Interrupted Stories

important; they were limited to strict reprimands, accompanied by strong threats, because the pavement was deteriorating, because the sidewalk posts were rotting, because carts and sleighs were catching on them. Efimka felt his guilt and, with a sigh, recalled the blessed time when streets were not paved and sidewalks were not repaired for a very simple reason: they did not exist.

Interactions of another kind, more pleasant and solemn, were repeated once every year. On the bright feast of Easter, all the household serfs would come to exchange the ritual greeting khristosovatsya a traditional Easter greeting involving a triple kiss with the master. On such occasions, Mikhail Stepanovich, usually sullen and irritable, would trade wrath for mercy and present his servants with a kind word, partly to forestall other gifts. “And do you remember,” Mikhail Stepanovich would say annually to Efimka, wiping his lips after the greeting, “do you remember how you used to pull me on a small sled and make a snow hill?” The old man’s heart would leap with joy at these words, and he would hasten to answer, “Of course, master, our provider, how could I not remember? It was back in the time of your late uncle, Lev Stepanovich. I remember it as if it were yesterday.”

— “Well, whether it was yesterday or not,” Mikhail Stepanovich would add with a smile, “it is certainly the fifth decade since. Look here, Efimka: the holiday is a holiday, but keep the street swept. And there are many drunks wandering about now, so

as soon as it gets dark, lock the gates. Are they stealing the cobblestones?” — “I guard them as I would my own eyes, master, and I go out once or twice at night to keep watch,” the porter would reply, and the master would give the sign for him to leave with the red egg given to him in exchange.

This periodic conversation limited the personal interactions between the two contemporaries who had lived under the same roof for fifty years. Efimka was usually very satisfied with these aristocratic recollections, and on the evening of the first day of the holiday, not quite sober, he would recount to someone in the dirty and stuffy coachman’s quarters how it all happened, adding, “Just think what a memory Mikhail Stepanovich has, remembering that—and it is the absolute truth! He used to harness me to a small sled, and I would pull, and he would keep on snapping his little whip—I swear to God—and just think how many years have passed!” And, shaking his head, he would untie his foot-wraps and fall asleep on the stove, having placed his armyak a long, heavy peasant coat underneath him (he had not yet managed to acquire a bed in half a century), thinking, perhaps, about the vanity of human life and the durability of certain social positions, for example, that of a porter.

And so, Efimka sat by the gates. At first, he slowly, more for pleasure than for utility, pushed dirty water along the gutter with his broom; then he took a pinch of snuff, sat for a while, looked around, and dozed off. He likely would have slept for quite some time, in the company of a courtyard dog of plebeian origin—black with white spots, long stiff hair, and a chewed-up ear, which she flicked from side to side to shoo away flies—had not a middle-aged woman awakened them both.