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to rub my back.
At last the whole thing was over. The doctor and her Galochka packed
their bags and went on their way, leaving a pleasant smell of surgical
spirit and an unpleasant smell of serum in the room. The pupils sat at their
desks, fidgeting and cautiously feeling for the effects of the injection
with their shoulder blades and talking freely to each other as a reward for
the suffering they had just endured.
"Open the window," said Kharlampy Diogenovich, resuming his seat. He
wanted this spirit of hospital freedom to depart along with the smell of
medicine.
He took out his yellow beads and flicked them thoughtfully to and fro.
There was not much of the lesson left. He usually filled in such gaps by
telling us something instructive connected with the ancient Greeks.
"As we know from Greek mythology, Hercules had to perform twelve
labours," he said, and stopped. Click-click--as two beads slid from right to
left. "But a certain young man thought he would revise Greek mythology," he
added, and stopped again. Click-click.
That fellow had too big an idea of himself, I thought, realising that
no one was allowed to revise Greek mythology. Some other God-forsaken
mythology, perhaps, might be knocked into shape, but not Greek mythology
because it had all been revised from beginning to end already and there
couldn't possibly be any mistakes in it.
"He decided to perform the thirteenth labour of Hercules," Kharlampy
Diogenovich went on. "And to some extent he succeeded."
We realised at once by his voice what a false and futile labour this
had been, because if there had been any need for Hercules to perform
thirteen labours he would have performed them himself, but since he had
stopped at twelve it meant that twelve were enough and there was no need for
anyone to mess about making corrections.
"Hercules performed his labours like a hero. But this young man
performed his labour out of cowardice." Kharlampy Diogenovich paused
thoughtfully, then added, "In a moment we shall learn just what it was that
induced him to perform this labour."
Click. This time only one bead slid from right to left, driven by a
very sharp flip of the finger. It slid rather nastily somehow. Two beads
sliding together, as they had done before, would have been better than just
one, all by itself.
I caught the scent of danger in the air. It was the sound not of a bead
sliding but of a small trap closing in Kharlampy Diogenovich's hands.
"I have a feeling that I know already what it was," he said, and looked
at me.
Something in his glance made my heart thud heavily against my spine.
"Be so kind," he said, and beckoned me to the blackboard.
"Who? Me?" I asked, feeling as if my voice was coming from the pit of
my stomach.
"Yes, you, my fearless malaria sufferer," he said.
I shambled towards the board.
"Tell us how you solved the problem," he said calmly and--click,
click--two more beads went sliding from right to left. I was in his hands.
The form looked on and waited. They were all expecting me to come to
grief, and they wanted me to do so as slowly and interestingly as possible.
I squinted at the board from the corner of my eye, trying to trace the
thread of cause and effect between the stages of the problem that were
written there, but it was no use. Then with a great show of impatience I
began rubbing it all out, as though what Shurik had written was muddling me
and preventing me from concentrating. I was still hoping for the bell to
ring and save me from execution. But the bell did not ring and it was
impossible to go on cleaning the board forever. I put down the rag to avoid
looking ridiculous before I had to.
"We are listening," Kharlampy Diogenovich said, without looking at me.
"An artillery shell..." I said brightly amid the form's jubilant
silence, and broke off.
"Continue," Kharlampy Diogenovich said, after waiting politely for some
moments.
"An artillery shell..." I repeated stubbornly, hoping that the impetus
of these correct words would carry me on to more, similarly correct words.
But something held me on a firm tether that pulled tight as soon as the
words were out of my mouth.
I concentrated fiercely, trying to imagine the course of the problem,
and then plunged forward again to break the invisible tether.
"An artillery shell..." I repeated, quivering with horror and
revulsion.
A few restrained titters came from the form. I sensed that the crucial
moment had arrived and decided not to allow myself to become ridiculous on
any account; I would rather just get a bad mark.
"Have you swallowed this artillery shell?" Kharlampy Diogenovich asked
with good-natured curiosity.
He asked the question as naturally as if he had been inquiring whether
I had swallowed a plum stone.
"Yes," I said quickly, sensing a trap and deciding to foil his plans
with an unexpected answer.
"Then you'd better ask the military instructor to come and dispose of
it for you," said Kharlampy Diogenovich, but the form was already laughing.
Sakharov was laughing, and trying to go on looking like the top boy at
the same time. Even Shurik Avdeyenko, the gloomiest boy in our form, whom I
had saved from certain disaster at the blackboard, was laughing. And Komarov
was laughing, Komarov who now called himself Alik but was really Adolf, just
as he had always been.
As I looked at him it occurred to me that if we had not had a real
gingerhead in our form he would have passed as one because his hair was fair
and the freckles that he kept hidden, like his first name, had given
themselves away during the injection. But we did have a real gingerhead in
the form and Komarov's gingerness had passed unnoticed. And it also occurred
to me that if we had not pulled the number of our form off the form-room
door a few days ago, the doctor might never have called on us in the first
place and nothing would have happened. I began to have vague presentiments
of the connection that exists between things and events.
The bell droned funereally through the form's laughter. Kharlampy
Diogenovich put a mark against my name in the register and also made a note
about me in his notebook.
From then on I took my homework more seriously and never asked the
footballers about problems I couldn't solve. Each man to his trade.
Later in life I noticed that nearly everyone is afraid of appearing
ridiculous. Particularly women and poets. Perhaps they sometimes appear
ridiculous because they are too afraid of appearing so. On the other hand,
no one can make someone else look ridiculous as skillfully as a good poet or
a good woman.
Of course, it is not very wise to be too afraid of appearing
ridiculous, but it is much less wise not to be afraid of ridicule at all.
It seems to me that ancient Rome perished because its emperors in all
their marble magnificence failed to realise how ridiculous they were. If
they had got themselves some jesters in time (you must hear the truth, if
only from a fool), they might have lasted a little longer. But they just
went on hoping that the geese would save Rome, and then the Barbarians came
and destroyed Rome, its emperors and its geese.
Not that I have any regrets about that, of course. But I do want to
express my admiration and gratitude for Kharlampy Diogenovich's method. With
the aid of laughter he tempered our sly young hearts and taught us to regard
ourselves with a strong enough sense of humour.
--------
In accordance with Moslem custom our family never ate pork. Our parents
ate none and strictly forbade us to eat any. Although another of Mahomet's
precepts--on the subject of alcoholic beverages--was violated, as I now
realise, quite unrestrainedly, no liberalism was allowed where pork was
concerned.
The ban engendered both an ardent desire and a frigid pride. I dreamed
of tasting pork. The smell of roast pork made me dizzy to the point of
collapse. I would stand for hours outside shop windows, staring at the
glistening sausages with their wrinkled sides and spotted ends fancied
myself tearing off the skin and plunging my teeth into the succulent, tender
meat. I imagined the taste of sausage so clearly that, when I did eventually
try it, I was quite surprised to discover how accurately fancy had informed
me.
Of course, there had been opportunities of tasting pork at nursery
school or when visiting friends but I had never broken the accepted rule.
I can still remember picking the lumps of pork out of a nursery school
plov and giving them away to my friends. The pangs of appetite were overcome
by the sweetness of self-denial. I felt a kind of ideological superiority
over my comrades. It was satisfying to be something of a mystery to the
world at large, as though I had knowledge that no one else possessed. And it
made my yearning for the sinful object of desire all the more intense.
There was a nurse who lived in one of the houses in our yard. We called
her Auntie Sonya. In those days for some reason we thought of her as a
doctor. In general, as one grows up, one notices a steady decline in the
status of one's elders.
Auntie Sonya was an elderly lady with her hair cut short and a look of
permanent sorrow on her face. She always spoke in a very quiet voice. It was
as though she had long since realised that there was nothing in life worth
raising one's voice about.
During the communal battles between neighbours that were frequent
enough in our yard she scarcely raised her voice at all, which created
additional difficulties for her opponents who, having failed to hear what
she had said, would lose the thread of the quarrel and be put off their
stroke.
Our families were on good terms. Mother told me that Auntie Sonya had
saved me from certain death. When I had been struck down by some grave
illness, she and mother had taken turns at my bedside for a whole month. For
some reason I experienced no feelings of gratitude towards Auntie Sonya for
saving me from certain death, but my sense of decorum, when they talked
about it, made me glad I was still alive.
She would often come round to sit with us of an evening and tell us her
life story, particularly the part about her first husband, who had been
killed in the civil war. I had heard this story many times before and yet I
always froze with horror at her description of how she had roamed about
among the dead, looking for the body of the man she loved. At this point she
would usually begin to cry, and my mother and elder sister would cry with
her, then begin comforting her, bring her a glass of water or persuade her
to have some tea.
It always astonished me how quickly the women would recover their
spirits and soon be able to chatter merrily and even with renewed interest
about all kinds of trivial matters. After this she would go home because her
husband would be back from work. He was called Uncle Shura.
I was very fond of Uncle Shura. I liked the wild tangle of black hair
that hung down over his forehead, his muscular arms with their neatly rolled
up sleeves, and even his stoop. It was not the stoop of an office clerk, but
the sound, sturdy kind of stance that one finds in some old workmen although
he was neither old nor a workman.
When he came home in the evening he would always set about mending
something--table lamps, electric irons radios and even clocks. All these
things were brought to him by neighbours and he repaired them, as a matter
of course free of charge.
Auntie Sonya would sit on the other side of the table, smoke and make
gentle fun of him for doing something that was not his business, wasting his
time, and so on.
'We'll see whether I'm wasting my time or not," Uncle Shura would
mutter indistinctly because he, too, had a cigarette between his teeth. He
would turn his next mending job this way and that in his deft, confident
hands blowing off the dust as he did so, and all of a sudden he would look
at it from quite a new, unexpected angle.
"Wasting your time and making a fool of yourself," Auntie Sonya would
reply and, releasing a haughty stream of smoke from her lips, gloomily wrap
her dressing-gown round her.
In the end he would manage to get the clock going, or the radio would
start giving out crackles and snatches of music and he would wink at me and
say:
"Well? Was I wasting my time or not?"
I would always rejoice in his success and smile to show that, although
it had nothing to do with me, I appreciated being included in his company.
"All right, enough of your boasting," Auntie Sonya would say. "Clear
the table and we'll have some tea."
Even in her gruff tone, however, I could detect a secret deeply hidden
note of pride, and I felt glad for Uncle Shura and decided that he was
probably just as good as that hero of the civil war whom Auntie Sonya would
never forget.
One evening, when I was sitting with them as usual, my sister dropped
in and was invited to stay for tea. Auntie Sonya laid the table, cut some
pieces of tender pink bacon fat, put some mustard on the table, and poured
out the tea. They had often eaten bacon fat before this, and offered it to
me as well, but I had always firmly refused, which for some reason rather
amused Uncle Shura. They offered me some now, not very insistently. Uncle
Shura placed a few cubes of fat on a piece of bread and held it out to my
sister. Aver a mincing refusal, she accepted this shameful offering and
began to eat it. In my indignation I felt the tea that I had begun to drink
freeze in my throat, and experienced some difficulty in swallowing it.
"That's the way!" said Uncle Shura. "She's not like you, you little
monk!"
I felt how much my sister was enjoying what she ate. I could see it
from the way she delicately licked her lips clean of the crumbs of bread
defiled by this infidel savoury, and the way she swallowed each piece,
sitting foolishly still and pausing as if to listen to what was going on in
her mouth and throat. She had started the slice on the side where the
thinner pieces of fat lay, and this was a sure sign that she was relishing
every morsel, because all normal children, when eating something they like,
leave the best piece till last. Clearly she was experiencing enormous
pleasure.
Now she was approaching the edge of the slice with the thickest piece
of fat on it, systematically intensifying her delight. At the same time,
with purely feminine guile she was relating how my brother had jumped out of
the window when his form mistress had come round to complain of his conduct.
Her story served the dual purpose of distracting attention from what she
herself was doing, while subtly flattering me, because everyone knew that my
teacher had never been round to complain about me and I certainly had no
reason to flee from her through the window.
In the course of her story my sister glanced at me from time to time,
trying to discover whether I was still watching her or whether I was so
carried away by her tale that I had forgotten what she was doing. But my
glance stated quite clearly that I was still keeping her under the most
vigilant observation. In reply she opened her eyes very wide as if
expressing surprise that I could pay so much attention to a mere trifle. I
leered back, alluding vaguely to the retribution that awaited her.
At one moment I thought the time of retribution had already arrived. My
sister choked, then cautiously began to clear her throat. I watched with
interest to see what would happen next. Uncle Shura patted her on the back.
She blushed and then stopped coughing, indicating that the cure had worked;
her embarrassment appeared to be equally short-lived. But I felt that the
piece that had stuck in her throat was still there. Pretending to have
recovered, she took another bite of bread and bacon fat.
Chew away, I thought to myself. We'll see how you manage to get it
down.
But apparently the gods had decided to postpone their vengeance. My
sister swallowed this piece safely. In fact, it must also have pushed down
the previous piece, because she breathed with relief and became quite
cheerful again. Now she ate with redoubled concentration and after each bite
licked her lips for so long that it looked almost as if she were showing her
tongue at me.
At last she reached the edge of the slice with the thickest piece of
fat on it and, before putting it in her mouth, she nibbled away the bread
round it, thus building up the pleasure to be gained from the last piece.
Eventually she swallowed this, too, and licked her lips as though
reliving the pleasure she had received, and also to show that all evidence
of her fall from grace had been destroyed.
The whole thing occupied less time than it takes to tell and could
scarcely have been noticed by a casual onlooker. Anyway I am sure neither
Uncle Shura nor Auntie Sonya noticed anything.
Having finished her slice, my sister started on her tea, still
pretending that nothing out of the ordinary had happened. As soon as she put
the cup to her lips I drank my own down very quickly, so that there should
be nothing in common between us. Before this I had refused a biscuit because
I was determined to make my martyrdom complete and deny myself every
possible joy while in her presence. Besides I was slightly offended with
Uncle Shura for pressing his food on me less persistently than on my sister.
I should not have accepted it, of course, but for her it would have been a
good lesson in principle.
In short, my mood was utterly spoiled and, as soon as I ad drunk my
tea, I got up to go. They asked me to stay but I was inexorable.
"I must do my homework," I said with the air of the lonely saint
granting everyone else complete freedom to indulge in sin.
My sister begged me to stay. She was sure I would denounce her as soon
as I got home and she was also afraid of crossing the yard at night by
herself.
At home I quickly undressed and got into bed. I was absorbed in envious
and gloating contemplation of my sister's apostasy. Strange visions passed
through my brain. Now I was a Red partisan captured by the Whites and they
were trying to make me eat pork. They tortured me but still I refused. The
officers shook their heads in amazement. What a boy! I was amazed at myself
but not a morsel passed my lips. They could kill me if they liked, but they
wouldn't make me eat.
The door creaked and my sister came in. She at once asked about me.
"He's gone to bed," my mother said. "He seemed rather glum when he came
home. Did something happen to him?"
"Oh no, nothing," my sister replied, and came over to my bed. I was
afraid she would start arguing and pleading with me and all that kind of
thing. Forgiveness was out of the question but I didn't even want her to
whittle down the condition I was in. So I pretended to be asleep. She stood
over me for a while, then stroked my head gently. But I turned over on to my
other side, showing that even while asleep I could tell the hand of a
traitor. She stood there a little longer, then withdrew. It seemed to me
that she felt some repentance but knew no way of expiating her guilt.
I pitied her a little, but apparently this was a mistake, for only a
minute later she began telling mother something in a low voice and they both
burst into little fits of laughter, carefully restrained to make it appear
that they were afraid of disturbing me. Gradually they calmed down and began
to prepare for bed.
Clearly she had enjoyed her evening. She had guzzled bacon fat and I
hadn't said anything and, to crown it all, she had made mother laugh. Never
mind, I thought, my hour will strike.
Next day the whole family was seated at table, waiting for father to
come home for dinner. He arrived late and got angry with mother for making
us wait for him. He had been having trouble at work lately and was often
gloomy and preoccupied.
It had been my intention to describe my sister's misdeed during the
meal, but now I realised this was the wrong time to speak. Nevertheless I
glanced at my sister now and then, giving the impression that I was about to
launch into an account of her crime. I would actually open my mouth, then
say something quite different. As soon as my lips parted she would drop her
eyes and lower her head in anticipation of the blow. It was even more
enjoyable to keep her on the brink of exposure than actually expose her.
One moment her face was pale, the next she would be blushing furiously.
Sometimes she would toss her head haughtily, then immediately her imploring
eyes would beg forgiveness for this rebellious gesture. She had no appetite
and pushed away the plate of soup almost untouched. Mother urged her to
finish it.
"Of course, she doesn't want it," I said. "She ate so much yesterday at
Uncle Shura's."
"So much what?" my brother asked, missing everything as usual.
Mother looked at me anxiously and shook her head without letting father
see. My sister took the plate back and began eating her soup in silence. Now
I was really enjoying myself. I transferred a boiled onion from my plate to
hers. Boiled onion was the bugbear of our childhood. We all hated it. Mother
gave me a severe glance of inquiry.
"She likes onions," I said. "You do, don't you?" I added fondly to my
sister.
Her only response was to bow her head even lower over the plate.
"If you like them, you can have mine as well," said my brother,
scooping one up in his spoon. He was just about to put it on her plate, but
my father gave him such a look that the spoon stopped in midair and beat a
cowardly retreat.
Between the first and second courses I devised a fresh amusement. I
dressed a slice of bread with little rings of cucumber from the salad and
began nibbling delicately at my vegetarian sandwich, pretending now and then
to dissolve with pleasure. This, I thought, was a very clever way of
reconstructing the scene of my sister's shameful fall. She stared at me in
astonishment, as though the pantomime meant nothing to her or, at least,
nothing shameful. Further than this, however, her protest did not go.
In other words, dinner was a tremendous success. Virtue blackmailed
ruthlessly and wickedness hung its head. After dinner we drank tea. Father
became noticeably more cheerful, and so, accordingly, did we. My sister was
particularly gay. The colour flooded into her cheeks and her eyes sparkled.
She started relating some incident that had occurred at school, constantly
appealing to me as a witness, as though nothing had happened between us. I
felt slightly disgusted by this familiarity. It struck me that a person with
her past could have behaved with a little more modesty instead of jumping
into the limelight. She could have waited until other, more worthy people
thought fit to relate that story. I was about to administer a moderate dose
of punishment, but father unwrapped a newspaper and took out a packet of new
exercise books.
In those pre-war years exercise books were as hard to come by as
textiles and certain foods. These were the best, glossy kind, with margins,
clearly marked in red, and heavy, cool pages of a bluish white colour, like
milk.
There were nine of these exercise books altogether and father gave us
three each. I at once felt my high spirits begin to wane. Such
egalitarianism seemed to me the limit of injustice.
I was doing well at school, and sometimes came top in one subject or
another. In fact, our relatives and friends were told that I was getting
excellent marks in all subjects, perhaps in order to balance the impression
created by my brother's unfortunate notoriety.
He was considered a very energetic slacker. As his teacher put it, his
ability to judge his own actions lagged far behind his temperament. I
imagined that temperament of his in the shape of a mischievous little imp
that was always running on ahead of my brother and that he could never catch
up with. Perhaps, it was to help him in this chase that ever since the age
of eleven he had dreamed of becoming a driver. On every available scrap of
paper he would scribble an application he had read somewhere:
To the Director of Transport
I request you to employ me in the organisation of which you are in
charge because I am a qualified driver, 3rd grade.
Later he succeeded in realising this fervent ambition. The organisation
of which a certain director was in charge entrusted him with a vehicle, but
it turned out that catching up with his temperament entailed exceeding the
speed limit, and in the end he had to change his profession.
And here was I, almost an outstanding pupil, being reduced to the same
level as my brother, who, starting from the back page as usual, would fill
up these beautiful exercise books with his idiotic applications.
And to the same level as my sister, who only the day before had been
guzzling bacon fat and was today receiving a present which she had done
nothing whatever to deserve.
I pushed aside the exercise books and sat scowling at the table,
painfully aware of the humiliating tears of resentment welling up in my
throat. My father tried to talk me round and promised to take me fishing in
the mountains, but it was no use. The more they tried to console me the more
strongly I felt that I had been unjustly passed over.
"Look! I've got two blotters!" my sister sang out all of a sudden, as
she opened one of the exercise books. This was the last straw. Perhaps, if
fate had not granted her that extra sheet of blotting paper, what did happen
might never have happened.
I stood up and in a trembling voice said to my father:
"Yesterday she was eating bacon fat...."
An indecent silence descended on the room. With a sense of fear I
realised that I had done something wrong. Either I had not expressed myself
quite clearly or else there was too close a connection between Mahomet's
great laws and the sneaking desire to lay hands on someone else's exercise
books.
Father stared at me gravely from under his slightly swollen lids.
Slowly his eyes filled with fury. I realised that his gaze held nothing for
me to look forward to. I made one more pitiful attempt to correct the
situation and channel his fury in the right direction.
"She ate bacon fat yesterday at Uncle Shura's," I said desperately,
feeling that my whole case was collapsing.
The next moment father seized me by the ears, shook my head and, as
though realising it would not come off, lifted me up and threw me to the
floor. In the brief seconds before I landed I felt a stab of pain and heard
the creak of my ears stretching.
"Son of a bitch!" he cried. "On top of everything else am I to have
traitors in my own house!"
He grabbed his leather jacket and swung out of the room, giving the
door such a slam that plaster fell off the walls. I remember being shaken
not so much by the pain or by what he said, but by the expression of utter
repugnance with which he had seized my ears. It was the expression of
someone about to kill a snake.
Stunned by what had happened, I remained lying on the floor for a long
time. My mother tried to lift me up while my brother, in a state of wild
excitement, ran round me in circles, pointing at my ears and roaring
delightedly,
"Our top boy!"
I was very fond of my father and this was the first time he had
punished me.
Many years have passed since then. For a long time now I have been
eating the pork that is available to all, though I don't think I am any the
happier for it. But the lesson was not wasted. It taught me for the rest of
my life that no lofty principle can justify meanness and treachery, and that
all treachery is the hairy caterpillar that grows from a small envy, no
matter under what high principles it may be concealed.
--------
It was 1942. I was living at my uncle's house in the village of
Napskal, in the mountains. Fear of the bombing and, above all, the wartime
food shortage had driven us away from town to this peaceful and relatively
well-provided corner of Abkhazia.
Our little town had, in fact, been bombed only twice, and the bombs the
Germans had dropped there had probably been intended for other, more
important targets, which they had been prevented from reaching. My theory is
that those pilots raided us out of fear of the punishment that awaited them
if they returned to base with a full load of bombs. I have two reasons for
thinking so. First, their aircraft approached the town not from behind their
lines but from behind ours and, secondly, there had never been anything
military in our town except the militia.
After the first air-raid the town became deserted. The table orators
and amateur strategists of the seaside coffee shops wisely adjourned their
unending discussions on current affairs and quietly withdrew to the
surrounding villages to eat Abkhazian hominy, whose prestige accordingly
mounted by leaps and bounds.
Only the most essential people and those who had nowhere else to go
remained in town. We were not essential and we had somewhere to go. So we
went. Our country relatives consulted each other and shared us out among
themselves, taking into account our respective potentialities. My elder
brother, as one already polluted by urban civilisation, remained in the
village nearest town and was afterwards recruited into the army. My sister
was sent off to live with a distant relative, who, being rich, seemed much
closer related than he really was. I, as the youngest and most useless, was
given to my uncle in the mountains. Mother remained somewhere near the
middle, in the house of her elder sister, whence she tried to stretch out to
us her warm and ageing wings.
My uncle turned out to be quite a big cattle-breeder; he had twenty
goats and three sheep. While I was trying to make up my mind where family
assistance ended and exploitation began, he quietly and painlessly put me in
charge of them. I soon took a liking to the job and learned how to exert my
will over this small but rebellious herd.
We were bound together by two ancient magical calls: Kheit! and Iiyo!
They had many meanings and shades of meaning depending on how they were
spoken. The goats understood these meanings perfectly but sometimes, when it
suited them, pretended to miss certain subtleties.
The various meanings were numerous enough. For instance, if I let my
voice ring out freely: "Kheit! Kheit!" it meant, "Graze on calmly, you've
nothing to worry about." If I called out in a tone of pedagogical reproach,
the meaning would be, "I can see you! I know where you're off to." And if I
let out a very sharp and rapid, "Iiyo! Iiyo!" they were supposed to
understand it as "Danger! Come back!"
Skillful mingling of both calls yielded a great number of variations of
an educative nature-orders, advice, warnings, reproach and so on.
At the sound of my voice the goats would usually raise their heads, as
if trying to make out what exactly was required of them this time. They
always grazed with a certain air of fastidiousness, tearing leaves off the
bushes and reaching up for the freshest and furthest away. There was
something indecent about them standing on their hind legs, and later on
when, as a young man, I saw the goat-legged human figures in a reproduction
of El Greco I was reminded of that impression.
The goats liked to graze on steep, craggy slopes near a mountain
stream. I think the sound of the water awakened their appetite, like the
sizzling of spitted meat before dinner. Their beards shook and they bared
their small, even teeth as they nibbled. It irritated me to see them abandon
one branch and with careless greed start on another before they had finished
the first.
At dinner we had to save every crumb, and they could afford to be
fussy. It was unjust.
The sheep usually followed in the wake of the goats recognising their
precedence but maintaining a modest dignity.
They kept their heads low to the ground, as though smelling out the
grass. For choice they preferred open level patches. But if they were
frightened by something and bolted, there was no stopping them. Their tails
would whack their hindquarters as they ran and each whack increased their
terror, making them rocket ahead in a kind of multi-stage panic.
As a resting place the goats would choose the highest and rockiest crag
they could find. They liked a clean spot to lie on. The oldest goat would
usually occupy the summit. He had terrifying horns and tufts of matted hair
that was yellow with age hung from his sides. You could feel he understood
his role in life. He moved slowly, with a dignified swaying of his
snow-white, wise old astrologer's beard. If a young goat was so unmindful as
to occupy his place he would walk up calmly and knock him down with a
sideways thrust of his horns, not even looking in his direction.
One day a goat disappeared from the herd. I wore myself out, running
from bush to bush, tearing my clothes to shreds and shouting till I was
hoarse. But still I couldn't find her. On my way back I happened to look up
and there she was, perched on a thick branch of a wild persimmon tree. She
had climbed up the twisted trunk. Our eyes met. She surveyed me with a
jaundiced glance of haughty non-recognition and obviously had no intention
of climbing down. Only when I let fly with a stone did she spring lightly to
the ground and run to rejoin the herd.
I think goats are the craftiest of all quadrupeds. I had only to let my
mind wander for a minute and they would melt away into the white rocks, the
hazel thickets and the ferns.
It was a hot, worrying job to look for them, running up and down the
narrow, heat-cracked paths with lizards darting to and fro like flashes of
green lightning. Sometimes a snake would wriggle away from just under my
feet and I would jump sky-high, the sole of the foot that had nearly trodden
on it tingling from its resilient chill, and go on running and running with
a sense of the insuperable, almost joyful lightness of fear.
And how strange it was to stop and listen to the rustle of the bushes,
wondering whether your quarry was there and listening to the swish of the
grasshoppers, to the distant song of the larks in the majestic blue above,
or perhaps to a human voice from the road, on to the steady thudding of your
own heart, and to breathe in the fleshy smell of the sun-drenched foliage,
all the sweet languor of the summer stillness.
But the worst thing of all was when the goats were trying to get into a
field of maize. No hedge could stop them.
I would race towards the field, shouting from a distance and throwing
anything that came to hand but, far from taking flight at the sight of me,
they would continue to gobble down the long maize leaves as fast as their
jaws would go.
In good weather I would usually lie on the grass in the shadow of a big
alder bush, listening to the spluttering roar of our U-2 planes patrolling
on the other side of the pass. Fighting was going on over there and every
day the thunder of war reached us as regularly as the sounds of labour in
the busy season.
One day a "hedgehopper", as we used to call those old biplanes, came
shooting over the mountains with a kind of panic-stricken rattle and dropped
like a stone into the lap of the Kodor Valley, then flew on almost at ground
level all the way to the sea. With every fibre in my body I felt the sheer
human terror of the pilot who had skimmed over the ridge, evidently to get
away from a German fighter. The plane's shadow swept across the field quite
near to me at unearthly speed, darkened the tobacco plantation, and a few
moments later was streaking low over the Kodor delta.
Once in a while a German plane would fly over at a great height. We
could tell it by the irregular throb of its engines, rather like the hum of
a malarial mosquito. Usually the anti-aircraft guns would open up when it
got near the town and we would see the shell bursts all round it, like
dandelion tops, but it would cruise along among them as though enchanted.
All through the war I never saw one of them shot down.
One day a villager came back from town, where he had gone to sell his
pigs, with the story that my brother was wounded, had been put in hospital
in Baku and was pining for mother to come and see him. The news startled us
all. Mother had to be told as soon as possible and it turned out that there
was no one else to send but me. I was only too willing.
They gave me a good feed of cheese and hominy grand dad lent me one of
his walking sticks and I set out on my Journey, although the day was near
its close and the sun only a tree's height above the horizon. I had only a
vague idea of the way there, or rather the whereabouts of the house where
mother was living, but I showed no interest in any explanations in case they
changed their minds about sending me.
I should have to go up through the forest and along a mountain ridge,
then make my way down to the road that was used for carting logs, and follow
it all the way to the village.
As soon as I entered the big forest of beeches, mingled with a
sprinkling of chestnuts and hornbeam, everything was cool, as though I had
dived into cold water and the summer day was far away behind me.
I breathed the clean, dank coolness of the forest, listened to the
exciting rustle of the green crowns overhead and made good speed along the
path. The deeper I went into the forest the more persistently and cheerfully
my stick tapped on the springy, rootwoven earth.
I knew that bears sometimes came up here at this time of the year. They
liked the bilberries that grew on the slopes and along the path.
At any other time I should have been frightened, but now I was spurred
on by heroic dreams and a vague anxiety about my brother. My feet seemed to
have wings and I mounted the slopes with ease, thrilling with the importance
of my mission and, above all, the realisation that I was needed. Although my
thoughts were occupied with these exalted feelings, I still had time to
admire the beauty of the mighty dark-silver trunks of the beeches, the
unexpectedly appealing glades with their bright feathery grass the inviting
roots of the big trees covered with the scaly leaves of last year. I would
have liked to lie down in those leaves with my head resting on the great
mossy roots. Sometimes through a gap in the trees I saw a misty green valley
with the sea poised at the end of it between earth and sky, like a mirage.
It was evening.
All of a sudden two girls appeared round a bend, looking frightened and
joyful at the same time. I knew them. They were from our village, but now
there was something strange about them. They were not quite their usual
selves. They spoke very quietly, in almost guilty tones, their heads
lowered. There was something of the woods, something shy and subtle about
them. One had her shoes in a bag and now she stood with one long bare leg
awkwardly scratching the other. I guessed she was trying to conceal at least
one of her legs.
Gradually their embarrassment communicated itself to me. I didn't know
what to say and was glad to bid them good-bye. They said good-bye, too, and
went on quietly, almost furtive in their attitude to the forest.
Presently I saw among the dark trees ahead a reddish-yellow road that
from a distance looked like a mountain torrent. Glad at the thought of
having a smooth road to walk on, I set off at a run down the steep path,
braking with my stick to stop myself plunging into the gloomy rhododendron
bushes.
I almost rolled out on to the road. I was sweating and my legs were
trembling from the strain, but the smell of petrol fumes and warm,
day-wearied roadside dust only increased my excitement. This was the smell
of the city that I had known since childhood. I must have been missing town
and my own home badly and, although it was even further from here to our
house in town than from the little village in the mountains, this woodland
road seemed to lead there.
I walked along it, trying to make out tyre-tracks in the dusk, and was
overjoyed when I spotted any particularly heavy marks. As I went on, the
road gradually grew lighter because a huge reddish moon was rising above the
jagged line of the forest.
At night in the mountains we used to spend a lot of time gazing at the
moon. I had been told you could see a goat-herd and a herd of white goats on
it, but I had never been able to spot them. Evidently you had to have seen
that goat-herd in early childhood. Whenever I watched the cold orb of the
moon I saw the outlines of rocky mountains and was overcome by a kind of
sweet sadness, perhaps because they were so terribly far away and yet so
much like our own mountains.
Now the moon looked like a big round of smoked mountain cheese. How I
would have relished a bite of that pungent smoky cheese, and some steaming
hominy to go with it!
I quickened my pace. The road was bordered on both sides with low alder
thickets, broken here and there by a maize field or a tobacco plantation. It
was very quiet- only the tapping of my stick enlivened the stillness.
Peasant houses with clean little yards and the bright light of fires showing
cosily through half-open kitchen doors began to appear.
I listened eagerly to the faint sounds of voices, which suddenly became
quite distinct.
"Let the dog out," came a man's voice, and a kitchen door flew open and
a dog ran out barking in my direction. I hurried on and, looking back over
my shoulder, noticed in the red rectangle of the open door the dark figure
of a girl standing very still and staring into the darkness.
Frightened by the dogs, I now tried to pass the houses as quietly as
possible.
At length I found myself on a broad green with a large walnut tree in
the middle and benches nailed round its trunk.
With its collective farm management office, village shop and barn this
must have been a noisy, busy place in the daytime, but now everything looked
desolate and deserted and by the light of the moon, rather eerie.
The house I was making for was situated not far from the farm
management office. I knew that after the green I had to take a path to the
left of the road, but there was more than one path leading off to the left
and I couldn't remember which would take me to my destination.
I halted doubtfully at a path that ran off into some hazel-nut
thickets. Was this the one? I could not remember any thickets like these. Or
perhaps there had been some? One minute I thought I saw many familiar
signs--a bend in the path, the ditch dividing it from the road, even the
hazel-nut thickets; but then I looked again and they all seemed different,
the wrong ones, and the path itself looked strange and hostile.
I stood shifting from one foot to another, listening to the buzzing of
the cicadas, staring at the enchantedly still bushes and at the moon, now
high in the sky and dazzling as a mirror.
All of a sudden something black and glossy bounced on to the path and
ran towards me. Before I could move, a large dog was greedily sniffing me
all over, pushing its moist, snuffling nose against my legs.
A few seconds later a man appeared with a small axe over his shoulder.
He called the dog off and I realised why it had been in such a hurry to
smell me; knowing its master, it had been afraid it would not have time. The
dog bounded away, circled round us, whining with the desire to please its
master, then froze by one of the bushes, sniffing at a trace left by some
other animal.
The man had a bridle round his waist and was evidently looking for his
horse. He came up to me and peered at me in surprise.
"Who do you belong to? What are you doing here?" he asked crossly
because he could not recognise me.
I said I was looking for Uncle Meksut's house.
"What do you want him for?" he asked, now exulting in his surprise.
I realised that healthy peasant curiosity was invincible, and told the
whole story.
While doing so, I kept a wary eye on the dog. Its master shook his
head, clicked his tongue and surveyed me sadly, as though regretting that I
At last the whole thing was over. The doctor and her Galochka packed
their bags and went on their way, leaving a pleasant smell of surgical
spirit and an unpleasant smell of serum in the room. The pupils sat at their
desks, fidgeting and cautiously feeling for the effects of the injection
with their shoulder blades and talking freely to each other as a reward for
the suffering they had just endured.
"Open the window," said Kharlampy Diogenovich, resuming his seat. He
wanted this spirit of hospital freedom to depart along with the smell of
medicine.
He took out his yellow beads and flicked them thoughtfully to and fro.
There was not much of the lesson left. He usually filled in such gaps by
telling us something instructive connected with the ancient Greeks.
"As we know from Greek mythology, Hercules had to perform twelve
labours," he said, and stopped. Click-click--as two beads slid from right to
left. "But a certain young man thought he would revise Greek mythology," he
added, and stopped again. Click-click.
That fellow had too big an idea of himself, I thought, realising that
no one was allowed to revise Greek mythology. Some other God-forsaken
mythology, perhaps, might be knocked into shape, but not Greek mythology
because it had all been revised from beginning to end already and there
couldn't possibly be any mistakes in it.
"He decided to perform the thirteenth labour of Hercules," Kharlampy
Diogenovich went on. "And to some extent he succeeded."
We realised at once by his voice what a false and futile labour this
had been, because if there had been any need for Hercules to perform
thirteen labours he would have performed them himself, but since he had
stopped at twelve it meant that twelve were enough and there was no need for
anyone to mess about making corrections.
"Hercules performed his labours like a hero. But this young man
performed his labour out of cowardice." Kharlampy Diogenovich paused
thoughtfully, then added, "In a moment we shall learn just what it was that
induced him to perform this labour."
Click. This time only one bead slid from right to left, driven by a
very sharp flip of the finger. It slid rather nastily somehow. Two beads
sliding together, as they had done before, would have been better than just
one, all by itself.
I caught the scent of danger in the air. It was the sound not of a bead
sliding but of a small trap closing in Kharlampy Diogenovich's hands.
"I have a feeling that I know already what it was," he said, and looked
at me.
Something in his glance made my heart thud heavily against my spine.
"Be so kind," he said, and beckoned me to the blackboard.
"Who? Me?" I asked, feeling as if my voice was coming from the pit of
my stomach.
"Yes, you, my fearless malaria sufferer," he said.
I shambled towards the board.
"Tell us how you solved the problem," he said calmly and--click,
click--two more beads went sliding from right to left. I was in his hands.
The form looked on and waited. They were all expecting me to come to
grief, and they wanted me to do so as slowly and interestingly as possible.
I squinted at the board from the corner of my eye, trying to trace the
thread of cause and effect between the stages of the problem that were
written there, but it was no use. Then with a great show of impatience I
began rubbing it all out, as though what Shurik had written was muddling me
and preventing me from concentrating. I was still hoping for the bell to
ring and save me from execution. But the bell did not ring and it was
impossible to go on cleaning the board forever. I put down the rag to avoid
looking ridiculous before I had to.
"We are listening," Kharlampy Diogenovich said, without looking at me.
"An artillery shell..." I said brightly amid the form's jubilant
silence, and broke off.
"Continue," Kharlampy Diogenovich said, after waiting politely for some
moments.
"An artillery shell..." I repeated stubbornly, hoping that the impetus
of these correct words would carry me on to more, similarly correct words.
But something held me on a firm tether that pulled tight as soon as the
words were out of my mouth.
I concentrated fiercely, trying to imagine the course of the problem,
and then plunged forward again to break the invisible tether.
"An artillery shell..." I repeated, quivering with horror and
revulsion.
A few restrained titters came from the form. I sensed that the crucial
moment had arrived and decided not to allow myself to become ridiculous on
any account; I would rather just get a bad mark.
"Have you swallowed this artillery shell?" Kharlampy Diogenovich asked
with good-natured curiosity.
He asked the question as naturally as if he had been inquiring whether
I had swallowed a plum stone.
"Yes," I said quickly, sensing a trap and deciding to foil his plans
with an unexpected answer.
"Then you'd better ask the military instructor to come and dispose of
it for you," said Kharlampy Diogenovich, but the form was already laughing.
Sakharov was laughing, and trying to go on looking like the top boy at
the same time. Even Shurik Avdeyenko, the gloomiest boy in our form, whom I
had saved from certain disaster at the blackboard, was laughing. And Komarov
was laughing, Komarov who now called himself Alik but was really Adolf, just
as he had always been.
As I looked at him it occurred to me that if we had not had a real
gingerhead in our form he would have passed as one because his hair was fair
and the freckles that he kept hidden, like his first name, had given
themselves away during the injection. But we did have a real gingerhead in
the form and Komarov's gingerness had passed unnoticed. And it also occurred
to me that if we had not pulled the number of our form off the form-room
door a few days ago, the doctor might never have called on us in the first
place and nothing would have happened. I began to have vague presentiments
of the connection that exists between things and events.
The bell droned funereally through the form's laughter. Kharlampy
Diogenovich put a mark against my name in the register and also made a note
about me in his notebook.
From then on I took my homework more seriously and never asked the
footballers about problems I couldn't solve. Each man to his trade.
Later in life I noticed that nearly everyone is afraid of appearing
ridiculous. Particularly women and poets. Perhaps they sometimes appear
ridiculous because they are too afraid of appearing so. On the other hand,
no one can make someone else look ridiculous as skillfully as a good poet or
a good woman.
Of course, it is not very wise to be too afraid of appearing
ridiculous, but it is much less wise not to be afraid of ridicule at all.
It seems to me that ancient Rome perished because its emperors in all
their marble magnificence failed to realise how ridiculous they were. If
they had got themselves some jesters in time (you must hear the truth, if
only from a fool), they might have lasted a little longer. But they just
went on hoping that the geese would save Rome, and then the Barbarians came
and destroyed Rome, its emperors and its geese.
Not that I have any regrets about that, of course. But I do want to
express my admiration and gratitude for Kharlampy Diogenovich's method. With
the aid of laughter he tempered our sly young hearts and taught us to regard
ourselves with a strong enough sense of humour.
--------
In accordance with Moslem custom our family never ate pork. Our parents
ate none and strictly forbade us to eat any. Although another of Mahomet's
precepts--on the subject of alcoholic beverages--was violated, as I now
realise, quite unrestrainedly, no liberalism was allowed where pork was
concerned.
The ban engendered both an ardent desire and a frigid pride. I dreamed
of tasting pork. The smell of roast pork made me dizzy to the point of
collapse. I would stand for hours outside shop windows, staring at the
glistening sausages with their wrinkled sides and spotted ends fancied
myself tearing off the skin and plunging my teeth into the succulent, tender
meat. I imagined the taste of sausage so clearly that, when I did eventually
try it, I was quite surprised to discover how accurately fancy had informed
me.
Of course, there had been opportunities of tasting pork at nursery
school or when visiting friends but I had never broken the accepted rule.
I can still remember picking the lumps of pork out of a nursery school
plov and giving them away to my friends. The pangs of appetite were overcome
by the sweetness of self-denial. I felt a kind of ideological superiority
over my comrades. It was satisfying to be something of a mystery to the
world at large, as though I had knowledge that no one else possessed. And it
made my yearning for the sinful object of desire all the more intense.
There was a nurse who lived in one of the houses in our yard. We called
her Auntie Sonya. In those days for some reason we thought of her as a
doctor. In general, as one grows up, one notices a steady decline in the
status of one's elders.
Auntie Sonya was an elderly lady with her hair cut short and a look of
permanent sorrow on her face. She always spoke in a very quiet voice. It was
as though she had long since realised that there was nothing in life worth
raising one's voice about.
During the communal battles between neighbours that were frequent
enough in our yard she scarcely raised her voice at all, which created
additional difficulties for her opponents who, having failed to hear what
she had said, would lose the thread of the quarrel and be put off their
stroke.
Our families were on good terms. Mother told me that Auntie Sonya had
saved me from certain death. When I had been struck down by some grave
illness, she and mother had taken turns at my bedside for a whole month. For
some reason I experienced no feelings of gratitude towards Auntie Sonya for
saving me from certain death, but my sense of decorum, when they talked
about it, made me glad I was still alive.
She would often come round to sit with us of an evening and tell us her
life story, particularly the part about her first husband, who had been
killed in the civil war. I had heard this story many times before and yet I
always froze with horror at her description of how she had roamed about
among the dead, looking for the body of the man she loved. At this point she
would usually begin to cry, and my mother and elder sister would cry with
her, then begin comforting her, bring her a glass of water or persuade her
to have some tea.
It always astonished me how quickly the women would recover their
spirits and soon be able to chatter merrily and even with renewed interest
about all kinds of trivial matters. After this she would go home because her
husband would be back from work. He was called Uncle Shura.
I was very fond of Uncle Shura. I liked the wild tangle of black hair
that hung down over his forehead, his muscular arms with their neatly rolled
up sleeves, and even his stoop. It was not the stoop of an office clerk, but
the sound, sturdy kind of stance that one finds in some old workmen although
he was neither old nor a workman.
When he came home in the evening he would always set about mending
something--table lamps, electric irons radios and even clocks. All these
things were brought to him by neighbours and he repaired them, as a matter
of course free of charge.
Auntie Sonya would sit on the other side of the table, smoke and make
gentle fun of him for doing something that was not his business, wasting his
time, and so on.
'We'll see whether I'm wasting my time or not," Uncle Shura would
mutter indistinctly because he, too, had a cigarette between his teeth. He
would turn his next mending job this way and that in his deft, confident
hands blowing off the dust as he did so, and all of a sudden he would look
at it from quite a new, unexpected angle.
"Wasting your time and making a fool of yourself," Auntie Sonya would
reply and, releasing a haughty stream of smoke from her lips, gloomily wrap
her dressing-gown round her.
In the end he would manage to get the clock going, or the radio would
start giving out crackles and snatches of music and he would wink at me and
say:
"Well? Was I wasting my time or not?"
I would always rejoice in his success and smile to show that, although
it had nothing to do with me, I appreciated being included in his company.
"All right, enough of your boasting," Auntie Sonya would say. "Clear
the table and we'll have some tea."
Even in her gruff tone, however, I could detect a secret deeply hidden
note of pride, and I felt glad for Uncle Shura and decided that he was
probably just as good as that hero of the civil war whom Auntie Sonya would
never forget.
One evening, when I was sitting with them as usual, my sister dropped
in and was invited to stay for tea. Auntie Sonya laid the table, cut some
pieces of tender pink bacon fat, put some mustard on the table, and poured
out the tea. They had often eaten bacon fat before this, and offered it to
me as well, but I had always firmly refused, which for some reason rather
amused Uncle Shura. They offered me some now, not very insistently. Uncle
Shura placed a few cubes of fat on a piece of bread and held it out to my
sister. Aver a mincing refusal, she accepted this shameful offering and
began to eat it. In my indignation I felt the tea that I had begun to drink
freeze in my throat, and experienced some difficulty in swallowing it.
"That's the way!" said Uncle Shura. "She's not like you, you little
monk!"
I felt how much my sister was enjoying what she ate. I could see it
from the way she delicately licked her lips clean of the crumbs of bread
defiled by this infidel savoury, and the way she swallowed each piece,
sitting foolishly still and pausing as if to listen to what was going on in
her mouth and throat. She had started the slice on the side where the
thinner pieces of fat lay, and this was a sure sign that she was relishing
every morsel, because all normal children, when eating something they like,
leave the best piece till last. Clearly she was experiencing enormous
pleasure.
Now she was approaching the edge of the slice with the thickest piece
of fat on it, systematically intensifying her delight. At the same time,
with purely feminine guile she was relating how my brother had jumped out of
the window when his form mistress had come round to complain of his conduct.
Her story served the dual purpose of distracting attention from what she
herself was doing, while subtly flattering me, because everyone knew that my
teacher had never been round to complain about me and I certainly had no
reason to flee from her through the window.
In the course of her story my sister glanced at me from time to time,
trying to discover whether I was still watching her or whether I was so
carried away by her tale that I had forgotten what she was doing. But my
glance stated quite clearly that I was still keeping her under the most
vigilant observation. In reply she opened her eyes very wide as if
expressing surprise that I could pay so much attention to a mere trifle. I
leered back, alluding vaguely to the retribution that awaited her.
At one moment I thought the time of retribution had already arrived. My
sister choked, then cautiously began to clear her throat. I watched with
interest to see what would happen next. Uncle Shura patted her on the back.
She blushed and then stopped coughing, indicating that the cure had worked;
her embarrassment appeared to be equally short-lived. But I felt that the
piece that had stuck in her throat was still there. Pretending to have
recovered, she took another bite of bread and bacon fat.
Chew away, I thought to myself. We'll see how you manage to get it
down.
But apparently the gods had decided to postpone their vengeance. My
sister swallowed this piece safely. In fact, it must also have pushed down
the previous piece, because she breathed with relief and became quite
cheerful again. Now she ate with redoubled concentration and after each bite
licked her lips for so long that it looked almost as if she were showing her
tongue at me.
At last she reached the edge of the slice with the thickest piece of
fat on it and, before putting it in her mouth, she nibbled away the bread
round it, thus building up the pleasure to be gained from the last piece.
Eventually she swallowed this, too, and licked her lips as though
reliving the pleasure she had received, and also to show that all evidence
of her fall from grace had been destroyed.
The whole thing occupied less time than it takes to tell and could
scarcely have been noticed by a casual onlooker. Anyway I am sure neither
Uncle Shura nor Auntie Sonya noticed anything.
Having finished her slice, my sister started on her tea, still
pretending that nothing out of the ordinary had happened. As soon as she put
the cup to her lips I drank my own down very quickly, so that there should
be nothing in common between us. Before this I had refused a biscuit because
I was determined to make my martyrdom complete and deny myself every
possible joy while in her presence. Besides I was slightly offended with
Uncle Shura for pressing his food on me less persistently than on my sister.
I should not have accepted it, of course, but for her it would have been a
good lesson in principle.
In short, my mood was utterly spoiled and, as soon as I ad drunk my
tea, I got up to go. They asked me to stay but I was inexorable.
"I must do my homework," I said with the air of the lonely saint
granting everyone else complete freedom to indulge in sin.
My sister begged me to stay. She was sure I would denounce her as soon
as I got home and she was also afraid of crossing the yard at night by
herself.
At home I quickly undressed and got into bed. I was absorbed in envious
and gloating contemplation of my sister's apostasy. Strange visions passed
through my brain. Now I was a Red partisan captured by the Whites and they
were trying to make me eat pork. They tortured me but still I refused. The
officers shook their heads in amazement. What a boy! I was amazed at myself
but not a morsel passed my lips. They could kill me if they liked, but they
wouldn't make me eat.
The door creaked and my sister came in. She at once asked about me.
"He's gone to bed," my mother said. "He seemed rather glum when he came
home. Did something happen to him?"
"Oh no, nothing," my sister replied, and came over to my bed. I was
afraid she would start arguing and pleading with me and all that kind of
thing. Forgiveness was out of the question but I didn't even want her to
whittle down the condition I was in. So I pretended to be asleep. She stood
over me for a while, then stroked my head gently. But I turned over on to my
other side, showing that even while asleep I could tell the hand of a
traitor. She stood there a little longer, then withdrew. It seemed to me
that she felt some repentance but knew no way of expiating her guilt.
I pitied her a little, but apparently this was a mistake, for only a
minute later she began telling mother something in a low voice and they both
burst into little fits of laughter, carefully restrained to make it appear
that they were afraid of disturbing me. Gradually they calmed down and began
to prepare for bed.
Clearly she had enjoyed her evening. She had guzzled bacon fat and I
hadn't said anything and, to crown it all, she had made mother laugh. Never
mind, I thought, my hour will strike.
Next day the whole family was seated at table, waiting for father to
come home for dinner. He arrived late and got angry with mother for making
us wait for him. He had been having trouble at work lately and was often
gloomy and preoccupied.
It had been my intention to describe my sister's misdeed during the
meal, but now I realised this was the wrong time to speak. Nevertheless I
glanced at my sister now and then, giving the impression that I was about to
launch into an account of her crime. I would actually open my mouth, then
say something quite different. As soon as my lips parted she would drop her
eyes and lower her head in anticipation of the blow. It was even more
enjoyable to keep her on the brink of exposure than actually expose her.
One moment her face was pale, the next she would be blushing furiously.
Sometimes she would toss her head haughtily, then immediately her imploring
eyes would beg forgiveness for this rebellious gesture. She had no appetite
and pushed away the plate of soup almost untouched. Mother urged her to
finish it.
"Of course, she doesn't want it," I said. "She ate so much yesterday at
Uncle Shura's."
"So much what?" my brother asked, missing everything as usual.
Mother looked at me anxiously and shook her head without letting father
see. My sister took the plate back and began eating her soup in silence. Now
I was really enjoying myself. I transferred a boiled onion from my plate to
hers. Boiled onion was the bugbear of our childhood. We all hated it. Mother
gave me a severe glance of inquiry.
"She likes onions," I said. "You do, don't you?" I added fondly to my
sister.
Her only response was to bow her head even lower over the plate.
"If you like them, you can have mine as well," said my brother,
scooping one up in his spoon. He was just about to put it on her plate, but
my father gave him such a look that the spoon stopped in midair and beat a
cowardly retreat.
Between the first and second courses I devised a fresh amusement. I
dressed a slice of bread with little rings of cucumber from the salad and
began nibbling delicately at my vegetarian sandwich, pretending now and then
to dissolve with pleasure. This, I thought, was a very clever way of
reconstructing the scene of my sister's shameful fall. She stared at me in
astonishment, as though the pantomime meant nothing to her or, at least,
nothing shameful. Further than this, however, her protest did not go.
In other words, dinner was a tremendous success. Virtue blackmailed
ruthlessly and wickedness hung its head. After dinner we drank tea. Father
became noticeably more cheerful, and so, accordingly, did we. My sister was
particularly gay. The colour flooded into her cheeks and her eyes sparkled.
She started relating some incident that had occurred at school, constantly
appealing to me as a witness, as though nothing had happened between us. I
felt slightly disgusted by this familiarity. It struck me that a person with
her past could have behaved with a little more modesty instead of jumping
into the limelight. She could have waited until other, more worthy people
thought fit to relate that story. I was about to administer a moderate dose
of punishment, but father unwrapped a newspaper and took out a packet of new
exercise books.
In those pre-war years exercise books were as hard to come by as
textiles and certain foods. These were the best, glossy kind, with margins,
clearly marked in red, and heavy, cool pages of a bluish white colour, like
milk.
There were nine of these exercise books altogether and father gave us
three each. I at once felt my high spirits begin to wane. Such
egalitarianism seemed to me the limit of injustice.
I was doing well at school, and sometimes came top in one subject or
another. In fact, our relatives and friends were told that I was getting
excellent marks in all subjects, perhaps in order to balance the impression
created by my brother's unfortunate notoriety.
He was considered a very energetic slacker. As his teacher put it, his
ability to judge his own actions lagged far behind his temperament. I
imagined that temperament of his in the shape of a mischievous little imp
that was always running on ahead of my brother and that he could never catch
up with. Perhaps, it was to help him in this chase that ever since the age
of eleven he had dreamed of becoming a driver. On every available scrap of
paper he would scribble an application he had read somewhere:
To the Director of Transport
I request you to employ me in the organisation of which you are in
charge because I am a qualified driver, 3rd grade.
Later he succeeded in realising this fervent ambition. The organisation
of which a certain director was in charge entrusted him with a vehicle, but
it turned out that catching up with his temperament entailed exceeding the
speed limit, and in the end he had to change his profession.
And here was I, almost an outstanding pupil, being reduced to the same
level as my brother, who, starting from the back page as usual, would fill
up these beautiful exercise books with his idiotic applications.
And to the same level as my sister, who only the day before had been
guzzling bacon fat and was today receiving a present which she had done
nothing whatever to deserve.
I pushed aside the exercise books and sat scowling at the table,
painfully aware of the humiliating tears of resentment welling up in my
throat. My father tried to talk me round and promised to take me fishing in
the mountains, but it was no use. The more they tried to console me the more
strongly I felt that I had been unjustly passed over.
"Look! I've got two blotters!" my sister sang out all of a sudden, as
she opened one of the exercise books. This was the last straw. Perhaps, if
fate had not granted her that extra sheet of blotting paper, what did happen
might never have happened.
I stood up and in a trembling voice said to my father:
"Yesterday she was eating bacon fat...."
An indecent silence descended on the room. With a sense of fear I
realised that I had done something wrong. Either I had not expressed myself
quite clearly or else there was too close a connection between Mahomet's
great laws and the sneaking desire to lay hands on someone else's exercise
books.
Father stared at me gravely from under his slightly swollen lids.
Slowly his eyes filled with fury. I realised that his gaze held nothing for
me to look forward to. I made one more pitiful attempt to correct the
situation and channel his fury in the right direction.
"She ate bacon fat yesterday at Uncle Shura's," I said desperately,
feeling that my whole case was collapsing.
The next moment father seized me by the ears, shook my head and, as
though realising it would not come off, lifted me up and threw me to the
floor. In the brief seconds before I landed I felt a stab of pain and heard
the creak of my ears stretching.
"Son of a bitch!" he cried. "On top of everything else am I to have
traitors in my own house!"
He grabbed his leather jacket and swung out of the room, giving the
door such a slam that plaster fell off the walls. I remember being shaken
not so much by the pain or by what he said, but by the expression of utter
repugnance with which he had seized my ears. It was the expression of
someone about to kill a snake.
Stunned by what had happened, I remained lying on the floor for a long
time. My mother tried to lift me up while my brother, in a state of wild
excitement, ran round me in circles, pointing at my ears and roaring
delightedly,
"Our top boy!"
I was very fond of my father and this was the first time he had
punished me.
Many years have passed since then. For a long time now I have been
eating the pork that is available to all, though I don't think I am any the
happier for it. But the lesson was not wasted. It taught me for the rest of
my life that no lofty principle can justify meanness and treachery, and that
all treachery is the hairy caterpillar that grows from a small envy, no
matter under what high principles it may be concealed.
--------
It was 1942. I was living at my uncle's house in the village of
Napskal, in the mountains. Fear of the bombing and, above all, the wartime
food shortage had driven us away from town to this peaceful and relatively
well-provided corner of Abkhazia.
Our little town had, in fact, been bombed only twice, and the bombs the
Germans had dropped there had probably been intended for other, more
important targets, which they had been prevented from reaching. My theory is
that those pilots raided us out of fear of the punishment that awaited them
if they returned to base with a full load of bombs. I have two reasons for
thinking so. First, their aircraft approached the town not from behind their
lines but from behind ours and, secondly, there had never been anything
military in our town except the militia.
After the first air-raid the town became deserted. The table orators
and amateur strategists of the seaside coffee shops wisely adjourned their
unending discussions on current affairs and quietly withdrew to the
surrounding villages to eat Abkhazian hominy, whose prestige accordingly
mounted by leaps and bounds.
Only the most essential people and those who had nowhere else to go
remained in town. We were not essential and we had somewhere to go. So we
went. Our country relatives consulted each other and shared us out among
themselves, taking into account our respective potentialities. My elder
brother, as one already polluted by urban civilisation, remained in the
village nearest town and was afterwards recruited into the army. My sister
was sent off to live with a distant relative, who, being rich, seemed much
closer related than he really was. I, as the youngest and most useless, was
given to my uncle in the mountains. Mother remained somewhere near the
middle, in the house of her elder sister, whence she tried to stretch out to
us her warm and ageing wings.
My uncle turned out to be quite a big cattle-breeder; he had twenty
goats and three sheep. While I was trying to make up my mind where family
assistance ended and exploitation began, he quietly and painlessly put me in
charge of them. I soon took a liking to the job and learned how to exert my
will over this small but rebellious herd.
We were bound together by two ancient magical calls: Kheit! and Iiyo!
They had many meanings and shades of meaning depending on how they were
spoken. The goats understood these meanings perfectly but sometimes, when it
suited them, pretended to miss certain subtleties.
The various meanings were numerous enough. For instance, if I let my
voice ring out freely: "Kheit! Kheit!" it meant, "Graze on calmly, you've
nothing to worry about." If I called out in a tone of pedagogical reproach,
the meaning would be, "I can see you! I know where you're off to." And if I
let out a very sharp and rapid, "Iiyo! Iiyo!" they were supposed to
understand it as "Danger! Come back!"
Skillful mingling of both calls yielded a great number of variations of
an educative nature-orders, advice, warnings, reproach and so on.
At the sound of my voice the goats would usually raise their heads, as
if trying to make out what exactly was required of them this time. They
always grazed with a certain air of fastidiousness, tearing leaves off the
bushes and reaching up for the freshest and furthest away. There was
something indecent about them standing on their hind legs, and later on
when, as a young man, I saw the goat-legged human figures in a reproduction
of El Greco I was reminded of that impression.
The goats liked to graze on steep, craggy slopes near a mountain
stream. I think the sound of the water awakened their appetite, like the
sizzling of spitted meat before dinner. Their beards shook and they bared
their small, even teeth as they nibbled. It irritated me to see them abandon
one branch and with careless greed start on another before they had finished
the first.
At dinner we had to save every crumb, and they could afford to be
fussy. It was unjust.
The sheep usually followed in the wake of the goats recognising their
precedence but maintaining a modest dignity.
They kept their heads low to the ground, as though smelling out the
grass. For choice they preferred open level patches. But if they were
frightened by something and bolted, there was no stopping them. Their tails
would whack their hindquarters as they ran and each whack increased their
terror, making them rocket ahead in a kind of multi-stage panic.
As a resting place the goats would choose the highest and rockiest crag
they could find. They liked a clean spot to lie on. The oldest goat would
usually occupy the summit. He had terrifying horns and tufts of matted hair
that was yellow with age hung from his sides. You could feel he understood
his role in life. He moved slowly, with a dignified swaying of his
snow-white, wise old astrologer's beard. If a young goat was so unmindful as
to occupy his place he would walk up calmly and knock him down with a
sideways thrust of his horns, not even looking in his direction.
One day a goat disappeared from the herd. I wore myself out, running
from bush to bush, tearing my clothes to shreds and shouting till I was
hoarse. But still I couldn't find her. On my way back I happened to look up
and there she was, perched on a thick branch of a wild persimmon tree. She
had climbed up the twisted trunk. Our eyes met. She surveyed me with a
jaundiced glance of haughty non-recognition and obviously had no intention
of climbing down. Only when I let fly with a stone did she spring lightly to
the ground and run to rejoin the herd.
I think goats are the craftiest of all quadrupeds. I had only to let my
mind wander for a minute and they would melt away into the white rocks, the
hazel thickets and the ferns.
It was a hot, worrying job to look for them, running up and down the
narrow, heat-cracked paths with lizards darting to and fro like flashes of
green lightning. Sometimes a snake would wriggle away from just under my
feet and I would jump sky-high, the sole of the foot that had nearly trodden
on it tingling from its resilient chill, and go on running and running with
a sense of the insuperable, almost joyful lightness of fear.
And how strange it was to stop and listen to the rustle of the bushes,
wondering whether your quarry was there and listening to the swish of the
grasshoppers, to the distant song of the larks in the majestic blue above,
or perhaps to a human voice from the road, on to the steady thudding of your
own heart, and to breathe in the fleshy smell of the sun-drenched foliage,
all the sweet languor of the summer stillness.
But the worst thing of all was when the goats were trying to get into a
field of maize. No hedge could stop them.
I would race towards the field, shouting from a distance and throwing
anything that came to hand but, far from taking flight at the sight of me,
they would continue to gobble down the long maize leaves as fast as their
jaws would go.
In good weather I would usually lie on the grass in the shadow of a big
alder bush, listening to the spluttering roar of our U-2 planes patrolling
on the other side of the pass. Fighting was going on over there and every
day the thunder of war reached us as regularly as the sounds of labour in
the busy season.
One day a "hedgehopper", as we used to call those old biplanes, came
shooting over the mountains with a kind of panic-stricken rattle and dropped
like a stone into the lap of the Kodor Valley, then flew on almost at ground
level all the way to the sea. With every fibre in my body I felt the sheer
human terror of the pilot who had skimmed over the ridge, evidently to get
away from a German fighter. The plane's shadow swept across the field quite
near to me at unearthly speed, darkened the tobacco plantation, and a few
moments later was streaking low over the Kodor delta.
Once in a while a German plane would fly over at a great height. We
could tell it by the irregular throb of its engines, rather like the hum of
a malarial mosquito. Usually the anti-aircraft guns would open up when it
got near the town and we would see the shell bursts all round it, like
dandelion tops, but it would cruise along among them as though enchanted.
All through the war I never saw one of them shot down.
One day a villager came back from town, where he had gone to sell his
pigs, with the story that my brother was wounded, had been put in hospital
in Baku and was pining for mother to come and see him. The news startled us
all. Mother had to be told as soon as possible and it turned out that there
was no one else to send but me. I was only too willing.
They gave me a good feed of cheese and hominy grand dad lent me one of
his walking sticks and I set out on my Journey, although the day was near
its close and the sun only a tree's height above the horizon. I had only a
vague idea of the way there, or rather the whereabouts of the house where
mother was living, but I showed no interest in any explanations in case they
changed their minds about sending me.
I should have to go up through the forest and along a mountain ridge,
then make my way down to the road that was used for carting logs, and follow
it all the way to the village.
As soon as I entered the big forest of beeches, mingled with a
sprinkling of chestnuts and hornbeam, everything was cool, as though I had
dived into cold water and the summer day was far away behind me.
I breathed the clean, dank coolness of the forest, listened to the
exciting rustle of the green crowns overhead and made good speed along the
path. The deeper I went into the forest the more persistently and cheerfully
my stick tapped on the springy, rootwoven earth.
I knew that bears sometimes came up here at this time of the year. They
liked the bilberries that grew on the slopes and along the path.
At any other time I should have been frightened, but now I was spurred
on by heroic dreams and a vague anxiety about my brother. My feet seemed to
have wings and I mounted the slopes with ease, thrilling with the importance
of my mission and, above all, the realisation that I was needed. Although my
thoughts were occupied with these exalted feelings, I still had time to
admire the beauty of the mighty dark-silver trunks of the beeches, the
unexpectedly appealing glades with their bright feathery grass the inviting
roots of the big trees covered with the scaly leaves of last year. I would
have liked to lie down in those leaves with my head resting on the great
mossy roots. Sometimes through a gap in the trees I saw a misty green valley
with the sea poised at the end of it between earth and sky, like a mirage.
It was evening.
All of a sudden two girls appeared round a bend, looking frightened and
joyful at the same time. I knew them. They were from our village, but now
there was something strange about them. They were not quite their usual
selves. They spoke very quietly, in almost guilty tones, their heads
lowered. There was something of the woods, something shy and subtle about
them. One had her shoes in a bag and now she stood with one long bare leg
awkwardly scratching the other. I guessed she was trying to conceal at least
one of her legs.
Gradually their embarrassment communicated itself to me. I didn't know
what to say and was glad to bid them good-bye. They said good-bye, too, and
went on quietly, almost furtive in their attitude to the forest.
Presently I saw among the dark trees ahead a reddish-yellow road that
from a distance looked like a mountain torrent. Glad at the thought of
having a smooth road to walk on, I set off at a run down the steep path,
braking with my stick to stop myself plunging into the gloomy rhododendron
bushes.
I almost rolled out on to the road. I was sweating and my legs were
trembling from the strain, but the smell of petrol fumes and warm,
day-wearied roadside dust only increased my excitement. This was the smell
of the city that I had known since childhood. I must have been missing town
and my own home badly and, although it was even further from here to our
house in town than from the little village in the mountains, this woodland
road seemed to lead there.
I walked along it, trying to make out tyre-tracks in the dusk, and was
overjoyed when I spotted any particularly heavy marks. As I went on, the
road gradually grew lighter because a huge reddish moon was rising above the
jagged line of the forest.
At night in the mountains we used to spend a lot of time gazing at the
moon. I had been told you could see a goat-herd and a herd of white goats on
it, but I had never been able to spot them. Evidently you had to have seen
that goat-herd in early childhood. Whenever I watched the cold orb of the
moon I saw the outlines of rocky mountains and was overcome by a kind of
sweet sadness, perhaps because they were so terribly far away and yet so
much like our own mountains.
Now the moon looked like a big round of smoked mountain cheese. How I
would have relished a bite of that pungent smoky cheese, and some steaming
hominy to go with it!
I quickened my pace. The road was bordered on both sides with low alder
thickets, broken here and there by a maize field or a tobacco plantation. It
was very quiet- only the tapping of my stick enlivened the stillness.
Peasant houses with clean little yards and the bright light of fires showing
cosily through half-open kitchen doors began to appear.
I listened eagerly to the faint sounds of voices, which suddenly became
quite distinct.
"Let the dog out," came a man's voice, and a kitchen door flew open and
a dog ran out barking in my direction. I hurried on and, looking back over
my shoulder, noticed in the red rectangle of the open door the dark figure
of a girl standing very still and staring into the darkness.
Frightened by the dogs, I now tried to pass the houses as quietly as
possible.
At length I found myself on a broad green with a large walnut tree in
the middle and benches nailed round its trunk.
With its collective farm management office, village shop and barn this
must have been a noisy, busy place in the daytime, but now everything looked
desolate and deserted and by the light of the moon, rather eerie.
The house I was making for was situated not far from the farm
management office. I knew that after the green I had to take a path to the
left of the road, but there was more than one path leading off to the left
and I couldn't remember which would take me to my destination.
I halted doubtfully at a path that ran off into some hazel-nut
thickets. Was this the one? I could not remember any thickets like these. Or
perhaps there had been some? One minute I thought I saw many familiar
signs--a bend in the path, the ditch dividing it from the road, even the
hazel-nut thickets; but then I looked again and they all seemed different,
the wrong ones, and the path itself looked strange and hostile.
I stood shifting from one foot to another, listening to the buzzing of
the cicadas, staring at the enchantedly still bushes and at the moon, now
high in the sky and dazzling as a mirror.
All of a sudden something black and glossy bounced on to the path and
ran towards me. Before I could move, a large dog was greedily sniffing me
all over, pushing its moist, snuffling nose against my legs.
A few seconds later a man appeared with a small axe over his shoulder.
He called the dog off and I realised why it had been in such a hurry to
smell me; knowing its master, it had been afraid it would not have time. The
dog bounded away, circled round us, whining with the desire to please its
master, then froze by one of the bushes, sniffing at a trace left by some
other animal.
The man had a bridle round his waist and was evidently looking for his
horse. He came up to me and peered at me in surprise.
"Who do you belong to? What are you doing here?" he asked crossly
because he could not recognise me.
I said I was looking for Uncle Meksut's house.
"What do you want him for?" he asked, now exulting in his surprise.
I realised that healthy peasant curiosity was invincible, and told the
whole story.
While doing so, I kept a wary eye on the dog. Its master shook his
head, clicked his tongue and surveyed me sadly, as though regretting that I