But I still think you’re wearing the oddest clothes I’ve ever seen! What’s this string hanging there? And you,” he shouted, turning to his younger son. “You Grand Padishah, why are you standing there with your arms dangling?* You son of a dog, aren’t you going to punch me too?”

“What will he think of next?” the mother gasped, throwing her arms around the boy. “He wants his own flesh and blood to raise a hand to him! That’s all we need! The boy is young, has had a long journey, and must be exhausted!” (The boy was nearly twenty and well over six feet tall.) “He has to rest and eat a bite of food, and the old fool wants to fight him!”

“You’re a milksop, I see!” Bulba said. “Don’t listen to your mother, my boy! She’s a woman, she knows nothing! What do you need sweetness for? An open field and a good horse, that’s all the sweetness you need! You see this saber? This saber is your mother! They’ve been filling your heads with filth, that’s what they’ve been doing! The Seminary, and all those little books and primers and philosophy and the devil knows what else—I spit on it all!” And Bulba slipped in a word that cannot appear in print. “What I ought to do is send you this very week to Zaporozhe.* That’s where you will find some real learning. There you’ll get some schooling. There you’ll really learn something!”

“The boys are only staying home a week?” the distraught mother gasped, her eyes filling with tears. “The poor boys won’t even have a chance to enjoy themselves a little. They won’t have a chance to get to know their own home, and I won’t be able to get my fill of looking at them!”

“Enough! Enough whining, old woman! Cossacks aren’t Cossacks so they can hobnob with women! Given half a chance you’d hide them under your skirt and sit on them like a hen. Off with you, quick, and get the table ready! Lay out everything we have! No need for fritters and poppyseed cakes, or any other delicate little morsels; just bring out some mutton and some goat, and the forty-year-old mead. And some good vodka, none of that fancy liquor with raisins and other little knickknacks in it! I want my vodka so clear and frothing that it hisses and whirls like it’s possessed!”

Bulba led his sons into the front room. Two pretty maids wearing coin necklaces, who had been busy cleaning, dropped everything and ran. They were evidently frightened by the arrival of the young masters, who never let anyone alone, or else they simply wanted to stick to their girlish ways, squealing and bolting whenever they saw a man, lifting their sleeves to their faces, hiding them in shame. The front room was furnished in the taste of those difficult, warring times, when battles and skirmishes broke out because of the union with Poland. Living traces of those days are found only in the songs and folk epics sung in the Ukraine by old, bearded, blind men quietly strumming their banduras, surrounded by a crowd.* Everything was clean and brightly painted. On the walls hung sabers, whips, bird traps, fishnets, muskets, an intricately carved gunpowder horn, a golden bridle, and a hobble with silver pendants. The windows were small, with round, dim panes such as are now found only in old churches, and through which one could only see if one raised the movable panels. Red drapes hung by the windows and doors. On shelves in the corners stood pots, bottles, flasks of blue and green glass, ornate silver goblets, and gilded cups of every handicraft—Venetian, Turkish, Circassian—that had made their way into Bulba’s front room by many paths and through many hands, as was not unusual for those swashbuckling times.† Birch benches ran along the walls in all the rooms. Beneath the icons in the prayer corner stood a massive table, and near it a stove with many ledges and protuberances, surrounded by warm benches. The stove was covered with bright multicolored tiles. All this was very familiar to the two young men, who in the past had walked home every year during the holidays because they did not yet have horses, and because it was not customary to allow students of the Seminary to ride. The only Cossack tradition they had kept was the long forelock, the chub, which seasoned Cossacks tugged at in jest.‡ Now that they had finished their studies, Bulba had sent them a pair of young stallions from his own herd.

To celebrate his sons’ arrival, Bulba called in all the Cossack captains and anyone from his regiment who was within reach. And when his old comrade Captain Dimitro Tovkach came with two officers, Bulba immediately presented his sons to them.

“Here—see what fine boys these are! I’ll be sending them to the Sech soon.”

The guests congratulated Bulba and the two young men, assuring them that it was a good idea, that there was no better schooling for young men than the Zaporozhian Sech.

“Well, my brothers, seat yourselves at the table wherever you like!” Bulba shouted, and turned to his sons. “First we shall down some vodka! God’s blessings upon you, and good health to the two of you! To you, Ostap, and to you, Andri! May God grant that success always follow you in battle, whether you fight heathen, Turk, or Tatar fiend. And if the damn Poles start plotting against our religion, then may you thrash them too! Come, hand me your cup! Good vodka, no? So how does one say ‘vodka’ in Latin? Ha! Well, my son, those Romans were fools—they didn’t even know there was such a thing as vodka! What was that fellow’s name again, the one who wrote little Latin ditties? I’m not much of a lettered man, so it’s not coming to me right now. Wasn’t it Horace, or something?”

“Ha, that’s my father for you!” Ostap, the older of the two boys, thought. “There’s nothing the old scoundrel doesn’t know, and yet he pretends not to.”

“It would surprise me if the Archimandrite at the Seminary let you have so much as a whiff of vodka,” Taras continued.* “And I trust you were given robust birch-wood and fresh cherry-wood whippings across your backs and your other Cossack parts! And perhaps the cleverer you got the more you got to taste the cat-o’-nine-tails. And not only on Saturdays, I’m sure, but on Wednesdays and Thursdays too!”

“There is no reason to remember what was, Papa,” Ostap answered coolly. “What was is now past and gone!”

“I’d like to see them try something now!” Andri said.