War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [631]
“So she’s come, the rascal!” Pierre heard the same gentle voice from the end of the shed. “She’s come, the rascal, she remembers! Well, well, enough.” And the soldier, pushing away a little dog that was jumping up to him, came back to his place and sat down. In his hands there was something wrapped in a rag.
“Here, have a bite to eat, master,” he said, returning again to his respectful tone, and unwrapping and offering Pierre several baked potatoes. “There was soup for dinner. But the potatoes are grand!”
Pierre had not eaten all day, and the smell of the potatoes seemed extraordinarily pleasant to him. He thanked the soldier and began to eat.
“What, just like that?” the soldier said, smiling, and he took one of the potatoes. “Do it this way.” He again took out his pocket knife, cut the potato into two equal halves on his palm, sprinkled them with salt from the rag, and offered them to Pierre.
“Grand potatoes,” he repeated. “That’s the way to eat them.”
It seemed to Pierre that he had never eaten anything tastier.
“No, I’m all right,” said Pierre, “but why did they shoot those unfortunate men!…The last one was about twenty.”
“Tsk, tsk…” said the little man. “What a sin, what a sin…” he added quickly, and, as if his words had always been ready in his mouth and flew out of it inadvertently, he went on: “Why is it, master, that you stayed in Moscow like this?”
“I didn’t think they’d come so quickly. I stayed by chance,” said Pierre.
“How did they take you, little falcon? From your own house?”
“No, I went to the fire, and there they seized me and tried me for arson.”
“Where there’s law, there’s lies,” the little man put in.
“Have you been here long?” asked Pierre, chewing the last potato.
“Me? They took me on Sunday from a hospital in Moscow.”
“And what are you, a soldier?”
“Soldiers of the Apsheronsky regiment. I was dying of fever. Nobody told us anything. There were about twenty of our men lying there. We never thought, never imagined.”
“And what, is it sad for you here?” asked Pierre.
“How could it not be, little falcon? My name’s Platon, last name Karataev,” he added, evidently to make it easier for Pierre to address him. “They nicknamed me ‘little falcon’ in the service. How can you not be sad, little falcon! Moscow, she’s the mother of cities. How can you not be sad looking at that. Well, the worm gnaws the cabbage, but dies before he’s done: that’s what the old folk used to say,” he added quickly.
“What, what’s that you said?” asked Pierre.
“Me?” asked Karataev. “I said: man proposes, God disposes,” he said, thinking he was repeating what he had said. And he went on at once: “So then, master, have you got family estates? And a house? So the cup’s overflowing! And a wife? Are your old parents still living?” he asked, and, though Pierre could not see it in the darkness, he sensed that the soldier’s lips were puckered in a restrained smile of tenderness as he asked him these things. He was clearly upset that Pierre had no parents, especially no mother.
“A wife for advice, a mother-in-law for welcome, but no one’s dearer than your own mother!” he said. “Well, but are there children?” he went on asking. Pierre’s negative answer clearly upset him, and he hastened to add: “So what, you’re young folk, God grant you’ll still have some. Only live in good accord…”
“It doesn’t matter now,” Pierre said involuntarily.
“Ah, you dear man,” Platon retorted. “There’s no safety from the beggar’s sack or the prison’s bars.” He settled himself more comfortably and cleared his throat, evidently preparing to tell a long story. “And so, my gentle friend, I used to live at home,” he began. “Our estate was a prosperous one, there was lots of land, the muzhiks lived well, and so did our household, thank God. My good father went out to mow with the six of us. We lived well. We were real Christian peasants. Then once…” And Platon Karataev told a long story of how he went to