With me holding the ideas I do, it’s impossible for the two of us to live in this world. I yield to him, as he is their darling. He may be of some use to a few, while my ideas, I see, are of no good whatsoever. It’s not for nothing that you gave me the name of some beast or other. No one wants to be my friend, and I’ve never met anyone whom I wanted to be my friend.’ He went on to ask me to write and let him know how I was keeping, and how Nastasya Petrovna was.

At this time two coopers of Aleksandr Ivanovich’s who had travelled with a consignment of vodka from the distillery in Vytegra arrived in St Petersburg and called on their master. I put them up in my spare kitchen. I knew both of them quite well. We got talking about one thing and another, and eventually came on to the subject of Musk-Ox.

‘How is he getting along with you?’ I asked them.

‘Oh, all right,’ said one of them.

‘He’s active,’ the other man volunteered.

‘But does he do any work?’

‘Well, what kind of work could you expect him to do? I don’t know why the master keeps him on, really.’

‘How does he pass the time?’

‘He wanders about in the forest. He’s supposed to be a sort of steward, keeping a record of the number of trees that have been felled, but he doesn’t even do that.’

‘Why not?’

‘Who knows? The master spoils him.’

‘But he’s strong, you know,’ the cooper went on. ‘Sometimes he picks up an axe, and when he starts to swing it – Lord! The sparks fairly fly!’

‘The other thing he’s been doing is night-watchman duty.’

‘What sort of night-watchman duty?’

‘The local people started putting a rumour around that there were runaway serfs in the neighbourhood, and he began to disappear for whole nights at a time. The lads started to get the idea that he might be mixed up with these runaways, and that they ought to keep an eye on him. So whenever he set off, three of them would tail him. They’d see him go straight to the farmhouse. Well, nothing came of it, though – nothing except a lot of nonsense. They said they saw him sit down under a shrub, right outside the master’s windows, call the dog, Sultanka, over to his side and sit there until dawn; when day broke he’d get up and move on to another place. And so it went on, a second and a third time. The lads would rush after him to see what he was doing. It went on like that until autumn. But one night after the Feast of the Assumption some of the lads were getting ready to turn in, and they said to him: “That’s enough of that, Petrovich – don’t you go off on night-watchman duty no more! Why don’t you turn in like the rest of us?” He didn’t say anything, but two days later we heard that he’d asked for leave of absence: and the master had him transferred to another dacha.’

‘But did your lads like him?’ I asked.

The cooper gave this some thought, and then said:

‘I don’t think they had any feelings one way or the other.’

‘But, I mean, he’s a good-natured fellow.’

‘Oh yes, he never did any of us any harm. They used to say that whenever he started talking about Filaret the Merciful or some other holy father, he’d turn everything to the subject of goodness, and deliver stirring words against Mammon-worship. A lot of the lads used to listen to what he had to say.’

‘And did they like what they heard?’

‘They liked it, all right. Sometimes he could even make them laugh.’

‘What did he say that was so comical?’

‘Well, for example, he’d talk for ages about God – and then suddenly you’d realize it was the higher-ups he was talking about. He’d take a handful of peas, select the biggest, juiciest ones, and plant them out on his svitka. “Now the biggest one,” he’d say, “is the Tsar; this smaller one here is his ministers and princes; this even smaller one is the lords and merchants and fat-bellied priests; and lastly, these ones –” here he’d point to the whole handful – “these are us, the tillers of the soil.” And then he’d throw these tillers of the soil among the princes and the priests: and it would all even out. There would just be a great pile of peas. Well, of course, the lads used to hoot with laughter. “Let’s see that show again,” they’d say.’

‘That was him – always playing the fool,’ the other man muttered.

We felt obliged to be silent for a while.

‘What is he, anyway?’ the second cooper asked. ‘Is he an actor?’

‘What gave you that idea?’

‘It’s what folk used to say. Mironka used to say it.’

Mironka was a quick, nimble little muzhik who had travelled everywhere with Aleksandr Ivanovich for as long as anyone could remember. He was renowned as a singer, storyteller and cracker of jokes.