Kandid left before sunup so as to get back by dinner-time. It was about ten kilometers to New Village, the road was familiar, well-trodden, spotted with bald patches from spilled grass-killer. It was reckoned safe to travel on. Warm, bottomless swamps lay to right and left, rotten branches poked up out of the stinking rusty water, the sticky caps of enormous swamp toadstools thrust up their round shining domes. Sometimes by the very road could be found the crushed homes of water spiders. From the road it was hard to make out anything taking place on the swamps; myriads of thick green columns, ropes, threads as shimmering as gossamer hung down from the dense interlocking tree-crowns overhead and sank their questing roots into the ooze. A greedy, relentless greenery stood like a wall of fog and concealed everything except sounds and smells. Every now and again something broke off in the yellow-green twilight and fell with an endless crashing, finishing with a thick, oily splash. The swamp sighed, rumbled, champed, and silence fell again, and a minute later, the fetid stench of the perturbed depths penetrated the green curtain and drifted onto the road. It was said that nobody could walk across these bottomless places, though the deadlings could walk anywhere, for the good reason thai they were deadlings - the swamp would not accept them. Just in case, Kandid broke off a branch for himself, not that he was afraid of deadlings, deadlings did no harm to men as a rule, but various rumors went the rounds concerning the fauna and flora of forest and swamp, and some of them might turn out to be true, with all their absurdity-He had gone about five hundred paces from the village, when Nava called him. He halted.
"Why go without me?" asked Nava, somewhat breathlessly. "I told you I'd go with you, I shan't stay alone in that village, nothing for me to do on my own, nobody likes me there, you're my husband, you have to take me with you, it doesn't signify that we've got no children yet all the same, you're my husband, and I'm your wife, we'll have children sometime... It's just, I'll tell you honestly, I don't want children yet, I can't understand why they're necessary or what we could do with them... Never mind what that elder says or that old man of yours, in our village it was quite different: who wants to, has children, and who doesn't doesn't..."
"Now, now, go back home," said Kandid. "Where did you get the idea I was going away? I'm just going to New Village, I'll be home for dinner all right..."
"That's all right, I'll go with you then, and we'll come back for dinner together, the dinner's been ready since yesterday, I've hidden it so that even that old man of yours won't find it."
Kandid walked on. It was useless to argue, let her come. He cheered up, even. He felt like tangling with somebody, swinging his stick and taking out on them all the frustration and anger and helplessness built up over how many years was it. On robbers. Or deadlings - it made no difference. Let the little girl come along. My wife, too, wants no children. He hit out with all his force, swung at a dank tree-root on the verge, and almost knocked himself over: the root had rotted completely and the stick went through it like thin air. Several sprightly gray animals leaped out and, gurgling, disappeared into the dark water.
Nava skipped alongside, now running ahead, now lagging behind. Now and again she took hold of Kandid's arm with both of hers and hung on thoroughly contented. She talked of the dinner, which she had so cunningly concealed from the old man, of how wild ants might have eaten it if she hadn't made sure they'd never find it, of how some noxious fly had woken her up and that when she was going to sleep last night, he, Dummy, was already snoring and muttering incomprehensible words in his sleep, and how did you know such words, Dummy, it's amazing when nobody in our village knows words like that, only you know, you always had, even when you were quite ill, knew even then...
