568
PARTISAN REVIEW
to be thought up, since there was still material in nature that lived
untouched by human hands.
Every fifth year half the village would go off to the mines and the
towns, and the other half to the forests-because of harvest failure. It has
been known from time immemorial that herbs , greens, and cereals do well
in forest clearings even in dry years. The half of the village that had stayed
would rush out to these clearings-to save their vegetables from being
plundered instantly by hordes of greedy wanderers. But this time there was
a drought the following year too. The village bolted up its huts and set out
onto the highway in two columns. One column set off to Kiev to beg, the
other to Lugansk in search of seasonal work; a few people turned off into
the forest and the overgrown gullies, where they took to eating raw grass,
clay, and bark and lived wild. The people who left were nearly all adul ts–
the children had ei ther managed to die in advance or had run off to beg.
As for the unweaned babies, the mothers who fed them had let them grad–
ually die, not allowing them to suck their
fill.
There was one old woman, Ignatyevna, who cured infants of hunger:
she gave them an infusion of mushrooms mixed with sweet herbs, and the
children fell peacefully silent with dry foam on their lips. The mother
would kiss her child on its now aged, wizened forehead and whisper: "He's
no longer suffering, the dear. Praise the Lord!"
Ignatyevna would be standing beside her. "He's passed away peaceful–
ly. Look at him lying there-he's happier now than when he was alive. He's
in Heaven now, listening to the silver winds...."
The mother would admire her child, believing its sad lot had been
eased. "Take myoId skirt, Ignatyevna, I've got nothing else to give you.
Many thanks!"
Ignatyevna held the skirt up to the light and said: "You have a little cry,
Mitrievna, it's what people do. But your skirt's in threads; you must throw
in a little shawl too-or how about a nice iron? .."
Zakhar Pavlovich was left alone in the village-he got to like being
there without people. But he spent most of the time in the forest, sharing
a hut with an old loner and living on a brew of herbs whose uses the loner
had studied beforehand.
Zakhar Pavlovich worked all the time, to forget his hunger, and he
taught himself to make from wood everything he had previously made
from metal. As for the loner-he had done nothing all his life, and now all
the more so: until the age of fifty he had just looked around him, won–
dering what was what and waiting for something finally to emerge from
the general turmoil, so he could start to act once the world had cleared up
and calmed down; he was not in any way possessed by life and he had never
taken a step either towards marriage with a wife or towards any generally
