned forward, her pink smock clinging to her breasts and shapely legs, and how she straightened up, her rising breasts outlined clearly beneath the tight cloth. He watched her slender feet lightly touching the ground in their worn red slippers, and her strong arms with rolled-up sleeves thrusting the spade into the dung as if in anger, her deep, black eyes glancing at him. Though her delicate eyebrows frowned at times, her eyes expressed pleasure and awareness of their beauty.

“I say, Olenin! You look like you’ve been up for a while!” Beletsky called out, entering the yard in an officer’s coat.

“Ah, Beletsky!” Olenin replied, holding out his hand. “You’re up early.”

“I had no choice,
mon cher
, I was driven out,” he said. “There’s to be
un petit bal
at my place tonight. Maryanka, you’re coming over to Ustenka’s this evening, aren’t you?” he called out to her.

Olenin was taken aback at the ease with which Beletsky addressed her. But Maryanka looked down as if she had not heard and marched off to the milk shed, her spade on her shoulder.

“Look how shy she is, the sweet thing,” Beletsky said as she disappeared into the shed. “Shy in front of you,
mon cher
,” he added and smiling cheerfully ran up the steps of the porch.

“There’s going to be a ball at your place?” Olenin asked. “And what do you mean, you were driven out?”

“My landlady’s daughter, Ustenka, is throwing
un petit bal
, and you are invited. When I say
un petit bal
, I mean pies will be served and girls will gather.”

“But why should we go?”

Beletsky grinned and with a wink nodded toward the milk shed.

Olenin shrugged his shoulders and blushed. “I say, Beletsky, what a strange fellow you are!”

“Come on, I want to hear all about it!”

Olenin frowned. Beletsky saw his frown and smiled with a sudden air of interest. “Come, come,” he said, “you’re practically living in the same house with her, and I must say she’s a splendid girl, a wonderful girl, a perfect beauty …”

“She is amazingly beautiful!” Olenin quickly said. “I have never seen such a beautiful woman.”

“Well then, what’s the problem?” Beletsky asked, completely confused.

“This may strike you as peculiar,” Olenin replied, “but there is no point in hiding the truth: From the day I arrived here, it is as if women no longer exist for me. And I like it that way, I really do! After all, what can men like you and me possibly have in common with these women? If you ask what I have in common with Uncle Eroshka, for instance, that’s entirely different. He and I share a passion for hunting.”

“What do we have in common with these women? Well, if you put it that way, what did I have in common with Amalia Ivanovna back in Moscow? Why should this be any different? If you tell me that the women here aren’t all that clean, well that’s another matter.
A la guerre comme à la guerre!
”

“I never knew any Amalia Ivanovnas, nor did I have anything to do with them,” Olenin replied. “One cannot respect such women, but these women I do respect.”