Collected Shorter Fiction, Volume 2 полностью

Another bullet hit Hadji Murád in the left side. He lay down in the ditch and again pulled some cotton wool out of his beshmét and plugged the wound. This wound in the side was fatal and he felt that he was dying. Memories and pictures succeeded one another with extraordinary rapidity in his imagination. Now he saw the powerful Abu Nutsal Khan, dagger in hand and holding up his severed cheek he rushed at his foe; then he saw the weak, bloodless old Vorontsóv with his cunning white face, and heard his soft voice; then he saw his son Yusúf, his wife Sofiát, and then the pale, red-bearded face of his enemy Shamil with its half-closed eyes. All these images passed through his mind without evoking any feeling within him – neither pity nor anger nor any kind of desire: everything seemed so insignificant in comparison with what was beginning, or had already begun, within him.

Yet his strong body continued the thing that he had commenced. Gathering together his last strength he rose from behind the bank, fired his pistol at a man who was just running towards him, and hit him. The man fell. Then Hadji Murád got quite out of the ditch, and limping heavily went dagger in hand straight at the foe.

Some shots cracked and he reeled and fell. Several militiamen with triumphant shrieks rushed towards the fallen body. But the body that seemed to be dead suddenly moved. First the uncovered, bleeding, shaven head rose; then the body with hands holding to the trunk of a tree. He seemed so terrible, that those who were running towards him stopped short. But suddenly a shudder passed through him, he staggered away from the tree and fell on his face, stretched out at full length like a thistle that had been mown down, and he moved no more.

He did not move, but still he felt.

When Hadji Aga, who was the first to reach him, struck him on the head with a large dagger, it seemed to Hadji Murád that someone was striking him with a hammer and he could not understand who was doing it or why. That was his last consciousness of any connexion with his body. He felt nothing more and his enemies kicked and hacked at what had no longer anything in common with him.

Hadji Aga placed his foot on the back of the corpse and with two blows cut off the head, and carefully – not to soil his shoes with blood – rolled it away with his foot. Crimson blood spurted from the arteries of the neck, and black blood flowed from the head, soaking the grass.

Kargánov and Hadji Aga and Akhmet Khan and all the militiamen gathered together – like sportsmen round a slaughtered animal – near the bodies of Hadji Murád and his men (Khanéfi, Khan Mahomá, and Gamzálo they bound), and amid the powder-smoke which hung over the bushes they triumphed in their victory.

The nightingales, that had hushed their songs while the firing lasted, now started their trills once more: first one quite close, then others in the distance.

* * *

It was of this death that I was reminded by the crushed thistle in the midst of the ploughed field.

¹ About £1, for at that time the ruble was worth about three shillings.

² ‘Well now! You’re going to tell me what it is.’

‘But, my dear.…

‘Don’t “my dear” me! It was an emissary, wasn’t it?’

‘Supposing it was, still I must not tell you.’

‘You must not? Well then, I will tell you!’

‘You?’

³ ‘It is a thing of value.’

⁴ ‘We must find an opportunity to make him a present.’

⁵ ‘This is the opportunity! Give him the watch.’

⁶ ‘You would do much better to remain at home … this is my business, and not yours.’

‘You cannot prevent my going to see the general’s wife!’

⁷ A popular expression, meaning that the sender of the message is already dead.

⁸ A town thirty miles south-west of Smolensk, at which, in November 1812, the rear-guard of Napoleon’s army was defeated during the retreat from Moscow. It is mentioned in War and Peace.

⁹ ‘Excellent, my dear!’

¹⁰ ‘Simon has had good luck.’

¹¹ ‘How horrible!’

¹² ‘War is war.’

¹³ ‘All this is thanks to you!’

¹⁴ ‘He has had some unpleasantness with the commandant of the place. Simon was in the wrong.’

¹⁵ Count Michael Tariélovich Lóris-Mélikov, who afterwards became Minister of the Interior and framed the Liberal ukase which was signed by Alexander II the day that he was assassinated.

¹⁶ The military conspirators who tried to secure a Constitution for Russia in 1825, on the accession of Nicholas I.

¹⁷ ‘His Majesty has just returned.’

¹⁸ ‘There’s someone there!’

¹⁹ Widow of Nicholas’s brother Michael: a clever, well-educated woman, interested in science, art, and public affairs.

²⁰ The Uniates acknowledge the Pope of Rome, though in other respects they are in accord with the Orthodox Russo-Greek Church.

²¹ A celebrated museum and picture gallery in St Petersburg, adjoining the Winter Palace.

²² ‘Poland and the Caucasus are Russia’s two sores. We need about 100,000 men in each of those two countries.’

²³ ‘You say that Poland —’ ‘Oh yes, it was a masterstroke of Metternich’s to leave us the bother of it.…’