On it sat a boy who was evidently sick: he must have been about nine years old, and he was voraciously eating a cottage-cheese pie. Another boy was lying down, covered with an overcoat and paying no attention to anything; by his flushed features and his eyes, which burned with an unhealthy glitter, it could be deduced that he had a fever – possibly typhus.

‘Are you ill?’ one of the ladies asked the boy who was swallowing chunks of pie without even bothering to chew them.

‘Ah?’

‘Are you ill?’

The boy shook his head.

‘You’re not ill?’

Again the boy shook his head.

‘Him no comprenay,’ the priest observed, and then asked, almost immediately, ‘Are you baptized?’

The lad thought about this, as if he had recognized something familiar about the question, and, once more agitating his head from side to side, said: ‘Ne-ne.’

‘What a pretty boy he is,’ the lady said, taking the lad by the chin and raising his comely face with its black-pupilled eyes.

‘Where’s your mother?’ Musk-Ox asked him suddenly, giving the lad’s overcoat a slight tug.

The lad trembled, looked at Vasily Petrovich, then at the people standing round, then at the NCO, and again at Vasily Petrovich.

‘Your mother, your mother – where is she?’ Musk-Ox repeated.

‘Mama?’

‘Yes, your mama, your mama?’

‘Mama—’ The boy waved his hand towards the distance.

‘At home?’

The recruit thought for a bit and then nodded his head in agreement.

‘He still has his wits about him,’ the priest interjected, and asked: ‘You have brothers?’

The child made a barely perceptible sign of negation.

‘Boy lying, you lying – they no take only sons for recruits. Lying nicht gut, nein,’ the priest continued, imagining that his pidgin Russian was making his side of the conversation more easily understood.

‘I vagrantsir.’

‘Wha – at?’

‘Vagrantsir,’ the boy said, more distinctly this time.

‘Aha, a vagrantsir! In plain Russian that means he’s a vagrant, given to a life of vagrancy. There’s a law against them, against those Jewish lads, I’ve read about it … They’re clamping down on vagrancy. Well, and quite right, too: a settled person has to stay at home, but it doesn’t cost a vagrant a copeck to wander, and he can take holy baptism and mend his ways and end up a respected member of society,’ said the priest. Just then, however, the name-check came to an end, and the NCO, pulling the horse by its bridle, tugged the cart with its load of recruits over to the front entrance of the barracks, where more young recruits were creeping forwards in a long line, trailing their kitbags and the skirts of their ungainly overcoats behind them. I began to look round to see if I could see my Musk-Ox; but there was no sign of him. Neither was there any sign of him that night, nor the following day, nor by dinner-time on the day after that. The servant-boy was sent to Vasily Petrovich’s flat, where he lived together with some other seminarists – but he was not there either. The young seminarists with whom Musk-Ox lived had long since grown accustomed to not seeing Vasily Petrovich for whole weeks on end, and they had paid no attention to his disappearance. Chelnovsky was not in the slightest perturbed, either.

‘He’ll be back,’ he would say. ‘He’s off wandering somewhere, or sleeping in some ryefield – that’s all.’

To the reader it should perhaps be explained that Vasily Petrovich was, in accordance with a favourite expression of his, very fond of ‘lairs’, of which he had rather many. The bedstead, with its bare boards, which stood in his room never held his body for long. Only now and again, when he called in at his home, would he lie down in it, compose a snap examination for the boys with some curious question or other at the end of each test, and then the bed would once again remain empty for a while. Only rarely did he sleep the night at our house, and then usually either on the porch or, if a heated discussion had begun during the evening and had not come to an end by bedtime, on the floor between our beds, with nothing underneath him but a thin floor-cloth. He would leave the house early in the morning and either go into the fields or to the cemetery. He visited the cemetery every day. There he would lie down on a grassy grave, open some paper-bound work by a classical Latin author, and proceed to read it; or he might roll the book up, put it under his head, and gaze up at the sky.

‘You’re a denizen of the graves, Vasily Petrovich,’ Chelnovsky’s daughters, with whom he was on friendly terms, would say to him.

‘Such silly nonsense you talk,’ Vasily Petrovich would reply.

‘You’re a vampire,’ the pale local schoolmaster, who had acquired the reputation of being something of a literary man ever since the local newspaper had published a learned article of his, would tell him.

‘Such silly nonsense you write,’ Musk-Ox would reply, and set off once again in the direction of his deceased friends.

Vasily Petrovich’s eccentricities had accustomed the small circle of his acquaintances not to be astonished by his escapades, and it was for this reason that no one was surprised by his swift and unexpected disappearance. He would have to come back again, and he would do so. No one was in any doubt about that: the only question was – where had he disappeared to? What part of the world was he wandering about in? What had caused him such irritation, and how would he get over it? These were questions the solution of which added some much-needed enlivenment to the tedium of my waking hours.

3

Another three days went by. The weather was magnificent. Our Russian nature, with all its might and generous splendour, came fully into its own. It was the time of the new moon. The hot days were followed by wonderful, light nights. At times such as these the inhabitants of Kursk would take delight in the singing of their local nightingales, which warbled to them for whole nights on end, as they in turn sat listening for whole nights on end in their large and leafy town gardens. Everyone went about softly and quietly, and only the young schoolmasters argued heatedly about ‘emotions lofty and exalted’, or about ‘dilettantism in science.’1 Heated, indeed, were those arguments. Even in the most remote flowerbeds of the old park one could hear the exclamations reverberating across through the air: ‘That’s a dilemma!’, ‘Oh, but you’re mistaken!’, ‘You can’t use a priori reasoning’, ‘Take an inductive approach!’, and the like. Back then we still held arguments about matters such as these. Nowadays one never hears arguments of that type. ‘To each season its bird, and to each bird its song.’ Russian middle-class society is not at all the same nowadays as it was when I lived in Kursk at the period during which the events of my story took place.