‘This is what happened. Maybe you don’t know it, Fedya, but that’s the place where one of our drowned men is buried. And he drowned a long time back when the pond was still deep. Now only his gravestone can be seen, only there’s not much of it -- it’s just a small mound… Anyhow, a day or so ago, the bailiff calls Yermil the dog-keeper and says to him: “Off with you and fetch the mail.” Yermil’s always the one who goes to fetch the mail ‘cos he’s done all his dogs in -- they just don’t somehow seem to live when he’s around, and never did have much of a life no-how, though he’s a good man with dogs and took to it in every way. Anyhow, Yermil went for the mail, and then he mucked about in the town and set off home real drunk. And it’s night-time, a bright night, with the moon shining… So he’s riding back across the dam, ‘cos that’s where his route came out. And he’s riding along, this dog-keeper Yermil, and he sees a little lamb on the drowned man’s grave, all white and curly and pretty, and it’s walking about, and Yermil thinks: “I’ll pick it up, I will, ‘cos there’s no point in letting it get lost here,” and so he gets off his horse and picks it up in his arms -- and the lamb doesn’t turn a hair. So Yermil walks back to the horse, but the horse backs away from him, snorts and shakes its head. So when he’s quieted it, he sits on it with the lamb and starts off again holding the lamb in front of him. He looks at the lamb, he does, and the lamb looks right back at him right in the eyes. Then that Yermil the dog-keeper got frightened: “I don’t recall,” he thought, “no lambs looking me in the eye like that afore.” Anyhow, it didn’t seem nothing, so he starts stroking its wool and saying “Sssh, there, sssh!” And that lamb bares its teeth at him sudden-like and says back to him: “Sssh, there, sssh!…”’ -- Ivan Turgenev, Bezhin Lea. SKETCHES FROM A HUNTER’S ALBUM, translated by Richard Freeborn. Penguin Books, 1990.
Posted on: Mon, 25 Aug 2014 00:55:25 +0000
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