Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak [151]
“Of course not. First of all, you say yourself it’s just a tall tale, folklore. Second, in mama’s time this folklore was already over a hundred years old, as she said. But why so loud? The old man will hear and get offended.”
“He won’t hear anything—he’s hard of hearing. And if he does hear, he won’t make sense of it—he’s a bit off.”
“Hey, Fyodor Nefyodych!” the old man urged the mare on, addressing her with a masculine name for no apparent reason, knowing perfectly well, and better than his passengers, that she was a mare. “What anathematic heat! Like the Hebrew youths in the Persian furnace! Hup, you unpastured devil. I’m talking to you, Mazeppa!”8
He would unexpectedly strike up snatches of popular songs composed in the local factories in former times.
Farewell to the central office,
Farewell to the pit yard and boss,
I’m sick to death of the master’s bread,
I’ve drunk my fill of stagnant water.
A swan goes swimming by the shore,
Paddling the water with his feet.
It isn’t wine that makes me tipsy,
Vanya’s been taken for a soldier.
But me, Masha, I’m a bright one,
But me, Masha, I’m no fool.
I’ll go off to Selyaba town,
Get hired by the Sentetyurikha.
“Hey, little sod, you’ve forgotten God! Look, people, at this carrion of a beast! You give her the whip, she gives you the slip. Hup, Fedya-Nefedya, where’ll that get ya? This here forest’s called the taiga, there’s no end to it. There’s a force of peasant folk in it, ho, ho! There’s the Forest Brotherhood in it. Hey, Fedya-Nefedya, stopped again, you devil, you goblin!”
Suddenly he turned around and, looking point-blank at Antonina Alexandrovna, said:
“What notion’s got into you, young’un, think I don’t sense where you come from? You’re a simple one, ma’am, I must say. Let the earth swallow me up, but I recognize you! That I do! Couldn’t believe my blinkers, a live Grigov!” (The old man called eyes “blinkers” and Krüger “Grigov.”) “You wouldn’t happen to be his granddaughter? Ain’t I got an eye for Grigov? I spent my whole life around him, broke my teeth on him. In all kinds of handiwork, all the jobs. As a pit-prop man, a winch man, a stable man. Hup, shake a leg! She’s stopped again, the cripple! Angels in China-land, I’m talking to you, ain’t I?
“Here you’re asking what Vakkh is he, that blacksmith maybe? You’re real simple, ma’am, such a big-eyed lady, but a fool. Your Vakkh, he was Postanogov by name. Postanogov Iron Belly, it’s fifty years he’s been in the ground, between the boards. And us now, on the contrary, we’re Mekhonoshin. Same name, namesakes, but the last name’s different—Efim, but not him.”
The old man gradually told his passengers in his own words what they already knew about the Mikulitsyns from Samdevyatov. He called him Mikulich and her Mikulichna. The manager’s present wife he called the second-wed, and of “the little first, the deceased one,” he said that she was a honey-woman, a white cherub. When he got on to the partisan leader Liberius and learned that his fame had not yet reached Moscow, that seemed incredible to him:
“You haven’t heard? Haven’t heard of Comrade Forester? Angels in China-land, what’s Moscow got ears for?”
Evening was beginning to fall. The travelers’ own shadows, growing ever longer, raced ahead of them. Their way lay across a wide empty expanse. Here and there, sticking up high, grew woody stalks of goosefoot, thistles, loosestrife, in solitary stands, with clusters of flowers at their tips. Lit from below, from the ground, by the rays of the sunset, their outlines rose up ghostly, like motionless mounted sentinels posted thinly