A Sportsman's Notebook Read online

  Master of description, he is also superb with endings, is quirky in this regard. Endings are the hardest part of any story, and are particularly difficult for a short story writer, among other reasons simply because he is so regularly faced with the problem of doing them right. (A novelist writes an ending only every few years.) The endings of some of these stories are so attenuated and poetically true—and true only poetically—as to leave the reader bemused and shaken. I’ll walk through one of my favorites, to give you a flavor of this.

  Like so many of the stories in the Notebooks, “The Singers” seems hardly constructed at all. A hunter, a small landowner, walks into a peasant tavern in a run-down village on a hot summer day. A highly miscellaneous group is assembled—Blinker, Muddlehead, Wild Master—these are their nicknames, and they’re an odd lot, loungers and boozers, “road masters” as we call them in Pakistan, men whose main occupation is strolling up and down the village street.

  It turns out that there is a contest on, a singing contest, with the prize a pot of beer. The challenger, an outsider known only as “the huckster,” wins the draw and begins. He sings artfully:

  His voice was quite sweet and agreeable, though somewhat husky; he played with it, twirled it about like a toy, with constant downward trills and modulations and constant returns to the top note, which he held and prolonged with a special effort . . . .

  Gradually, he catches up his audience, enflames them.

  Encouraged by the signs of general satisfaction, the huckster fairly whirled along and went off into such flourishes, such tongue-clickings and drummings, such wild throat-play, that at length, exhausted, pale, bathed in hot sweat, he threw himself back, let out a last dying note—and his wild outburst was answered in unison by the company.

  The louder part of the crowd by acclamation crowns him the winner, no contest—but cooler heads prevail and his local rival, Yasha, is asked to try his voice.

  His first note was faint and uneven, and came, it seemed, not from his chest, but from somewhere far away, as if it had chanced to fly into the room. . . . Seldom, I confess, have I heard such a voice: it was somewhat worn and had a sort of cracked ring; at first it had even a certain suggestion of the morbid; but it also held a deep, unsimulated passion, and youth, and strength, and sweetness, and a deliciously detached note of melancholy. The truthful, fervent Russian soul rang and breathed in it and fairly caught at your heart, caught straight at your Russian heartstrings.

  When he finishes, the audience is silent; the innkeeper’s wife, in tears, withdraws into another room. The rival singer, the huckster, goes up to Yasha. “‘You. . . . It’s yours. . . . You’ve won,’ he brought out at last with difficulty and dashed from the room.”

  Now comes the shift, irrational and intuitive, that I find so intriguing. The narrator, the landowner, goes out of the inn, his world made strange by the music he has heard, falls asleep in a hay loft, and rises just as night has fallen. Collecting himself, he sets off home, passing the tavern, where all are drunk now and rolling around like beasts—he sees it through the window. Walking along the dark road, he hears a boy calling a name, Antropka, Antropka, over and over again.

  “Antropka! Antropka-a-a! . . .” it called, in stubborn, tearful desperation, with a long dragging-out of the last syllable.

  For a few moments it was silent, then began to call again. The voice carried clearly in the unmoving, lightly-sleeping air. Thirty times at least it had called Antropka’s name, when suddenly, from the opposite end of the meadow, as if from a different world, came a scarcely audible reply:

  “What-a-a-a-at?”

  The boy’s voice called at once, glad but indignant:

  “Come here you devil!”

  “What fo-o-o-r?” answered the other, after a pause.

  “Because father wants to be-ee-ee-eat you.”

  There it closes—leaving the strange nutty taste of this ending, which is almost unsatisfying, lingering on our palates. What does it mean?

  And so that’s it, or not quite. “Soft you; a word or two before you go.” I make a special pleading for these stories. I am a farmer in Pakistan, in a land that surely is among the last places on earth where the condition that Turgenev describes—feudal life—still exists. I pray that this form of inequality will never again be visited upon mankind, but suspect that human folly is incapable of correction, and that someday, on Mars or on Planet X, again man will lord over man as they did in feudal Russia—and as they do in our present, sad Pakistan. I have lived, and I hope to die, in my faith in Turgenev. I speak with special knowledge. He has described this scene—this feudal scene—better than anyone—and fixed it forever.

  Engage with him with love. Attach yourself to this book, it will make you larger.

  —Daniyal Mueenuddin

  Khor and Kalinich

  ANYONE WHO HAS CROSSED FROM THE DISTRICT OF BOLKHOV into that of Zhizdra will probably have been struck by the sharp difference between the natives of the provinces of Orel and Kaluga. The peasant of Orel is short, stooping, sullen; he looks at you from under his brows, lives in flimsy huts of poplar wood, does labor-duty for his master; never goes in for trade; eats badly, wears plaited shoes. In Kaluga the peasant pays rent and lives in spacious cabins of pinewood; he is tall, with a bold gay way of looking at you, and a clean white face; he trades in oil and tar, and on feast days wears boots. In Orel—I am speaking about the eastern part of the province—the village is usually situated among ploughed fields near a ravine which peters out into a dirty pond. Except for a few willows, which are always ready to oblige, and for two or three lank birches, there is not a tree to be seen for a verst around; one hut huddles against another; the roofs have a rough thatch of rotten straw. . . . In Kaluga, on the other hand, the village is largely surrounded by forest; the huts have a freer, sturdier look and are roofed with planks, the gates are well-fitted, the wicker-work fence round the back-yard is neither tattered nor tumble-down, nor does it offer an open invitation to every pig that may come along. . . . Even the sport is better in the province of Kaluga. In Orel the remaining tracts of forest and bush will have vanished in about five years’ time, and there is no question of marshes; but in Kaluga, forests where no timber may be cut stretch for hundreds of versts, and marshes for tens of versts, the blackcock (noble bird) is not yet extinct, the generous snipe abounds, and the fussy partridge cheers and startles both sportsman and dog as he flies violently up from cover.

  Once, when I was shooting in the district of Zhizdra, I met in the fields, and got to know, a small landowner from Kaluga, Polutykin by name, an enthusiastic sportsman and proportionately excellent fellow. It’s true that he had certain weaknesses: for instance, he had courted all the wealthy marriageable girls in the province and, being rejected and forbidden the house, he would broken-heartedly confide his sorrows to all his friends and continue to send the girls’ parents presents of sour peaches and other unripe produce of his garden; he loved to repeat, over and over again, one and the same story, which, notwithstanding Mr. Polutykin’s high regard for its excellence, certainly had never made anybody laugh; he admired the works of Akim Nakhimov and the story of Pinna; he stammered; he called his dog “Astronomer”; he said “aye” instead of “yes”; in his house he had introduced a French style of cooking, the secret of which, as understood by his cook, consisted in completely transforming the natural taste of every dish: meat, from the hands of this expert, tasted of fish; fish, of mushrooms; macaroni, of gun-powder; and, with it all, no carrot ever fell into the soup without taking the form of a rhombus or a trapeze. Yet, apart from these rare and unimportant failings, Mr. Polutykin was, as I have already said, an excellent fellow.

  On the very first day of my acquaintanceship with him, Mr. Polutykin invited me to stay the night. “It’s about five versts to where I live,” he added. “It’s too far to walk; let’s first go and see Khor.” The reader will excuse me from reproducing his stammer.

  “And who may Khor be?”

 
“One of my peasants . . . he lives just here.”

  So we went to see Khor. In the middle of the forest, in a cleared and cultivated glade, stood the lonely farm where Khor lived. It consisted of several cabins of pinewood grouped together behind fences; in front of the largest hut was a lean-to roof supported on slender poles. We went in and were met by a young peasant lad of about twenty, tall and good-looking.

  “Hallo, Fedya! Is Khor at home?” Mr. Polutykin asked him.

  “No, Khor’s gone to town,” answered the lad, smiling and showing a row of snow-white teeth. “Would you like the cart harnessed?”

  “Yes, my boy, we would. And bring us some kvass.”

  We went into the hut. There were none of your colored prints stuck to the clean boarding of the walls; in the corner, in front of the heavy icon with its crust of silver, an oil-lamp glimmered; the table of limewood had been freshly scraped and washed; between the timbers and along the jambs of the windows there were no skittish, roving bettles, no lurking, reflective cockroaches. The lad soon appeared with a big white jug full of excellent kvass, a huge hunk of wheaten bread and a dozen salted cucumbers in a wooden bowl. He set all these victuals out on the table, leant in the doorway and began to contemplate us with a smile. Before we had finished eating, a cart rattled up to the door. We went out. A boy of about fifteen, curly-headed and ruddy-cheeked, was sitting with the reins in his hand, with difficulty keeping control of a well-fed roan stallion. Round the cart stood half a dozen gigantic young men, all very much like each other and like Fedya. “The whole lot are Khor’s children,” observed Polutykin. “Yes, all Khor’s litter,”* rejoined Fedya, who had followed us out into the porch; “and not the whole lot, either; Potap is in the forest, and Sidor has gone to town with old Khor. . . . Look here, Vasya,” he continued, turning to the driver, “remember you’re driving the master, and go at a good pace. Only go easy over the bumps, do you hear, or you’ll damage the cart and disturb the master’s digestion!”

  The rest of Khor’s litter chuckled at Fedya’s remark. “Help Astronomer up too,” cried Mr. Polutykin solemnly. Fedya gaily lifted up the dog, which wore a constrained smile, and set him down in the bottom of the cart. Vasya gave the horse its head, and off we went. “There’s my estate office,” said Mr. Polutykin to me suddenly, pointing to a little low house. “Shall we call in?”

  “Certainly.”

  “It’s disused now,” he explained, getting down from the cart, “but it’s worth looking at all the same.”

  The office consisted of two empty rooms. The watchman, an old man with one eye, came running out from the back-yard.

  “Good day to you, Minyaich,” said Mr. Polutykin, “and where’s the water?”

  The one-eyed old man vanished and returned at once with a bottle of water and two glasses. “Try it,” said Polutykin to me; “try my excellent spring water.” We drank a glass each, the old man bowing deeply meanwhile.

  “Well, now I think we might go on,” observed my new friend. “In this office I sold ten acres of forest to Alliluyev the merchant, and at a good price, too.”

  We took our places in the cart and in half an hour were already driving into the courtyard of Polutykin’s house.

  “Tell me,” I asked Polutykin at supper, “why does your Khor live separately from your other peasants?”

  “I’ll tell you: because he is the clever one among them. About twenty-five years ago his hut got burnt down; so up he comes to my late father and says: ‘Nikolai Kuzmich, please may I settle on your land, in the forest beside the marsh? I’ll pay you good rent.’ ‘But why do you want to settle beside the marsh?’ ‘I just do; but you, sir, Nikolai Kuzmich, please don’t give me any work to do, but fix any rent you like.’ ‘Fifty rubles a year.’ ‘Certainly.’ ‘And no arrears, mind!’ ‘Of course, no arrears.’ . . . So he settled beside the marsh. And since then he has been known as Khor.”

  “And he’s done well out of it?” I asked.

  “He has. Now he pays me a hundred rubles rent, and I am going to make him pay more still, I think. I have said to him several times: ‘Buy your own freedom, Khor, do!’ But he, the crafty brute, assures me that he could not manage it; that he has got no money . . . As if he expected me to believe him! . . .”

  Next day we went out shooting as soon as we had drunk tea. As we drove through the village Mr. Polutykin told the driver to stop in front of a little low hut and called out loudly: “Kalinich!”

  “Coming, sir, coming,” replied a voice from the yard; “I’m just tying my shoe.”

  We went slowly on: outside the village we were overtaken by a man of about forty—tall, thin, with a small head, carried well in the air. This was Kalinich. His good-natured swarthy face, with pock marks here and there, appealed to me as soon as I saw it. Kalinich, as I learnt later on, accompanied his master out shooting every day, carried his bag, and sometimes his gun too, marked his birds, brought him water to drink, picked strawberries, built shelters for him, ran to fetch the drozhky; without him Mr. Polutykin could not stir a yard. Kalinich was a man of the gayest and gentlest character imaginable; he was constantly humming below his breath and throwing carefree glances in all directions; he spoke in a slightly nasal voice, smiling and screwing up his pale-blue eyes and often passing his hand over his scanty wedge-shaped beard. He walked slowly but with large strides, leaning slightly on a long thin stick. In the course of the day he and I got talking together several times, and he looked after me without a trace of servility; his attitude to his master was one of fatherly supervision.

  When the unbearable midday heat compelled us to seek shelter, he led us to his bee-garden in the very depth of the forest. He opened up for us a little hut, hung with bunches of dried aromatic herbs, gave us some fresh hay to lie on, then himself put a sort of network bag over his head, took a knife, a pot and a piece of burning wood, and went off to the bee-garden to cut us some honeycomb. We washed down the warm translucent honey with spring water, and fell asleep to the monotonous humming of bees and the busy murmur of leaves. A gentle breath of wind awakened me. I opened my eyes and saw Kalinich. He was sitting on the threshold of the half-open door, fashioning a spoon with his knife. I lay and admired his face, which was gentle and serene as the evening sky. Mr. Polutykin also awoke. We did not get up at once. After a long tramp and a deep sleep it is delightful to lie motionless in the hay: a luxurious languor invades the body, the face glows with warmth, a delicious laziness closes the eyes.

  At length we rose, went out, and continued our wanderings until nightfall. At supper I spoke again about Khor and also about Kalinich.

  “Kalinich is a good fellow,” said Mr. Polutykin: “a keen, obliging fellow. He’s not much good on the land, though; I am always taking him away from it. Every day he comes out shooting with me. . . . What good that does the land, you can well imagine.” I agreed with him, and we went to bed.

  Next day Mr. Polutykin was obliged to go into town about some trouble which he had with his neighbor Pichukov. Pichukov had ploughed up some of Polutykin’s land and, on this land, had beaten one of Polutykin’s peasant women. I went out shooting alone and towards evening I paid a call on Khor. In the doorway of the hut I was met by an old man—bald, short, sturdy and broad-shouldered: Khor himself. I looked at him with curiosity. His cast of face recalled Socrates: the same high bumpy forehead, the same little eyes, the same snub nose. We went together into the hut. My friend Fedya brought me some milk and black bread. Khor sat down on a bench and, tranquilly stroking his curly beard, engaged me in conversation.

  He seemed a man conscious of his own worth; slow of speech and movement, with an occasional chuckle from behind his long moustaches. I talked to him about the sowing, the harvest, about the peasant’s life. . . . He always seemed to agree with me; only, when he did so, I was conscious of an uneasy feeling that I was not really right after all; our conversation had a certain strangeness about it. Some of Khor’s utterances were abstruse—probably the effect of caution. Here is a sam
ple of our conversation for you:

  “Tell me, Khor,” I said to him, “why don’t you buy your freedom from the master?”

  “And why should I buy it? As things are, I know the master and I know the rent he wants. . . . He is a good master, too.”

  “All the same, you would be better off if you were free,” I remarked.

  Khor gave me a sidelong glance. “Certainly,” he said.

  “Well, then, why don’t you buy your freedom?”

  Khor swivelled his head from side to side.

  “And what am I to buy it with, sir?”

  “Oh, come on, man. . . .”

  “Once Khor gets in among people who are free,” he continued below his breath, as if talking to himself, “any fellow who shaves his beard would be Khor’s master.”

  “But you could shave your own beard, too.”

  “What’s a beard? A beard is grass; you can always cut it.”

  “Well, then?”

  “Of course, Khor might get right in among the merchants; merchants have a good life—and they’ve got beards too.”

  “Well, don’t you do a bit of trading, too?” I asked him.

  “I trade in a small way, with oil and tar. . . . Now, sir, would you like me to harness the cart?”

  You’ve got your head screwed on the right way, and a firm hold on your tongue, too, I thought. “No,” I said aloud, “I don’t need the cart; I shall be shooting near your place to-morrow and, if I may, I’ll spend the night here in your hay-shed.”

  “You’ll be welcome. But will you be all right in the shed? I’ll tell the women to spread a sheet for you and to put out a pillow. Hey, there, women!” he shouted, rising from his place. “Come here! . . . Fedya, you go with them. Women are such fools.”