Novels, Tales, Journeys полностью

The police began to investigate. They found out that Kirdjali was indeed in Kishinev. He was caught in the house of a fugitive monk, in the evening, when he was having supper, sitting in the dark with seven comrades.

Kirdjali was put under guard. He did not try to conceal the truth and admitted that he was Kirdjali.

“But,” he added, “since I crossed the Prut, I haven’t touched even a hair of anyone’s property, I haven’t harmed the least Gypsy. For the Turks, the Moldavians, the Wallachians, I am, of course, a bandit, but for the Russians I am a guest. When Saphianos, having spent all his grapeshot, came to us in the border post, to take buttons, nails, chains, and yatagan handles from the wounded men for his last shots, I gave him twenty beshliks^*5 and was left without money. As God is my witness, I, Kirdjali, lived by begging! Why do the Russians now turn me over to my enemies?”

After that, Kirdjali fell silent and calmly began to wait for the deciding of his fate.

He did not wait long. The authorities, not being obliged to look at bandits from their romantic side, and convinced of the justice of the demand, ordered Kirdjali sent to Jassy.

A man of intelligence and heart, then an unknown young official, now occupying an important post,5 gave me a vivid description of his departure:

At the gates of the jail stood a postal karutsa…(Perhaps you do not know what a karutsa is. It is a low wicker cart, to which until recently six or eight little nags would be hitched. A Moldavian in moustaches and a lambskin hat rode on one of them, constantly shouting and cracking his whip, and his nags went at a rather swift trot. If one of them began to falter, he would unhitch it with terrible curses and abandon it by the roadside, unconcerned for its fate. On his way back he was sure to find it in the same place, calmly grazing on the green steppe. It was not infrequent that a traveler, leaving one station with eight horses, would arrive at the next with a pair. That was fifteen years ago. Nowadays, in Russified Bessarabia, they have adopted the Russian way of harnessing and the Russian cart.)

Such a karutsa stood by the gates of the jail in 1821, on one of the last days of September. Jewesses, their sleeves hanging and their slippers dragging, Arnauts in their ragged and picturesque attire, slender Moldavian women with black-eyed children in their arms, surrounded the karutsa. The men kept silent, the women excitedly awaited something.

The gates opened and several police officers came out; after them two soldiers led out the fettered Kirdjali.

He seemed to be about thirty years old. The features of his swarthy face were regular and stern. He was tall, broad-shouldered, and gave a general impression of extraordinary physical strength. A multicolored turban covered his head at an angle, a broad belt girded his slender waist; a dolman of thick blue broadcloth, the wide folds of a shirt falling to his knees, and beautiful shoes completed his attire. His look was proud and calm.

One of the officers, a red-faced little old man in a faded uniform with three buttons dangling from it, pinched a pair of tin-rimmed spectacles to the purple bump that served him as a nose, unfolded a document, and, with a nasal twang, began to read in Moldavian. From time to time he glanced haughtily at the fettered Kirdjali, to whom the document apparently referred. Kirdjali listened to him attentively. The official finished his reading, folded the document, shouted menacingly at the people, commanded them to make way, and ordered the karutsa brought. Then Kirdjali turned to him and spoke a few words in Moldavian; his voice trembled, his face changed; he wept and fell at the feet of the police officer, clanking his chains. The police officer, frightened, jumped back; the soldiers were about to pick Kirdjali up, but he got up by himself, gathered his shackles, stepped into the karutsa, and shouted “Haida!”^*6 A gendarme sat beside him, the Moldavian cracked his whip, and the karutsa rolled off.

“What did Kirdjali say to you?” the young official asked the policeman.

“You see, sir,” the policeman replied, laughing, “he begged me to take care of his wife and child, who live in a Bulgarian village not far from Kilia. He’s afraid they may suffer on account of him. Stupid folk, sir.”

The young official’s account moved me deeply. I felt sorry for poor Kirdjali. For a long time I knew nothing of his fate. It was several years later that I ran into that young official. We got to talking of past times.

“And what about your friend Kirdjali?” I asked. “Do you know what’s become of him?”

“That I do,” he replied, and told me the following:

Kirdjali, having been brought to Jassy, was presented to the pasha, who condemned him to be impaled. The execution was put off until some holiday or other. Meanwhile he was locked up in prison.