Chapter 3 "My Life - A Mainlander's Story" III

three A railway is being built in our area.On the eve of the holiday, there are groups of ragged people walking around the city. People in the city call them "iron stoves", and everyone is afraid of them.How often have I seen men in rags with blood on their faces and without hats taken to the police station, followed by others with a samovar or a long ago washed and still wet Underwear, as physical evidence. "Iron Stoves" usually gather near taverns and in market places; they drink, eat, swear obscenities, and whistle harshly when they meet frivolous women passing by.In order to entertain these hungry and ragged people, our shopkeeper drunk a dog and a cat with white wine, or tied an empty kerosene barrel to the dog's tail, whistled, and the dog He ran along the street, and the sound of the iron barrel was loud, and the dog screamed in fright, thinking that some kind of monster was chasing after him, and ran far away from the city in one breath, to the field, where he was tired Get exhausted.Several dogs in our city often tremble with their tails between their legs, and it is said that they cannot stand such entertainment and have gone mad.

The railway station was built five versts from the city, and it was said that the engineer demanded a bribe of 50,000 rubles in order to build the railway to the edge of the city, but the municipal administration only agreed to pay 40,000 rubles, and the parties fell out over the 10,000 rubles.Now the city people regret it, because they have to build a road to the train station, and it is estimated that the cost of building this road will be even more.Sleepers and steel tracks have been laid across the railway line, and official trains come and go, transporting construction materials and workers.Because the bridge-building project responsible for Torshikov has not been completed, the entire line project has been delayed, and some stations have not yet been repaired.

Dubechnia was the name of the first station, seventeen versts from the city.I was walking.Autumn sowing and spring sowing crops are immersed in the morning sun and look green. The land in this area is flat and pleasant, and the outlines of the railway station, mounds and manors are clearly visible in the distance. . . . What a joy it is to be out in the open!How I wish I could feel free, if only for one morning, from thinking about what's going on in the city, about my own poverty, about my own hunger!Nothing gets in the way of my life more than a burning pang of hunger.When this feeling arises, my noble thoughts mix strangely with thoughts of buckwheat porridge, meatloaf, fried fish.For example, now, I am standing alone in the field, looking up at a lark, it seems to be standing still in one place in the sky, singing incessantly, as if hysterical, but I am thinking "If only I could eat a piece of bread and butter at this time!" Or I sit down on the side of the road, close my eyes and listen to this wonderful noise in May, but I can't help it. I was reminded of the smell of scalding potatoes.

I am tall and strong, but I usually eat very little, so my main feeling throughout the day is hunger. Maybe it is because of this that I deeply understand why so many people work only to eat, and can't live without talking. Let's start with the topic of eating. In Dubechniya, workers are plastering walls inside the station and building a wooden building above the water tower.It was hot, the air smelled of lime mortar, and workers were limping limply over piles of wood chips and broken bricks.The old switchman was sleeping next to his hut with the sun shining down on his face.Not a single tree.There was a slight humming on the telegraph wires, and here and there were hawks on the wire.I was also walking up and down on the piles of wood chips and broken bricks, not knowing what to do, and I remembered what the engineer said to me when I asked what my job was: "Go there and see." ’” But what is there to see in this desolate place?The plasterers were talking about a foreman, a man named Fedot Vasilyev, and I couldn't understand what they were saying, and gradually a feeling of distress took hold of me.It is a physical discomfort: one feels one's hands, one's feet, one's tall body, but does not know what to do with them, where to put them.

I wandered about for at least two hours before I noticed that outside the station, to the right of the railway line, a row of telegraph poles stretched for a mile and a half or two, terminating in a white stone wall.The workers said the office was over there, and I finally figured that was where I should be. It was an old, deserted manor.The white stone on the walls has loosened, weathered, and has collapsed in places.There was a side house, with a windowless wall looking out onto the field, with a rusted roof and gleaming patches of tinplate in places.Looking in from the gate, you can see a large yard full of weeds and an old main house with shuttered windows and a high, rusty red roof.On the left and right sides of the main house stood a solitary wing, one with a battened window, the other with an open window, and beside the house stood a line on which linens were hanging, and a few calves approached nearby. go.The last telegraph pole stood in the yard, and the wires from it went to the window of the side house, the one with one wall looking out into the field.The door was open and I went in.At a table with a telegraph sat a gentleman with curly black hair and a canvas jacket.He looked at me sternly, frowning, but immediately smiled, and said, "Hello, Little Profit!"

This is Ivan Cheprakov, my middle school classmate who got expelled in second grade for smoking.One autumn we went together to catch goldfinch, yellow finch, and squirrel, and sold them at the market early in the morning while our parents were still asleep.We hid in the shadows and waited for the small flocks of starlings going south to fly by, shot them with small canister shells, and picked up the wounded birds, some of which died in agony. We groaned in our cages, and when some of the birds recovered, we sold them and had the audacity to swear to the buyer that they were all males. Once at the market, I had only one starling left unsold, and after selling it to customers for a long time, I finally sold it for a kopeck. "Anyway, I got a little bit of interest!" I comforted myself, and hid the kopeck. From then on, the boys and classmates on the street gave me the nickname "Little Interest", and I still occasionally pay it back. Some little boys joked with the little clerk and called me this nickname, but no one except me remembers how I got it.

Cheprakov was a stocky, narrow-chested, stooped, long-legged man.His cravat looked like it was tied with string, he didn't wear a vest at all, and his boots were worse than mine, with the heels all crooked.He seldom closed his eyes, and there was an eager expression on his face, as if he was about to grab something.He is always in a hurry. "Wait a minute," he said hurriedly. "Listen to me! ... Well, what did I just say?" We chatted.It was only then that I learned that the estate where I was now was not long ago the property of Cheprakov, and that it had been transferred to the engineer Torschikov only last autumn.The engineer, who thought it better to spend the money on land rather than securities, had bought three mortgaged estates of considerable size in our part of the country.At the time of the sale, Cheprakov's mother, with the consent of the buyer, obtained the right to live in an annex for two more years and asked for a job for her son in the office.

"Will he buy it or not!" Cheprakov said of the engineer. "How much money he shaves from contractors alone! He shaves on everybody!" Then he took me to dinner, and hastily decided that I'd live with them in the wing, and I'd eat at his mother's. "She's a miser," he said, "but she won't ask you for a lot of money either." The small rooms in which his mother lived seemed cramped, and all the rooms, including the vestibule and the doorway, were piled up with furniture which had been brought here from the big house after the sale of the estate.They are all old antiques made of mahogany.The hostess, Cheprakova, was a fat, elderly lady with squinted Chinese eyes, who was knitting socks in a big armchair by the window.She was very polite to me.

"Mom, this is Poloznev!" Cheprakov introduced me. "He came here to work." "Are you an aristocrat?" she asked in a queer, ugly voice, and I felt as if a lump of fat was churning in her throat. "Yes!" I replied. "Please sit down." Lunch was bad, consisting of scones and milk soup stuffed with bitter curd. The hostess, Yelena Nikiforovna, always blinded her eyes in a queer way, now one eye, now the other.She talked and ate, but her whole body already exuded a smell of death, and even seemed to faintly exude the breath of a dead body.The spark of her life was already very weak and was about to go out. She only vaguely realized that she was the wife of a landowner who had many serfs in the past, and she was also the wife of a general. The remnants of her life flashed in her mind, and she said to her son: "Jean, you shouldn't be holding a knife like this!"

Or else she would gasp for breath, and say to me, with the affectation of a hostess for guests: "You know, we've sold our estate. It's a pity, of course, we're used to living here." Yes, but Torshikov promised to be the station master of the Dubechnya railway station. So we don't have to leave here, we will live at the station in the future, it will be the same as living in this estate. The engineer is a great help Man! Don't you think he's handsome?" Not so long ago the Cheprakovs had lived in luxury, but after the death of the general. Everything has changed.Yelena Nikiforovna began to quarrel with her neighbors and start a lawsuit.She never paid the housekeeper and workmen what was due to them.She was always afraid of being blackmailed, and within ten years Dubechnya had become almost unrecognizable.

Behind the big house there was an old garden, but now it was a field, overgrown with weeds and bushes, and desolate.I walked across the still solid and beautiful terrace, and through the glass doors I could see a room with a parquet floor, probably a living room, with an old piano, engravings on the walls with large mahogany frames, and Nothing left.Of the former flower-beds all that remain are peonies and poppies, with white and scarlet buds protruding from the grass.The garden paths were lined with young maples and young elms, gnawed by cows, but stretching upward and tangling with each other.The vegetation is so thick here that it seems that the road is impassable, but only around the house, and on both sides of the old avenue there are still poplars, pines, and old linden trees; behind these trees a mowing field has been opened. , here is no longer stuffy, and there are no cobwebs sticking to people's mouths and eyes, but only the breeze.The farther it is from the main house, the more open it becomes. Cherry trees, plum trees, and multi-branched apple trees have grown in the open space. These trees are supported by sticks. There are many dead spots on the branches, which look ugly. The pear trees grow tall. It's so amazing that people can't believe it's a pear tree.This part of the garden has been leased to the merchants of our city.A foolish peasant lived in a hut, and guarded the place against thieves and starlings. The further one went, the trees in the garden became thinner and became a real meadow, leading down a slope to a river overgrown with green reeds and willows.Near the embankment of the mill is the deep water section. The water is deep and there are many fish. The small mill with thatched roof makes a noisy noise, and the toads are croaking like crazy.The surface of the water is as smooth as a mirror, and there are occasional ripples, which are the water lilies in the river, disturbed by the happy fish, swaying back and forth.Across the river is the tiny village of Dubechnia.The quiet, blue water of the river draws people in, giving it a feeling of coolness and tranquility.Now all this, the water, the mill, the comfortable banks, belonged to the engineer! So my new job started.I received telegrams, sent telegrams, wrote various reports, and copied all the requisitions, applications, and reports sent to our office by foremen and foremen who could not understand art and science.But most of the day I do nothing, walk up and down the room waiting for the telegram, or ask a child to watch in the wing, and I go for a walk in the garden by myself, until the child comes and tells me the telegraph is ringing. only to go back.I'm partnering with Mrs. Cheprakova.We seldom eat meat, and our dishes are all made of milk. We fast on Wednesdays and Fridays, and on such days, we use a pink dish called a fasting dish.Cheprakova often blurred her eyes, it was a habit for her, and I always felt uncomfortable in her presence. In this wing there was too little work for one man, so Cheprakov did nothing but sleep or go to the water's edge with his gun to shoot ducks.Every evening he would go to the village or the station to have a drink, and before going to bed, he would look in the mirror and shout: "Ivan Cheprakov, hello!" When he was drunk, his face turned pale, and he kept rubbing his hands and laughing, his laughter sounded like a horse neighing: Xixixi!He often gets up on a whim, takes off his clothes, and runs naked across the fields.He ate flies and said the taste was a bit sour.