Chapter I
The Melekhov farmstead stood right on the edge of the village. The little gate from the cattle yard led northwards to the Don. A steep descent of eight fathoms between chalk boulders, overgrown with greenish moss, and there was the bank: a pearly scattering of shells, a grey, fractured border of wave-kissed shingle, and beyond that—the swift current of the Don, boiling over with black ripple under the wind. To the east, beyond the red willows of the threshing-floor fences, ran the Hetman’s Road, hoary with wormwood, the brown, tenacious plantain crushed by horses’ hooves, a small chapel at the fork; and beyond it—the steppe, veiled in a flowing shimmer. To the south—the chalk spine of the hill. To the west—the street, crossing the square, running towards the floodplain.
A Cossack named Prokofy Melekhov returned to the village during the second-to-last Turkish campaign. From Turkey he brought a wife—a small woman wrapped in a shawl. She hid her face, rarely showing her melancholy, untamed eyes. The silk shawl smelled of distant, unknown fragrances, its rainbow patterns feeding the envy of the local women. The captured Turkish woman kept aloof from Prokofy’s relatives, and old Melekhov soon separated his son. He never visited his son’s kuren [house] until his death, unable to forget the offense.
Prokofy soon built his new place: carpenters built the kuren, and he himself fenced off yards for the cattle, leading his stooping foreign wife to the new farmstead by autumn. As he walked with her behind the cart loaded with their belongings, the whole village, old and young, poured into the street. The Cossacks laughed restrainedly into their beards, the women called out loudly to each other, a horde of unwashed Cossack boys hooted after Prokofy, but he, with his chekmen [coat] unbuttoned, walked slowly, as if following a freshly ploughed furrow, clasping his wife’s fragile wrist in his enormous, black palm, carrying his straw-white, tousled head high in defiance—only the muscles beneath his cheekbones swelled and rolled, and sweat beaded between his stony, habitually motionless eyebrows.
From that time on, he was rarely seen in the village and did not frequent the square. He lived in his kuren, apart by the Don, like a solitary wolf. Strange things were gossiped about him in the village. Children who grazed calves beyond the common ground told that they had seen Prokofy at evenings, when the light faded, carrying his wife in his arms as far as the Tatar burial mound. He would seat her there on the crest of the mound, her back against an ancient, weather-beaten, porous stone, sit beside her, and thus they would gaze at the steppe for a long time. They gazed until the sunset died down, and then Prokofy would wrap his wife in his zipun [coat] and carry her home. The village was at a loss for guesses, searching for an explanation for such strange behaviour; the women didn’t even have time to fight over it amidst their conversations. They spoke variously of Prokofy’s wife: some claimed she possessed an unprecedented beauty, others said the opposite. Everything was settled after the most reckless of the women, Mavra the grass widow, ran over to Prokofy’s place, supposedly for fresh leaven. Prokofy went into the cellar for the leaven, and in that time Mavra managed to see that the Turkish woman Prokofy had taken was utterly worthless…
After a while, the flushed Mavra, with her shawl askew, was rushing to the crowd of women in the lane:
“What did he find good in her, my darlings? If only she were a woman, but she is so… Neither backside nor belly, only a disgrace. Our girls walk out smoother than her. Her waist—you could break it, like a wasp; her eyes—black, huge, she flashes them like Satan, God forgive me. She must be heavily pregnant, by God!”
“Pregnant?” the women marvelled.
“I’m not a little one, I’ve nursed three myself.”
“And her face, what about her face?”
“Her face? Yellow. Her eyes are dimmed—it must not be sweet in a foreign land, I would say. And also, women, she walks… in Prokofy’s trousers!”
“No-o-o?” the women gasped, startled and in unison.
“I saw it myself—in trousers, only without lampasin [Cossack stripe]. She must have picked up his everyday ones. She has a long shift on, and underneath you can see the trousers tucked into stockings. When I saw it, I was chilled to the core…”
Whispers spread through the village that Prokofy’s wife was a witch. Astakhov’s daughter-in-law (the Astakhovs lived on the edge of the village closest to Prokofy) swore that on the second day of Trinity, before dawn, she saw Prokofy’s wife, barefoot and with her hair loose, milking their cow in their yard. Since then, the cow’s udder had shrivelled to the size of a child’s fist, she stopped giving milk, and soon died.
That year, there was an unprecedented cattle plague. Every day, the sandy spit near the Don was stained with the carcasses of cows and young livestock. The plague spread to the horses. The herds of horses grazing on the communal allotment dwindled. And right then, a dark rumour crept through the lanes and streets…
The Cossacks came to Prokofy’s house from the village gathering.
The master came out onto the porch, bowing.
“What good news brings you, honoured elders?”
The crowd, approaching the porch, stood in silent anticipation.
Finally, one slightly drunk old man shouted first:
“Drag your witch out here! We’ll pass judgement!”
Prokofy rushed into the house, but they caught him in the hallway. A tall gunner, nicknamed Lyushnya in the street, banged Prokofy’s head against the wall, pleading:
“Don’t make a noise, don’t make a noise, there’s no need for that! We won’t touch you, but we’ll bury your woman in the ground. It’s better to destroy her than for the whole village to perish without livestock. And you don’t make a noise, or I’ll smash the wall with your head!”
“Drag the bitch out to the yard!” men thundered at the porch.
Prokofy’s relative, winding the Turkish woman’s hair around his hand and covering her screaming mouth with the other, dragged her at a run through the hallway and threw her at the feet of the crowd. A thin shriek pierced the roaring voices.
Prokofy shoved aside six Cossacks and, breaking into the main room, tore the sabre from the wall. Pushing each other, the Cossacks scattered from the hallway. Circling the gleaming, whistling sabre above his head, Prokofy ran down from the porch. The crowd faltered and scattered across the yard.
Near the barn, Prokofy caught up with the heavy-footed gunner Lyushnya and, from behind, with a diagonal cut from the left shoulder, split him down to the waist. The Cossacks, who were breaking fence stakes from the wattle fence, fled through the threshing floor into the steppe.
Half an hour later, the emboldened crowd approached the farmstead. Two scouts, shrinking, entered the hallway. Prokofy’s wife lay on the kitchen threshold, covered in blood, her head awkwardly thrown back; her bitten tongue writhed in the gap of her painfully bared teeth. Prokofy, with a trembling head and a fixed stare, was wrapping a squealing bundle—a prematurely born child—in a sheepskin coat.
Prokofy’s wife died that evening. His mother, taking pity, took the premature child.
He was bundled in steamed bran, fed mare’s milk, and a month later, convinced that the swarthy Turkish-looking boy would survive, they took him to the church and baptized him. He was named Panteley after his grandfather. Prokofy returned from hard labour twelve years later. His closely trimmed, reddish beard with grey streaks and ordinary Russian clothes made him an outsider, unlike a Cossack. He took his son and began farming.
Panteley grew up dark-skinned, swarthy, and mischievous. He resembled his mother in face and stocky build.
Prokofy married him to a Cossack woman—the daughter of a neighbour.
Since then, Turkish blood began to mix with Cossack blood. This is how the Melekhov Cossacks—known on the street as the Turks—came to be in the village, with their hooked noses and wild, handsome looks.
After burying his father, Panteley devoted himself to the farm: he re-roofed the house, added half a desyatina [1.35 acres] of unused land to the homestead, built new sheds, and a tin-roofed barn. At the master’s request, the tinsmith cut out a pair of tin cockerels from the scraps and fastened them to the barn roof. They cheered the Melekhov yard with their carefree appearance, giving it a look of self-satisfaction and prosperity.
As the years rolled on, Panteley Prokofyevich grew sturdy: he widened, hunched slightly, but still looked like a well-built old man. He was lean, lame (he broke his left leg during a cavalry inspection in his youth), wore a silver crescent earring in his left ear, his raven-black beard and hair had not faded with age; in anger, he could lose consciousness, and this, apparently, prematurely aged his once beautiful, now entirely covered in a web of wrinkles, stout wife.
His elder, already married, son Petro resembled his mother: small, snub-nosed, with a shock of wheat-coloured hair, and brown eyes; while the younger, Grigory, took after his father: half a head taller than Petro, though six years younger, he had the same hooked, kite-like nose as his bati [father], hot, bluish-tinged almond-shaped eyes in slightly slanted slits, and sharp cheekbones covered with brown, ruddy skin. Grigory also stooped like his father, and even their smiles shared a common, somewhat animalistic quality.
Dunyashka—her father’s darling—a long-armed, large-eyed teenager, and Petro’s wife Darya with a small child—that was the entire Melekhov family.
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