31–32.
iii. A. Leskov, Zhizn’ Nikolaya Leskova (Moscow: 1954), p. 100.
iv. McLean, op. cit., p. 146.
MUSK-OX
A Story
‘It feeds on grass or, if there be insufficient of this, on lichen.’
From a zoology treatise
1
When I first made Vasily Petrovich’s acquaintance, he was already known as ‘Musk-Ox’. People had given him this sobriquet because he really did look uncommonly like the musk-ox that is to be seen in the illustrated treatise on zoology by Yulian Simashko.1 He was twenty-eight, but looked much older. While one could not have described him as athletic or Herculean, he was none the less a thoroughly strong and healthy individual – small in stature, thick-set and broad-shouldered. Vasily Petrovich’s face was round and colourless; but it was indeed only his face that was round – his cranium displayed a curious deformity. At first sight it was reminiscent of a Kaffir’s skull, but as one examined it and studied it more closely, one found oneself unable to place it within any straightforward phrenological system. He wore his hair in a fashion that made it look as though he wished to mislead everyone as to the actual shape of his ‘upper storey’. The hair at the back of his head was cut very short, while at the front, over his ears, it fell in two long, thick, dark chestnut-coloured forelocks. Vasily Petrovich was in the habit of twisting these forelocks, and they forever lay on his temples like two rolled-up cylinders, while on his cheeks they curled, recalling the horns of the beast from which he had received his appellation. It was these forelocks which, more than anything else, made Vasily Petrovich resemble a musk-ox. There was, however, certainly nothing ridiculous about his physical appearance in general. A person meeting him for the first time would simply be aware that Vasily Petrovich was, as they say, ‘poorly cut but firmly sewn’ and, looking into his widely spaced, hazel-coloured eyes, would not fail to observe the will-power, determination and common sense which they contained. There was much that was unusual about the character of Vasily Petrovich. His primary distinguishing feature was an almost evangelical lack of concern about himself. The son of a rural deacon, who had grown up in bitter poverty and had, what was more, lost both his parents at an early stage in life, not only did he fail to manifest a concern for any lasting improvement in the conditions of his existence, but never even seemed to give a thought to the morrow. He possessed nothing which he might have given away, but was capable of stripping the last shirt from his body, and assumed a similar capability in everyone he came across – those who did not have it he customarily referred to, quite simply and plainly, as ‘pigs’. When Vasily Petrovich was out of boots,2 that is to say, when his boots had, to use his own expression, ‘completely dropped their jaws’, he would come to you or to me and without ceremony take your or my spare pair of boots, if they even so much as remotely fitted him, leaving his own cast-offs as a souvenir.
To Vasily Petrovich it was all the same whether you were at home or not: he would make himself at home in your quarters, take whatever he needed, always in the smallest quantities possible, and occasionally tell you when he met you later that he had borrowed your tobacco, or tea, or boots. More frequently, however, he would omit to say anything about such trivial matters. He could not abide modern literature, and read only the Gospels and the ancient classics. He would not hear a word on the subject of women, considered them all, without exception, ‘halfwits’ and quite sincerely regretted that his aged mother was a woman, and not some sexless being. Vasily Petrovich’s selflessness knew no bounds. Never to a single one of us did he at any time indicate that he felt any affection for us; yet we were all well aware that there was no sacrifice which Musk-Ox would not make for each one of his associates and acquaintances. It never entered our heads to doubt his readiness to sacrifice himself for his chosen ideal – yet it was not easy to discover what that ideal might be. It was not so much that he poured ridicule on the many theories in which we then so ardently believed; it was rather that he nourished a deep and sincere contempt for them.
Musk-Ox was no lover of conversation: what he did, he did in silence, and it was always something which at any given moment he might least have been expected to do.
How and why he had become a member of the small circle of people to which I, too, belonged during the limited duration of my stay in our provincial capital, I do not know. Some three years before my arrival there, Musk-Ox had completed his studies at the Kursk theological seminary. His mother, who fed him on the crumbs she had scraped together ‘in the name of Christ’, was impatiently waiting for him to become a priest and settle down in a parish with a young wife. But the thought of a young wife had not even crossed her son’s mind.
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