‘Stamp it down?’ the younger of the two asked when the earth was level with the edges.
‘No need, let it be!’ the other sighed. ‘When the angels sound the last trump he will be able to get to his feet more quickly.’
Within two weeks the little mound was overgrown with burdock and wormwood; wild oats were dancing on it, rape was yellowing gaily at the side, clover was raising its head, and the air was scented with thyme, spurge and honey-dew.
Soon afterward some old man drove out from the village, dug a little hole at the head of the grave, and set up a shrine on a freshly cut oaken pole. In the shadow beneath the triangular coping appeared the sorrowful features of the Mother of God, and on the base below her was painted an inscription in old Slavonic:
In the years of trouble and pother,
Brothers judge not your brother.
The old man drove off, leaving the shrine in the steppe to depress the passers-by, to arouse a dumb yearning in their hearts with its everlastingly despondent look.
Later on, in June, two bustards fought around the shrine. They beat out a little bare patch in the blue wormwood, crushing the green flood of ripening spear-grass, fighting for the female, for the right to life, for love and fertility. And again after a little while, under the mound, right by the shrine, in the shaggy shelter of the old wormwood a female bustard laid nine speckled, smoky-blue eggs and sat on them, warming them with her body, protecting them with her glossy wings.
THE BEGINNING
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First published in Russian as Tikhi Don 1929
First published in Great Britain in 1934
Published in Penguin Classics 2016
Copyright © Mikhail Sholokhov, 2016
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Cover © British Library
Board/Topfoto.
ISBN: 978-0-241-28441-4
* Hokhol: familiar name for Ukrainians
Mikhail Sholokhov, And Quiet Flows the Don
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