all crumpled up, his arm waving over the flames, the skirt of his coat reminding one of a broken wing. But nothing could subdue Olesha; he had had two glasses of vodka and had become still more exuberantly cheerful. The old man also had some vodka, ate a baked egg with bread after it; and suddenly he said, quite softly:

“Now go home, Olesha!”

The great black beast rose, made the sign of the cross, and glanced into the black sky.

“Keep well, father, and many thanks!” he said. Then he pushed his hard, heavy paw into my hand and obediently crawled into the thicket, where a narrow path was concealed.

“A good man?” I asked.

“Yes, but he has to be watched carefully; his is a violent nature! He beat his wife so hard that she could not bear any children, kept having miscarriages, and went mad in the end. I would ask him: why do you beat her?—and he would say: I don’t know, just want to, that’s all.…”

He remained silent, let his arm drop, and sat motionless, peering into the flames of the bonfire, his gray eyebrows raised. His face, lit up by the fire, seemed red-hot and became terrible to look at: the dark pupils of the naked, lacerated eyes had changed their shape—it was hard to tell whether they were narrower or more dilated—the whites had grown larger and he seemed to have suddenly become blind.

He moved his lips; the scanty hair of his mustache stirred and bristled—as though he wanted to say something and could not. But when he started to speak again, he did so calmly, thoughtfully, in a peculiar manner:

“It happens to many a man, this, friend; that you suddenly want to beat up a woman, without any fault of her own and—at what a moment, too! You’ve just been kissing her, marveling at her beauty; and suddenly, at that very moment, the desire overcomes you to beat her! Yes, yes, friend, it happens…I can tell you; I am a quiet, gentle man and did love women so much, sometimes to the point of wanting to get deep inside the woman, right to her very heart and hide in it, as a dove does in the sky—that’s how wonderful it was. And then, suddenly, would come the desire to hit her, pinch her as hard as one could; and I would do so, yes! She would shriek and cry: what’s the matter? And there is no answer—what answer could there be?”

I looked at him in amazement, unable, too, to say anything or ask any question—this strange confession astonished me. After a pause, he went on about Olesha.

“After his wife went mad, Olesha became still more illtempered—a fierce mood would come over him, he’d believe himself damned, and beat everyone up. A short while ago the peasants brought him to me tied up; they’d almost thrashed him to death. He was all swollen, covered with blood like bread with crust. ‘Tame him, father Savel,’ they said, ‘or we’ll kill him, there’s no living with the beast!’ Yes, friend. I spent about five days bringing him back to life. I can doctor a bit, too, you know.…Yes, it isn’t easy for people to live, friend, it isn’t. Not always is life sweet, my dear clear-eyed friend.…So I try to console people, I do.…”

He gave a piteous smile, and his face grew more hideous and terrible.

“Some of them I have to deceive a little; there are, you see, some people who have no comfort left to them at all but deceit. There are some like that, I tell you.…”

There were many questions I wanted to put to him, but he had eaten nothing the whole day; fatigue and the glass of vodka were obviously telling on him. He dozed, rocking to and fro, and his red eyelids dropped more frequently over the naked eyes. I could not help asking all the same: