Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow by Irina Reyfman (top 10 novels of all time .txt) 📕

all its force. O ye who come after me, be manly but remember humanity!”—He returned my ruble and calmly resumed his place.

“Take your holiday pie, grandfather,” a woman of about fifty said to the blind man when coming up.—How rapturously he took it with both hands. “Here is true benefaction, here true alms. For thirty years in a row I have been eating this pie on holidays and Sundays. You have not forgotten the promise you made in your childhood. Does what I did for your late father deserve your remembering me until my death? I, my friends, saved her father from the beating that itinerant soldiers often give to peasants. The soldiers wanted to confiscate something from him; he began to argue with them. The affair took place behind the threshing areas. Soldiers began to beat up the peasant. I was the sergeant in the same company as these soldiers and happened to be there. I came running when I heard the peasant’s cry and saved him from the beatings; perhaps even from something worse, not that one can guess beforehand. This is what my present benefactress remembered when she saw me here in my beggarly state. This is what she remembers every day and every holiday. My deed was not large, but it was kind. And a kind deed pleases God; He never allows it to go for naught.”

“Will you really insult me so in front of everyone, dear old man, and will you reject my alms alone?” I said to him. “Are my alms the alms of a sinner? Even so, they can be of use to him if they serve to soften his cruel heart.” “You distress a heart already distressed long ago by the punishment of nature,” the elder said. “I was unaware that I could offend you by not accepting a handout that could cause harm. Forgive me my sin, but give me, if you want to give me something, give me what can be useful to me…. We had a cold spring, my throat was sore; I did not have a smallest scarf to tie around my neck. God had mercy, the illness passed…. Do you not have a little old scarf? When my throat gets sore, I will tie it around; it will warm my neck, and my throat will stop hurting. I will remember you, if you need the recollection of a beggar.” I took the scarf from my neck and put it around the blind man’s neck…. And I took my leave.

When I was returning through Klin, I did not come across the blind singer again. He died three days before my return. But my scarf, as the woman who brought him pies on holidays recounted, he put around his neck after he fell suddenly ill shortly before his death, and they laid him in his coffin with it. Oh! should anyone feel the value of this scarf, he will also feel what passed in me when I heard this.

PESHKI

No matter how much I wished to hasten the completion of my journey, hunger—as the saying goes—smashes stone walls,121 and it forced me to enter the post hut and, until I could gain access once more to ragoÛts, fricassees, pâtés, and other French food invented to poison the stomach, to dine on the old piece of roast beef that traveled with me as stores. Having dined this time much worse than many colonels (not to mention generals) sometimes dine on long marches, I, according to praiseworthy common custom, poured into a cup the coffee prepared for me and assuaged my capriciousness with the fruits of the sweat of miserable African slaves.

Spotting the sugar in front of me, the hostess who was kneading dough, sent a small boy to me to ask for a little piece of this food of boyars. “Why boyars’?” I said to her, giving my remaining sugar to the child. “Can you, too, really not use it?” “It is boyars’ because we do not have the means to buy it, while boyars use it because they are not the ones who furnish the money. It is true that our steward, when he goes to Moscow, buys it, but he, too, pays with our tears.” “Do you really think that whoever uses sugar makes you weep?” “Not everyone, but all noblemen, yes. Is it not your peasants’ tears that you drink when they eat the same bread as we do?” As she said this, she showed me the composition of her bread. It consisted of three-quarters of chaff and one quarter of unsifted flour. “And even in the current bad harvests we thank God. Many of our neighbors are worse off. How much good can it do you, boyars, that you eat sugar while we go hungry? Children are dying, adults die too. But what can you do—you grieve for a while, you grieve but do what your master orders.” And she began to put bread loaves into the oven.

This rebuke, uttered not angrily or indignantly but with a deep feeling of stirring sorrow, filled my heart with grief. For the first time I examined carefully all the tools of the peasant hut. For the first time I turned my heart to something that it had previously only glided over.—Four walls covered halfway atop with soot, as was the entire ceiling. The cracked floor, covered with dirt at least a vershok* thick; the oven, although lacking a chimney, was the best protection from the cold, and its smoke filled the hut every morning in the winter and summer; window frames over which a bovine membrane was stretched allowed in a dingy midday light; two or three pots (lucky is the hut to have in one of them every day any meatless cabbage soup!). A wooden bowl and round platters called plates; a table hewn with an axe which is scraped clean for holidays. A trough to feed pigs or calves when there are any, and to sleep