“It is late. She is sleeping.”
The Popadya stamped the floor with her foot. “Wake her. Go!”
Nastya came in, slender and tall like her father, with large clumsy hands, that had grown coarse with toil. Shivering with the cold, she had wrapped a short shawl about her shoulders and was counting the greasy deck of cards without emitting a sound.
Then silently they sat down to a boisterously funny card game—amid the chaos of overturned furniture, in the dead of night, when all the world had long sought the oblivion of sleep—men, and beasts and fields. The Popadya joked and laughed and pilfered trumps out of the deck, and it seemed to her that the whole world was laughing and jesting, but the moment the last sound of her words died in the air, the same threatening and unbroken stillness closed over her, stifling her. And it was terrible to look upon the two pairs of mute and scrawny arms that moved slowly and silently over the table, as though these arms alone were alive and the people who owned them did not exist. Then shivering, as though with a crazedly drunken expectation of something supernatural, she looked up above the table—two cold—pallid—sullen faces loomed desolately in the darkness and swayed back and forth in a queer and wordless whirl—two cold, two sullen faces. Mumbling something, the Popadya gulped down another glassful of liquor, and once more the scrawny hands moved noiselessly, and the stillness began to hum, and someone else, a fourth one made his appearance behind the table. Someone’s rapaciously curved fingers were shuffling the cards, then they shifted to her body, running over her knees like spiders, crawling up towards her throat.
“Who’s here?” she cried out leaping to her feet and surprised to find the others standing up and watching her with terrified glances. Yes there were only two of them: her husband and Nastya.
“Calm yourself, Nastya. We’re here. There’s no one else here.”
“And he?”
“He is sleeping.”
The Popadya sat down and for a moment everything stopped rocking and slipped back into place. And Father Vassily’s face looked kind.
“Vassya! And what will happen to us when he starts to walk?”