And he thought first about what might happen to him that night, and then, no longer reverting to that, he gave himself up to the memories that came of their own accord. He thought first of Marfa’s arrival two days before, and the workers’ drunkenness, and his own renunciation of alcohol, and then of this day’s journey, and the home of Taras, and the talk of division; and then he thought of his son, and of Mukhorty, who would get warm now under the sacking, and then of his master, who was making the sledge squeak as he turned around in it. “He can’t be glad he came, either, poor soul,” he thought. “You wouldn’t want to die with a life like that. Not like me.” And all these ideas began plaiting themselves together, mixing in his head, and he fell asleep.
But when Vassili Andreyich rocked the sledge mounting the horse, and the backboard Nikita was leaning against jerked away completely and then hit him in the spine with one of the runners, he woke up and, willy-nilly, had to change his position. Straightening out his legs with difficulty and shaking the snow off them, he got up, and a piercing chill instantly ran through him. When he saw what was going on, he wanted Vassili Andreyich to leave him the sacking, which the horse no longer needed, so that he could cover himself with it. That was what he shouted to Vassili Andreyich.
But Vassili Andreyich didn’t stop and vanished into the snowy dust.
Left on his own, Nikita thought for a moment what he should do. He felt far too weak to go looking for houses. He couldn’t sit down anymore where he had sat earlier—the place was all covered in snow. Even in the sledge, he felt he wouldn’t get warm because he had nothing to cover himself and he was no longer remotely warmed by his kaftan and sheepskin. He felt as cold as if he were only wearing a shirt. He became frightened. “God in Heaven!” he muttered, and the knowledge that he wasn’t alone, that someone heard him and wouldn’t abandon him, calmed him. He took a deep breath and, without taking the ticking off his head, got into the sledge and lay down in his master’s place.
But it was quite impossible to get warm in the sledge either. At first his whole body trembled, then the trembling passed off and he gradually began to lose consciousness. Whether he was dying, or falling asleep, he couldn’t tell, but he felt equally prepared for both.18
8
Meanwhile Vassili Andreyich urged Mukhorty on with his heels and the ends of the reins, in the direction where for some reason he assumed the forest and watchman’s hut should be. The snow was blinding him, and the wind seemed to want to stop him, but he leaned forward, constantly pulling his fur coat close and tucking it between himself and the cold bellyband that prevented him getting a proper grip, whipping Mukhorty on without respite. Obediently but with difficulty, the horse went at an amble where he was told.
For about five minutes Vassili Andreyich rode in what seemed to him a straight line, seeing nothing except the horse’s head and the white waste, and hearing nothing except the wind tearing past the horse’s ears and the collar of his fur coat.
Suddenly something darkened in front of him. His heart leapt, and he rode toward the blackness, already seeing in it the walls of village houses. But the black thing wasn’t stationary, it kept moving; and it wasn’t a village, but some tall wormwood stalks, sticking up through the snow in the rough ground between two fields, desperately tossing about under a wind that dashed them sideways, hissing through them. And for some reason the sight of these weeds, mercilessly tormented by the wind, made Vassili Andreyich shudder; and he hurriedly began beating the horse on, not noticing that when he rode up to the clump of wormwood he had changed tack completely, and was now urging the horse in the opposite direction from before, still imagining that he was riding toward the place where the watchman’s hut should be. But the horse kept pulling to the right, and so he kept pulling it to the left.
Something grew dark in front of him again. He felt glad, sure that this time it really must be the village. But it was just another bit of scrub. For some reason the dreadful shaking of the tall, dry weeds filled Vassili Andreyich with terror. It wasn’t just that it was a very similar clump of wormwood. There were hoof prints beside it, drifting over with snow. Vassili Andreyich stopped, leaned over, and glanced at them. It was a horse track, lightly dusted with snow. There was no doubt it could only be his own. He was going round in a circle, and not a wide one either. “I’ll perish like this!” he thought, and to ward off his terror, he beat the horse on even more fiercely, peering into the white snowy gloom, in which little dots of light seemed to him to be sparkling, only to vanish when he looked at them. Once he thought he heard dogs barking, or wolves howling, but the sounds were so faint and indistinct, he couldn’t be sure whether he had actually heard something or only imagined it. He stopped, and started listening intently.
Suddenly a fearful, deafening cry broke out right beside him, and everything shuddered and trembled under him. Vassili Andreyich grabbed the horse’s neck, but the horse’s neck was all shaking, too, and the terrible cry became even more horrifying. For some seconds Vassili Andreyich couldn’t come to himself or understand what was happening. But it was only Mukhorty, neighing in his loud, resonant voice, either trying to cheer himself or calling for help. “Bloody brute! You terrified the life out of me, damn you!” Vassili Andreyich said to himself. But even when he understood the reason for his terror, he couldn’t shake it off.
“I must stop and think. I must calm down,” he kept saying to himself, and at the same time couldn’t stop himself beating the horse on, not noticing that now they were going with the wind rather than against it. His body was frozen and painful, especially his thighs, which were unprotected and rubbed against the brass-studded bellyband; his feet and hands trembled, and his breathing came in great jerks.
He can see himself perishing in this dreadful snowy waste. He sees nothing that can save him.
Suddenly the horse gave way under him. It was caught in a snowdrift, thrashing about and keeling over sideways. Vassili Andreyich tumbled off, yanking the breeching strap which had supported his leg, and pulling to one side the bellyband he had been holding on to. The minute Vassili Andreyich was off his back, the horse righted himself, strained, lunged, and leapt. Neighing again, dragging the flapping sacking and bellyband behind him, he vanished from sight, leaving Vassili Andreyich alone in the snowdrift. Vassili Andreyich flung himself after him, but the snow was so deep, and his fur coats were so heavy, he sank in up to his knees at every step. After twenty steps at the most, he stopped, breathless. “The forest, the sheep, the leaseholds, the shop, the taverns, the house and barn and their iron roofs, my heir,” he thought, “—what will become of them all? How can this be? It can’t be—” flashed through his mind, and for some reason he remembered the wormwood he had twice ridden past, thrashing in the wind, and such horror came over him, he couldn’t believe what was happening to him was real. “Isn’t this all a dream?” he thought, and wanted to wake up, but there was no way of waking. This was real snow, stinging his face, covering him, and chilling his right hand, whose glove he had lost. And this was a real waste, the waste he was left in, lonely as that clump of weeds—to wait for certain, swift, and meaningless death.
“Queen of Heaven, holy father Nikolai, teacher of temperance!” he cried. And he remembered the prayers of the day before, the icon with its blackened face and gold leaf, and the candles he sold to be burned before the icon, which were brought back to him immediately afterward, and put back in their chest barely singed.19 He began imploring the same Nicholas the Miracle Worker to save him, promising him prayers and candles. But at this very moment he understood, clearly and without question, that the dark face, the gold leaf, the candles, the priest, and the prayers—they were all very important and necessary there, in the church, but here they could do nothing for him. There was no connection, and could be no connection, between those candles and prayers and his present catastrophic situation.
“I mustn’t lose heart,” he thought. “I must follow the horse’s tracks, and before they’re covered over, too.
He’ll lead me out, or I might catch him. But I mustn’t hurry, or I’ll make matters worse.” Yet in spite of his determination to go slowly, he threw himself forward at a run, falling constantly, heaving himself up, and falling again. The horse’s tracks were already barely visible in the places where the snow wasn’t deep. “I’m done for,” thought Vassili Andreyich. “I’ll lose track of him, and never catch up with him.” But at that moment, glancing in front of him, he saw something dark. It was Mukhorty. And not only Mukhorty, but the sledge, its shafts and the kerchief. Mukhorty, with bellyband and sacking askew, was now standing not in his original place, but closer to the shafts, shaking his head, which was dragged down by the reins caught under his hooves. Vassili Andreyich had plunged into the same drift where he got stuck with Nikita. The horse had been bringing him back to the sledge, and he had leapt off him not more than fifty paces away.
9
Stumbling up to the sledge, Vassili Andreyich caught hold of it and stood still for a long time, trying to calm down and get his breath back. Nikita wasn’t in his old place, and in the sledge something was lying covered up with snow. Vassili Andreyich guessed it was Nikita. Now his terror passed completely, and if he was afraid of anything, it was the horrible sensation of terror he had experienced on horseback—and especially when he was left on his own in the snowdrift. Whatever happened he had to ward off this terror, and to keep it at bay he had to do something, to busy himself in some way. And so the first thing he did was to put his back to the wind and undo his fur coat. Then, when he had got his breath back slightly, he shook the snow out of his boots and his left glove—the right one was hopelessly lost and probably completely snowed under by now. Then he did up his belt again, tight and low on the hips, as he used to do when he came out of his shop to buy grain the peasants brought on their carts. He got down to business. The first thing that occurred to him was to free the horse’s legs. Vassili Andreyich did so, and, having untangled the rein, tethered Mukhorty to the iron staple on the front of the sledge, where he had been before. He was just about to go round the horse to put the loin strap, bellyband and sacking to rights, when he saw something moving in the sledge. Nikita’s head poked out of the snow that had covered it completely. Half-frozen, he laboriously heaved himself into a sitting position, flapping his hand in front of his nose in the oddest way, just as though he was waving off flies. He went on flapping his hand and saying something, and it seemed to Vassili Andreyich that he was calling him. Vassili Andreyich left the sacking hanging crooked and came up to the sledge.
“What is it?” he asked. “What are you saying?”
“I—I’m d-dying, that’s what,” Nikita said, stumbling painfully. “Give what’s owing to my boy or the old lady, it doesn’t matter which.”
“What, are you frozen?” asked Vassili Andreyich.
“I can feel . . . I’m dying . . . forgive me, for Christ’s sake,” said Nikita tearfully, still flapping his hand just as though shooing off flies.
Vassili Andreyich stood in silence, without moving, for half a minute and then suddenly, with the same decisiveness with which he shook hands over a good bargain, took a step back, pushed up his sleeves, and with both hands started shoveling the snow off Nikita and out of the sledge. When he’d shifted it all, he hastily undid his belt, opened his fur coat wide, and, pushing Nikita down, lay on top of him, covering him not only with his fur coat but his own glowing, overheated body. Pushing down the laps of his overcoat between the sledge sides and Nikita with his hands, and pinning the hem down with his knees, Vassili Andreyich lay prone, leaning his head on the front of the sledge. Now he heard neither the horse’s movements, nor the howling wind, attending only to Nikita’s breathing. At first Nikita lay motionless for a long time. Then he breathed in noisily and stirred.
“There you go! And you said you were dying. Lie there, get warm, and that’s how we’ll . . .” Vassili Andreyich began.
But to his great astonishment he could say no more, because tears came into his eyes and his lower jaw was trembling. He stopped speaking, and tried to swallow the thing rising in his throat. “That fright must have taken all the strength out of me,” he thought. But his present weakness was not only not unpleasant, it gave him a particular gladness he had never felt before.
“And so we’ll . . .” he repeated to himself, feeling a special, solemn tenderness. For quite a long time he lay like that in silence, wiping his eyes on the fur of his coat and tucking in its right corner, which the wind kept tugging loose, under his knee.
But he passionately wanted to tell someone how happy he was.
“Nikita!” he said.
“It’s good, it’s warm,” came the answer from under him.
“That’s it, brother. I would have died, too. You would have frozen, and I would . . .”
But his jaw shook again, his eyes filled with tears, and he couldn’t go on.
“Well, never mind,” he thought. “I know what I know.”
And he fell silent. He lay still for a long time.
He was warmed underneath by Nikita, and warm on top from his greatcoats. Only his hands, holding the fur down at Nikita’s sides, and his legs, constantly uncovered by the wind pulling his coattails loose, began to go numb. His right hand, without its glove, was coldest of all. But he wasn’t thinking about his legs or his hands; he thought only about how he could warm the peasant lying under him.
Several times he glanced at the horse, and saw that his back was bare and that the bellyband and sacking were dangling in the snow, but he couldn’t bring himself to leave Nikita for a minute, or disrupt his own sense of happiness. He was no longer in the least afraid.
“We’ll get out of it this time, no fear!” he said to himself, meaning he’d get his peasant warm, and speaking with the same boastfulness he habitually used when talking of his purchases and sales.
Vassili Andreyich lay like that for one hour, and two, and three, without noticing how the time passed. At first his mind’s eye was filled with impressions of the blizzard, the shafts, and the horse under its yoke, and memories of Nikita lying under him. Then they mingled with memories of the festival, his wife, the district police officer, the chest of candles, and Nikita again, lying under the chest. Then came peasants, buying and selling, and white walls, and houses roofed in iron, under which Nikita was lying. Then everything muddled together, one thing running into another and, like the colors of the rainbow fusing into a single white light, all his different perceptions ran into a single nothingness, and he fell asleep. He slept dreamlessly for a long time. Just before dawn, the dreams returned. He seemed to be standing before the chest of candles, and Tikhonov’s widow was demanding a five-kopek candle for the holy day.
He tries to take a candle and give it to her, but his hands won’t move, they are stuck in his pockets. He wants to come around the chest, but his legs won’t move; his new, clean galoshes have grown into the stone floor, and he can’t lift them or get out of them. And suddenly the candle chest turns from a chest of candles into a bed; and Vassili Andreyich sees himself lying belly down on the candle chest, or rather his bed, in his house. And he is lying on his bed and can’t get up, but he needs to get up, because in a minute Ivan Matveyich, the district police officer, is coming for him, and he must go with Ivan Matveyich, either to buy the forest or to put right Mukhorty’s bellyband. And he asks his wife, “Mikolavna, hasn’t he come?” and she says, “No, he hasn’t come.” And he hears someone driving up to the front steps. It must be him. No, they’ve gone past. “Mikolavna, Mikolavna, hasn’t he come yet?” “Not yet.” And he lies on his bed, and he still can’t get up, and keeps waiting, and this waiting is dreadful and wonderful at the same time. And suddenly his joy is accomplished; the one he was waiting for has come, and it is no longer Ivan Matveyich, the district police officer, but someone else, the very one he was waiting for. He has come and is calling him, and this one, the one who is calling him, is the one who called him and told him to lie on Nikita. And Vassili Andre
yich is glad that this one has come for him. “I’m coming!” he cries joyfully, and his cry wakes him. He is awake, but he is utterly different from who he was when he fell asleep. He tries to rise, and he cannot; he tries to move his hand, and cannot; his foot, and cannot. He tries to turn his head, but this he cannot do. And he is surprised, but not in the least disturbed. He understands that this is death, but this doesn’t trouble him either. He remembers that Nikita is lying under him, that he was warmed and is alive, and it seems to him that he is Nikita and Nikita is he, and that his life is not in himself, but in Nikita. He strains his ears, and hears breathing, and even a light snore, from Nikita. “Nikita is alive, and that means I am living too,” he says to himself triumphantly.
And he remembers his money, his shop, his house, his buying and selling, and the Mironov millions, and it is hard for him to understand why that man, whom people called Vassili Brekhunov, troubled himself with all those things that troubled him. “Oh well, he didn’t know what it was all about,” he thinks, of Vassili Brekhunov. “He didn’t know, as now I know, and know for sure. Now I know.” And again he hears the one who called, calling him. “I’m coming, I’m coming!” his whole being replies in joy and tenderness. And he feels he is free and nothing more can hold him.
And Vassili Andreyich saw nothing more, heard nothing more, felt nothing more in this world.
The snow smoked on around them. The spinning snowflakes wildly covered the furs of the dead Vassili Andreyich, Mukhorty shuddering in every limb, the barely visible sledge, and Nikita, lying in its depths, warm under his dead master.
10
Nikita woke before dawn. An eddy of cold down his back woke him. He was dreaming that as he was driving home from the mill with flour belonging to his master, he missed the bridge crossing the stream and jammed the cart. And he sees that he climbed under the cart and heaved it up, straightening his back. But—a strange thing!—the cart doesn’t move and sticks to his back, and he can neither shift it nor get out from under it. It has crushed the small of his back entirely. And how cold he is! It’s obvious he has to get himself out. “Give over!” he says to whoever it is who’s crushing his back with the cart. “Get the sacks off!” But the cart is getting colder and colder as it presses down on him, and suddenly something knocks sharply, and he wakes up completely and remembers everything. The cold cart is his dead, frozen master, lying on top of him. And Mukhorty is the one who knocked, hitting his hoof against the sledge a couple of times.