“It was one Assumption Eve, three years later, that I remember some one shouting from the opposite bank. I crossed over, and whom should I see but the lady herself, all wrapped up—and with her a young gentleman, one of the officials. A troika!... I ferried them over to this side; the troika was ready; ah, but you should have seen them fly! Hardly the wink of an eye and there was not a trace of them.
“And in the morning Vassili Sergeyich came running here. ‘Simon, has my wife passed this way with a gentleman in spectacles?’ ‘Yes, she did pass this way,’ I said to him. ‘Go and seek the wind in the fields!’ He gave chase to them, but returned in five days. When I ferried him across to the other side, he threw himself down in the bottom of the boat, and began to beat his head against the planks and to whine. ‘What else had you to expect?’ I said to him. I laughed and reminded him: ‘Even in Siberia people live!’ But he only beat his head the harder.... Then he began to hanker after freedom. He heard his wife was in Russia, and of course he wanted to go there and to take her away from her lover. Almost every day he would go to the post-office or to the government offices. He presented petition after petition, begging for pardon and for permission to return home. He told me he had spent a couple of hundred rubles on telegrams alone. He sold his land, while he mortgaged his house to Jews. He grew gray and bent; his face yellow—a consumptive, in fact. Speaking to you, he would always go: khe-khe-khe ... and his eyes full of tears. For eight years he kept on handing in those petitions, but after that he had come to life and grown jolly again. You see, he had thought of another luxury. His daughter had grown up. And he feasted his eyes on her and didn’t get enough of it. She really was an attractive girl—pretty, black-browed, and rather spirited in manner. Every Sunday he’d take her with him to Girino to church. They’d stand hand in hand on the ferry, and he not taking his eyes from her. ‘Yes, Simon,’ he would say, ‘even in Siberia people live. Even in Siberia there is happiness. Just look what a daughter I’ve got! You can’t find another like her if you seek a thousand miles around!’ The girl, as I said, was really a beauty.... But I thought to myself: ‘Just wait.... She’s a young girl; the blood tingles, and one wants to live, and what sort of life is to be had here?’ And, comrade, to make the story short, she really began to ail.... She got to coughing, and coughing, to pining away; and now she is very sick, can hardly stand on her legs. Consumption! There’s your Siberian happiness for you—the deuce take it!—that’s how even in Siberia people live.... Now he’s begun to chase after doctors, and to bring them back home with him. Let him but hear there’s a doctor or a healer within two hundred or three hundred versts, and off he goes after him. It’s terrible to think how much money he has spent on doctors. I’d rather drink up the money.... She’ll die, any way. She’ll die, there’s no gainsaying that, and then he’ll be lost altogether. He’ll hang himself from sorrow, or he’ll escape to Russia—and then you know what will happen. He’ll be caught, sentenced to hard labor; he’ll taste the knout....”
“That is well,” murmured the Tartar, trembling with cold.
“What is well?” asked Wiseacre.
“He’s had his wife, his daughter.... You say you want nothing. To have nothing is bad! His wife lived with him three years—God was good to him. To have nothing is bad, but three years is good. Don’t you understand?”
Trembling with cold, stammering out with difficulty the few Russian words he knew, the Tartar expressed the hope that God might preserve him from dying in a strange land and being buried in a cold, blighted earth; if his wife should come only for a single day, for a single hour, he would consent, for the sake of this brief happiness, to undergo the worst tortures and thank God for them. Better one day of happiness than nothing!
Again he spoke of the handsome and clever wife he had left at home; then, putting his hands to his head, he began to cry and to assure Simon that he was innocent and was undergoing punishment for no just cause. His two brothers and an uncle had stolen some horses from a muzhik and had beaten the old man half to death; but society dealt with him unjustly, and sent the three brothers to Siberia, while the uncle, a rich man, remained at home.
“You’ll get used to it,” said Simon.
The Tartar did not reply, but fixed a tearful gaze upon the fire. His face expressed doubt and alarm, as if he still did not understand why he was here in this darkness and cold, among strangers, and not at home. Wiseacre lay beside the fire, chuckled at something, and hummed.
“What sort of happiness is there for her with her father?” he said after a pause. “He loves her, and is comforted in her, it is true; but he’s no fool; he’s a stern, harsh old man—and young girls don’t want sternness.... They want caresses and ha-ha-ha! and hi-ho-ho!—and perfume and pomade. Yes.... Ekh, this business!” sighed Simon, and lifted himself awkwardly. “The vodka’s all gone; that means it’s time to go to bed. Well, I’m going, brother....”