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BORIS PILNYAK
sober, accidentally happened to shove, as the result of an
awk–
ward movement, the wife of the chairman of the executive com–
mittee and she, with utmost scorn, said to him: "I am Kuvar–
zina." Satz, not having been informed of the power of this
family, excused himself with an air of surprise and was, as a
consequence of his surprise, booted out of the district. The lead–
ing officials of the town kept very much to themselves and,
with
their inborn suspiciousness, were wary of the rest of the popula–
tion; they conducted public life by means of cabals and year
after year they re-elected each other to the leading posts in the
district in accordance with arrangements between the different
feuding cliques.... In view of the shut-in nature of their life,
which proceeded in secret from the rest of the populace, the
leading officials are of no interest for the purposes of this tale.
The Skudrin house stood by the Skudrin bridge, and the
house was inhabited by Yakov Karpovich Skudrin, a go-between
in peasant lawsuits, who was eighty-five years old. Apart from
Yakov Karpovich Skudrin, there dwelt separately from him in
the town his two much younger sisters, Kapitolina and Rimma,
and Ivan the outcast, who had changed his name to Ozhogov.
More will be said of these later.
For the last forty years Yakov Karpovitch had suffered from
hernia and, when he walked about, he supported his hernia with
his right hand through a slit in his trousers. His hands were puffy
and greenish in color and he would take great pinches of salt for
his bread from the common saltcellar and, gritting the salt on
his teeth, he would carefully pour back into the saltcellar any–
thing that had been spilled. During the last thirty years Yakov
Karpovich had lost the habit of normal sleep; he used to wake at
night and pore over the Bible till dawn, and then fall asleep till
noon. But in the middle of the day he would always
go
to the
public reading room to peruse the newspapers-no newspapers
were sold in the town, for subscription money was short-so the
papers were read in reading rooms. Yakov Karpovich was fat,
bald and quite grey; his eyes were always running and whenever
