Mikhail Sholokhov - Mole
Sholokhov Mikhail
Mole
Mikhail Sholokhov
Mole
I
On the table are cartridge cases that smell of burnt gunpowder, a lamb bone, a field map, a report, a bridle with the scent of horse sweat, a loaf of bread. All this is on the table, and on a hewn bench, moldy from the damp wall, with his back pressed tightly against the windowsill, Nikolka Koshevoy, the squadron commander, is sitting. The pencil is in his frozen, motionless fingers. Next to the old posters spread out on the table is a half-filled questionnaire. The rough leaf says sparingly: Nikolai Koshevoy. Squadron commander. Earth worker Member of the RKSM.
Against the “age” column, the pencil slowly writes: 18 years.
Nikolka is broad-shouldered and looks beyond his years. His eyes are aging with radiant wrinkles and his back is stooped like an old man - after all, he’s a boy, a kid, a green cougar, they say jokingly in the squadron - but look for someone else who could eliminate two gangs almost without damage and lead the squadron into battles and battles for six months no worse than any old commander!
Nikolka is ashamed of her eighteen years. The pencil always crawls against the hated “age” column, slowing down its run, and Nikolka’s cheekbones blaze with an annoying blush. Nikolkin’s father is a Cossack, and on his father’s side he is a Cossack. He remembers, as if half asleep, when he was five or six years old, his father put him on his service horse.
- Hold on to your mane, son! - he shouted, and his mother smiled at Nikolka from the door of the cooking room, turning pale, and with wide open eyes she looked at the little legs that circled the sharp spine of the horse, and at her father, who was holding the reins.
That was a long time ago. Nikolkin’s father disappeared during the German war, as if he sank into the water. Not a word of him, not a ghost. Mother died. From his father, Nikolka inherited a love of horses, immeasurable courage and a mole, the same as his father’s, the size of a pigeon’s egg, on his left leg, above the ankle. Until he was fifteen, he hung around among the workers, and then he begged for a long overcoat and, with the Red Regiment passing through the village, went to attack Wrangel. This summer, Nikolka swam in the Don with the military commissar. He, stuttering and twisting his shell-shocked head, said, slapping Nikolka on her stooped and tanned back:
- You are that... that... You are happy... happy! Well, yes, happy! A mole is, they say, happiness.
Nikolka bared his boiling teeth, dived and, snorting, shouted from the water:
- You're lying, weirdo! I’ve been an orphan since childhood, I’ve been a worker all my life, but he’s a blessing!..
And he swam onto the yellow spit that hugged the Don.
II
The hut where Nikolka lives is located on a ravine above the Don. From the windows you can see the green splashing Obdonye and the blued steel of the water. At night, during a storm, the waves knock under the yar, the shutters yearn, choking, and it seems to Nikolka that water is creeping insinuatingly into the cracks of the floor and, as it arrives, shaking the hut.
He wanted to move to another apartment, but he never did, he stayed until the fall. On a frosty morning, Nikolka came out onto the porch, breaking the fragile silence with the chime of his shod boots. He went down to the cherry orchard and lay down on the grass, stained with tears and gray with dew. You can hear how in the barn the owner persuades the cow to stand still, the heifer moos demandingly and in a deep voice, and streams of milk are heard against the walls of the barn.
A gate creaked in the yard and a dog began to bark. Platoon commander's voice:
- Is the commander home?
Nikolka rose up on his elbows.
- Here I am! Well, what else is there?
— The messenger came from the village. He says the gang made its way from the Salsk district, took over the Grushinsky state farm...
- Take him here.
A horse is pulled by express to the stable, then doused with hot water. In the middle of the yard, she fell on her front legs, then on her side, wheezed abruptly and briefly and died, looking with glassy eyes at the chained dog, choking on an angry bark. Because she died because there were three crosses on the package brought by express, and with the package the express person rode forty miles without stopping.
Nikolka read that the chairman was asking him to come out with the squadron to help, and he went to the room, clutching his saber, thinking wearily: “I should study to go somewhere, but here is a gang... The military commissar is ashamed: they say, you can’t write the words correctly, and also a squadron... What does it have to do with me that I didn’t manage to graduate from parish school? He’s an eccentric... And then there’s the gang... There’s blood again, and I’ve already given up on living like this... I’m sick of everything...”
He went out onto the porch, loading his carbine as he walked, and his thoughts, like horses on a well-trodden road, raced: “I should go to the city... I should study...”
He walked past a dead horse into the stable, looked at the black ribbon of blood running from his dusty nostrils, and turned away.
III
Along the hummocky summer grass, along the ruts licked by the winds, the mousey roadside plant curls up, the quinoa and puffballs burst thickly and terry. Once upon a time, hay was transported along the road to the threshing floors, frozen in the steppe with amber splashes, and the thorn road lay in a mound near the telegraph poles. The pillars run into the whitish autumn haze, step over logs and beams, and past the pillars on a shiny path the ataman leads a gang - fifty Don and Kuban Cossacks, dissatisfied with the Soviet government. For three days, like a whitened wolf from a flock of sheep, they leave on roads and virgin lands without roads, and behind him, in nazir, is Nikolka Koshevoy’s detachment.
Notorious people in the gang, service-minded, experienced, but still the ataman is deeply thoughtful: he stands up in his stirrups, scans the steppe with his eyes, counts miles to the blue border of the forests stretching on the other side of the Don.
So they leave like wolves, and behind them Nikolai Koshevoy’s squadron tramples their tracks.
On fine summer days in the Don steppes, under the sky a thick and transparent silver ringing rings and sways an ear of grain. This is before mowing, when the grain of vigorous wheat turns black on the ear, like a seventeen-year-old guy, and the grain blows upward and tries to outgrow the person.
Bearded villagers sow rye with wedges on loam, along sandy mounds, near levadas. It will not be born for a long time, since ancient times tithes do not yield more than thirty measures, but they sow because they drive moonshine out of life, clearer than a girl’s tears; because from ancient times it was the custom, grandfathers and great-grandfathers drank, and on the coat of arms of the Cossacks of the Don Army Region, it must have been no wonder that a drunken Cossack was depicted, sitting slumped on a wine barrel. Farms and villages wander through the autumn with thick and furious hops, red-topped hats swing drunkenly over the fences of redwood.
That’s why the ataman is never sober during the day, which is why all the coachmen and machine gunners are drunkenly staggering on the spring carts.
The ataman had not seen his native kurens for seven years. German captivity, then Wrangel, Constantinople molten in the sun, a camp in barbed wire, a Turkish felucca with a resinous salty wing, Kuban reeds, sultanic reeds, and - a gang.
Here it is, Ataman’s life, if you look back over your shoulder. His soul has become calloused; in the summer, in the hot weather, the traces of cloven bull hooves become stale near the steppe muzga. The pain, wonderful and incomprehensible, sharpens from the inside, fills the muscles with nausea, and the chieftain feels: not to forget it and not to fill the fever with any moonshine. And he drinks - there is never a sober day because the rye blossoms more odorously and sweetly in the Don steppes, overturned under the sun by a greedy black earth womb, and the dark-cheeked zhalmerki in the villages and villages brew such moonshine that it is impossible to distinguish it from flowing spring water.
IV
The first frost hit the dawn. Silver streaks splashed onto the spreading leaves of the water lilies, and in the morning Lukich noticed thin multi-colored pieces of ice, like mica, on the mill wheel.
In the morning, Lukich fell ill: his lower back was tingling, the pain of his deaf legs became cast iron, and they stuck to the ground. He shuffled around the mill, with difficulty moving his awkward, boneless body. A litter of mice darted out of the weeds; I looked up with teary-wet eyes: a dove was pouring out small and businesslike mutterings from the crossbar under the ceiling. With his nostrils, as if molded from loam, the grandfather inhaled the viscous scent of water mold and the smell of ground rye, listened to how badly, choking, the water sucked and licked the piles, and thoughtfully kneaded his moist beard.
Lukich lay down to rest in the bee yard. Under his sheepskin coat he slept diagonally, with his mouth open, and in the corners of his lips he slobbered his beard with saliva, sticky and warm. Twilight thickly smeared my grandfather’s hut, a mill stuck in the milky patches of fog...
And when I woke up, two horsemen rode out of the forest. One of them shouted to his grandfather, who was walking through the beekeeper:
- Come here, grandfather!
Lukich looked suspiciously and stopped. During the troubled years, he had seen a lot of such armed people who took food and flour without asking, and he strongly disliked all of them indiscriminately, without distinguishing them.
- Hurry up, you old bastard!
Lukich moved between the dugout hives, muttered quietly with his faded lips, and stood at a distance from the guests, watching sideways.
“We are Reds, grandpa... Don’t be afraid of us,” the ataman hissed peacefully. We are chasing a gang, we fought off our own... Maybe you saw a detachment pass here yesterday?
- There were some.
-Where did they go, grandfather?
- And cholera knows them!
“You don’t have any of them left at your mill?”
“Netuti,” Lukich said briefly and turned his back.
MOLE (story)
VI
It's dawn.
Nikolka, green from sleepless nights, galloped up to the machine-gun gig.
- When we go on the attack, hit the right flank. We need to break their wing!
And he galloped towards the deployed squadron.
Behind a pile of stunted oak trees, horsemen appeared on the road - four in a row, carts in the middle.
- By basting! - Nikolka shouted and, feeling the growing roar of hooves behind him, pulled his stallion with a whip.
At the edge of the forest, a machine gun pounded desperately, and those on the road quickly, as if in a training exercise, crumbled like lava.
* * *
A wolf, hung with burrs, jumped out of a windfall onto a hillock. He listened, bending his head forward. Shots drummed in the distance, and a multi-voiced howl swayed like a viscous wave.
Knock! - a shot fell in the alder forest, and somewhere behind the hill, behind the plowing, the echo muttered patteringly: so!
And again often: knock, knock, knock!.. And behind the hill they answered: so! So! So!..
The wolf stood and slowly, waddled, pulled into the ravine, into the thickets of yellowed, unmown kuga...
- Hold on!.. Don’t throw the cart!.. To the coppice... To the coppice, into the mother’s blood! - shouted the chieftain, standing up in his stirrups.
And near the carts the coachmen and machine gunners were already scurrying around, cutting off the lines, and the chain, broken by the incessant fire of machine guns, was already overwhelmed in an uncontrollable flight.
The ataman turned his horse, and, opening up, one galloped towards him and waved his saber. The chieftain guessed from the binoculars dangling on his chest and from his burka that it was no ordinary Red Army soldier galloping, and he pulled the reins. From afar I saw a young, beardless face, twisted with anger, and eyes narrowed by the wind. The horse danced under the ataman, squatting on its hind legs, and he, pulling the Mauser caught in his sash from his belt, shouted:
- White-lipped puppy!.. Wave, wave, I’ll wave to you!..
The chieftain shot at the growing black cloak. The horse, having galloped about eight fathoms, fell, and Nikolka threw off his cloak, shooting, and ran closer and closer to the chieftain...
Behind the copse, someone howled like an animal and stopped short. The sun was covered by a cloud, and floating shadows fell on the steppe, on the roads, on the forest, torn away by the winds and in autumn.
“Nuk, the sucker, he’s hot, and because of this, death will get his hands on him here,” the chieftain thought in fragments and, waiting until his clip ran out, he let go of the reins and swooped down like a kite.
See also: You can’t hide an awl in a bag, or the collapse of “Sholokhovedeniya”
Having leaned from the saddle, he waved his saber, for a moment he felt how his body went limp under the blow and obediently slid to the ground. The chieftain jumped down, pulled the binoculars off the dead man, looked at his legs, which were trembling with a slight chill, looked around and sat down to remove the chrome boots from the dead man. With his foot resting on his crunchy knee, he took off one boot quickly and deftly. Under the other, it’s clear that the stocking has rolled up: it won’t come off. He pulled, cursed angrily, tore off the boot and stocking and on his leg, above the ankle, he saw a mole the size of a pigeon’s egg. Slowly, as if afraid to wake him up, he turned his cold head face up, smeared his hands with blood, which was crawling out of his mouth in a wide, lumpy shaft, looked closely, and only then awkwardly hugged the angular shoulders and said dully:
- Son!.. Nikolushka!.. Dear!.. My little blood...
Blackening, he shouted:
- Say at least a word! How is this possible, huh?
He fell, looking into the fading eyes; his eyelids, stained with blood, lifted, shaking his limp, pliable body... But Nikolka firmly bit the blue tip of his tongue, as if he was afraid to let slip about something immeasurably large and important.
Pressing the chieftain to his chest, he kissed his son’s freezing hands and, clenching the steamed steel of the Mauser with his teeth, shot himself in the mouth...
* * *
And in the evening, when the horsemen loomed behind the copse, the wind carried voices, the snorting of horses and the ringing of stirrups - a vulture reluctantly fell from the shaggy head of the chieftain. It fell off and melted into the gray, autumn-colorless sky.
Victor Sevsky
Veniamin Alekseevich Krasnushkin is a writer who wrote under the pseudonym Viktor Sevsky. He was born in 1891 in the village of Filonovskaya into a wealthy Cossack family, the head of which rose to the nobility. He received his education at Moscow University.
Since 1908 - professional writer. Edited a newspaper. He had more than a thousand publications in local and central publications, including the novel “Bloody Glory” (1911) and the biographical book “General Kornilov” (1919). While working in St. Petersburg, he wrote the article “Turgenev’s Grandson” - this is about Bunin.
In 1913, he began writing a novel about a fatal love triangle (Stepan, Grigory, Aksinya). But soon the war began, and the concept of the novel expanded, then - the revolution, the Civil War.
In 1920, the author with an unfinished manuscript of the novel was captured by the Reds in Rostov-on-Don. He was shot, but someone in the Cheka read and appreciated the manuscript...
The story “Mole” is part of the “Don Stories” cycle, for the compilation of which fragments of this seized manuscript by V.A. Krasnushkin-Sevsky.
Read online “Birthmark”
Sholokhov Mikhail
Mole
Mikhail Sholokhov
Mole
I
On the table are cartridge cases that smell of burnt gunpowder, a lamb bone, a field map, a report, a bridle with the scent of horse sweat, a loaf of bread. All this is on the table, and on a hewn bench, moldy from the damp wall, with his back pressed tightly against the windowsill, Nikolka Koshevoy, the squadron commander, is sitting. The pencil is in his frozen, motionless fingers. Next to the old posters spread out on the table is a half-filled questionnaire. The rough leaf says sparingly: Nikolai Koshevoy. Squadron commander. Earth worker Member of the RKSM.
Against the “age” column, the pencil slowly writes: 18 years.
Nikolka is broad-shouldered and looks beyond his years. His eyes are aging with radiant wrinkles and his back is stooped like an old man - after all, he’s a boy, a kid, a green cougar, they say jokingly in the squadron - but look for someone else who could eliminate two gangs almost without damage and lead the squadron into battles and battles for six months no worse than any old commander!
Nikolka is ashamed of her eighteen years. The pencil always crawls against the hated “age” column, slowing down its run, and Nikolka’s cheekbones blaze with an annoying blush. Nikolkin’s father is a Cossack, and on his father’s side he is a Cossack. He remembers, as if half asleep, when he was five or six years old, his father put him on his service horse.
- Hold on to your mane, son! - he shouted, and his mother smiled at Nikolka from the door of the cooking room, turning pale, and with wide open eyes she looked at the little legs that circled the sharp spine of the horse, and at her father, who was holding the reins.
That was a long time ago. Nikolkin’s father disappeared during the German war, as if he sank into the water. Not a word of him, not a ghost. Mother died. From his father, Nikolka inherited a love of horses, immeasurable courage and a mole, the same as his father’s, the size of a pigeon’s egg, on his left leg, above the ankle. Until he was fifteen, he hung around among the workers, and then he begged for a long overcoat and, with the Red Regiment passing through the village, went to attack Wrangel. This summer, Nikolka swam in the Don with the military commissar. He, stuttering and twisting his shell-shocked head, said, slapping Nikolka on her stooped and tanned back:
- You are that... that... You are happy... happy! Well, yes, happy! A mole is, they say, happiness.
Nikolka bared his boiling teeth, dived and, snorting, shouted from the water:
- You're lying, weirdo! I’ve been an orphan since childhood, I’ve been a worker all my life, but he’s a blessing! .
And he swam onto the yellow spit that hugged the Don.
II
The hut where Nikolka lives is located on a ravine above the Don. From the windows you can see the green splashing Obdonye and the blued steel of the water. At night, during a storm, the waves knock under the yar, the shutters yearn, choking, and it seems to Nikolka that water is creeping insinuatingly into the cracks of the floor and, as it arrives, shaking the hut.
He wanted to move to another apartment, but he never did, he stayed until the fall. On a frosty morning, Nikolka came out onto the porch, breaking the fragile silence with the chime of his shod boots. He went down to the cherry orchard and lay down on the grass, stained with tears and gray with dew. You can hear how in the barn the owner persuades the cow to stand still, the heifer moos demandingly and in a deep voice, and streams of milk are heard against the walls of the barn.
A gate creaked in the yard and a dog began to bark. Platoon commander's voice:
- Is the commander home?
Nikolka rose up on his elbows.
.
- Here I am! Well, what else is there?
— The messenger came from the village. He says the gang made its way from the Salsk district, took over the Grushinsky state farm...
- Take him here.
A horse is pulled by express to the stable, then doused with hot water. In the middle of the yard, she fell on her front legs, then on her side, wheezed abruptly and briefly and died, looking with glassy eyes at the chained dog, choking on an angry bark. Because she died because there were three crosses on the package brought by express, and with the package the express person rode forty miles without stopping.
Nikolka read that the chairman was asking him to come out with the squadron to help, and he went to the room, clutching his saber, thinking wearily: “I should study to go somewhere, but here is a gang... The military commissar is ashamed: they say, you can’t write the words correctly, and also a squadron... What do I have to do with the fact that I didn’t manage to graduate from parish school? He’s an eccentric... And then there’s a gang... There’s blood again, and I’ve already moderated living like this... I’m sick of everything... “
He went out onto the porch, loading his carbine as he walked, and his thoughts, like horses on a well-trodden road, raced: “I should go to the city... I should study... “
He walked past a dead horse into the stable, looked at the black ribbon of blood running from his dusty nostrils, and turned away.
III
Along the hummocky summer grass, along the ruts licked by the winds, the mousey roadside plant curls up, the quinoa and puffballs burst thickly and terry. Once upon a time, hay was transported along the road to the threshing floors, frozen in the steppe with amber splashes, and the thorn road lay in a mound near the telegraph poles. The pillars run into the whitish autumn haze, step over logs and beams, and past the pillars on a shiny path the ataman leads a gang - fifty Don and Kuban Cossacks, dissatisfied with the Soviet government. For three days, like a whitened wolf from a flock of sheep, they leave on roads and virgin lands without roads, and behind him, in nazir, is Nikolka Koshevoy’s detachment.
Notorious people in the gang, service-minded, experienced, but still the ataman is deeply thoughtful: he stands up in his stirrups, scans the steppe with his eyes, counts miles to the blue border of the forests stretching on the other side of the Don.
So they leave like wolves, and behind them Nikolai Koshevoy’s squadron tramples their tracks.
On fine summer days in the Don steppes, under the sky a thick and transparent silver ringing rings and sways an ear of grain. This is before mowing, when the grain of vigorous wheat turns black on the ear, like a seventeen-year-old guy, and the grain blows upward and tries to outgrow the person.
Bearded villagers sow rye with wedges on loam, along sandy mounds, near levadas. It will not be born for a long time, since ancient times tithes do not yield more than thirty measures, but they sow because they drive moonshine out of life, clearer than a girl’s tears; because from ancient times it was the custom, grandfathers and great-grandfathers drank, and on the coat of arms of the Cossacks of the Don Army Region, it must have been no wonder that a drunken Cossack was depicted, sitting slumped on a wine barrel. Farms and villages wander through the autumn with thick and furious hops, red-topped hats swing drunkenly over the fences of redwood.
That’s why the ataman is never sober during the day, which is why all the coachmen and machine gunners are drunkenly staggering on the spring carts.
The ataman had not seen his native kurens for seven years. German captivity, then Wrangel, Constantinople molten in the sun, a camp in barbed wire, a Turkish felucca with a resinous salty wing, Kuban reeds, sultanic reeds, and - a gang.
Here it is, Ataman’s life, if you look back over your shoulder. His soul has become callous, and in the summer in the heat of the day the tracks of cloven bull hooves near the muzga become stale. } steppe. The pain, wonderful and incomprehensible, sharpens from the inside, fills the muscles with nausea, and the ataman feels: not to forget it and not to fill the fever with any moonshine. And he drinks - there is never a sober day because the rye blossoms more odorously and sweetly in the Don steppes, overturned under the sun by a greedy black earth womb, and the dark-skinned zhalmerki in the villages and villages brew such moonshine that it is impossible to distinguish it from flowing spring water.
IV
The first frost hit the dawn. ...
