Collected Shorter Fiction, Volume 2 полностью

When he was ready he told his orderly to bring him some medicine. The orderly knew that ‘medicine’ meant vodka, and brought some.

‘There is nothing so bad as mixing,’ muttered the major when he had drunk the vodka and taken a bite of rye bread. ‘Yesterday I drank a little chikhír and now I have a headache.… Well, I’m ready,’ he added, and went to the parlour, into which Butler had already shown Hadji Murád and the officer who accompanied him.

The officer handed the major orders from the commander of the left flank to the effect that he should receive Hadji Murád and should allow him to have intercourse with the mountaineers through spies, but was on no account to allow him to leave the fort without a convoy of Cossacks.

Having read the order the major looked intently at Hadji Murád and again scrutinized the paper. After passing his eyes several times from one to the other in this manner, he at last fixed them on Hadji Murád and said:

‘Yakshí, Bek; yakshí!’ ‘(‘Very well, sir, very well!’)’ ‘Let him stay here, and tell him I have orders not to let him out – and what is commanded is sacred! Well, Butler, where do you think we’d better lodge him? Shall we put him in the office?’

Butler had not time to answer before Márya Dmítrievna – who had come from the kitchen and was standing in the doorway – said to the major:

‘Why? Keep him here! We will give him the guest-chamber and the storeroom. Then at any rate he will be within sight,’ said she, glancing at Hadji Murád; but meeting his eyes she turned quickly away.

‘Do you know, I think Márya Dmítrievna is right,’ said Butler.

‘Now then, now then, get away! Women have no business here,’ said the major frowning.

During the whole of this discussion Hadji Murád sat with his hand on the hilt of his dagger and a faint smile of contempt on his lips. He said it was all the same to him where he lodged, and that he wanted nothing but what the Sirdar had permitted – namely, to have communication with the mountaineers, and that he therefore wished they should be allowed to come to him.

The major said this should be done, and asked Butler to entertain the visitors till something could be got for them to eat and their rooms prepared. Meantime he himself would go across to the office to write what was necessary and to give some orders.

Hadji Murád’s relations with his new acquaintances were at once very clearly defined. From the first he was repelled by and contemptuous of the major, to whom he always behaved very haughtily. Márya Dmítrievna, who prepared and served up his food, pleased him particularly. He liked her simplicity and especially the – to him – foreign type of her beauty, and he was influenced by the attraction she felt towards him and unconsciously conveyed. He tried not to look at her or speak to her, but his eyes involuntarily turned towards her and followed her movements. With Butler, from their first acquaintance, he immediately made friends and talked much and willingly with him, questioning him about his life, telling him of his own, communicating to him the news the spies brought him of his family’s condition, and even consulting him as to how he ought to act.

The news he received through the spies was not good. During the first four days of his stay in the fort they came to see him twice and both times brought bad news.

XIX

HADJI MURÁD’S family had been removed to Vedenó soon after his desertion to the Russians, and were there kept under guard awaiting Shamil’s decision. The women – his old mother Patimát and his two wives with their five little children – were kept under guard in the sáklya of the officer Ibrahim Raschid, while Hadji Murád’s son Yusúf, a youth of eighteen, was put in prison – that is, into a pit more than seven feet deep, together with seven criminals, who like himself were awaiting a decision as to their fate.

The decision was delayed because Shamil was away on a campaign against the Russians.

On January 6, 1852, he returned to Vedenó after a battle, in which according to the Russians he had been vanquished and had fled to Vedenó; but in which according to him and all the murids he had been victorious and had repulsed the Russians. In this battle he himself fired his rifle – a thing he seldom did – and drawing his sword would have charged straight at the Russians had not the murids who accompanied him held him back. Two of them were killed on the spot at his side.

It was noon when Shamil, surrounded by a party of murids who caracoled around him firing their rifles and pistols and continually singing Lya illyah il Allah! rode up to his place of residence.