What For?За что?

In the spring of 1830 there came to Pan Yachevsky, at Rozhanka, his family estate, young Iosif Migursky, the only son of his late friend. Yachevsky was a broad-browed, broad-shouldered, broad-chested old man of 65, with a long white mustache on a brick-red face, a patriot of the time of the second partition of Poland. As a youth he had served with Migursky’s father under the banners of Kościuszko, and with all the strength of his patriotic soul he hated the apocalyptic harlot, as he called her, Catherine II, and the traitor Poniatowski, her vile lover; and he believed in the restoration of the Rzeczpospolita just as he believed at night that by morning the sun would rise again. In the year ’12 he commanded a regiment in the armies of Napoleon, whom he adored. Napoleon’s downfall grieved him, but he did not despair of the restoration of a Kingdom of Poland, crippled, it was true, but a kingdom all the same. The opening of the Sejm in Warsaw by Alexander I revived his hopes, but the Holy Alliance, the reaction throughout Europe, and Constantine’s tyrannical caprice put off the fulfillment of his cherished wish. In ’25 Yachevsky settled in the country, and from then on he lived at his Rozhanka without ever leaving it, filling his time with the management of the estate, with hunting, and with reading newspapers and letters, through which he still followed the political events in his country with ardor. He was married for the second time, to a poor, beautiful gentlewoman, and this marriage was unhappy. He neither loved nor respected this second wife of his; she was a burden to him, and he treated her badly, roughly, as though taking out on her his own mistake of a second marriage. There were no children by the second wife. By the first wife there were two daughters: the elder, Vanda, a stately beauty who knew the worth of her beauty and was bored in the country, and the younger, Albina, her father’s favorite, a lively, bony girl with curly fair hair and big, shining blue eyes set wide apart, like her father’s.

Albina was 15 when Iosif Migursky came. Migursky had visited the Yachevskys before, as a student, in Vilno, where they spent their winters, and had paid court to Vanda; but now, for the first time, he came to them in the country as a man fully grown and free. Young Migursky’s visit pleased everyone who lived at Rozhanka. The old man was pleased with Yuzyo Migursky because he reminded him of his friend, the young man’s father, as he had been when they were both young, and also because he spoke with ardor and the rosiest hopes of the revolutionary ferment not only in Poland but abroad, where he had just come from. Pani Yachevskaya was pleased with Migursky because when there were guests old Yachevsky restrained himself and did not scold her for everything, as he usually did. Vanda was pleased with him because she was sure that Migursky had come for her and meant to propose to her; she was preparing to accept him, but intended, as she said to herself, lui tenir la dragée haute. Albina was glad that everyone was glad. Vanda was not the only one sure that Migursky had come intending to propose to her. Everyone in the house thought so, from old Yachevsky to Nurse Ludvika, though no one said it.

And it was true. Migursky had come with that intention, but after staying a week he went away, troubled and upset by something, without having proposed. Everyone was surprised by this unexpected departure, and no one but Albina understood its cause. Albina knew that the cause of this strange departure was herself. All the time he was at Rozhanka she had noticed that Migursky was particularly animated and merry only with her. He treated her like a child, joked with her, teased her, but with a woman’s instinct she sensed that in his manner toward her there was not the attitude of a grown-up toward a child but that of a man toward a woman. She saw it in the admiring gaze and the tender smile with which he met her when she came into a room and followed her when she went out. She was not clearly aware of what it was, but this attitude of his toward her gladdened her, and without meaning to she tried to do what pleased him. And whatever she did pleased him. And so in his presence she did everything she did with a particular excitement. He liked the way she raced with a beautiful khort (a greyhound) that jumped up at her and licked her flushed and shining face; liked the way she would break into infectious, ringing laughter at the slightest occasion; liked the way she put on a serious air during the priest’s dull sermon while her eyes went on laughing merrily; liked the way she mimicked, with extraordinary faithfulness and comedy, now the old nurse, now a drunken neighbor, now himself, Migursky, passing in an instant from imitating one to imitating another. Above all he liked her rapturous joy in life, just as though she had only this moment come to know the whole charm of life and was hurrying to make the most of it. He liked this joy in life that was so much her own, and this joy in life was roused and heightened precisely by her knowing that this joy in life delighted him. And so it was Albina alone who knew why Migursky, who had come to propose to Vanda, had gone away without doing so. Though she would not have dared say it to anyone, and did not say it clearly even to herself, in the depths of her soul she knew that he had wanted to fall in love with her sister and had fallen in love with her, Albina. Albina wondered greatly at this, thinking herself quite insignificant beside the clever, educated, beautiful Vanda, but she could not help knowing that it was so, and could not help rejoicing in it, because she herself had fallen in love with Migursky with all the strength of her soul, fallen in love as one loves only the first time and only once in a lifetime.

At the end of the summer the newspapers brought news of the revolution in Paris. After that, reports began to come of disturbances brewing in Warsaw. With every post Yachevsky waited, in fear and hope, for news of Constantine’s assassination and the beginning of the revolution. At last, in November, there came to Rozhanka first the tidings of the attack on the Belvedere and the flight of Constantine Pavlovich, then that the Sejm had declared the Romanov dynasty deprived of the Polish throne, that Chłopicki had been proclaimed dictator, and that the Polish people were free once more. The rising had not yet reached Rozhanka, but everyone who lived there followed its course, expected it to reach them, and prepared for it. Old Yachevsky corresponded with an old acquaintance, one of the leaders of the rising, received mysterious Jewish factors, on revolutionary business, not estate business, and prepared to join the rising when the time came. Pani Yachevskaya saw to her husband’s material comforts not only as always but even more than always, and, as always, by this very thing irritated him more and more. Vanda sent her diamonds to a friend in Warsaw so that the money they fetched could be given to the revolutionary committee. Albina was interested only in what Migursky was doing. Through her father she knew that he had joined Dwernicki’s detachment, and she tried to learn everything that concerned that detachment. Migursky wrote twice: once to tell them that he had joined the army, and again, in the middle of February, a rapturous letter about the Polish victory at Stoczek, where they took 6 Russian guns and prisoners. “Zwycięstwo Polakòw i klęska Moskali! Wiwat!” he ended the letter. Albina was in raptures. She pored over the map, reckoning where and when the Muscovites must be finally defeated, and turned pale and trembled when her father slowly opened the packets brought from the post. Once her stepmother, coming into her room, found her before the mirror in trousers and a konfederatka. Albina was preparing to run away from home in men’s clothes to join the Polish army. Her stepmother told her father. Her father called his daughter to him and, hiding his sympathy with her, even his admiration for her, gave her a stern reprimand, demanding that she put out of her head her foolish thoughts of taking part in the war. “A woman has a different task: to love and to comfort those who sacrifice themselves for the fatherland,” he told her. Now he needed her, as his joy and his comfort, and the time would come when a husband would need her too. He knew what would move her. He hinted to her that he was lonely and unhappy, and kissed her. She pressed her face to him, hiding her tears, which wet the sleeve of his dressing gown all the same, and promised him to undertake nothing without his consent.

Only people who have experienced what the Poles experienced after the partition of Poland, when one part of it was subjected to the power of the hated Germans and another to the power of the still more hated Muscovites, can understand the rapture the Poles experienced in ’30 and ’31, when, after earlier unhappy attempts at liberation, a new hope of liberation seemed attainable. But this hope did not last long. The forces were too unequal, and the revolution was crushed once more. Once more tens of thousands of senselessly obedient Russian men were driven into Poland, and under the command now of Diebitsch, now of Paskevich, and of their supreme director, Nicholas I, not knowing themselves why they were doing it, they soaked the earth with their own blood and that of their brothers the Poles, crushed them, and gave them over once more into the power of weak and insignificant men, who wanted neither freedom for the Poles nor their suppression, but only one thing: the gratification of their own greed and childish vanity.

Warsaw was taken, the separate detachments routed. Hundreds, thousands of people were shot, beaten to death with sticks, exiled. Among the exiled was young Migursky. His estate was confiscated, and he himself was sent as a private soldier to a line battalion in Uralsk.

The Yachevskys spent the winter of 1832 in Vilno for the sake of the old man’s health; since ’31 he had suffered from heart disease. There a letter came to them from Migursky, from the fortress. He wrote that however hard he found what he had gone through and what lay ahead of him, he was glad it had been his lot to suffer for the fatherland; that he did not despair of the holy cause for which he had given part of his life and was ready to give the rest of it; and that if a new opportunity arose tomorrow, he would act in the same way. Reading the letter aloud, the old man broke into sobs at this place and for a long time could not go on. In the rest of the letter, which Vanda read aloud, Migursky wrote that whatever his plans and dreams had been on that last visit of his, which would remain forever the brightest point in his whole life, he now neither could nor would speak of them.

Vanda and Albina each understood the meaning of these words in her own way, but neither explained to anyone how she had understood them. At the end of the letter Migursky sent greetings to everyone, and, among other things, in the same playful tone he had taken with Albina during his visit, he addressed her in the letter too, asking whether she still ran as fast, outrunning the khorts, and still mimicked everyone as well. He wished health to the old man, success in her household affairs to the mother, a worthy husband to Vanda, and to Albina the continuance of that same joy in life.

Old Yachevsky’s health grew worse and worse, and in 1833 the whole family went abroad. In Baden Vanda met a rich Polish émigré and married him. The old man’s illness grew rapidly worse, and at the beginning of 1833 he died abroad in Albina’s arms. He would not let his wife look after him, and to his last minute he could not forgive her the mistake he had made in marrying her. Pani Yachevskaya returned to the country with Albina. The chief interest of Albina’s life was Migursky. In her eyes he was the greatest of heroes and martyrs, to whose service she had resolved to devote her life. Even before they went abroad she had begun to correspond with him, at first on her father’s behalf, then on her own. After her father’s death, back in Russia, she went on corresponding with him, and when she turned 18 she announced to her stepmother that she had decided to go to Migursky in Uralsk, to marry him there. Her stepmother began to reproach Migursky for selfishly wanting to ease his hard lot by captivating a rich girl and making her share his misfortune. Albina grew angry and declared to her stepmother that only she could ascribe such base thoughts to a man who had sacrificed everything for his people; that Migursky, on the contrary, had refused the help she offered him; and that she had irrevocably decided to go to him and marry him, if only he would be willing to give her this happiness. Albina was of age, and she had money: the 300,000 zlotys that her late uncle had left to his two nieces. So nothing could hold her back.

In November 1833 Albina took leave of her household, who saw her off in tears, as though to her death, to the far, unknown land of barbarous Muscovy; she took her seat, with old, devoted Nurse Ludvika, whom she was taking with her, in her father’s closed sleigh, newly repaired for the long road, and set out on her long journey.

Migursky lived not in the barracks but in lodgings of his own. Nicholas Pavlovich demanded that the Poles reduced to the ranks should not only bear the whole weight of a soldier’s harsh life but also endure all the humiliations to which private soldiers were subjected at that time; but most of the plain people who had to carry out these orders of his understood how hard the position of these men reduced to the ranks was, and, despite the danger of not carrying out his will, wherever they could, they did not carry it out. The commander of the battalion in which Migursky had been enrolled, a half-literate man who had risen from the ranks, understood the position of a formerly rich, educated young man who had lost everything, pitied him and respected him, and granted him indulgences of every kind. And Migursky could not fail to appreciate the good nature of the lieutenant colonel with white side-whiskers on his puffy soldier’s face, and to repay him he agreed to teach his sons, who were preparing for the cadet corps, mathematics and French.

Migursky’s life in Uralsk, now dragging on into its seventh month, was not only monotonous, dreary, and dull, but hard as well. Of acquaintances, besides the battalion commander, whom he tried to keep at as great a distance as possible, he had only one, an exiled Pole, a poorly educated, wily, unpleasant man, who dealt in fish here. But the chief burden of Migursky’s life lay in this, that he found it hard to grow used to want. After the confiscation of his estate he had no means at all, and he scraped by selling the gold things he had left.

The only joy of his life since his exile, and a great one, was his correspondence with Albina, of whom a poetic, sweet image had remained in his soul since his visit to Rozhanka, an image that now, in exile, grew more and more beautiful. In one of her first letters she asked him, among other things, what the words in his letter of long ago meant: “whatever my wishes and dreams had been.” He answered that now he could confess to her that his dreams had been of calling her his wife. She answered that she loved him. He answered that it would have been better if she had not written that, because it was terrible for him to think of what might have been and was now impossible. She answered that it was not only possible but would certainly come to pass. He answered that he could not accept her sacrifice, that in his present position it was impossible. Soon after this letter of his he received a postal notice for 2,000 zlotys. By the postmark on the envelope and the handwriting he knew that it had been sent by Albina, and he remembered that in one of his first letters he had described to her, in a joking tone, the pleasure he now felt in earning by his lessons all he needed: money for tea, tobacco, and even books. Putting the money into another envelope, he sent it back with a letter in which he asked her not to spoil their sacred relationship with money. He had enough of everything, he wrote, and he was perfectly happy knowing that he had such a friend as she. There their correspondence stopped.

In November Migursky was sitting at the lieutenant colonel’s, giving the boys a lesson, when the sound of an approaching post bell was heard, and the runners of a sleigh creaked over the frozen snow and stopped at the porch. The children jumped up to see who had come. Migursky stayed in the room, watching the door and waiting for the children to come back, but through the door came the lieutenant colonel’s wife herself.

“Some ladies have come to see you, ‘Pan’; they’re asking for you,” she said. “Must be from your parts. Polish, by the look of them.”

Had Migursky been asked whether he thought it possible that Albina would come to him, he would have said it was unthinkable; yet in the depths of his soul he was waiting for her. The blood rushed to his heart, and, gasping for breath, he ran out into the hall. In the hall a stout, pockmarked woman was untying the kerchief on her head. Another woman was going in at the door of the colonel’s quarters. Hearing steps behind her, she looked around. From under the hood beamed Albina’s joyous, wide-set, shining blue eyes, with frost on their lashes. He stood rooted to the spot and did not know how to meet her, how to greet her. “Yuzyo!” she cried, calling him what her father had called him and what she called him to herself, threw her arms around his neck, pressed her flushed, cold face to his, and laughed and wept.

When she learned who Albina was and why she had come, the kind colonel’s wife took her in and lodged her in her own house until the wedding.

The good-natured lieutenant colonel obtained permission from the higher authorities. A priest was sent for from Orenburg, and the Migurskys were married. The battalion commander’s wife stood in as mother, one of the pupils carried the icon, and Brzhozovsky, the exiled Pole, was best man.

Albina, strange as this may seem, loved her husband passionately, but did not know him at all. Only now was she becoming acquainted with him. It goes without saying that in the living man of flesh and blood she found much that was commonplace and unpoetic, which had not been in the image she had carried and nurtured in her imagination; but then, precisely because he was a man of flesh and blood, she found in him much that was simple and good, which had not been in that abstract image. She had heard from acquaintances and friends of his bravery in the war, and she knew of his courage in the loss of his fortune and his freedom, and she pictured him as a hero, always living an exalted, heroic life; in reality, for all his extraordinary physical strength and bravery, he turned out to be a meek, mild lamb, the simplest of men, with good-natured jokes, with that same childlike smile of a sensual mouth framed by a fair little beard and mustache which had charmed her back at Rozhanka, and with a pipe that was never out, which she found especially hard to bear during her pregnancy.

Migursky, too, came to know Albina only now, and in Albina he came to know woman for the first time. From the women he had known before his marriage he could not have known women. And what he came to know in Albina as in a woman in general surprised him, and might rather have disenchanted him with woman in general, had he not felt toward Albina, as Albina, an especially tender and grateful feeling. Toward Albina as a woman in general he felt an affectionate, somewhat ironic indulgence; toward Albina as Albina, not only a tender love but also admiration and the consciousness of a debt he could never repay for her sacrifice, which had given him an undeserved happiness.

The Migurskys were happy in this, that, having turned all the strength of their love on each other, they felt among strangers as two people feel who have lost their way in winter and are freezing and warming each other. Their joyful life was helped, too, by the part taken in it by Nurse Ludvika, slavishly, selflessly devoted to her little mistress, good-naturedly grumbling, comic, and falling in love with every man she met. The Migurskys were happy in their children, too. A year later a boy was born. A year and a half later, a girl. The boy was his mother over again: the same eyes, and the same playfulness and grace. The girl was a healthy, pretty little animal.

But the Migurskys were unhappy in their distance from their homeland and, above all, in the weight of a humiliating position to which they were not accustomed. It was Albina who suffered most over this humiliation. He, her Yuzyo, a hero, the ideal of a man, had to stand at attention before every officer, do rifle drill, stand guard, and obey without a murmur.

Besides that, the news that came from Poland was of the saddest. Almost all their close relatives and friends had either been exiled or had lost everything and fled abroad. And for the Migurskys themselves no end of any kind to this situation was in sight. All attempts to petition for a pardon, or at least for an improvement in his position, for promotion to officer’s rank, failed of their aim. Nicholas Pavlovich held reviews, parades, and drills, went to masquerades, flirted with masked women, galloped needlessly about Russia from Chuguev to Novorossiysk, Petersburg, and Moscow, frightening the people and running horses into the ground; and when some bold man ventured to ask for a softening of the lot of the exiled Decembrists or of the Poles, who were suffering for that very love of country which he himself extolled, he would thrust out his chest, fix his pewter eyes on whatever happened to be before them, and say: “Let them serve. Too soon.” As though he knew when it would not be too soon, when the time would have come. And all those close to him, the generals, the chamberlains, and their wives, who lived off him, were filled with tender admiration at the extraordinary foresight and wisdom of this great man.

On the whole, all the same, there was more happiness than unhappiness in the Migurskys’ life.

So they lived for five years. But suddenly an unexpected, terrible grief fell upon them. First the girl fell ill; two days later the boy fell ill: he burned with fever for three days and, without the help of doctors (none could be found), died on the fourth day. Two days after him the girl died too.

Albina did not drown herself in the Ural only because she could not imagine without horror her husband’s state on hearing of her suicide. But it was hard for her to live. Always active and caring before, she now left all her cares to Ludvika and sat for hours without doing anything, looking silently at whatever met her eyes, or else she would suddenly jump up and run off to her little room, and there, not answering the consolations of her husband and Ludvika, she would weep quietly, only shaking her head, begging them to go away and leave her alone. In summer she would go to the children’s grave and sit there, tearing her heart with memories of what had been and what might have been. Most of all she was tormented by the thought that the children might have lived if they had been living in a town where medical help could have been given. “What for? What for?” she thought. “Yuzyo and I, we want nothing from anyone, except that he should live as he was born and as his grandfathers and great-grandfathers lived, and that I should only live with him, love him, love my little ones, bring them up.” “And suddenly they torment him, exile him, and take from me what is dearer to me than the world. Why? What for?” She put this question to people and to God. And she could not imagine the possibility of any answer.

And without that answer there was no life. And her life stopped. The poor life in exile, which before she had known how to adorn with her womanly taste and elegance, now became unbearable not only to her but to Migursky as well, who suffered for her and did not know how to help her.

At this time, the hardest for the Migurskys, there arrived in Uralsk a Pole, Rosolovsky, who had been implicated in a grand plan of revolt and escape organized at that time in Siberia by the exiled priest Sirotsinsky.

Rosolovsky, just like Migursky, just like the thousands of people punished with exile to Siberia because they wanted to be what they were born — Poles — had been implicated in this affair, punished for it with the birch, and put into the ranks as a soldier in the same battalion as Migursky. Rosolovsky, once a teacher of mathematics, was a tall, stooping, thin man with sunken cheeks and a frowning brow.

On the very first evening of his stay, Rosolovsky, sitting over tea at the Migurskys’, naturally began to tell, in his slow, calm bass, about the affair for which he had suffered so cruelly. The affair was this: Sirotsinsky had organized throughout Siberia a secret society whose aim was, with the help of the Poles enlisted in the Cossack and line regiments, to stir the soldiers and the convicts to revolt, raise the settlers, seize the artillery at Omsk, and set everyone free.

“But was that really possible?” asked Migursky.

“Quite possible; everything was ready,” said Rosolovsky, frowning darkly, and slowly, calmly, he told the whole plan of liberation and all the measures taken to make the venture succeed and, should it fail, to save the conspirators. Success would have been certain had two villains not turned traitor. Sirotsinsky, as Rosolovsky told it, was a man of genius and of great strength of soul. And he died a hero and a martyr. And in his even, calm bass Rosolovsky began to tell the details of the execution, at which, by order of the authorities, he had had to be present together with all who had been tried in the affair.

“Two battalions of soldiers stood in two rows, making a long street; each soldier had in his hand a flexible rod, of an Imperially approved thickness: such that only three of them could go into the muzzle of a musket. The first they led out was Doctor Shakalsky. Two soldiers led him, and those with the rods struck him on his bared back as he came level with them. I saw it only when he came near the place where I stood. Before that I heard only the roll of the drum, but then, when the whistle of the rods and the sound of the blows on his body became audible, I knew he was coming near. And I saw the soldiers pulling him along by the muskets, and he walked, flinching and turning his head now to one side, now to the other. And once, as he was led past us, I heard the Russian doctor say to the soldiers: ‘Don’t hit hard, have pity.’ But they all beat him; when he was led past me the second time, he was no longer walking but being dragged. His back was terrible to look at. I shut my eyes. He fell, and they carried him away. Then they led out the second. Then the third, then the fourth. All fell, all were carried away, some as if dead, others barely alive, and all of us had to stand and watch. It went on for six hours — from early morning until two in the afternoon. The last they led out was Sirotsinsky himself. I had not seen him for a long time and would not have known him, he had aged so. His shaven face, all in wrinkles, was a pale greenish color. His bared body was thin and yellow; his ribs stuck out above his sunken belly. He walked as all the others had, flinching and jerking up his head at every blow, but he did not groan, and he loudly recited a prayer: Miserere mei Deus secundam magnam misericordiam tuam.”

“I heard it myself,” Rosolovsky rasped quickly, and, shutting his mouth, breathed heavily through his nose.

Ludvika, sitting by the window, was sobbing, her face covered with her kerchief.

“Why must you go on describing it! Beasts — beasts is what they are!” cried Migursky, and, throwing down his pipe, he jumped up from his chair and went off with quick steps into the dark bedroom. Albina sat as though turned to stone, her eyes fixed on a dark corner.

The next day Migursky, coming home from drill, was surprised by the look of his wife, who met him, as in the old days, with light steps and a radiant face, and led him into the bedroom.

“Now, Yuzyo, listen.”

“I’m listening. What is it?”

“I thought all night about what Rosolovsky told us. And I have made up my mind: I cannot live like this, I cannot live here. I cannot! I will die sooner than stay here.”

“But what is there to do?”

“Escape.”

“Escape? How?”

“I have thought it all out. Listen.”

And she told him the plan she had thought up that night. The plan was this: he, Migursky, would go out of the house in the evening and leave his greatcoat on the bank of the Ural, and on the greatcoat a letter in which he would write that he was taking his own life. They would think he had drowned himself. They would search for the body, send out papers. But he would hide. She would hide him so that no one would find him. They could live like that for a month, even. And when everything had settled down, they would escape.

Her scheme seemed impracticable to Migursky at first, but by the end of the day, as she urged it on him with such passion and assurance, he began to agree with her. Besides, he was inclined to agree for another reason too: the punishment for a failed escape, the same punishment as the one Rosolovsky had told about, would fall on him, Migursky, while success would free her, and he saw how hard life here had been for her since the children died.

Rosolovsky and Ludvika were let into the secret, and after long consultations, changes, and corrections the plan of escape was worked out. At first they meant to arrange it so that Migursky, once he had been declared drowned, would escape alone, on foot. Albina would set out in a carriage and meet him at an agreed place. That was the first plan. But later, when Rosolovsky told about all the failed attempts at escape in Siberia over the last five years (in all that time only one lucky man had gotten away and saved himself), Albina proposed another plan: that Yuzyo, hidden in the carriage, should travel with her and Ludvika as far as Saratov. In Saratov he was to change his clothes and go down along the bank of the Volga, and at an agreed place get into a boat that she would hire in Saratov, and in it he would sail with Albina and Ludvika down the Volga to Astrakhan and across the Caspian Sea to Persia. This plan was approved by everyone, and by its chief organizer, Rosolovsky, but there was the difficulty of contriving a space in the carriage that would not draw the attention of the authorities and yet could hold a man. And when Albina, after a visit to the children’s grave, told Rosolovsky how painful it was for her to leave the children’s remains in a strange land, he thought it over and said:

“Ask the authorities for permission to take the children’s coffins with you; they will grant it.”

“No, I don’t want that, I don’t want it!” said Albina.

“Ask. Everything turns on that. We won’t take the coffins, but we’ll make a big box for them and put Yuzef in the box.”

At first Albina rejected the proposal, so distasteful was it to her to bind up a deception with the memory of the children; but when Migursky cheerfully approved the scheme, she agreed.

So the final plan worked out was this: Migursky would do everything needed to convince the authorities that he had drowned himself. When his death had been acknowledged, Albina would submit a petition to be allowed, after her husband’s death, to return to her homeland and to take the children’s remains with her. And when she had been granted this permission too, it would be made to look as though the graves had been dug open and the coffins taken; but the coffins would be left in place, and in the box prepared for the purpose Migursky would lie in place of the children’s coffins. The box would be put on the tarantass, and so they would drive to Saratov. At Saratov they would take a boat. In the boat Yuzyo would come out of the box, and they would sail down to the Caspian Sea. And there, Persia or Turkey, and freedom.

First of all the Migurskys bought a tarantass, on the pretext of sending Ludvika back to her homeland. Then they set about fitting the tarantass with a box in which one could lie, doubled up though it might be, without suffocating, and from which one could get out quickly and unseen and climb back in. The three of them — Albina, Rosolovsky, and Migursky himself — devised the box and fitted it. Especially important was the help of Rosolovsky, who was a good joiner. The box was made so that, mounted on the bars behind the body, it fitted tight against the body, and the side that lay against the body came away, so that a man, taking that side out, could lie partly in the box and partly on the floor of the tarantass. Besides that, holes for air were bored in the box, and on top and on the sides the box was to be covered with bast matting and tied around with ropes. One could get into it and out of it through the tarantass, in which a seat had been made.

When the tarantass and the box were ready, even before her husband’s disappearance, Albina, to prepare the authorities, went to the colonel and told him that her husband had fallen into melancholy and had attempted suicide, that she was afraid for him, and asked that he be given leave for a time. Her gift for acting served her well. The anxiety and fear for her husband that she showed were so natural that the colonel was moved and promised to do all he could. After this Migursky composed a letter that was to be found in the cuff of his greatcoat on the bank of the Ural, and on the appointed day, in the evening, he went to the Ural, waited until dark, laid his clothes on the bank, the greatcoat with the letter, and secretly returned home. A place had been made ready for him in the attic, which was kept locked. In the night Albina sent Ludvika to the colonel to report that her husband had left the house 20 hours before and had not come back. In the morning they brought her her husband’s letter, and with an expression of great despair, in tears, she took it to the colonel. A week later Albina submitted a petition to leave for her homeland. The grief that Migurskaya showed struck all who saw her. Everyone pitied the unhappy mother and wife. When her departure had been permitted, she submitted another petition, for leave to dig up the bodies of the children and take them with her. The authorities marveled at this sentimentality, but granted this too.

On the evening of the day after this permission too had been received, Rosolovsky, with Albina and Ludvika, drove in a hired cart, with the box into which the children’s coffins were to be put, to the cemetery, to the children’s grave. Albina knelt by the children’s graves, prayed, and soon rose and, frowning, turned to Rosolovsky and said:

“Do what has to be done; I cannot,” and she moved away to one side.

Rosolovsky and Ludvika moved the gravestone aside and dug over the top of the grave with a spade, so that it looked as though it had been dug open. When all was done, they called Albina and drove home with the box filled with earth.

The appointed day of departure came. Rosolovsky rejoiced at the success of the enterprise, now carried almost to its end. Ludvika baked cookies and little pies for the road and, repeating her favorite saying, “Iak mame Kocham,” said that her heart was bursting with fear and joy. Migursky rejoiced at his release from the attic, where he had sat for more than a month, and most of all at Albina’s revived spirits and joy in life. It was as though she had forgotten all her former grief and all the dangers, and, running up to him in the attic, she shone with rapturous joy, as in her girlhood.

At three in the morning a Cossack came to escort them, and a Cossack driver brought a troika of horses. Albina, with Ludvika and the little dog, took her seat in the tarantass on cushions covered with a rug. The Cossack and the driver climbed up onto the driver’s seat. Migursky, dressed in peasant clothes, lay in the body of the tarantass.

They drove out of the town, and the good troika bore the tarantass away along a road beaten as smooth as stone, through the endless unplowed steppe, overgrown with last year’s silvery feather grass.

Albina’s heart stood still in her breast with hope and rapture. Wanting to share her feelings, every now and then, with a faint smile, she nodded to Ludvika, now toward the broad back of the Cossack sitting on the driver’s seat, now toward the floor of the tarantass. Ludvika, with a meaningful look, stared motionless straight ahead and only pursed her lips a little. The day was clear. On every side stretched the boundless empty steppe, its silvery feather grass glittering in the slanting rays of the morning sun. Only, now on one side and now on the other of the hard road, on which the swift unshod hooves of the Bashkir horses rang out as on asphalt, little mounds of earth thrown up by ground squirrels came into view; a little sentry animal sat up on its haunches and, warning of danger, whistled shrilly and vanished into its burrow. They seldom met other travelers: a train of Cossack carts with wheat, or Bashkirs on horseback, with whom the Cossack briskly exchanged words in Tatar. At every station the horses were fresh and well fed, and the half-ruble tips that Albina gave made the drivers race, as they put it, like couriers — at a gallop the whole way.

At the very first station, while the old driver had led his horses away and the new one had not yet brought his, and the Cossack had gone into the yard, Albina leaned over and asked her husband how he felt and whether he needed anything.

“Splendid, comfortable. I need nothing. I could easily lie here two days and nights.”

Toward evening they reached the large village of Dergachi. So that her husband could stretch his limbs and refresh himself, Albina stopped not at the post station but at an inn, and at once, giving the Cossack money, sent him to buy her eggs and milk. The tarantass stood under a shed; it was dark in the yard, and, posting Ludvika to watch for the Cossack, Albina let her husband out and fed him, and before the Cossack came back he had climbed into his hiding place again. They sent for horses again and drove on. Albina felt her spirits rising higher and higher and could not hold back her rapture and gaiety. She had no one to talk to but Ludvika, the Cossack, and Trezorka, and she amused herself with them.

Ludvika, who in spite of her plainness at once suspected any man she had dealings with of amorous designs on her, now suspected the very same of the strapping, good-natured Ural Cossack with unusually clear and kind blue eyes who was escorting them, and who was especially agreeable to both women for his simplicity and good-natured friendliness. Besides Trezorka, whom Albina shook her finger at and would not let sniff under the seat, she now amused herself with Ludvika and her comic flirting with the Cossack, who did not suspect the intentions ascribed to him and smiled good-naturedly at everything said to him. Albina, excited by the danger, and by the success of the venture now beginning to come true, and by the wonderful weather and the steppe air, felt a childlike rapture and gaiety such as she had not felt for a long time. Migursky heard her cheerful chatter, and he too, in spite of the physical hardship of his position, which he kept hidden (he was very hot, and thirst tormented him), forgot himself and rejoiced in her joy.

Toward evening of the second day something began to show in the haze. It was Saratov and the Volga. The Cossack, with his steppe eyes, could see both the Volga and a mast, and pointed them out to Ludvika. Ludvika said that she saw them too. But Albina could make out nothing. And she only said, loudly on purpose — so that her husband would hear:

“Saratov, the Volga,” Albina went on, as though talking to Trezor, telling her husband all that she saw.

Without driving into Saratov, Albina stopped on the left bank of the Volga, in the Pokrovskaya settlement, directly opposite the town. Here she hoped to find time in the night to talk with her husband and even to let him out of the box. But all through the short spring night the Cossack did not leave the tarantass, and sat beside it in an empty cart that stood under the shed. Ludvika, on Albina’s orders, sat in the tarantass and, quite sure that it was for her sake that the Cossack would not leave the tarantass, winked, laughed, and hid her pockmarked face in her kerchief. But Albina no longer saw anything amusing in this, and grew more and more anxious, not understanding why the Cossack kept so constantly by the tarantass.

Several times in the short May night, its evening glow merging with the dawn, Albina went out of the inn’s room, past the stinking gallery, onto the back porch. The Cossack was still awake and sat, his legs hanging down, on the empty cart that stood beside the tarantass. Only before daybreak, when the cocks had woken and were calling to one another from yard to yard, did Albina, coming down, find a moment to talk with her husband. The Cossack lay sprawled in the cart, snoring. She went carefully up to the tarantass and pushed the box.

“Yuzyo!” There was no answer.

“Yuzyo, Yuzyo!” she said louder, in fright.

“What is it, dear, what?” Migursky said in a sleepy voice from the box.

“Why didn’t you answer?”

“I was asleep,” he said, and by the sound of his voice she could tell that he was smiling. “Well, shall I come out?” he asked.

“You can’t, the Cossack is here,” and as she said it she glanced at the Cossack sleeping in the cart.

And, strange to say, the Cossack was snoring, but his eyes, his kind blue eyes, were open. He was looking at her, and only when his eyes met hers did he close them.

“Did I imagine it, or was he really not asleep?” Albina asked herself. “I must have imagined it,” she thought, and turned to her husband again.

“Bear it a little longer,” she said. “Do you want something to eat?”

“No. I want a smoke.”

Albina looked at the Cossack again. He was asleep. “Yes, I imagined it,” she thought.

“I’ll go to the governor now.”

“Well, good luck…”

And Albina, taking a dress out of the trunk, went into the room to change.

Having changed into her best widow’s dress, Albina crossed the Volga. On the embankment she took a cab and drove to the governor’s. The governor received her. The pretty Polish widow, smiling so charmingly and speaking such excellent French, greatly pleased the governor, an old man who tried to look young. He granted her everything and asked her to come to him again the next day to receive from him an order to the town governor in Tsaritsyn. Glad both of the success of her petition and of the effect of her charm, which she saw in the governor’s manner, Albina, happy and full of hope, was riding back downhill along an unpaved street in a long open cab to the landing. The sun had already risen above the woods, and its slanting rays played on the rippling water of the vast spring flood. To the right and the left along the hillside, apple trees drenched in fragrant blossom showed like white clouds. A forest of masts stood along the shore, and sails showed white across the flood, rippling in the breeze and sparkling in the sun. At the landing, having fallen into talk with the cabman, Albina asked whether a boat could be hired to Astrakhan, and dozens of noisy, cheerful boatmen offered her their services and their boats. She came to terms with one of the boatmen, who pleased her more than the rest, and went to look at his boat, a kosovushka, which stood crowded among other boats at the landing. The boat had a small mast that could be set up, with a sail, so that it could go under sail. For a calm there were oars, and two strong, cheerful bargemen to row, who sat in the boat in the sun. The cheerful, good-natured pilot advised her not to leave the tarantass behind, but to take off its wheels and set it in the boat. “It’ll fit just right, and you’ll sit more comfortably. God send us fair weather, we’ll run down to Astrakhan in five days or so.”

Albina struck a bargain with the boatman and told him to come to the Pokrovskaya settlement, to Login’s inn, to look at the tarantass and receive a deposit. Everything was going better than she had expected. In the most rapturously happy state, Albina crossed the Volga and, after paying off the cabman, made her way to the inn.

The Cossack Danilo Lifanov came from Streletsky Umet on the Obshchy Syrt. He was 34 and was serving the last month of his term of Cossack service. In his family there were his grandfather, an old man of 90 who still remembered Pugachev; two brothers; the wife of his elder brother, who had been sent to penal servitude in Siberia for the Old Belief; his wife; two daughters; and two sons. His father had been killed in the war with the French. He was the head of the house. On their farmstead they had 16 horses and two teams of oxen, and 15 sotenniks of their own free land plowed and sown with wheat. He, Danilo, had served in Orenburg and in Kazan, and was now finishing his term. He held firmly to the Old Belief, did not smoke, did not drink, and did not eat from the same dishes as the worldly, and he held as strictly to his oath. In all his affairs he was slow, steady, and thorough, and to whatever the authorities charged him with he gave all his attention, and did not forget it for a minute until he had fulfilled the whole of his commission, as he understood it. Now he had been ordered to escort two Polish women with coffins to Saratov, so that no harm should be done them on the road, so that they should travel quietly and get up to no mischief, and in Saratov to hand them over to the authorities in due form. And so he had brought them to Saratov, with the little dog and their coffins and all. The women were quiet and kindly; Polish though they were, they did nothing wrong. But here, in the Pokrovskaya settlement, in the evening, as he walked past the tarantass, he saw the little dog jump into it and start whining and wagging its tail, and from under the seat of the tarantass he seemed to hear someone’s voice. One of the Polish women, the old one, seeing the little dog in the tarantass, took fright at something, snatched it up, and carried it off.

“There’s something here,” the Cossack thought, and began to keep watch. When the young Polish woman came out to the tarantass in the night, he pretended to be asleep, and distinctly heard a man’s voice from the box. Early in the morning he went to the police and reported that the Polish women put in his charge were up to no good, and that in place of the dead they were carrying some living man in the box.

When Albina, in her rapturously merry mood, sure that everything was settled now and that in a few days they would be free, came up to the inn, she was surprised to see at the gate a smart carriage and pair, its side horse curving outward, and two Cossacks. People were crowding in the gateway, looking into the yard.

She was so full of hope and energy that the thought never even entered her head that the carriage and the crowding people had anything to do with her. She went into the yard and, glancing at the same moment under the shed where her tarantass stood, saw that the people were crowding precisely around her tarantass, and in that same instant she heard Trezorka’s desperate barking. The most terrible thing that could have happened had happened. In front of the tarantass, his clean uniform gleaming, his buttons, shoulder pieces, and patent-leather boots shining in the sun, stood a stately man with black side-whiskers, saying something loudly in a hoarse, commanding voice. Before him, between two soldiers, in peasant dress, with hay in his tangled hair, stood her Yuzyo, and, as though bewildered by what was going on around him, he kept raising and lowering his mighty shoulders. Trezorka, not knowing that he was the cause of the whole misfortune, his hackles up, was barking furiously and uselessly at the police chief. On seeing Albina, Migursky started and wanted to go to her, but the soldiers held him back.

“It’s nothing, Albina, nothing!” said Migursky, smiling his gentle smile.

“And here’s the little lady herself!” said the police chief. “This way, if you please. Your babies’ coffins? Eh?” he said, winking toward Migursky.

Albina made no answer; she only clutched at her breast and, her mouth open, stared at her husband in horror.

As happens in the moments before death, and in the decisive moments of life generally, in a single instant she felt and thought through an abyss of feelings and thoughts, and at the same time she did not yet understand, did not believe her misfortune. The first feeling was one she had long known — the feeling of wounded pride at the sight of her hero husband humiliated before those coarse, savage people who now held him in their power. “How dare they hold him, this best of all men, in their power?” The other feeling, which seized her at the same time, was the consciousness of the misfortune that had come to pass. And the consciousness of misfortune called up in her the memory of the chief misfortune of her life, the death of the children. And at once the question arose: what for? what were the children taken away for? And the question, what were the children taken away for? called up the question: what was her husband, her beloved, the best of men, now perishing and suffering for? And then and there she remembered what a shameful punishment awaited him, and that she, she alone, was to blame for it.

“What is he to you? Is he your husband?” the police chief repeated.

“What for, what for?” she cried and, going off into hysterical laughter, fell onto the box, which had now been taken down from the driver’s seat and stood beside the tarantass. Shaking all over with sobs, her face streaming with tears, Ludvika came up to her.

“Panienka, dear panienka! Jak Boga kocham, nothing will happen, nothing,” she kept saying, running her hands over her aimlessly.

They put handcuffs on Migursky and led him out of the yard. Seeing this, Albina ran after him.

“Forgive me, forgive me,” she said. “It’s all my doing! I alone am to blame.”

“They’ll sort out there who is to blame. Your turn will come too,” said the police chief, and moved her aside with his hand.

Migursky was led off to the ferry, and Albina, not knowing herself why she did it, followed him and did not listen to Ludvika’s coaxing.

The Cossack Danilo Lifanov stood all this while by the wheels of the tarantass, glancing gloomily now at the police chief, now at Albina, now down at his own feet.

When Migursky had been led away, Trezorka, left by himself, wagging his little tail, began to nuzzle up to the Cossack. He had grown used to him on the road. The Cossack suddenly pulled away from the tarantass, tore off his cap, flung it to the ground with all his might, kicked Trezorka away from him, and went into the tavern. In the tavern he called for vodka and drank day and night, drank away everything he had, the clothes on his back included, and only on the following night, waking in a ditch, did he stop thinking about the question that tormented him: had he done right in reporting to the authorities about the Polish woman’s husband in the box?

Migursky was tried and, for the escape, sentenced to run the gauntlet of 1,000 men. His relatives and Vanda, who had connections in Petersburg, obtained a mitigation of the sentence for him, and he was exiled to Siberia as a settler for life. Albina went after him.

As for Nicholas Pavlovich, he rejoiced that he had crushed the hydra of revolution not only in Poland but in all Europe, and was proud that he had not broken the precepts of Russian autocracy and, for the good of the Russian people, had kept Poland in Russia’s power. And men in stars and gilded uniforms praised him so for it that he sincerely believed he was a great man and that his life was a great good for humanity, and especially for Russians, toward whose corruption and stupefaction all his powers were, unconsciously, directed.