A Hero of Our Time - Mikhail IUr'evich Lermontov [11]
Will you say that morality gains nothing from all of this? Forgive me. Enough people have been fed on sweets: their guts have rotted from them. What is needed is a bitter medicine, the pungent truth. But do not think now that the author of this book has had the proud impulse to remedy human flaws. God cure him of such audacity! It simply amused him to paint the contemporary person, one that he understands, and to his misfortune has come across too often.
PART ONE
I
BELA
I was traveling post from Tiflis. The entire load of my cart consisted of one valise of average size, half-filled with my travel notes about Georgia. The majority of these, luckily for you, were lost; but the valise with the rest of my things, luckily for me, remained intact.
The sun was just beginning to hide behind snowy peaks when I entered the Koyshaursky Valley. The Ossetian cart driver sang songs at full voice as he tirelessly urged the horses onward, so that we might succeed in climbing Koyshaursky Mountain before nightfall. What a glorious place, this valley! On every side there are unassailable mountains and reddish promontories, hung with green ivy and crowned with clumps of plane trees; there are yellow precipices, covered with the lines of gullies; and right up high: a gold fringe of snow. Below, the Aragva River, having gathered another nameless rivulet which noisily unearthed itself from a black and gloomy chasm, extends like a silver thread, glittering like a scaly snake.
We arrived at the foot of the Koyshaursky Mountain and stopped at a dukhan.1 Two dozen or so Georgians and other mountain dwellers were crowded noisily there. Nearby, a caravan of camels had stopped for a night’s shelter. I was supposed to hire some bullocks to drag my cart up this forsaken mountain, because it was autumn already, there was black ice, and this slope was about two versts2 in length.
There was nothing else to be done so I hired the six bullocks and a few Ossetians. One of them hoisted my valise onto his shoulders; the others started to prod the bullocks using their voices alone.
Behind my cart, another was being pulled by a foursome of bullocks as though it took no effort, even though it was full to the brim. This disparity surprised me. The owner walked behind his cart, smoking a little Kabardian pipe plated in silver. He wore an officer’s frock coat without epaulets and a shaggy Circassian hat. He seemed about fifty years old; the dark complexion of his face showed that it was long acquainted with the Transcaucasian sun, but the premature graying of his mustache didn’t correspond with his solid gait and bright appearance. I walked up to him and bowed; he silently returned the bow and pushed out an enormous cloud of smoke.
“It seems you and I will be traveling companions?”
He bowed again silently.
“Might you be going to Stavropol?”
“Yes, indeed . . . on official business.”
“Tell me, if you would, why is your heavy cart being pulled easily by four bullocks, when mine, which is empty, can barely be moved by six beasts with the help of these Ossetians?”
He smiled slyly and looked at me with emphasis.
“You have only recently arrived in the Caucasus, perhaps?”
“About a year ago,” I replied.
He smiled a second time.
“Well . . . what?”
“Yes! What awful rogues, these Asiatics! You think they’re urging those bullocks with what they’re saying? Devil knows what they’re crying out. The bulls, though, they understand them. You could yoke twenty to your cart even, and the bullocks still wouldn’t move as long as they cry out like that . . . Awful cheats! But what do you expect of them? . . . They love to make off with the money of passersby . . . the spoiled little swindlers!