Selected Stories of Anton Chekov - By Anton Chekhov Page 0,88

has nothing to cover himself with, but at least he can make a fire …

In a week, when the water fully subsided and the ferry was set up, none of the boatmen would be needed except for Semyon, and the Tartar would start going from village to village, begging and asking for work. His wife was only seventeen; she was beautiful, pampered, and shy—could she, too, go around the villages with her face uncovered and beg for alms? No, it was horrible even to think of it …

Dawn was breaking; the outlines of the barge, the osier bushes in the rippling water, could be seen clearly, and, looking back, there was the clay cliffside, the hut roofed with brown straw below, and a cluster of village cottages above. In the village the cocks were already crowing.

The red clay cliffside, the barge, the river, the unkind strangers, hunger, cold, sickness—maybe none of it exists in reality. Probably I am only dreaming it all, thought the Tartar. He felt that he was asleep and heard his own snoring … Of course he is at home, in Simbirsk province, and as soon as he calls his wife’s name, she will call back to him; and his mother is in the next room … Sometimes one has such frightful dreams! What for? The Tartar smiled and opened his eyes. What river is this? The Volga?

It was snowing.

“Hallo-o-o!” someone was shouting from the other bank. “Ba-a-arridge!”

The Tartar came to his senses and went to wake up his comrades, so that they could cross to the other side. Putting on their ragged sheepskin coats as they went, cursing in hoarse, just-awakened voices, and hunching up against the cold, the boatmen appeared on the bank. The river, which exhaled a piercing cold, probably seemed disgusting and eerie to them after sleep. They clambered unhurriedly into the barridge … The Tartar and the three boatmen took hold of the long, broad-bladed oars, which in the dark resembled crayfish claws; Semyon heaved the weight of his belly against the long tiller. The shouting from the other side went on, and two pistol shots rang out, probably with the thought that the boatmen were asleep or had gone to the pothouse in the village.

“All right, you’ll get there!” the Explainer said in the tone of a man convinced that in this world there is no need to hurry, “nothing good will come of it anyway.”

The heavy, clumsy barge detached itself from the bank and floated among the osier bushes, and only by the fact that the osiers were slowly dropping behind could one tell that it was not standing in place but moving. The boatmen swung the oars regularly, in unison; the Explainer lay his belly against the tiller and, describing a curve in the air, flew from one gunwale to the other. In the darkness it looked as if people were sitting on some antediluvian animal with long paws and floating on it towards some cold, gloomy land such as one sometimes sees in nightmares.

They passed the osiers and emerged into the open. On the other bank the knocking and regular splashing of the oars could already be heard, and there came a shout of “Hurry! Hurry!” Another ten minutes passed and the barge bumped heavily against the wharf.

“It just keeps pouring down, pouring down!” Semyon muttered, wiping the snow from his face. “Where it comes from God only knows!”

On the other side an old man was waiting, lean, not tall, in a jacket lined with fox fur and a white lambskin hat. He stood apart from the horses and did not move; he had a grim, concentrated expression, as if he were at pains to remember something and angry with his disobedient memory. When Semyon came up to him, smiling, and removed his hat, he said:

“I’m rushing to Anastasyevka. My daughter’s gotten worse again, and I’ve heard a new doctor has been appointed to Anastasyevka.”

They pulled the tarantass onto the barge and went back. The man whom Semyon called Vassily Sergeich stood motionless all the while they crossed, his thick lips tightly compressed and his eyes fixed on one point; when the coachman asked permission to smoke in his presence, he made no answer, as if he had not heard. And Semyon, laying his belly against the tiller, looked at him mockingly and said:

“People can live in Siberia, too. Li-i-ive!”

The Explainer’s face wore a triumphant expression, as if he had proved something and was glad it had come