The soldier blinked and considered the matter. “The sheep without a name might be a ram,” he said at last, at his leisure. “But I will ask you something also. Is Adam a name, or is it not?”
“It is.”
“Very well. And about how many people, for example, have died since then?”
“I don’t know,” said Kuzma. “Why do you inquire?”
“Simply because that’s one of the things we never were born to understand. Now, take any busybody you like. Do you indulge in revolt? Do it, my dear man: perhaps you will become a fit-marshal! Only, at best, that they may stretch you out without your breeches for a flogging. Are you a peasant? Till the soil. Are you a cooper? In that case, equally, attend to your business. I, for example, am a soldier and a veterinary. Not long ago I was passing through the Fair, and what should I see but a horse with the glanders? I went at once to the policeman: ‘Thus and so,’ says I, ‘Your High Well-born.’ ‘But can you kill that horse with a feather?’ ‘With the greatest pleasure!’”
“With what sort of a feather?” inquired Kuzma.
“Why, a goose feather. I took it, sharpened it, jabbed it into his spinal cord, blew a little—into the feather, I mean—and the thing was done. ’Tis a simple matter, to all appearance, but just try to do it!” And the soldier winked craftily and tapped his brow with his finger: “Understanding is needed here.”
Kuzma shrugged his shoulders and made no reply. And as he passed Odnodvorka’s cottage he found out from her boy Senka what the soldier’s name was. It turned out to be Parmen.
“And what’s your task for to-morrow?” added Kuzma, gazing with curiosity at Senka’s fiery red mop of hair, his lively green eyes, his pock-marked face, his rickety little body, and his hands and feet all cracked with mud and chaps.
“The tasks are verses,” said Senka, grasping his uplifted foot in his right hand and hopping up and down on one spot.