Collected Shorter Fiction, Volume 2 полностью

Hadji Murád grew thoughtful. He remembered how his mother had laid him to sleep beside her under a fur coat on the roof of the sáklya, and he had asked her to show him the place in her side where the scar of her wound was still visible.

He repeated the song, which he remembered:

‘My white bosom was pierced by the blade of bright steel,

But I laid my bright sun, my dear boy, close upon it

Till his body was bathed in the stream of my blood.

And the wound healed without aid of herbs or of grass.

As I feared not death, so my boy will ne’er fear it.’

‘My mother is now in Shamil’s hands,’ he added, ‘and she must be rescued.’

He remembered the fountain below the hill, when holding on to his mother’s sharováry (loose Turkish trousers) he had gone with her for water. He remembered how she had shaved his head for the first time, and how the reflection of his round bluish head in the shining brass vessel that hung on the wall had astonished him. He remembered a lean dog that had licked his face. He remembered the strange smell of the lepéshki (a kind of flat cake) his mother had given him – a smell of smoke and of sour milk. He remembered how his mother had carried him in a basket on her back to visit his grandfather at the farmstead. He remembered his wrinkled grandfather with his grey hairs, and how he had hammered silver with his sinewy hands.

‘Well, so my mother did not go as nurse,’ he said with a jerk of his head, ‘and the Khansha took another nurse but still remained fond of my mother, and my mother used to take us children to the Khansha’s palace, and we played with her children and she was fond of us.

‘There were three young Khans: Abu Nutsal Khan my brother Osman’s foster-brother; Umma Khan my own sworn brother; and Bulách Khan the youngest – whom Shamil threw over the precipice. But that happened later.

‘I was about sixteen when murids began to visit the aouls. They beat the stones with wooden scimitars and cried, “Mussulmans, Ghazavát!” The Chechens all went over to Muridism and the Avars began to go over too. I was then living in the palace like a brother of the Khans. I could do as I liked, and I became rich. I had horses and weapons and money. I lived for pleasure and had no care, and went on like that till the time when Kazi-Mulla, the Imám, was killed and Hamzád succeeded him. Hamzád sent envoys to the Khans to say that if they did not join the Ghazavát he would destroy Khunzákh.

‘This needed consideration. The Khans feared the Russians, but were also afraid to join in the Holy War. The old Khansha sent me with her second son, Umma Khan, to Tiflis to ask the Russian Commander-in-Chief for help against Hamzád. The Commander-in-Chief at Tiflis was Baron Rosen. He did not receive either me or Umma Khan. He sent word that he would help us, but did nothing. Only his officers came riding to us and played cards with Umma Khan. They made him drunk with wine and took him to bad places, and he lost all he had to them at cards. His body was as strong as a bull’s and he was as brave as a lion, but his soul was weak as water. He would have gambled away his last horses and weapons if I had not made him come away.

‘After visiting Tiflis my ideas changed and I advised the old Khansha and the Khans to join the Ghazavát.…’

‘What made you change your mind?’ asked Lóris-Mélikov. ‘Were you not pleased with the Russians?’

Hadji Murád paused.

‘No, I was not pleased,’ he answered decidedly, closing his eyes. ‘And there was also another reason why I wished to join the Ghazavát.’

‘What was that?’

‘Why, near Tselméss the Khan and I encountered three murids, two of whom escaped but the third one I shot with my pistol.

‘He was still alive when I approached to take his weapons. He looked up at me, and said, “Thou hast killed me … I am happy; but thou art a Mussulman, young and strong. Join the Ghazavát! God wills it!’ ”

‘And did you join it?’

‘I did not, but it made me think,’ said Hadji Murád, and he went on with his tale.

‘When Hamzád approached Khunzákh we sent our Elders to him to say that we would agree to join the Ghazavát if the Imám would send a learned man to explain it to us. Hamzád had our Elders’ moustaches shaved off, their nostrils pierced, and cakes hung to their noses, and in that condition he sent them back to us.