PAGE 5
The Dead Man
by
“There will be no rain tonight.”
“Do you keep such a thing as a Psalter here?” I inquired.
“Such a thing as a what?”
“As a Psalter– a book?”
No answer followed.
Faster and faster the southern night went on descending, and wiping the land clean of heat, as though that heat had been dust. Upon me there came a feeling that I should like to go and bury myself in some sweet-smelling hay, and sleep there until sunrise.
“Maybe Panek has one of those things?” hazarded Ufim after a long pause. “At any rate he has dealings with the Molokans.”
After that, the company held further converse in whispers. Then all save the more rotund of the old women left the forecourt, while its remaining occupant said to me with a sigh:
“You may come and look at him if you wish.”
Small and gentle looked the woman’s meekly lowered head as, folding her hands across her breast, she added in a whisper:
“Oh purest Mother of God! Oh Thou of spotless chastity!”
In contrast to her expression, that on the face of the dead man was stem and, as it were, fraught with importance where thick grey eyebrows lay parted over a large nose, and the latter curved downwards towards a moustache which divided introspective, partially closed eyes from a mouth that was set half-open. Indeed, it was as though the man were pondering something of annoyance, so that presently he would make shift to deliver himself of a final and urgent injunction. The blue smoke of a meagre candle quivered meanwhile, over his head, though the wick diffused so feeble a light that the death blurs under the eyes and in the cheek furrows lay uneffaced, and the dark hands and wrists, disposed, lumplike, on the front of the greyish-blue shroud, seemed to have had their fingers twisted in a manner which even death had failed to rectify. And ever and anon, streaming from door to window, came a draught variously fraught with the odours of wormwood, mint, and corruption.
Presently the old woman’s whispering grew more animated and intelligible, while constantly, amid the wheezed mutterings, sheet lightning cut the black square of the window space with menacing flashes, and seemed, with their blue glare, as it shot through the tomblike hut, to cause the candle’s flickering flame to undergo a temporary extinction, a temporary withdrawal, and the grey bristles on the dead man’s face to gleam like the scales of a fish, and his features to gather themselves into a grim frown. Meanwhile, like a stream of cold, bitter water dripping upon my breast, the old woman’s whispered soliloquy maintained its uninterrupted flow.
At length there recurred, somehow, to my mind the words which, impressive though they be, never can assuage sorrow–the words:
“Weep not for me, Martha, nor gaze into the tomb, for, lo, I am risen!”
Nay, and never would THIS man rise again. . . .
Presently the bony old woman returned with a report that nowhere among the huts could a Psalter be found, but only a book of another kind. Would it do?
The other book turned out to be a grammar of the Church Slavonic dialect, with the first pages torn out, and beginning with the words, “Drug, drugi, druzhe.” [“A friend, of a friend, O friend.”]
“What, then, are we to do? ” vexedly asked the smaller of the dames when I had explained to her that a grammar could work no benefit to a corpse. As she put the query, her small, childlike face quivered with disappointment, and her eyes swelled and overflowed with tears.
“My man has lived his life,” she said with a sob, “and now he cannot even be given proper burial! “
And, similarly, when next I offered to recite over her husband each and every prayer and psalm that I could contrive to recall to my recollection, on condition that all present should meanwhile leave the hut (for I felt that, since the task would be one novel to me, the attendance of auditors might hinder me from mustering my entire stock of petitions), she so disbelieved me, or failed to understand me, that for long enough she could only stand tottering in the doorway as, with twitching nose, she drew her sleeve across her worn, diminutive features.