A Hero of Our Time - Mikhail IUr'evich Lermontov [38]
A silence followed. But I was shocked by one thing: before, the blind boy had spoken to me in a Ukrainian dialect, and now he was expressing himself cleanly in Russian.
“You see, I’m right,” said the blind boy again, clapping his palms, “Yanko isn’t afraid of the sea or the wind or the fog or the shore patrol. Listen now. You won’t fool me—that isn’t water lapping, those are his long oars.”
The woman jumped up and began peering into the distance with an anxious look.
“You’re delirious, blind boy,” she said, “I don’t see anything.”
I admit, as hard as I tried to make out in the distance anything that resembled a boat, I was unsuccessful. Thus passed about ten minutes. And then, a black dot appeared between the mountains of waves. It grew larger and smaller in turns. Slowly climbing up to the peak of a wave, and quickly falling from it, a boat was approaching the shore. Brave was the seaman who decided to set out across the strait at a distance of twenty versts on such a night, and important must his reason have been, to have induced him to it! Thinking this, with an involuntary beating of my heart, I looked at the poor boat, but like a duck, it dived under and then, rapidly waving its oars, like wings, sprang out of the depths in a spray of foam. And I thought to myself, it is going to strike against the shore with all its might and fly into pieces. But it turned deftly to one side, and hurdled unharmed into a small bay. A man of medium height, in a Tatar sheepswool hat, emerged from it. He waved an arm and the three of them took to dragging something out of the boat. The load was so great that even now I don’t understand how it hadn’t sunk. Each took a bundle onto his shoulder and they set off along the shoreline; and soon I lost sight of them. I had to go back, but I confess that all these odd things had perturbed me, and I barely managed to wait until morning.
My Cossack was very surprised to see me fully dressed when he awoke. I, however, did not give him any reason for it. I admired the blue sky beyond the window, studded with little clouds, above the far coast of the Crimea, which extended in a violet stripe and ended in a cliff, at the top of which a lighthouse tower shone white. Then I set off for the Fanagorya fort in order to learn from the commandant the time of my departure to Gelendzhik.
But alas! The commandant could not tell me anything definitively. The ships standing at the jetty were all patrol or merchant ships, which hadn’t yet started loading. “Maybe in about three, four days, the postal boat will arrive,” said the commandant, “and then we’ll see.” I returned home, morose and angry. I was met in the doorway by the frightened face of my Cossack.
“It’s bad, Your Honor!” he said to me.
“Yes, brother, God knows when we’ll get out of this place!”
He seemed even more alarmed at this and, leaning into me, said in a whisper:
“It is unclean here! Today I met a Black Sea uryadnik.5 I know him—he was in my detachment last year. And when I told him where we were staying, he said: ‘Brother, it’s unclean there, the people are not good!’ Yes, and it’s true, who is this blind boy? He goes everywhere alone, to the bazaar, to get bread, to fetch water . . . it’s clear that they’re used to him around here.”
“What of it? Has the proprietress appeared at least?”
“Today, when you were gone, an old woman came and with her a daughter.”
“What daughter? She doesn’t have a daughter.”
“God knows who she was, if she wasn’t the daughter. Over there, the old woman is sitting in her house.”
I went into the peasant house. The stove had been lit and it was hot; a meal, a rather luxurious one for the likes of poor folk, was cooking inside it. The old woman answered all my questions with the reply that she was deaf and couldn’t hear. What was I to do with her? I addressed myself to the blind boy who was sitting in front of the stove and putting brushwood in the fire.
“So, tell me, you blind imp,” I said, taking him by the ear,
“where did you trundle along to with your bundle last night?” Suddenly, my blind