"According to you, I suppose," Osip asked the bricklayer, "if you don't sin, you can't repent, and if you don't repent, you won't be saved?"
"That's a more hopeful way. Forget the devil and you cease to love God, the fathers said."
Shishlin was not intemperate, but two glasses would make him tipsy. His face would be flushed, his eyes childish, and his voice would be raised in song.
"How good everything is, brothers! Here we live, work a little, and have as much as we want to eat, God be praised! Ah, how good it is!"
He wept. The tears trickled down his beard and gleamed on the silken hairs like false pearls.
His laudation of our life and those tears were unpleasant to me. My grandmother had sung the praises of life more convincingly, more sympathetically, and not so crudely.
All these discussions kept me in a continual tension, and aroused a dull emotion in me. I had already read many books about peasants, and I saw how utterly unlike the peasants in the books were to those in real life. In books they were all unhappy. Good or evil characters, they were all poorer in words and ideas than peasants in real life. In books they spoke less of God, of sects, of churches, and more of government, land, and law. They spoke less about women, too, but quite as coarsely, though more kindly. For the peasants in real life, women were a pastime, but a dangerous one. One had to be artful with women; otherwise they would gain the upper hand and spoil one's whole life. The muzhik in books may be good or bad, but he is altogether one or the other. The real muzhik is neither wholly good nor wholly bad, but he is wonderfully interesting. If the peasant in real life does not blurt out all his thoughts to you, you have a feeling that he is keeping something back which he means to keep for himself alone, and that very unsaid, hidden thing is the most important thing about him.
Of all the peasants I had read of in books, the one I liked the best was Petr in "The Carpenter's Gang." I wanted to read the story to my comrades, and I brought the book to the Yarmaka. I often spent the night in one or another of the workshops; sometimes it was because I was so tired that I lacked the strength to get home.
When I told them that I had a book about carpenters, my statement aroused a lively interest, especially in Osip. He took the book out of my hands, and turned over the leaves distrustfully, shaking his head.
"And it is really written about us! Oh, you rascal! Who wrote it? Some gentleman? I thought as much! Gentlemen, and chinovniks especially, are experts at anything. Where God does not even guess, a chinovnik has it all settled in his mind. That's what they live for."