Tales of the Wilderness by Boris Pilniak

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Their way led them through fields all lilac-coloured in the glowing
sun: there they encountered an honest peasant dressed in a short fur
jacket and a cap beneath which his look was calm and grave.

He told them there was nothing at the station, that the townsfolk
themselves were running like mice; and he urged them to go to
Poriechie, to give Silvester the blacksmith some tar for his
ploughshares, and, if he had none, to make them some of his own hand-
ploughshares; then to go and sow flax. The towns were dying out. The
towns were no more! It was the people's Rising, and they had to live
as in the olden days: there were no towns then, and there was no need
for them.

They turned back. To Poriechie for tar.... Silvester made them a
hand-plough.... Grandfather Yonov the One Eyed stalked round the
fields exhorting to sow: "We have to live by ourselves! Now we
ourselves are the Masters! Ourselves alone! It is the Rising!"

They worked from dawn till sunset with all their strength, fastening
their belts tight round their bodies to stifle the pangs of hunger.

The summer passed in heat-waves, thunder and lightning. The forest
gabbled in the storms at night. Towards autumn it began to rustle,
leafless, beneath the showers of rain. The rye, oats, millet, and
buckwheat were carried into the corn-kilns and barns, and the fields
lay stripped and bare.

The corn had been harvested; there was enough and to spare till the
fallow crop was reaped. The air in the peasants' cottages was
bedimmed by the smoke from the stoves; Grandfather Yonov the One-Eyed
climbed on to his, to tell his grandchildren fairytales and to rest.

The nights grew dark and damp, the forest began to rumble, and wolves
approached from the marshlands. A new couple had grown up, bowed to
the winds and wedded; half the village had perished the previous
winter, and it was necessary to breed. The people lived in their
cabins together with the calves, the sheep, and the swine. They used
splinters for lights, striking the light from flint.

Often at night starving people from the towns brought money, clothes,
foot-ware, bundles of odds-and ends--in short anything they could
steal from the towns and exchange for flour. They rapped on the
windows like thieves.

The Kononov women sat at their looms while the men went a-preying in
the forest. And so they toiled on stubbornly, sternly, alone,
fighting hand-to-hand with the night, with the forest and with the
frost. The crossways to the forests became choked, and they made new
ways to the marshlands, to the Seven Brothers, to the wastelands.
Life was hard and stern. The peasants looked out upon the world from
beneath their brows, as their cottages from beneath the pines; and
they lived gladsomely, as they should.

They knew it was the Rising. And in the Rising there could be no
falling back.

Forests, thickets, fields, a tranquil sky--and crossways!...
Sometimes the crossways joined the main-road that ran alongside the
railway. Both led to the towns where dwelt Those Others who had
yearned to march over the crossways, who had made the main-roads
straight as rules. And to the towns the elemental Rising of the
Crossways brought death.

There, lamenting the past, in terror before the people's Rising, all
were employed in offices filling up papers. All for safety held
official positions, all to a man busying themselves over papers,
documents, cards, placards, and speeches until they were lost in a
whirlwind of words.

The food of the towns was exhausted; the lights had gone out; there
was neither fuel nor water. Dogs, cats, mice, all had disappeared--
even the nettles on the outskirts had been plucked by famished
urchins as vegetable for soup. Into the cookhouses, whence cutlery
had vanished, crowded old men in bowlers and bonneted old women,
whose bony fingers clutched convulsively at plates of leavings.

Everywhere there were groups of miscreants selling mouldy bread at
exorbitant prices. The dead in their thousands, over whom there was
no time to carry out funeral rites, were borne away to the churches.

Famine, disease, and death swept the towns. The inhabitants grew
savage in their craving for bread. They starved. They sat without
light. They froze. They pulled down the hedges and wooden buildings
to warm their dying hearths and their offices. The red-blood life
deserted the towns; indeed it had never really existed in them; and
there came a white-paper life that was death. When death means life
there is no death, but the towns were still-born.

There were harrowing scenes in the spring, when, like incense at
funeral-rites, the smoky wood-piles smouldered on the pillaged,
ransacked, and bespattered streets with their broken windows,
boarded-up doors, and defaced walls, consuming carrion and enveloping
the town in a stinking and stifling vapour.

Men with soft-skinned hands still frequented restaurants, still wooed
lascivious women, still sought to pillage the towns; they even
plundered the very corpses, hoping to carry loot into the country, to
barter it for the bread that had been gained by horny-handed labour.
Thus might they postpone their deaths another month, thus might they
still fill up papers, still go on wooing (legally) carnal women and
await their heart's desire, the return of the decadent past. They
were afraid to recognise that only one thing was left them, to rot in
death--to die--that even the past they longed for was a way to death
for them.

... Forests, thickets, fields, a tranquil sky....

Many dwelt in the towns--amongst them a certain man, no different
from the rest. He had no bread, and he too went into the country to
bargain for flour in exchange for his gramophone. Producing all the
necessary papers, permits, and licences, he proceeded to the railway,
which was dying because it too was of the towns.

At the station there were thousands of others with permits to travel
for bread, and because of those thousands only those without permits
succeeded in boarding the train. This particular man fastened himself
on the lower step of a carriage, under sacks that hung from the roof,
travelling thus for some forty miles. Then he and his gramophone were
thrown off, and for the first time in his life he tramped thirty
miles on foot under the weight of a gramophone.

At the next station he climbed on to the roof of a carriage and
travelled a hundred miles further. Then he was thrown off again, But
there the main-road passed the railway; by turning aside from it,
walking through a field, fording a river, making a way through the
woods, skirting the ravines, trudging through river beds, and
traversing the marshes he reached the village of Pochinki.

He arrived there with his gramophone at sundown. The red light of the
sun was reflected on the windows, the women-folk were milking the
cows: it was already autumn and the daylight faded rapidly. The man
with the gramophone tapped at the window and Kononov Ivan lifted the
shutter.

"Look, comrade, I've a gramophone here, to exchange for flour ... a
gramophone, a musical instrument, and records...."

Throwing back his shoulders, Kononov-Ivan stood by the window--then
stooped, looked askance at the sunset, at the fields, at the musical
instrument. He reflected a moment, then muttered absently:

"Aint wanted.... Go to Poriechie...." and the shutter dropped.

A sombre sky in autumnal lights--and the crossways.... Two wheel-
tracks, ripple-grass, a foot-path. Sometimes the wanderer tired, that
path seemed interminable, without beginning or ending. He turned
aside, went astray, returned on his tracks--evermore to the thickets,
forests, marshes....

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