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broken and the opening was wide enough to climb through.
There was a store-keeper who lived on the premises and in addition to
his other duties performed that of watchman. We had been at war with him for
many years because we liked to use the school yard for football and he tried
to keep us out.
He was, unfortunately, a hale and hearty old man.
As soon as it grew properly dark we climbed into the school yard and
crept over to the locked door. It showed up faintly in the dim light from
the street and the black hole left by the missing pane looked menacing. From
the street came the voices of our lads. They sounded remote, like distant
echoes of a peaceful life that we had left irrevocably behind us. A large
puddle glistened oilily just in front of the door. I stepped round it
carefully and looked in through the hole.
"In you go," said Yura, and I climbed in.
With one hand I found a hold on the wall and with the other gripped the
door handle, pulled my legs up and pushed them through the hole, trying to
feel the floor inside with my feet. In this position of moral and physical
suspense I dangled for a time, wiggling my toes and slipping gradually until
I felt the floor and was able to pull the upper part of my body inside.
Overhanging the corridor was the first flight of the stairs leading to
the attic. We had to go along the corridor, then turn down another corridor
at the end of which was the cafeteria.
Yura climbed in quickly after me and we advanced along the corridor,
stopping every now and then and listening to the eerie silence of the locked
classrooms and the dark deserted school.
My heart beat so hard that with every step I had to overcome its
recoil. When we passed a window my friend's stern profile would appear in
the darkness and I would feel less frightened. I have forgotten to say that
for some reason I was wearing a white shirt. More suitable for a ghost than
a burglar, it loomed a ghastly white in the darkness, as though I were
dressed in my own fear. I tried not to look at it to keep my anxiety at bay.
We reached the door of the cafeteria. A faint ray of light shone
through the crack. Yura pressed on the door; the crack widened and he put
his eye to it.
He kept his eye to that crack for a long time, as though trying to get
a glimpse of the night life of the sausages or the other inhabitants of the
cafeteria. Finally he turned a more cheerful face towards me and signalled
me to look through the crack as well, as if offering me a portion of good
cheer before engaging in the most dangerous part of our enterprise. I peeped
in and again saw our sausages. They were still in the same place, but now,
covered with a piece of cheesecloth, they looked even more tempting.
Yura took a pair of pincers that we had obtained beforehand and set to
work on the pad lock. It was a matter of pulling out one of the rings to
which the lock was attached. But this was not so easy.
Excited by the sight of the sausages, he began to hurry and the pincers
slipped off the ring several times with a rather loud clank.
And suddenly I heard quite distinctly the sound of footsteps on the
floor above us. Whoever it was walked on for a few more steps, and then
stopped, as if listening.
"Let's run for it!" I whispered in panic. but at once felt his fingers
gripping my forearm.
We stood stiff and silent in the long stillness of the corridor.
"You imagined it," Yura whispered at last.
I shook my head. We stiffened again.
I don't know how long we stood like this. In the end Yura turned back
to the door, as though comparing the degree of risk with the degree of
temptation. He listened again peeped through the crack, listened, and then
set about the lock in real earnest.
And suddenly those footsteps came again! Once more Yura's hand,
forestalling my reflex of desertion, gripped my arm.
But the footsteps did not stop. Now they were clearly approaching down
the stairs. They hesitated for a moment and suddenly a beam of light,
reaching us sooner than the click of the switch descended, from the upper
floor like the blast of an explosion and the footsteps started again.
Yura's hand relaxed its grip on my arm. The wild and unerring horse of
fear carried me off and threw me out of the school building. I didn't stop
for a second at the hole in the door. I shot straight through it and opened
my eyes when I landed in the puddle. Only when I had scrambled over the
fence did I notice that Yura was not with me. I did not know what to think.
Surely the watchman hadn't caught him? If he had, why hadn't I heard
anything?
I observed the school through the fence, waiting for a flashing of
lights and buzzing of angry little alarm bells, and then for the militia to
arrive... But time passed and all was quiet and I began to notice how dirty
my white shirt was. I should be in trouble for that at home and would have
to slip in quietly, throw the shirt in with the dirty linen and put on
something else.
Lost in these depressing thoughts, I noticed Yura only when he swung
himself over the fence and landed beside me.
What had happened? Apparently, when we were running away from the
watchman, he had sensed that we should not be able to get out of the
building together and had had the presence of mind to run up the attic
staircase and wait there for the danger to pass. And he had thought of that
in the few seconds while we were running away!
I could never have thought of such a thing so quickly. I had darted
like an animal back through the hole I had come in by, but Yura... Well,
that was what he was like, my old friend Yura Stavrakidi.
Reading over what I have written I recall that according to the best
literary formulas one should also say a few words about shortcomings of
one's hero. They were, of course insignificant and did nothing to darken his
shining aspect, they merely shaded it in a little. The existence of such
defects--only small ones, I must repeat--should bring him nearer to us, make
him more human and even, perhaps, evoke an understanding smile. People are
only human, after all.
I must admit that Yura liked a fight. In those days we all liked
fighting, but Yura for quite natural reasons was particularly fond of this
pastime.
He would fight to defend his own honour, or Greek honour, or simply
that of the weak and defenceless, or the honour of painters, quite often the
honour of our street and, less often, that of our class. And sometimes he
would fight for no particular reason, when the two sides merely wanted to
measure their strength so that they could afterwards jump to a higher branch
of the genealogical tree of chivalry, or yield their own branch, as the case
might be.
"I want to fight him," Yura would say to me quietly, nodding at some
boy or other. Usually this was a newcomer who had only just appeared at our
school or in the neighbourhood of our street. Or sometimes this was one of
our old acquaintances who had suddenly grown much bigger or filled out
during the summer and now required--though he might not wish it himself--a
reassessment of his potential.
So Yura would nod in his direction and there was such ardour and secret
happiness in his face that I could not help admiring him. Such probably is
the admiration of the gardener who finds a prematurely ripened fruit in his
orchard and carefully bends the branch to examine it, or perhaps of a Don
Juan viewing from afar a new beloved with a similar significant tenderness.
Usually the boy would sooner or later become aware of Yura's secret
passion and a shy embarrassment would appear in his movements that would
eventually break out into arrogance.
"He feels it too," Yura would say, nodding joyfully in his direction
and his eyes would glow with the goat-like cunning of a little satyr.
One day Yura and I were standing at the entrance to what was at the
time I am writing of our best cinema, the Apsny. There was some fabulous
film on and the street around us was surging with youngsters. Many were
looking for tickets and would peer into our eyes, trying to spot someone who
had bought a ticket for the purpose of reselling it.
How pleasant it was to be able to stand in the crowd before the show
began and feel the ticket in your pocket, knowing there were so many
yearning to get one but you had yours so you had nothing to fear. And when
the doors opened you would also be able to stroll round the foyer,
inspecting for the hundredth time the delightful daubs of a local artist on
themes from Pushkin's fairy-tales, relishing the knowledge that these little
pleasures were all for free and the main pleasure was yet to come. And after
that, when they let you into the hall, which would be positively steaming
from the previous show and redolent of the pleasure that had just been
experienced by others and was still in store for you, there would be the
newsreel, a feeble one perhaps but also in the nature of a free gift with
the real pleasure yet to come, and perhaps the sweetest thing in life was to
keep putting it off and putting it off since happiness, once begun, could
not be stretched for ever, because it might break, like the film itself.
And this was the state of blissful suspense in which I was standing
when a boy came up to Yura.
"Got a ticket?"
Yura looked at the lad, such a puny, such a ticket-less little fellow,
and paused as if to let him feel the full depth of his nothingness, and
said, "Yes, I have, but I'm going myself."
"I see you're trying to be funny," the boy retorted cheekily,
emboldened by disappointment.
"Yes, I was," Yura agreed. He seemed unable to believe his ears, unable
to comprehend that from this depth of nothingness anyone could possibly
answer him back, and was now testing his own senses to see if he had not
perhaps imagined this impudent voice.
"But it didn't come off, did it?" the boy said and with a vengeful nod
turned to go away.
"Wait a minute," Yura started forward.
The boy halted fearlessly.
"So I'm a speculator, am I?" Yura asked unexpectedly and, seizing him
by the lapels of his jacket, shook him. "I'm a speculator, am I?" he
repeated.
I felt a sour taste in my mouth. This was my body's as yet unconscious
reaction to what was dishonourable and unfair.
I sensed that Yura wanted to fight the boy, but that would have been
beyond all borings. The boy obviously did not want to fight, he was
obviously the weaker of the two, he had not said that Yura was a speculator,
and he wasn't even a ginger-head.
"So I'm a speculator, am I?" Yura repeated, and tried to shake him into
fighting form.
"I didn't say that," the boy's voice began to quaver, and he looked
round in search of friends or protectors.
"Yes, you did!" Yura shook him again, striving to elicit some further
insult, so that he could let fly. But the boy would not be provoked and this
annoyed Yura even more because he might have to take the final step himself.
And it looked as if he was going to.
But at that moment half a dozen Greek boys appeared from nowhere and
surrounded us, chanting in one voice, "Aren't you ashamed, Greek? ...
Kendrepeso..." came the familiar words out of the din.
Apparently they knew both Yura and the other boy well and Yura for some
reason had to reckon with them. And this boy, so obviously Russian in
appearance, suddenly, as if from sheer fright, also began to babble in Greek
so fluently that even Yura was confused. Apparently the boy lived in the
same yard as these lads.
They went on like this for some time, raising and lowering their
voices, going over from Russian to Greek and back to Russian. Yura
maintained that although the boy had not actually called him a speculator,
he had asked how much he would sell his ticket for, which obviously meant
... and so on.
"I didn't say that. It's not true," the boy argued, boldly now that he
was surrounded by his Greek friends.
"Aren't you ashamed, Greek?" again the Greeks appealed to Yura's
conscience in their own language.
"Ask him, if you don't believe me," Yura said, and turned towards me.
I had been expecting this. I hated him at that moment. I would have
liked to tread on his handsome, lying face, but he was my friend and by some
ancient law of comradeship, fellow-countrymanship, kinship or whatever, I
was bound to defend him, while another, stronger but for some reason
illegitimate feeling prompted me to take the side of the other boy.
Everyone looked at me, confident that I would take Yura's side, if only
because he had appealed to me. But for the first second I hesitated and by
so doing at once roused intense curiosity, because if I was his friend and
had not leapt to his defence I must be going to say something unusual or
perhaps even tell the whole truth.
They all stared at me in hushed expectation and I felt that every
moment of my silence was lifting me to intrepid heights in their eyes.
Indeed, I myself felt how high I was rising in my silence, how fruitful it
was in itself, and yet at the same time, knowing in advance that I should
fail them as soon as I opened my mouth, I waited for the moment when it
would be simply too dangerous to go any higher in view of the inevitable
subsequent fall.
"I didn't hear," I said, and acid spurted into my mouth as if I had
bitten into the crabbiest of all crab apples.
Both sides instantly lost interest in me and returned to their
argument, now relying only on their own forces. The bell rang.
We sat together watching the film. Sometimes from the corner of my eye
I caught a glimpse of my friend's stern face that was becoming more and more
estranged.
On the way home I tried to explain something, but he was unresponsive.
"Let's not start a jabber-jabber conference," he said as we reached his
house and he turned into the courtyard.
That was the beginning of the end of our friendship. We did not
quarrel. We simply lost our common aim. Gradually we left the childhood we
had shared and entered a youth that we could not share because youth was the
beginning of specialisation of the soul. And in purely physical terms,
through circumstances beyond our control we lost touch with each other.
It was only many years later that we met again in our town on the upper
floor of the off-shore restaurant Amra I had dropped in for a cup of coffee.
He was sitting with a group of local lads. We recognised each other from a
distance and he rose, smiling broadly, from his table.
I sat down with him and, as custom required, we recalled our schooldays
and old friends.
Yura was now a naval officer, serving somewhere up north. He was on a
long leave. He had come here for a holiday and a good time and was then
going to spend the rest of his leave in Kazakhstan, where his parents were
now living.
I reminded him of his running along the beam and confessed that this
feat of his had remained for me a great and never-to-be-fulfilled ambition.
"I could never have walked it," Yura said, with a shrug.
"Couldn't you?"
"I was far too scared to take it slowly," he said, and a ghost of the
old fearlessness appeared in his eye for a moment.
"You don't mean it!" I exclaimed, feeling that his confession imposed
some sort of obligation on me, though I did not know yet what it was.
"Do you know why I used to make it sway?" he asked and, without waiting
for my answer, replied, "I thought a steady rolling would be better than
sudden plunges... Like at sea," he added, consoling me with a more universal
application of his discovery.
No, I had no regrets about my adolescent enthusiasm for his feat. I
merely felt that courage, like cowardice, too, probably, was of a more
complex nature than I had previously suspected, and much of what I had once
believed to be clearly solved after all had probably not been solved so
exactly.
It made me sad. Scraps of half-formed thoughts prevented me from
enjoying myself, as exams still waiting to be taken had done when I was a
student.
I wanted to go home at once and form a final opinion at least about
something. But I had to stay because the waitress arrived with what had been
ordered. She had brought a bottle of brandy and a skillfully cut water
melon, which as soon as the plate was on the table opened out trickling with
juice, like a huge lotus with blood-stained petals.
Yura's hand went out to the bottle. No, of course, I couldn't leave.
--------
I have told the story of how in my childhood, when finding my way at
night to the house of a relative of ours, I fell into a freshly dug grave,
where I spent several hours in the company of a stray goat, until I and the
goat were rescued by a passing peasant. That was during the war.
Some time after this nocturnal adventure, we, that is, my mother,
sister and I, went to live in that very village. At first we stayed with my
mother's sister, then we found a room in another house and moved.
The house had been occupied before the war by three brothers. They were
all in the army. One of them had married before enlisting and now his young,
blooming and not too grief-stricken wife was all alone in the house.
Remembering her now, I am drawn to the conclusion that a grass widow is
called a grass widow because she catches fire as easily as dry grass.
While we were living there, one of the brothers came home. Yes, the one
that was married. He came home a little too quietly somehow. We noticed him
in the kitchen one morning. He was sitting in front of the fire roasting a
corncob on a spit, as though to remind himself of his pre-war childhood.
There was something about him that made one think he ought not to have come
home just yet. Or perhaps, he ought not to have married quite so soon;
because I think it was missing his wife so badly that brought him home too
early.
He pottered about in the garden with a kind of desperate eagerness for
a week or so, then he was arrested; and shortly afterwards we heard that he
was a deserter. He was arrested just as quietly as he had arrived.
We gradually settled down in the new place. My sister obtained work at
the local collective farm as a time-keeper; we were allotted a patch of
land, on which we grew melons and maize. We also grew pumpkins on it, and
cucumbers and tomatoes, too. In those days we used to grow everything.
Well, it so happened that not far from our house there lived the very
man whose grave I had fallen into. Incidentally, people in the village used
to say that everyone had fallen into that grave except the man it was meant
for. The story turned out to be long and complex. The grave's future owner,
if one may so describe him, old Shchaaban Larba, nicknamed Crooked Arm, had
been in hospital with either appendicitis or rupture. (In Russian, it would
probably be more correct to call him Withered Arm, but Crooked Arm
corresponds more closely to the spirit and, hence, the meaning of the
nickname.) Well, as I was saying, Crooked Arm had had an operation, and he
was still in hospital, calmly recovering his health, when someone telephoned
from the hospital to our village Soviet to say that the patient had died and
would have to be collected and taken home immediately because he had been
lying dead for more than a day already.
None of the sick man's relatives had been visiting the hospital just
then because he had been about to be discharged.
True, a fellow villager, Mustafa, had been in town at the time on
business of his own and had, incidentally, been asked to call at the
hospital and find out why Crooked Arm was still there, and whether he had
not perhaps decided to have his crooked arm put right as well as the
appendicitis or rupture. And then, all of a sudden, such unexpected news.
The dead man's relatives, as our customs demand, sent out messengers of
woe to the neighbouring villages, a large army cape was stretched across the
yard of his house to make a shelter where the funeral feast would be held,
and a grave was dug in the cemetery.
The collective farm sent its one and only lorry to bring the dead man
home because private transport was hard to come by in wartime. In short, the
whole thing was arranged in proper style, just as it should be. Yes,
everything was as it should be, except the dead man himself, Shchaaban
Larba, who, so it was said, had never given anyone any peace while he was
alive, and after death became quite unmanageable.
The day after the sorrowful news the lorry arrived back in the village
with the body of the dead man, who turned out to be alive.
Crooked Arm, they say, walked into the yard of his house gently
supported by Mustafa and swearing loudly. His indignation was due not to the
news of his death and the preparations for his funeral but to something he
noticed at once on glancing at the shelter made with the army cape, for
which two apple trees had been stripped of their branches. Still swearing,
Crooked Arm demonstrated on the spot how the cape could have been hung
without touching the trees.
After that, they say, he made the round of his guests shaking hands
with each and staring keenly into their eyes to discover what impression had
been caused by the news of his death and simultaneous, quite unexpected,
resurrection.
Having done this, they say, he raised that arm of his which had been
withering for twenty years but still had not withered away, and, shading his
eyes with his hand, peered rudely at the women who had been hired to weep
for him as though he didn't know what they were there for.
"What do you want?" he rasped.
They looked embarrassed. "Oh, nothing special. We just came to weep for
you."
"Well, get on with it then," Crooked Arm is said to have replied, and
put his hand to his ear to listen to the weeping. But at this point someone
intervened and led the weepers away.
When he saw the gifts that his relatives had brought, Crooked Arm
pondered for a moment. It is the custom among my people to hold any kind of
funeral feast on such a grand scale that, were it all done at the expense of
the dead man's family, its surviving members would have no alternative but
to lie down and die as well.
So, all the relatives and neighbours help out. Some bring wine, some
bring roast chickens, some bring khachapuri, and someone may even bring a
calf. And it so happened this time that one of the relatives from the next
village had brought along a well fattened calf, which Crooked Arm took an
immediate liking to. Incidentally, they say that it was from this relative
that the measurements had been taken for digging the grave, because he was
just about the same height as Crooked Arm. They say that when one of the
lads who had been told to dig the grave came up to him with a measuring
string, this relative expressed some displeasure and argued that there were
other people more suitable for the purpose, that he was probably a little
taller than Crooked Arm and Crooked Arm was more stocky.
So saying, he tried to get away from the measuring string, but the lad
would not let him get away. Like all grave-diggers, this lad was given to
joking. He said that Crooked Arm's stockiness made no difference now, and
that if the worst came to the worst and Crooked Arm was not the right size,
they would have his relative in mind.
The relative, they say, sniggered half-heartedly at these jokes, but
evidently took offence, because he withdrew to the company of the people
from his own village and stood with them, glancing sulkily at his calf,
which was tethered to the fence.
At the sight of all these gifts Crooked Arm announced that it was too
early yet to rejoice, that he still felt very ill, and that he had been
discharged only so that he should not die in hospital because doctors were
fined for that, just as collective farmers were fined for spoiled produce.
He then went straight to bed and gave instructions that the grave should on
no account be filled in, but kept open in readiness. The relatives, it is
said, dispersed somewhat unwillingly, the one who had brought the calf being
particularly displeased. But Crooked Arm calmed him with assurances that he
would not have long to wait, so the calf would not waste away even if it was
not let out of the yard.
Crooked Arm stayed in bed for about a week. After a couple of days he
began to be pestered by the curious, because by that time the rumour had
spread that Crooked Arm, having died in the hospital, had come to life on
the way home and arrived there for his own funeral. Another rumour had it
that he had not died at all but had fallen into a deep sleep from which the
doctors had been unable to awake him, but the journey back had been so bumpy
that he had woken up of his own accord.
At first Crooked Arm received the visitors, particularly while they
continued to bring him all kinds of delicacies designed to tempt the palate
of a man who had recently been dead and was still not quite alive again. But
eventually he grew tired of this, and in any case the chairman of the farm
said there was work to be done. So, when he heard the gate creak, he would
run out on the veranda and bellow in his loud voice, "Back! Keep back, you
parasites! I'll set the dog on you!"
However, the rumours of his resurrection grew and multiplied. It must
have been quite a year later when I heard in one of the neighbouring
villages that Crooked Arm had come to life not on the way home from
hospital, but actually in his grave, several days after burial. The noise he
had been making was heard by a boy who had been looking for his goat one
evening in the cemetery. So the villagers had to go and dig him out. If he
had not possessed such a powerful voice, they said, he would have died of
hunger, or even of thirst, because the site that had been chosen for his
grave was a good one--well drained.
So it came about that Crooked Arm survived or, at least, prevented his
own funeral, while retaining for himself a grave in complete readiness.
When they first saw Crooked Arm on his return from hospital, the people
of the village decided that it was the secretary of the village Soviet who
had played a joke on them, because he was the man who had said he had talked
with the hospital or someone who had pretended to be the hospital. But the
secretary declared that he would never dream of playing such a joke with a
war on.
Everyone believed him, because to joke like that in wartime would have
been just a bit too stupid. Eventually, it was agreed that there had been
some sort of mix-up at the hospital, that another old man had died, perhaps
even one of Crooked Arm's namesakes, for in Abkhazia we have any number of
people of the very same name.
I heard Crooked Arm's voice the first day we started living with our
grass widow, even before I had met him face to face. At exactly midday, when
he was coming home for dinner from work on the farm, he would at a distance
of some three hundred meters from his house start shouting to his wife,
scolding her and inquiring furiously if the hominy was ready.
The old woman would respond with equally frantic yells and their voices
with no loss of power or clarity would gradually come together, overreach
each other and at last fall silent. After a time the old woman's voice would
shoot up triumphantly from the silence but Crooked Arm's would not respond.
Later on, when I began visiting their house, I realised that the old man
kept quiet at this stage for the simple reason that his mouth was occupied
with eating; he ate as frantically as he cursed, so he could not possibly
eat and curse at the same time.
Coming home from work in the evening, he would inquire in the same tone
of voice about his horse or his grandson Yashka and again about the hominy
for supper.
Later on, I made friends with this Yashka, who was just as loud-voiced
as his grandfather but, unlike him, a good-natured lounger. Crooked Arm
usually took him to school on the back of his horse, and would curse all the
way there over having to waste his precious time on this dunderhead. Yashka
would sit in silence behind his grandfather, holding on to his belt and
gazing around with a sheepish grin on his face.
If his grandfather was away, he would be taken to school by his
grandmother on the same horse, and he would sit behind her in the same way,
except that he did not let her ride right up to the school in case the boys
made fun of him.
He and I attended school in different shifts. On my way home from
school I would meet them about halfway and Yashka would screw his head round
and stare wistfully after me, thereby touching off a fresh explosion of fury
from his grandfather. Yashka had to be taken to school because it was three
kilometres from his home and Yashka was so absentminded that he sometimes
forgot where he was going and took the wrong road.
In the early days, on meeting me in the street, Crooked Arm would look
at me shading his eyes with his hand, and ask:
"Who do you belong to?"
"I am the son of so-and-so," I would answer politely and give the name
of my mother, whom he had known for many years.
"Who's she?" he would thunder, and scrutinise me even more thoroughly
from under his crooked palm.
"She is Uncle Meksut's wife's sister," I would explain, though I
realised he was pretending.
"So you're one of those parasites from town?" he would say with a nod
in the direction of our house.
"Yes," I would reply, confirming that we lived there and at the same
time reluctantly acknowledging our role as parasites.
He would stand before me, peering at me in astonishment with his gimlet
eyes, a rather short, stocky man with a massive neck as red as a cock's
comb. And while he stood there, peering at me in surprise, as though to
achieve a complete mental picture of me, he would at the same time be
listening to something else, to something that was taking place on the other
side of the fence, in the maize on his allotment, as though he could tell by
whispers, by scuffling, by sounds audible to his ears alone exactly what was
happening on his allotment, in his yard and perhaps even inside the house
itself.
"So it was you who fell into my grave?" he would ask suddenly,
listening as usual to what was happening on his allotment and already
sensing something amiss that made him snort with dissatisfaction.
"Yes," I would reply, observing him with secret misgiving, because I
felt he was packed with some kind of explosive force.
"And what did you think of it down there?" he would ask still with one
ear to the fence, as it were, and becoming more and more agitated over what
was happening on the other side of it, and even beginning to mutter to
himself, "Is that old woman dead, or what? Curse her eyes... She'll ruin me
one of these days, the old fool..."
"Very nice," I would reply, trying to display my gratitude for the
hospitality. After all, it was his grave.
"It's a good, dry spot," he would agree, almost whining with
indignation at what was happening on his allotment; and all of a sudden he
would let fly and shout to his old woman, leaping straight to his top note:
"Hey! There's something grunting in the kitchen garden! Blast your
ears--it's the pigs, the pigs!"
"May I bury them with you in that grave of yours! You see pigs
everywhere!" the old woman would retort at once.
"But I can hear them--they're munching and grunting, munching and
grunting!" he would shout, forgetting all about me, and, as usual, their
voices overlapped and he seemed to snatch the end of her shout and haul
himself along by it towards the house, tossing her his own raging voice as
he went. By and by we grew accustomed to his voice and stopped paying much
attention to it, and when he was away for a few days and all was quiet and
still, it seemed strange, as though something was missing and our ears were
full of an empty roar.
His wife, a tall old woman, taller than he, and unbelievably thin,
would sometimes, when he was not at home, come round for a chat with my
mother. She would occasionally bring a cheese or a bowl of maize flour or a
fragrant lump of meat that had been smoked over an outdoor fire. With a shy
little laugh she would ask us to hide away what she had brought and, for
goodness sake, never say thank you, because that bawling husband of hers
must not know anything about it.
She and my mother would talk for hours and Crooked Arm's wife would
smoke all the time, making herself cigarette after cigarette. Suddenly
Crooked Arm's voice would be heard. He would shout something to her in the
direction of their house and she would prick up her ears at the sound of his
voice and shake with silent laughter, as though she were afraid he would
hear her laughing at him for shouting in the wrong direction.
"What do you want now--I'm over here!" she would shout in the end.
"Aha, idling again! Birds of a feather! You're nothing but a gang of
chatterboxes!" he would bawl, after a brief pause during which he must have
been struck dumb with indignation at her treachery.
One day he rode up to our gate and shouted to me to bring out a sack.
Grumbling loudly about parasites who had to have everything chewed and put
in their mouths for them to swallow, he filled my sack half full of flour
and, still fuming because he was giving away his own maize that he had had
to take to the mill on his own horse, he tied his sack to the saddle again
and rode away, bawling over his shoulder that I must be careful not to tell
that woman anything about the flour because he never had any peace from her
shrieking as it was.
Time went by and Old Crooked Arm showed no signs of dying. The longer
he delayed his death, the more the calf flourished and grew fat; the more
the calf flourished and grew fat, the sadder its former owner became. In the
end he sent a man to Crooked Arm to drop a hint about the calf. Thank the
Lord Crooked Arm was still alive, the message ran, but now it would be only
right to return the calf, because he had not made Crooked Arm a present of
it; he had only brought it to the funeral as a good kinsman should.
"Brought an egg and wants to go home with a chicken," Crooked Arm is
said to have responded. After this, they say he thought for a moment and
added: "Tell him that if I die soon he can come to the funeral without any
offering at all and if he dies I'll come to his house like a good kinsman
and bring a calf from his calf."
Crooked Arm's relative, on learning of these terms, is said to have
taken offence and told the messenger to tell Crooked Arm without any hints
this time that he did not want any calf from his calf, and certainly not
when he himself was dead; he wanted his own calf, while he was still alive,
the calf which he had brought to the funeral as an offering as a good
kinsman should. Since Crooked Arm still had not died it was time to return
the calf to its proper owner. Moreover, he gave his word that in spite of
the fact that while he was at Crooked Arm's house he had suffered the
humiliation of being measured with a bit of string, he would nevertheless,
if Crooked Arm really did die, bring the calf back again.
"This man will drive me to the grave with that calf of his," is what
Crooked Arm is supposed to have said on hearing these explanations. "Tell
him," he added, "that he has not long to wait now, so it's not worth
tormenting the wretched animal."
A few days after this conversation Crooked Arm transplanted from his
allotment to his grave two young peach trees. Possibly he did this to revive
the idea of his imminent doom. Yashka and I helped him. But apparently the
two young peach trees were not enough for him. Some days later he went to
the farm plantation at night, dug up a small tung tree and planted it
between the two peach trees. Everyone soon got to know about this. The
members of the farm chuckled among themselves and said that Crooked Arm
wanted to poison the dead with the tung fruit. No one attached much
importance to the transplanting because no one before or since had ever
stolen a tung tree for the simple reason that no peasant farmer had any use
for one, the fruit of the tung being deadly poisonous and consequently
rather dangerous.
The former owner of the calf also fell silent. Either he became
convinced that Crooked Arm was doomed after having planted a tung tree on
his grave, or else, fearing the old man's tongue, which was no less venomous
than the tung fruit, he had decided to leave him in peace.
Incidentally, legend has it that it was Crooked Arm's tongue in his
young days that gave him his crooked arm. It happened in the following
manner.
They say that after some feast or other, the local prince was sitting
surrounded by numerous guests in his host's courtyard. The prince was eating
peaches, which he peeled with a small penknife attached to a silver chain.
This penknife on its silver chain, by the way, has nothing to do with the
subsequent events, but all narrators of this tale have mentioned this
penknife, never failing to add that it was attached to a silver chain. In
retelling the incident once again I should have liked to avoid that penknife
on its silver chain, but for some reason I feel that I must mention it, that
it contains some element of truth without which something will be
lost--though I don't know what.
Anyway, the prince was eating peaches and complacently recalling
amorous joys. In the end, so they say, he surveyed the host's courtyard and
remarked with a sigh, "If I were to assemble all the women I have had in my
time, this yard wouldn't hold them."
But Crooked Arm, they say, even in those days, despite his youth, never
allowed anyone to be complacent for long. He popped up from somewhere and
said, "I wonder how many she-asses there would be braying in this yard?"
This somewhat elderly prince was a great connoisseur of feminine
beauty, added to which, they say, he was modestly proud of his ability to
strip a fruit of its skin without once breaking the ribbon of peel. This
skill never deserted him, not even after a night's hard drinking. No matter
how closely he was watched, or how hard people tried to distract him, he
never made a slip. Sometimes they would try to catch him out with a fruit of
extremely odd and ugly shape, but he would examine it from all angles, take
out his little penknife on its silver chain and unerringly set it to work
along the only correct path.
Having thus produced a spiral wreath of peel, he would usually hold it
up before the assembled company. And if there was a pretty girl among them
he would call her over and hang the ring of peel over her ear.
It seems to me that Crooked Arm must have been irritated by the
Prince's skill. I think he must have been observing him for a long time and
was sure that sooner or later the ribbon of peel would break. He may
actually have placed great hopes in one particular peach, but the prince
had, as usual, dealt with it quite successfully and even started boasting
about his women. You must agree there was enough to make Crooked Arm
explode, particularly as a young man.
They say that after Crooked Arm's unexpected remark the prince turned
purple and stared speechlessly at him with his eyes popping out, still
holding in his right hand the peeled and oozing peach, and in his left, the
penknife on its silver chain.
Everyone was struck dumb with horror, but the prince continued to stare
unblinkingly at Crooked Arm while the hand that was holding the peach moved
restlessly in the air as though sensing how inappropriate it was to be
holding a peach at that moment, not to mention the difficulty of drawing a
pistol while holding a peach in one's hand, particularly a peeled one. They
say his hand even lowered to the ground to get rid of the peach, but at the
last moment somehow could not bring itself to do such a thing. After all the
peach had been skinned and a well brought-up princely hand must have felt
that a skinned peach simply could not be placed on the ground. And so it
rose again, this hand, and for an agonising second groped in the air for an
invisible plate, feeling that there must be someone who would think of
providing a plate, but everyone was paralysed with fear and no one had the
presence of mind to help the prince discard this, by now indecently naked
peach. And at this point, they say, Crooked Arm himself came to the prince's
aid.
"Pop it in your mouth!" he suggested.
The guests had no time to recover from this fresh impertinence before
they found themselves witnessing the inexplicable self-abasement of the
prince, who is said to have begun in shameful haste to push the juicy,
dripping peach into his mouth, while continuing to stare at Crooked Arm with
hate-filled eyes. At last, having somehow coped with the peach, he reached
for his pistol. Still gazing at Crooked Arm with those bulging, hate-filled
eyes, he fumbled speechlessly in the region of his belt but, owing to his
extreme agitation, or, as others infer more correctly, because his hands
were sticky with peach juice, he just could not unbutton his holster.
Perhaps someone would yet have come to his senses, perhaps someone
might have managed to seize the prince's arm or, at least, hustle Crooked
Arm aside, making it impossible to shoot and perhaps dangerous for other
people, but then, they say, Shchaaban's voice rang out in the silence for
the last time. I don't mean in the sense that after this his voice never
rang out any more. Rather on the contrary, it became even louder and more
scornful. But in the sense that after this phrase he ceased to be just
Shchaaban and became Shchaaban Crooked Arm.
"I bet he doesn't take so long over the other thing," he is said to
have remarked, "judging by the way our Chegem she-asses..."
They say he did not finish his remark about the she-asses because the
old prince, at last, coped with his holster--a shot rang out, the women
shrieked and, when the smoke cleared, Crooked Arm was what fate had destined
him to be, that is, crooked-armed. Afterwards, when he was asked why after
the first insult he had gone on teasing the prince he would simply reply, "I
just couldn't stop."
Later on, however, when the prince went off with the Mensheviks and
Soviet power was finally and irrevocably established in our part of the
country, Crooked Arm began to assert that he had had an old score to settle
with the prince, perhaps even something to do with the days of partisan
warfare, and that this exchange had been merely a pretext for, or
consequence of, other more important things.
In short, despite the prince's bullet, Crooked Arm went on taking the
rise out of anyone and everyone and his jokes seemed to lose none of their
sting as the years went by.
When I was roaming round the village I would often see him on the
tobacco or tea plantation or weeding the maize. If he was in a good mood he
would simply play the fool and have everyone doubled up with laughter.
He had a knack of imitating the voices of people he knew and of animals
as well; and he was particularly good at crowing like a cock.
Sometimes he would jab his hoe into the ground, straighten his back,
look around and let out a mighty crow. The cocks in the neighbouring yards
would answer almost at once. Everyone would burst out laughing, and while
the nearest cock went on calling him he would resume his hoeing and mutter,
"A fat lot you know, you fool."
Down our way, like everywhere else probably, people believe that the
crowing of a cock has a special meaning, that it is almost an omen of the
owner's fate. Crooked Arm was debunking these rural clairvoyants. In spite
of his half-withered arm he certainly worked like the devil. Although when
sometimes there was a rumour that a new national loan was being floated, to
which contributions would be required, or when the remaining men in the
village were being mobilised for tree-felling, he would slip his left arm
into a clean red sling and go about like that for as long as he considered
necessary. I don't think this red sling was much help to him; it certainly
couldn't get him out of signing up for the loan. Nonetheless, it apparently
There was a store-keeper who lived on the premises and in addition to
his other duties performed that of watchman. We had been at war with him for
many years because we liked to use the school yard for football and he tried
to keep us out.
He was, unfortunately, a hale and hearty old man.
As soon as it grew properly dark we climbed into the school yard and
crept over to the locked door. It showed up faintly in the dim light from
the street and the black hole left by the missing pane looked menacing. From
the street came the voices of our lads. They sounded remote, like distant
echoes of a peaceful life that we had left irrevocably behind us. A large
puddle glistened oilily just in front of the door. I stepped round it
carefully and looked in through the hole.
"In you go," said Yura, and I climbed in.
With one hand I found a hold on the wall and with the other gripped the
door handle, pulled my legs up and pushed them through the hole, trying to
feel the floor inside with my feet. In this position of moral and physical
suspense I dangled for a time, wiggling my toes and slipping gradually until
I felt the floor and was able to pull the upper part of my body inside.
Overhanging the corridor was the first flight of the stairs leading to
the attic. We had to go along the corridor, then turn down another corridor
at the end of which was the cafeteria.
Yura climbed in quickly after me and we advanced along the corridor,
stopping every now and then and listening to the eerie silence of the locked
classrooms and the dark deserted school.
My heart beat so hard that with every step I had to overcome its
recoil. When we passed a window my friend's stern profile would appear in
the darkness and I would feel less frightened. I have forgotten to say that
for some reason I was wearing a white shirt. More suitable for a ghost than
a burglar, it loomed a ghastly white in the darkness, as though I were
dressed in my own fear. I tried not to look at it to keep my anxiety at bay.
We reached the door of the cafeteria. A faint ray of light shone
through the crack. Yura pressed on the door; the crack widened and he put
his eye to it.
He kept his eye to that crack for a long time, as though trying to get
a glimpse of the night life of the sausages or the other inhabitants of the
cafeteria. Finally he turned a more cheerful face towards me and signalled
me to look through the crack as well, as if offering me a portion of good
cheer before engaging in the most dangerous part of our enterprise. I peeped
in and again saw our sausages. They were still in the same place, but now,
covered with a piece of cheesecloth, they looked even more tempting.
Yura took a pair of pincers that we had obtained beforehand and set to
work on the pad lock. It was a matter of pulling out one of the rings to
which the lock was attached. But this was not so easy.
Excited by the sight of the sausages, he began to hurry and the pincers
slipped off the ring several times with a rather loud clank.
And suddenly I heard quite distinctly the sound of footsteps on the
floor above us. Whoever it was walked on for a few more steps, and then
stopped, as if listening.
"Let's run for it!" I whispered in panic. but at once felt his fingers
gripping my forearm.
We stood stiff and silent in the long stillness of the corridor.
"You imagined it," Yura whispered at last.
I shook my head. We stiffened again.
I don't know how long we stood like this. In the end Yura turned back
to the door, as though comparing the degree of risk with the degree of
temptation. He listened again peeped through the crack, listened, and then
set about the lock in real earnest.
And suddenly those footsteps came again! Once more Yura's hand,
forestalling my reflex of desertion, gripped my arm.
But the footsteps did not stop. Now they were clearly approaching down
the stairs. They hesitated for a moment and suddenly a beam of light,
reaching us sooner than the click of the switch descended, from the upper
floor like the blast of an explosion and the footsteps started again.
Yura's hand relaxed its grip on my arm. The wild and unerring horse of
fear carried me off and threw me out of the school building. I didn't stop
for a second at the hole in the door. I shot straight through it and opened
my eyes when I landed in the puddle. Only when I had scrambled over the
fence did I notice that Yura was not with me. I did not know what to think.
Surely the watchman hadn't caught him? If he had, why hadn't I heard
anything?
I observed the school through the fence, waiting for a flashing of
lights and buzzing of angry little alarm bells, and then for the militia to
arrive... But time passed and all was quiet and I began to notice how dirty
my white shirt was. I should be in trouble for that at home and would have
to slip in quietly, throw the shirt in with the dirty linen and put on
something else.
Lost in these depressing thoughts, I noticed Yura only when he swung
himself over the fence and landed beside me.
What had happened? Apparently, when we were running away from the
watchman, he had sensed that we should not be able to get out of the
building together and had had the presence of mind to run up the attic
staircase and wait there for the danger to pass. And he had thought of that
in the few seconds while we were running away!
I could never have thought of such a thing so quickly. I had darted
like an animal back through the hole I had come in by, but Yura... Well,
that was what he was like, my old friend Yura Stavrakidi.
Reading over what I have written I recall that according to the best
literary formulas one should also say a few words about shortcomings of
one's hero. They were, of course insignificant and did nothing to darken his
shining aspect, they merely shaded it in a little. The existence of such
defects--only small ones, I must repeat--should bring him nearer to us, make
him more human and even, perhaps, evoke an understanding smile. People are
only human, after all.
I must admit that Yura liked a fight. In those days we all liked
fighting, but Yura for quite natural reasons was particularly fond of this
pastime.
He would fight to defend his own honour, or Greek honour, or simply
that of the weak and defenceless, or the honour of painters, quite often the
honour of our street and, less often, that of our class. And sometimes he
would fight for no particular reason, when the two sides merely wanted to
measure their strength so that they could afterwards jump to a higher branch
of the genealogical tree of chivalry, or yield their own branch, as the case
might be.
"I want to fight him," Yura would say to me quietly, nodding at some
boy or other. Usually this was a newcomer who had only just appeared at our
school or in the neighbourhood of our street. Or sometimes this was one of
our old acquaintances who had suddenly grown much bigger or filled out
during the summer and now required--though he might not wish it himself--a
reassessment of his potential.
So Yura would nod in his direction and there was such ardour and secret
happiness in his face that I could not help admiring him. Such probably is
the admiration of the gardener who finds a prematurely ripened fruit in his
orchard and carefully bends the branch to examine it, or perhaps of a Don
Juan viewing from afar a new beloved with a similar significant tenderness.
Usually the boy would sooner or later become aware of Yura's secret
passion and a shy embarrassment would appear in his movements that would
eventually break out into arrogance.
"He feels it too," Yura would say, nodding joyfully in his direction
and his eyes would glow with the goat-like cunning of a little satyr.
One day Yura and I were standing at the entrance to what was at the
time I am writing of our best cinema, the Apsny. There was some fabulous
film on and the street around us was surging with youngsters. Many were
looking for tickets and would peer into our eyes, trying to spot someone who
had bought a ticket for the purpose of reselling it.
How pleasant it was to be able to stand in the crowd before the show
began and feel the ticket in your pocket, knowing there were so many
yearning to get one but you had yours so you had nothing to fear. And when
the doors opened you would also be able to stroll round the foyer,
inspecting for the hundredth time the delightful daubs of a local artist on
themes from Pushkin's fairy-tales, relishing the knowledge that these little
pleasures were all for free and the main pleasure was yet to come. And after
that, when they let you into the hall, which would be positively steaming
from the previous show and redolent of the pleasure that had just been
experienced by others and was still in store for you, there would be the
newsreel, a feeble one perhaps but also in the nature of a free gift with
the real pleasure yet to come, and perhaps the sweetest thing in life was to
keep putting it off and putting it off since happiness, once begun, could
not be stretched for ever, because it might break, like the film itself.
And this was the state of blissful suspense in which I was standing
when a boy came up to Yura.
"Got a ticket?"
Yura looked at the lad, such a puny, such a ticket-less little fellow,
and paused as if to let him feel the full depth of his nothingness, and
said, "Yes, I have, but I'm going myself."
"I see you're trying to be funny," the boy retorted cheekily,
emboldened by disappointment.
"Yes, I was," Yura agreed. He seemed unable to believe his ears, unable
to comprehend that from this depth of nothingness anyone could possibly
answer him back, and was now testing his own senses to see if he had not
perhaps imagined this impudent voice.
"But it didn't come off, did it?" the boy said and with a vengeful nod
turned to go away.
"Wait a minute," Yura started forward.
The boy halted fearlessly.
"So I'm a speculator, am I?" Yura asked unexpectedly and, seizing him
by the lapels of his jacket, shook him. "I'm a speculator, am I?" he
repeated.
I felt a sour taste in my mouth. This was my body's as yet unconscious
reaction to what was dishonourable and unfair.
I sensed that Yura wanted to fight the boy, but that would have been
beyond all borings. The boy obviously did not want to fight, he was
obviously the weaker of the two, he had not said that Yura was a speculator,
and he wasn't even a ginger-head.
"So I'm a speculator, am I?" Yura repeated, and tried to shake him into
fighting form.
"I didn't say that," the boy's voice began to quaver, and he looked
round in search of friends or protectors.
"Yes, you did!" Yura shook him again, striving to elicit some further
insult, so that he could let fly. But the boy would not be provoked and this
annoyed Yura even more because he might have to take the final step himself.
And it looked as if he was going to.
But at that moment half a dozen Greek boys appeared from nowhere and
surrounded us, chanting in one voice, "Aren't you ashamed, Greek? ...
Kendrepeso..." came the familiar words out of the din.
Apparently they knew both Yura and the other boy well and Yura for some
reason had to reckon with them. And this boy, so obviously Russian in
appearance, suddenly, as if from sheer fright, also began to babble in Greek
so fluently that even Yura was confused. Apparently the boy lived in the
same yard as these lads.
They went on like this for some time, raising and lowering their
voices, going over from Russian to Greek and back to Russian. Yura
maintained that although the boy had not actually called him a speculator,
he had asked how much he would sell his ticket for, which obviously meant
... and so on.
"I didn't say that. It's not true," the boy argued, boldly now that he
was surrounded by his Greek friends.
"Aren't you ashamed, Greek?" again the Greeks appealed to Yura's
conscience in their own language.
"Ask him, if you don't believe me," Yura said, and turned towards me.
I had been expecting this. I hated him at that moment. I would have
liked to tread on his handsome, lying face, but he was my friend and by some
ancient law of comradeship, fellow-countrymanship, kinship or whatever, I
was bound to defend him, while another, stronger but for some reason
illegitimate feeling prompted me to take the side of the other boy.
Everyone looked at me, confident that I would take Yura's side, if only
because he had appealed to me. But for the first second I hesitated and by
so doing at once roused intense curiosity, because if I was his friend and
had not leapt to his defence I must be going to say something unusual or
perhaps even tell the whole truth.
They all stared at me in hushed expectation and I felt that every
moment of my silence was lifting me to intrepid heights in their eyes.
Indeed, I myself felt how high I was rising in my silence, how fruitful it
was in itself, and yet at the same time, knowing in advance that I should
fail them as soon as I opened my mouth, I waited for the moment when it
would be simply too dangerous to go any higher in view of the inevitable
subsequent fall.
"I didn't hear," I said, and acid spurted into my mouth as if I had
bitten into the crabbiest of all crab apples.
Both sides instantly lost interest in me and returned to their
argument, now relying only on their own forces. The bell rang.
We sat together watching the film. Sometimes from the corner of my eye
I caught a glimpse of my friend's stern face that was becoming more and more
estranged.
On the way home I tried to explain something, but he was unresponsive.
"Let's not start a jabber-jabber conference," he said as we reached his
house and he turned into the courtyard.
That was the beginning of the end of our friendship. We did not
quarrel. We simply lost our common aim. Gradually we left the childhood we
had shared and entered a youth that we could not share because youth was the
beginning of specialisation of the soul. And in purely physical terms,
through circumstances beyond our control we lost touch with each other.
It was only many years later that we met again in our town on the upper
floor of the off-shore restaurant Amra I had dropped in for a cup of coffee.
He was sitting with a group of local lads. We recognised each other from a
distance and he rose, smiling broadly, from his table.
I sat down with him and, as custom required, we recalled our schooldays
and old friends.
Yura was now a naval officer, serving somewhere up north. He was on a
long leave. He had come here for a holiday and a good time and was then
going to spend the rest of his leave in Kazakhstan, where his parents were
now living.
I reminded him of his running along the beam and confessed that this
feat of his had remained for me a great and never-to-be-fulfilled ambition.
"I could never have walked it," Yura said, with a shrug.
"Couldn't you?"
"I was far too scared to take it slowly," he said, and a ghost of the
old fearlessness appeared in his eye for a moment.
"You don't mean it!" I exclaimed, feeling that his confession imposed
some sort of obligation on me, though I did not know yet what it was.
"Do you know why I used to make it sway?" he asked and, without waiting
for my answer, replied, "I thought a steady rolling would be better than
sudden plunges... Like at sea," he added, consoling me with a more universal
application of his discovery.
No, I had no regrets about my adolescent enthusiasm for his feat. I
merely felt that courage, like cowardice, too, probably, was of a more
complex nature than I had previously suspected, and much of what I had once
believed to be clearly solved after all had probably not been solved so
exactly.
It made me sad. Scraps of half-formed thoughts prevented me from
enjoying myself, as exams still waiting to be taken had done when I was a
student.
I wanted to go home at once and form a final opinion at least about
something. But I had to stay because the waitress arrived with what had been
ordered. She had brought a bottle of brandy and a skillfully cut water
melon, which as soon as the plate was on the table opened out trickling with
juice, like a huge lotus with blood-stained petals.
Yura's hand went out to the bottle. No, of course, I couldn't leave.
--------
I have told the story of how in my childhood, when finding my way at
night to the house of a relative of ours, I fell into a freshly dug grave,
where I spent several hours in the company of a stray goat, until I and the
goat were rescued by a passing peasant. That was during the war.
Some time after this nocturnal adventure, we, that is, my mother,
sister and I, went to live in that very village. At first we stayed with my
mother's sister, then we found a room in another house and moved.
The house had been occupied before the war by three brothers. They were
all in the army. One of them had married before enlisting and now his young,
blooming and not too grief-stricken wife was all alone in the house.
Remembering her now, I am drawn to the conclusion that a grass widow is
called a grass widow because she catches fire as easily as dry grass.
While we were living there, one of the brothers came home. Yes, the one
that was married. He came home a little too quietly somehow. We noticed him
in the kitchen one morning. He was sitting in front of the fire roasting a
corncob on a spit, as though to remind himself of his pre-war childhood.
There was something about him that made one think he ought not to have come
home just yet. Or perhaps, he ought not to have married quite so soon;
because I think it was missing his wife so badly that brought him home too
early.
He pottered about in the garden with a kind of desperate eagerness for
a week or so, then he was arrested; and shortly afterwards we heard that he
was a deserter. He was arrested just as quietly as he had arrived.
We gradually settled down in the new place. My sister obtained work at
the local collective farm as a time-keeper; we were allotted a patch of
land, on which we grew melons and maize. We also grew pumpkins on it, and
cucumbers and tomatoes, too. In those days we used to grow everything.
Well, it so happened that not far from our house there lived the very
man whose grave I had fallen into. Incidentally, people in the village used
to say that everyone had fallen into that grave except the man it was meant
for. The story turned out to be long and complex. The grave's future owner,
if one may so describe him, old Shchaaban Larba, nicknamed Crooked Arm, had
been in hospital with either appendicitis or rupture. (In Russian, it would
probably be more correct to call him Withered Arm, but Crooked Arm
corresponds more closely to the spirit and, hence, the meaning of the
nickname.) Well, as I was saying, Crooked Arm had had an operation, and he
was still in hospital, calmly recovering his health, when someone telephoned
from the hospital to our village Soviet to say that the patient had died and
would have to be collected and taken home immediately because he had been
lying dead for more than a day already.
None of the sick man's relatives had been visiting the hospital just
then because he had been about to be discharged.
True, a fellow villager, Mustafa, had been in town at the time on
business of his own and had, incidentally, been asked to call at the
hospital and find out why Crooked Arm was still there, and whether he had
not perhaps decided to have his crooked arm put right as well as the
appendicitis or rupture. And then, all of a sudden, such unexpected news.
The dead man's relatives, as our customs demand, sent out messengers of
woe to the neighbouring villages, a large army cape was stretched across the
yard of his house to make a shelter where the funeral feast would be held,
and a grave was dug in the cemetery.
The collective farm sent its one and only lorry to bring the dead man
home because private transport was hard to come by in wartime. In short, the
whole thing was arranged in proper style, just as it should be. Yes,
everything was as it should be, except the dead man himself, Shchaaban
Larba, who, so it was said, had never given anyone any peace while he was
alive, and after death became quite unmanageable.
The day after the sorrowful news the lorry arrived back in the village
with the body of the dead man, who turned out to be alive.
Crooked Arm, they say, walked into the yard of his house gently
supported by Mustafa and swearing loudly. His indignation was due not to the
news of his death and the preparations for his funeral but to something he
noticed at once on glancing at the shelter made with the army cape, for
which two apple trees had been stripped of their branches. Still swearing,
Crooked Arm demonstrated on the spot how the cape could have been hung
without touching the trees.
After that, they say, he made the round of his guests shaking hands
with each and staring keenly into their eyes to discover what impression had
been caused by the news of his death and simultaneous, quite unexpected,
resurrection.
Having done this, they say, he raised that arm of his which had been
withering for twenty years but still had not withered away, and, shading his
eyes with his hand, peered rudely at the women who had been hired to weep
for him as though he didn't know what they were there for.
"What do you want?" he rasped.
They looked embarrassed. "Oh, nothing special. We just came to weep for
you."
"Well, get on with it then," Crooked Arm is said to have replied, and
put his hand to his ear to listen to the weeping. But at this point someone
intervened and led the weepers away.
When he saw the gifts that his relatives had brought, Crooked Arm
pondered for a moment. It is the custom among my people to hold any kind of
funeral feast on such a grand scale that, were it all done at the expense of
the dead man's family, its surviving members would have no alternative but
to lie down and die as well.
So, all the relatives and neighbours help out. Some bring wine, some
bring roast chickens, some bring khachapuri, and someone may even bring a
calf. And it so happened this time that one of the relatives from the next
village had brought along a well fattened calf, which Crooked Arm took an
immediate liking to. Incidentally, they say that it was from this relative
that the measurements had been taken for digging the grave, because he was
just about the same height as Crooked Arm. They say that when one of the
lads who had been told to dig the grave came up to him with a measuring
string, this relative expressed some displeasure and argued that there were
other people more suitable for the purpose, that he was probably a little
taller than Crooked Arm and Crooked Arm was more stocky.
So saying, he tried to get away from the measuring string, but the lad
would not let him get away. Like all grave-diggers, this lad was given to
joking. He said that Crooked Arm's stockiness made no difference now, and
that if the worst came to the worst and Crooked Arm was not the right size,
they would have his relative in mind.
The relative, they say, sniggered half-heartedly at these jokes, but
evidently took offence, because he withdrew to the company of the people
from his own village and stood with them, glancing sulkily at his calf,
which was tethered to the fence.
At the sight of all these gifts Crooked Arm announced that it was too
early yet to rejoice, that he still felt very ill, and that he had been
discharged only so that he should not die in hospital because doctors were
fined for that, just as collective farmers were fined for spoiled produce.
He then went straight to bed and gave instructions that the grave should on
no account be filled in, but kept open in readiness. The relatives, it is
said, dispersed somewhat unwillingly, the one who had brought the calf being
particularly displeased. But Crooked Arm calmed him with assurances that he
would not have long to wait, so the calf would not waste away even if it was
not let out of the yard.
Crooked Arm stayed in bed for about a week. After a couple of days he
began to be pestered by the curious, because by that time the rumour had
spread that Crooked Arm, having died in the hospital, had come to life on
the way home and arrived there for his own funeral. Another rumour had it
that he had not died at all but had fallen into a deep sleep from which the
doctors had been unable to awake him, but the journey back had been so bumpy
that he had woken up of his own accord.
At first Crooked Arm received the visitors, particularly while they
continued to bring him all kinds of delicacies designed to tempt the palate
of a man who had recently been dead and was still not quite alive again. But
eventually he grew tired of this, and in any case the chairman of the farm
said there was work to be done. So, when he heard the gate creak, he would
run out on the veranda and bellow in his loud voice, "Back! Keep back, you
parasites! I'll set the dog on you!"
However, the rumours of his resurrection grew and multiplied. It must
have been quite a year later when I heard in one of the neighbouring
villages that Crooked Arm had come to life not on the way home from
hospital, but actually in his grave, several days after burial. The noise he
had been making was heard by a boy who had been looking for his goat one
evening in the cemetery. So the villagers had to go and dig him out. If he
had not possessed such a powerful voice, they said, he would have died of
hunger, or even of thirst, because the site that had been chosen for his
grave was a good one--well drained.
So it came about that Crooked Arm survived or, at least, prevented his
own funeral, while retaining for himself a grave in complete readiness.
When they first saw Crooked Arm on his return from hospital, the people
of the village decided that it was the secretary of the village Soviet who
had played a joke on them, because he was the man who had said he had talked
with the hospital or someone who had pretended to be the hospital. But the
secretary declared that he would never dream of playing such a joke with a
war on.
Everyone believed him, because to joke like that in wartime would have
been just a bit too stupid. Eventually, it was agreed that there had been
some sort of mix-up at the hospital, that another old man had died, perhaps
even one of Crooked Arm's namesakes, for in Abkhazia we have any number of
people of the very same name.
I heard Crooked Arm's voice the first day we started living with our
grass widow, even before I had met him face to face. At exactly midday, when
he was coming home for dinner from work on the farm, he would at a distance
of some three hundred meters from his house start shouting to his wife,
scolding her and inquiring furiously if the hominy was ready.
The old woman would respond with equally frantic yells and their voices
with no loss of power or clarity would gradually come together, overreach
each other and at last fall silent. After a time the old woman's voice would
shoot up triumphantly from the silence but Crooked Arm's would not respond.
Later on, when I began visiting their house, I realised that the old man
kept quiet at this stage for the simple reason that his mouth was occupied
with eating; he ate as frantically as he cursed, so he could not possibly
eat and curse at the same time.
Coming home from work in the evening, he would inquire in the same tone
of voice about his horse or his grandson Yashka and again about the hominy
for supper.
Later on, I made friends with this Yashka, who was just as loud-voiced
as his grandfather but, unlike him, a good-natured lounger. Crooked Arm
usually took him to school on the back of his horse, and would curse all the
way there over having to waste his precious time on this dunderhead. Yashka
would sit in silence behind his grandfather, holding on to his belt and
gazing around with a sheepish grin on his face.
If his grandfather was away, he would be taken to school by his
grandmother on the same horse, and he would sit behind her in the same way,
except that he did not let her ride right up to the school in case the boys
made fun of him.
He and I attended school in different shifts. On my way home from
school I would meet them about halfway and Yashka would screw his head round
and stare wistfully after me, thereby touching off a fresh explosion of fury
from his grandfather. Yashka had to be taken to school because it was three
kilometres from his home and Yashka was so absentminded that he sometimes
forgot where he was going and took the wrong road.
In the early days, on meeting me in the street, Crooked Arm would look
at me shading his eyes with his hand, and ask:
"Who do you belong to?"
"I am the son of so-and-so," I would answer politely and give the name
of my mother, whom he had known for many years.
"Who's she?" he would thunder, and scrutinise me even more thoroughly
from under his crooked palm.
"She is Uncle Meksut's wife's sister," I would explain, though I
realised he was pretending.
"So you're one of those parasites from town?" he would say with a nod
in the direction of our house.
"Yes," I would reply, confirming that we lived there and at the same
time reluctantly acknowledging our role as parasites.
He would stand before me, peering at me in astonishment with his gimlet
eyes, a rather short, stocky man with a massive neck as red as a cock's
comb. And while he stood there, peering at me in surprise, as though to
achieve a complete mental picture of me, he would at the same time be
listening to something else, to something that was taking place on the other
side of the fence, in the maize on his allotment, as though he could tell by
whispers, by scuffling, by sounds audible to his ears alone exactly what was
happening on his allotment, in his yard and perhaps even inside the house
itself.
"So it was you who fell into my grave?" he would ask suddenly,
listening as usual to what was happening on his allotment and already
sensing something amiss that made him snort with dissatisfaction.
"Yes," I would reply, observing him with secret misgiving, because I
felt he was packed with some kind of explosive force.
"And what did you think of it down there?" he would ask still with one
ear to the fence, as it were, and becoming more and more agitated over what
was happening on the other side of it, and even beginning to mutter to
himself, "Is that old woman dead, or what? Curse her eyes... She'll ruin me
one of these days, the old fool..."
"Very nice," I would reply, trying to display my gratitude for the
hospitality. After all, it was his grave.
"It's a good, dry spot," he would agree, almost whining with
indignation at what was happening on his allotment; and all of a sudden he
would let fly and shout to his old woman, leaping straight to his top note:
"Hey! There's something grunting in the kitchen garden! Blast your
ears--it's the pigs, the pigs!"
"May I bury them with you in that grave of yours! You see pigs
everywhere!" the old woman would retort at once.
"But I can hear them--they're munching and grunting, munching and
grunting!" he would shout, forgetting all about me, and, as usual, their
voices overlapped and he seemed to snatch the end of her shout and haul
himself along by it towards the house, tossing her his own raging voice as
he went. By and by we grew accustomed to his voice and stopped paying much
attention to it, and when he was away for a few days and all was quiet and
still, it seemed strange, as though something was missing and our ears were
full of an empty roar.
His wife, a tall old woman, taller than he, and unbelievably thin,
would sometimes, when he was not at home, come round for a chat with my
mother. She would occasionally bring a cheese or a bowl of maize flour or a
fragrant lump of meat that had been smoked over an outdoor fire. With a shy
little laugh she would ask us to hide away what she had brought and, for
goodness sake, never say thank you, because that bawling husband of hers
must not know anything about it.
She and my mother would talk for hours and Crooked Arm's wife would
smoke all the time, making herself cigarette after cigarette. Suddenly
Crooked Arm's voice would be heard. He would shout something to her in the
direction of their house and she would prick up her ears at the sound of his
voice and shake with silent laughter, as though she were afraid he would
hear her laughing at him for shouting in the wrong direction.
"What do you want now--I'm over here!" she would shout in the end.
"Aha, idling again! Birds of a feather! You're nothing but a gang of
chatterboxes!" he would bawl, after a brief pause during which he must have
been struck dumb with indignation at her treachery.
One day he rode up to our gate and shouted to me to bring out a sack.
Grumbling loudly about parasites who had to have everything chewed and put
in their mouths for them to swallow, he filled my sack half full of flour
and, still fuming because he was giving away his own maize that he had had
to take to the mill on his own horse, he tied his sack to the saddle again
and rode away, bawling over his shoulder that I must be careful not to tell
that woman anything about the flour because he never had any peace from her
shrieking as it was.
Time went by and Old Crooked Arm showed no signs of dying. The longer
he delayed his death, the more the calf flourished and grew fat; the more
the calf flourished and grew fat, the sadder its former owner became. In the
end he sent a man to Crooked Arm to drop a hint about the calf. Thank the
Lord Crooked Arm was still alive, the message ran, but now it would be only
right to return the calf, because he had not made Crooked Arm a present of
it; he had only brought it to the funeral as a good kinsman should.
"Brought an egg and wants to go home with a chicken," Crooked Arm is
said to have responded. After this, they say he thought for a moment and
added: "Tell him that if I die soon he can come to the funeral without any
offering at all and if he dies I'll come to his house like a good kinsman
and bring a calf from his calf."
Crooked Arm's relative, on learning of these terms, is said to have
taken offence and told the messenger to tell Crooked Arm without any hints
this time that he did not want any calf from his calf, and certainly not
when he himself was dead; he wanted his own calf, while he was still alive,
the calf which he had brought to the funeral as an offering as a good
kinsman should. Since Crooked Arm still had not died it was time to return
the calf to its proper owner. Moreover, he gave his word that in spite of
the fact that while he was at Crooked Arm's house he had suffered the
humiliation of being measured with a bit of string, he would nevertheless,
if Crooked Arm really did die, bring the calf back again.
"This man will drive me to the grave with that calf of his," is what
Crooked Arm is supposed to have said on hearing these explanations. "Tell
him," he added, "that he has not long to wait now, so it's not worth
tormenting the wretched animal."
A few days after this conversation Crooked Arm transplanted from his
allotment to his grave two young peach trees. Possibly he did this to revive
the idea of his imminent doom. Yashka and I helped him. But apparently the
two young peach trees were not enough for him. Some days later he went to
the farm plantation at night, dug up a small tung tree and planted it
between the two peach trees. Everyone soon got to know about this. The
members of the farm chuckled among themselves and said that Crooked Arm
wanted to poison the dead with the tung fruit. No one attached much
importance to the transplanting because no one before or since had ever
stolen a tung tree for the simple reason that no peasant farmer had any use
for one, the fruit of the tung being deadly poisonous and consequently
rather dangerous.
The former owner of the calf also fell silent. Either he became
convinced that Crooked Arm was doomed after having planted a tung tree on
his grave, or else, fearing the old man's tongue, which was no less venomous
than the tung fruit, he had decided to leave him in peace.
Incidentally, legend has it that it was Crooked Arm's tongue in his
young days that gave him his crooked arm. It happened in the following
manner.
They say that after some feast or other, the local prince was sitting
surrounded by numerous guests in his host's courtyard. The prince was eating
peaches, which he peeled with a small penknife attached to a silver chain.
This penknife on its silver chain, by the way, has nothing to do with the
subsequent events, but all narrators of this tale have mentioned this
penknife, never failing to add that it was attached to a silver chain. In
retelling the incident once again I should have liked to avoid that penknife
on its silver chain, but for some reason I feel that I must mention it, that
it contains some element of truth without which something will be
lost--though I don't know what.
Anyway, the prince was eating peaches and complacently recalling
amorous joys. In the end, so they say, he surveyed the host's courtyard and
remarked with a sigh, "If I were to assemble all the women I have had in my
time, this yard wouldn't hold them."
But Crooked Arm, they say, even in those days, despite his youth, never
allowed anyone to be complacent for long. He popped up from somewhere and
said, "I wonder how many she-asses there would be braying in this yard?"
This somewhat elderly prince was a great connoisseur of feminine
beauty, added to which, they say, he was modestly proud of his ability to
strip a fruit of its skin without once breaking the ribbon of peel. This
skill never deserted him, not even after a night's hard drinking. No matter
how closely he was watched, or how hard people tried to distract him, he
never made a slip. Sometimes they would try to catch him out with a fruit of
extremely odd and ugly shape, but he would examine it from all angles, take
out his little penknife on its silver chain and unerringly set it to work
along the only correct path.
Having thus produced a spiral wreath of peel, he would usually hold it
up before the assembled company. And if there was a pretty girl among them
he would call her over and hang the ring of peel over her ear.
It seems to me that Crooked Arm must have been irritated by the
Prince's skill. I think he must have been observing him for a long time and
was sure that sooner or later the ribbon of peel would break. He may
actually have placed great hopes in one particular peach, but the prince
had, as usual, dealt with it quite successfully and even started boasting
about his women. You must agree there was enough to make Crooked Arm
explode, particularly as a young man.
They say that after Crooked Arm's unexpected remark the prince turned
purple and stared speechlessly at him with his eyes popping out, still
holding in his right hand the peeled and oozing peach, and in his left, the
penknife on its silver chain.
Everyone was struck dumb with horror, but the prince continued to stare
unblinkingly at Crooked Arm while the hand that was holding the peach moved
restlessly in the air as though sensing how inappropriate it was to be
holding a peach at that moment, not to mention the difficulty of drawing a
pistol while holding a peach in one's hand, particularly a peeled one. They
say his hand even lowered to the ground to get rid of the peach, but at the
last moment somehow could not bring itself to do such a thing. After all the
peach had been skinned and a well brought-up princely hand must have felt
that a skinned peach simply could not be placed on the ground. And so it
rose again, this hand, and for an agonising second groped in the air for an
invisible plate, feeling that there must be someone who would think of
providing a plate, but everyone was paralysed with fear and no one had the
presence of mind to help the prince discard this, by now indecently naked
peach. And at this point, they say, Crooked Arm himself came to the prince's
aid.
"Pop it in your mouth!" he suggested.
The guests had no time to recover from this fresh impertinence before
they found themselves witnessing the inexplicable self-abasement of the
prince, who is said to have begun in shameful haste to push the juicy,
dripping peach into his mouth, while continuing to stare at Crooked Arm with
hate-filled eyes. At last, having somehow coped with the peach, he reached
for his pistol. Still gazing at Crooked Arm with those bulging, hate-filled
eyes, he fumbled speechlessly in the region of his belt but, owing to his
extreme agitation, or, as others infer more correctly, because his hands
were sticky with peach juice, he just could not unbutton his holster.
Perhaps someone would yet have come to his senses, perhaps someone
might have managed to seize the prince's arm or, at least, hustle Crooked
Arm aside, making it impossible to shoot and perhaps dangerous for other
people, but then, they say, Shchaaban's voice rang out in the silence for
the last time. I don't mean in the sense that after this his voice never
rang out any more. Rather on the contrary, it became even louder and more
scornful. But in the sense that after this phrase he ceased to be just
Shchaaban and became Shchaaban Crooked Arm.
"I bet he doesn't take so long over the other thing," he is said to
have remarked, "judging by the way our Chegem she-asses..."
They say he did not finish his remark about the she-asses because the
old prince, at last, coped with his holster--a shot rang out, the women
shrieked and, when the smoke cleared, Crooked Arm was what fate had destined
him to be, that is, crooked-armed. Afterwards, when he was asked why after
the first insult he had gone on teasing the prince he would simply reply, "I
just couldn't stop."
Later on, however, when the prince went off with the Mensheviks and
Soviet power was finally and irrevocably established in our part of the
country, Crooked Arm began to assert that he had had an old score to settle
with the prince, perhaps even something to do with the days of partisan
warfare, and that this exchange had been merely a pretext for, or
consequence of, other more important things.
In short, despite the prince's bullet, Crooked Arm went on taking the
rise out of anyone and everyone and his jokes seemed to lose none of their
sting as the years went by.
When I was roaming round the village I would often see him on the
tobacco or tea plantation or weeding the maize. If he was in a good mood he
would simply play the fool and have everyone doubled up with laughter.
He had a knack of imitating the voices of people he knew and of animals
as well; and he was particularly good at crowing like a cock.
Sometimes he would jab his hoe into the ground, straighten his back,
look around and let out a mighty crow. The cocks in the neighbouring yards
would answer almost at once. Everyone would burst out laughing, and while
the nearest cock went on calling him he would resume his hoeing and mutter,
"A fat lot you know, you fool."
Down our way, like everywhere else probably, people believe that the
crowing of a cock has a special meaning, that it is almost an omen of the
owner's fate. Crooked Arm was debunking these rural clairvoyants. In spite
of his half-withered arm he certainly worked like the devil. Although when
sometimes there was a rumour that a new national loan was being floated, to
which contributions would be required, or when the remaining men in the
village were being mobilised for tree-felling, he would slip his left arm
into a clean red sling and go about like that for as long as he considered
necessary. I don't think this red sling was much help to him; it certainly
couldn't get him out of signing up for the loan. Nonetheless, it apparently