The words of the song were incomprehensible and long-winded, the melody reminiscent of the howling of wolves in winter. He sang for as long as there was vodka in the bottle, then toppled sideways onto the bench or lowered his head onto the table and slept like that until the siren. The dog would lie alongside him.

He died of a hernia. He turned all black and tossed on his bed with his eyes tightly closed, grinding his teeth, for about five days. Sometimes he would say to his wife:

“Give me arsenic, poison me…”

The doctor ordered that Mikhail have poultices applied, but said an operation was essential and the sick man should be taken to hospital that very day.

“Go to hell, I’ll die by myself!… Scum!…” wheezed Mikhail.

And when the doctor had gone and his wife began tearfully trying to persuade him to consent to the operation, he clenched his fist and, shaking it, declared:

“If I get better, it’ll be the worse for you!”

He died in the morning, in those moments when the siren was calling men to work. He lay in the coffin with his mouth open, but his brows were knitted angrily. He was buried by his wife, son and dog, and Danila Vesovshchikov – an old drunkard and thief dismissed from the factory – and a few of the settlement’s beggars. His wife cried quietly and just a little; Pavel did not cry. Meeting the coffin in the street, the settlement-dwellers stopped and, crossing themselves, said to one another:

“I expect Palageya must be happy as a sandboy that he’s passed away…”

Some made a correction:

“Not ‘passed away’, snuffed it…”

When the coffin had been buried, the people left, but the dog remained and, sitting on the fresh earth, spent a long time sniffing silently at the grave. A few days later, somebody killed it…

III

On a Sunday about two weeks after his father’s death, Pavel Vlasov came home very drunk. Staggering, he squeezed into the corner where the icons were and, banging his fist on the table as his father had, he shouted to his mother:

“Dinner!”

His mother went over to him, sat down beside him and put her arms around her son, drawing his head onto her breast. He resisted, with his hand pushing against her shoulder, and shouted:

“Mamasha – hurry up!…”

“You little idiot!” said his mother, sadly and lovingly, overcoming his resistance.

“And I’m going to have a smoke! Give me my father’s pipe…” Pavel mumbled, moving his disobedient tongue with difficulty.

It was the first time he had had too much to drink. The vodka had weakened his body but had not smothered his consciousness, and there was a question hammering in his head:

“Drunk? Drunk?”

He was embarrassed by his mother’s caresses and touched by the sadness in her eyes. He felt like crying, and to suppress this desire he started pretending to be drunker than he was.

And his mother stroked his sweaty, tangled hair with her hand and said quietly:

“You didn’t need to do this…”

He began to feel sick. After a violent attack of vomiting, his mother put him to bed, covering his pale forehead with a damp towel. He had sobered up a little, but everything beneath him and around him was undulating, his eyelids were heavy and, with a foul, bitter taste in his mouth, he looked through his eyelashes at his mother’s big face and thought incoherently:

“It must still be too soon for me. Others drink and they’re all right, but it makes me sick…”

From somewhere far away came his mother’s soft voice:

“What sort of breadwinner are you going to be for me if you start drinking?…”

Shutting his eyes tight, he said:

“Everybody drinks.”

His mother heaved a heavy sigh. He was right. She herself knew that, apart from the tavern, there was nowhere for people to find any joy. But she said nonetheless:

“Well, you can choose not to drink! Your father drank enough for you as well. And he gave me enough of a hard time… so you might show your mother some pity, eh?”

Listening to the sad, soft words, Pavel recalled that in his father’s lifetime his mother had been inconspicuous in the house, taciturn, and had always lived in anxious expectation of a beating. Avoiding encounters with his father, he had spent little time at home of late and had grown unused to his mother, so now, gradually sobering up, he looked at her closely.

She was tall, a little stooped, and her body, jaded from long hours of work and her husband’s blows, moved noiselessly and somehow sideways, as if she were always afraid of knocking into something. Her broad, oval face, puffy and deeply lined with wrinkles, was lit up by dark eyes, anxious and sad, like those of the majority of the women in the settlement. Above the right eyebrow was a deep scar which drew the eyebrow up a little, and her right ear, too, seemed higher than the left one, lending her face an expression that suggested she was always listening out fearfully. Grey strands shone in her dense, dark hair. Overall, she was soft, sad and submissive…

And tears flowed slowly down her cheeks.

“Don’t cry!” her son begged quietly. “Give me something to drink.”

“I’ll bring you some water with ice…”

But when she returned, he had already fallen asleep. She stood over him for a moment, the kovsh* in her hand trembled, and the ice struck quietly against the tinplate. Putting the kovsh down on the table, she silently sank to her knees in front of the icons. Beating against the window panes were the sounds of drunken life.