Berries

There were hot, windless June days. The leaves in the forest were lush, dense, and green; only here and there yellowed birch and linden leaves were falling. The rosebushes were covered with fragrant flowers, in the forest meadows the clover was solid honey, the rye was thick, tall, darkening and rippling, half-filled already, in the lowlands the corncrakes were calling to each other, in the oats and rye the quail now croaked and now chirped, the nightingale in the forest only occasionally made a trill and fell silent, the dry heat baked. On the roads the dust lay motionless, a finger thick, and rose in a thick cloud, carried now to the right, now to the left by an occasional faint breath of wind.

The peasants were finishing their construction work, carting manure; the livestock was starving on the dried-up fallow, waiting for the aftermath. Cows and calves were running wild with their tails raised in hooks, running from the herders from the stalls. Boys watched the horses along the roads and field edges. The women were dragging sacks of grass from the forest, the girls and little girls were racing one another, crawling among the bushes in the cleared forest, picking berries and carrying them to sell to the summer people.

The summer people, in their ornate, architecturally fanciful little houses, strolled lazily under parasols in light, clean, expensive clothes along sand-covered paths or sat in the shade of trees and pavilions, at painted tables and, languishing from the heat, drank tea or cool beverages.

At the magnificent dacha of Nikolai Semyonych, with its tower, veranda, little balcony, and galleries—everything fresh, new, and clean—stood a hired troika with bells, in a carriage, which had brought from the city for fifteen “there and back,” as the driver said, a Petersburg gentleman.

This gentleman was a well-known liberal activist who had participated in all the committees, commissions, presentations of cunningly composed addresses that seemed loyal but were in essence most liberal. He had come from the city, where he was, as always, a terribly busy man who would stay only twenty-four hours, to visit his friend, childhood companion, and almost fellow-thinker.

They differed only slightly in the methods of applying constitutional principles. The Petersburger was more European, with a slight bias even toward socialism, and received a very large salary from the positions he held. Nikolai Semyonych, however, was a purely Russian man, Orthodox, with a touch of Slavophilism, and owned many thousands of desyatins of land.

They had dined in the garden on a dinner of five courses, but because of the heat had eaten almost nothing, so that the labors of the forty-ruble cook and his assistants, who had worked especially hard for the guest, were almost wasted. They ate only the iced okroshka soup with fresh whitefish and the multicolored ice cream in a beautiful mold decorated with various spun-sugar threads and biscuits. At dinner were the guest, a liberal doctor, a student tutoring the children who was a desperate Social Democrat and revolutionary whom Nikolai Semyonych knew how to keep in check, Meri, Nikolai Semyonych’s wife, and three children, of whom the youngest came only for the dessert.

Dinner was somewhat strained because Meri, herself a very nervous woman, was worried about the stomach upset of Goga—as (is customary among proper people) the youngest boy Nikolai was called—and also because as soon as a political conversation began between the guest and Nikolai Semyonych, the desperate student, wishing to show that he did not hold back his convictions before anyone, would break into the conversation, and the guest would fall silent, while Nikolai Semyonych would quiet the revolutionary.

They dined at seven o’clock. After dinner the friends sat on the veranda, refreshing themselves with cold Narzan water and light white wine, and conversed.

Their disagreement first expressed itself on the question of whether elections should be two-stage or direct, and they began to argue heatedly when they were called to tea in the dining room, which was protected from flies by screens. At tea there was general conversation with Meri, whom this conversation could not engage since she was wholly absorbed in thoughts about the signs of Goga’s stomach upset. The conversation was about painting, and Meri argued that in decadent painting there was un je ne sais quoi that one could not deny. She was not at all thinking about decadent painting at that moment but was saying what she had said many times. The guest had no interest in this at all, but he had heard what people said against decadentism and said all of it so convincingly that no one would have guessed he had no interest whatsoever in decadentism or non-decadentism. Nikolai Semyonych, looking at his wife, sensed that she was displeased about something and that there would probably be some unpleasantness—besides which, he was very bored listening to what she was saying and what he had heard, it seemed to him, more than a hundred times.

The expensive bronze lamps and lanterns in the courtyard were lit, the children were put to bed after subjecting the sick Goga to medical procedures.

The guest, Nikolai Semyonych, and the doctor came out onto the veranda. The lackey brought candles with shades and more Narzan, and around midnight a real, animated conversation began about what state measures should be adopted at this important time for Russia. Both smoked continuously as they talked.

Outside, beyond the gates of the dacha, the coachman’s horses jingled their bells, standing without feed, and the old coachman sitting in the carriage without food now yawned, now snored—a man who had lived with one master for twenty years and sent all his wages, except for three or five rubles that he drank away, home to his brother. When roosters from various dachas began calling to each other, especially one loud, high-pitched one at the neighboring dacha, the coachman began to wonder if they had forgotten him, got down from the carriage, and went into the dacha. He saw that his passenger was sitting and drinking something and in between talking loudly. He was afraid to interrupt and went to find the lackey. The lackey in his livery jacket was sitting asleep in the entrance hall. The coachman woke him. The lackey, a former house serf who fed his large family—five girls and two boys—with his service (the service was profitable—fifteen rubles salary and from the masters in tips sometimes up to a hundred rubles a year), jumped up and, having straightened and brushed himself off, went to the masters to say that the coachman was worried and asking to be released.

When the lackey entered, the argument was at its height. The doctor who had joined them was participating in it.

“I cannot allow,” the guest was saying, “that the Russian people should have to go along some different paths of development. First of all, freedom is needed—political freedom—that freedom, as everyone knows, the greatest freedom—while observing the greatest rights of other people.”

The guest felt that he had gotten confused and was saying something wrong, but in the heat of the argument he could not properly remember how one should say it.

“That is so,” replied Nikolai Semyonych, not listening to the guest and only wishing to express his own thought, which he particularly liked. “That is so, but it is achieved by a different path, not by a majority of votes but by universal agreement. Look at the decisions of the mir.”

“Ah, that mir.”

“It cannot be denied,” said the doctor, “that the Slavic peoples have their own special view. For example, the Polish right of veto. I do not claim that this is better.”

“Allow me to finish my whole thought,” Nikolai Semyonych began. “The Russian people have special qualities. These qualities…”

But Ivan, who had come in with sleepy eyes in his livery, interrupted him:

“The coachman is worried…”

“Tell him” (the Petersburg guest said “you” to all lackeys and was proud of this) “that I will leave soon. And I will pay extra for the additional time.”

“Yes, sir.”

Ivan left, and Nikolai Semyonych could finish his whole thought. But both the guest and the doctor had heard it twenty times (or at least it seemed so to them) and began to refute it, especially the guest, with examples from history. He knew history excellently. The doctor was on the guest’s side and admired his erudition and was glad of the chance to become acquainted with him.

The conversation went on so long that it grew light beyond the forest on the other side of the road, and the nightingale woke up, but the conversationalists kept smoking and talking, talking and smoking.

Perhaps the conversation would have continued further, but a maid came out of the door.

This maid was an orphan who, in order to feed herself, had had to enter service. At first she had lived with merchants, where a clerk seduced her and she gave birth. Her child died, and she went to work for a civil servant, where a son, a gymnasium student, would not leave her in peace; then she became an assistant maid at Nikolai Semyonych’s and considered herself fortunate that the masters no longer pursued her with their lust and paid her salary punctually. She came to report that the mistress was calling for the doctor and Nikolai Semyonych.

“Well,” thought Nikolai Semyonych, “it must be something with Goga.”

“What is it?” he asked.

“Nikolai Nikolaevich is not well,” said the maid. Nikolai Nikolaevich—they—this was the overfed Goga suffering from diarrhea.

“Well, it’s time anyway,” said the guest. “Look how light it is. How long we’ve sat,” he said with a smile, as if praising himself and his companions for having talked so long and so much, and took his leave.

Ivan ran about on tired legs for a long time looking for the guest’s hat and umbrella, which the guest himself had stuffed into the most inappropriate places. Ivan hoped to receive a tip, but the guest, always generous and not at all reluctant to give him a ruble, was so carried away by the conversation that he completely forgot about it and remembered only on the way that he had given nothing to the lackey. “Well, nothing to be done.”

The coachman climbed onto the box, gathered up the reins, sat sideways, and started off. The bells jingled. The Petersburger, swaying on the soft springs, rode and thought about the narrowness and bias of his friend’s thoughts.

Nikolai Semyonych thought the same thing, not going immediately to his wife. “Terrible, this narrow Petersburg parochialism. They cannot get out of it,” he thought.

But he delayed going to his wife because he expected nothing good from this meeting now. The whole matter was about the berries. The boys had brought berries yesterday. Nikolai Semyonych had bought two plates of not-quite-ripe berries without bargaining. The children came running and begged for them, began eating right from the plates. Meri had not yet come out. And when she came out and learned that Goga had been given berries, she was terribly angry, since his stomach was already upset. She began to reproach her husband, he reproached her. And an unpleasant conversation, almost a quarrel, ensued. By evening Goga did indeed have a bad bowel movement. Nikolai Semyonych thought that would be the end of it, but the summons for the doctor meant the matter had taken a bad turn.

When he went in to his wife, she in a colorful silk dressing gown that she liked very much but was not thinking about now, was standing in the nursery with the doctor over the chamber pot and lighting it with a dripping candle.

The doctor, with an attentive expression, in pince-nez, looked in, stirring the smelly contents with a stick.

“Yes,” he said significantly.

“All because of those cursed berries.”

“Well, why the berries?” Nikolai Semyonych said timidly.

“Why the berries? You fed him, and I haven’t slept all night, and the child will die…”

“Well, he won’t die,” the doctor said with a smile. “A small dose of bismuth and caution. We’ll give it right now.”

“He’s fallen asleep,” said Meri.

“Well, better not to disturb him. I’ll stop by tomorrow.”

“Please do.”

The doctor left, Nikolai Semyonych remained alone and for a long time could not calm his wife. When he fell asleep, it was already completely light.

In the neighboring village at this same time, the peasants and boys were returning from the night pasture. Some were riding one horse, some had horses in tow with yearlings and two-year-olds running behind.

Taraska Rezunov, a lad of about twelve, in a sheepskin coat but barefoot, wearing a cap, on a piebald mare with a gelding in tow and a yearling, piebald like its mother, had outrun everyone and galloped up the hill to the village. A black dog ran merrily ahead of the horses, looking back at them. The fat piebald yearling behind kicked up its white-stockinged legs now to one side, now to the other. Taraska rode up to the hut, dismounted, tied the horses at the gate, and went into the entrance hall.

“Hey you, overslept,” he shouted at his sisters and brother, who were sleeping in the entrance hall on a piece of sacking.

Their mother, who had been sleeping next to them, had already gotten up to milk the cow.

Olgushka jumped up, smoothing with both hands her disheveled long whitish hair, while Fedka, who had been sleeping next to her, still lay with his head buried in the sheepskin, only rubbing his calloused heel against the shapely child’s leg that stuck out from under the coat.

The children had been planning since the previous evening to go berry-picking, and Taraska had promised to wake his sister and the little one as soon as he returned from the night pasture.

He did just that. At the pasture, sitting under a bush, he had been falling asleep; but now he had woken up and decided not to go to bed but to go with the girls for berries. Mother gave him a mug of milk. He cut himself a chunk of bread and sat down at the table on the high bench and began to eat.

When he, in just his shirt and pants, with quick steps leaving distinct tracks of his bare feet in the dust, went along the road where several other such tracks already lay—some larger, some smaller, bare footprints with clearly imprinted little toes—the girls were already visible far ahead as red and white specks against the dark green of the grove. (They had prepared a little pot and cup the evening before and, without having breakfast or taking any bread, crossed themselves a couple of times toward the front corner and ran out into the street.) Taraska caught up with them beyond the big forest, just as they turned off the road.

Dew lay on the grass, on the bushes, even on the lower branches of the bushes and trees, and the little girls’ bare legs immediately got wet and at first grew cold, then warmed up, stepping now on soft grass, now on the unevenness of dry ground. The berry place was in a cleared forest. The girls first entered last year’s clearing. The young growth had just begun to rise, and between the lush young bushes stood places with low grass in which ripened and hid pinkish-white and here and there red berries.

Bent double, the girls picked berry after berry with their small sunburned little hands and put the worse ones in their mouths, the better ones in the cup.

“Olgushka! Come here. There’s an awful lot here.”

“Really? You’re lying! Ahoy!” they called to each other when they wandered behind the bushes, not going far apart.

Taraska went farther from them, across the ravine to a forest that had been cut down a year earlier, where the young growth, especially the hazel and maple, was taller than a person. The grass was juicier and denser, and when he came upon places with strawberries, the berries were larger and juicier under the protection of the grass.

“Grushka!”

“Wha-at?”

“What if there’s a wolf?”

“So what about a wolf? Why are you scaring me? I’m not afraid,” said Grushka, and getting distracted, thinking about the wolf, she put berry after berry—and the very best ones—not into the cup but into her mouth.

“Our Taraska’s gone across the ravine. Taraska-a!”

“Ye-es!” Taraska answered from across the ravine. “Come here.”

“Let’s go, there’s more there.”

And the girls climbed down into the ravine, holding onto bushes, and up the other side by way of little gullies, and there, in the warmth of the sun, they immediately found a little clearing with short grass, completely covered with berries. Both fell silent and worked without stopping with both hands and lips.

Suddenly something started and, amid the silence, crashed through the grass and bushes with a terrible, as it seemed to them, racket.

Grushka fell from fright and spilled the berries she had collected, almost half a cup.

“Mama!” she shrieked and began to cry.

“It’s a hare, a hare. Taraska! A hare. There he is,” Olgushka shouted, pointing at the grayish-brown back with ears that flashed between the bushes. “What’s wrong with you?” Olgushka turned to Grushka when the hare had disappeared.

“I thought it was a wolf,” Grushka replied, and suddenly right after the terror and tears of despair she burst out laughing.

“What a fool.”

“I was so scared!” said Grushka, dissolving in laughter ringing like a little bell.

They gathered up the berries and went on. The sun had already risen and was dappling the greenery with bright patches and shadows and glistening in the drops of dew, in which the girls had now gotten wet up to the waist.

The girls were almost at the edge of the forest, going ever farther in the hope that the farther they went, the more berries there would be, when in various places they heard the ringing calls of girls and women who had come out later and were also gathering berries.

By breakfast time the cup and little pot were already half full when the girls met up with Aunt Akulina, who had also come out for berries. Behind Aunt Akulina toddled on fat, crooked little legs a tiny, pot-bellied boy in just a little shirt and without a cap.

“He tagged along with me,” Akulina told the girls, taking the boy in her arms. “And there was no one to leave him with.”

“We just scared up a huge hare. How it crashed—it was scary…”

“Imagine that!” said Akulina and set the little one down from her arms again.

Having chatted thus, the girls parted from Akulina and continued their work.

“Let’s sit down now,” said Olgushka, sitting down in the thick shade of a hazel bush. “I’m worn out. Oh, if only we’d brought some bread, we could eat now.”

“I want to eat too,” said Grushka.

“What’s that Aunt Akulina shouting about so? Do you hear? Ahoy, Aunt Akulina!”

“Olgushka-a!” Akulina called back.

“Wha-at!”

“Isn’t the little one with you?” Akulina was shouting from beyond the gully.

“No!”

But then the bushes rustled, and from beyond the gully appeared Aunt Akulina herself with her skirt hitched up above her knees and her basket on her arm.

“Haven’t you seen the little one?”

“No.”

“What a sin! Mishka-a-a!”

“Mishka-a-a!”

No one answered.

“Oh, woe, he’ll get lost. He’ll wander into the big forest.”

Olgushka jumped up and went with Grushka to search in one direction, Aunt Akulina in another. They kept calling for Mishka in ringing voices, but no one answered.

“I’m worn out,” said Grushka, lagging behind, but Olgushka kept calling and went now right, now left, looking around.

Akulina’s desperate voice could be heard far off toward the big forest. Olgushka was about to give up searching and go home when in one lush bush near a stump of young linden growth she heard the persistent and angry, desperate peeping of some bird, probably with chicks, displeased about something. The bird was obviously afraid of something and angry at something. Olgushka looked at the bush, overgrown with thick, tall grass with white flowers, and right beneath it saw a little blue heap that did not look like any forest plants. She stopped, looked more closely.

It was Mishka. It was him the bird feared and at whom it was angry.

Mishka lay on his fat belly, his little hands under his head and his plump, crooked little legs stretched out, and was sweetly asleep.

Olgushka called the mother and, having woken the little one, gave him some berries.

And for a long time afterward Olgushka told everyone she met—at home to her mother and father and to the neighbors—how she had searched for and found Akulina’s little boy.

The sun had come fully out from behind the forest and was hotly baking the earth and everything on it.

“Olgushka! Let’s go swimming,” the girls who had joined her invited Olga. And all of them in a big ring went with songs to the river. Splashing about, squealing, and kicking their legs, the girls did not notice how a low black cloud was coming up from the west, how the sun began to hide and appear again, how a smell of flowers and birch leaves came, and how it began to rumble. The girls had not managed to get dressed when the rain poured down and soaked them to the bone.

In their little shirts that clung to their bodies and had darkened, the girls ran home, ate, and carried dinner out to the field where their father was plowing up the potatoes.

When they returned and had eaten, their little shirts had already dried. Having sorted through the strawberries and put them in cups, they carried them to the dacha of Nikolai Semyonych, where they paid well; but this time they were refused.

Meri, sitting under a parasol in a big armchair and languishing from the heat, saw the girls with berries and waved her fan at them.

“No, no.”

But Valya, the eldest, a twelve-year-old boy, resting from the exhaustion of the classical gymnasium and playing croquet with the neighbors, saw the berries, ran up to Olgushka, and asked:

“How much?”

She said:

“Thirty kopecks.”

“Too much,” he said. He said “too much” because that was what grown-ups always said. “Wait, just go around the corner,” he said and ran to the nanny.

Meanwhile Olgushka and Grushka were admiring the mirrored gazing ball, in which some small houses, forests, and gardens could be seen.

Both this ball and many other things were not surprising to them, because they expected everything most wondrous from the mysterious and incomprehensible world of the masters.

Valya ran to the nanny and began asking her for thirty kopecks. The nanny said that twenty was enough and got the money out of her little trunk for him. And he, avoiding his father, who had just gotten up after the difficult night before and was smoking and reading the newspapers, gave the twenty-kopeck piece to the girls and, having poured the berries onto a plate, attacked them.

Having returned home, Olgushka untied with her teeth the little knot in the kerchief in which the twenty-kopeck piece was tied and gave it to her mother. Her mother hid the money and gathered the laundry for the river.

Taraska, who since breakfast had been plowing up the potatoes with his father, was at this time sleeping in the shade of a thick, dark oak; right there sat his father, watching the hobbled unharnessed horse that was grazing at the boundary of someone else’s land and could at any minute wander into the oats or someone else’s meadows.

Everything in Nikolai Semyonych’s family was today as usual. Everything was in order. Breakfast of three courses was ready; the flies had long been eating it, but no one came because no one felt like eating.

Nikolai Semyonych was pleased with the correctness of his judgments, which was confirmed by what he had read today in the newspapers. Meri was calm because Goga had had a good bowel movement. The doctor was pleased that the remedies he had proposed had brought benefit. Valya was pleased that he had eaten a whole plate of strawberries.

—Leo Tolstoy

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Translator’s Notes:

• This story is a masterpiece of social contrast. The wealthy liberal Nikolai Semyonych and his Petersburg guest debate political reform late into the night, using words like “freedom” and “the people,” while remaining oblivious to the actual peasant people whose lives surround them.
• The mir (peasant commune) was a central institution in Russian village life that made decisions by consensus. Slavophiles like Nikolai Semyonych idealized it as a uniquely Russian alternative to Western parliamentary democracy.
• The maid’s backstory—seduced by a clerk, her child died, pursued by a gymnasium student—compressed into one sentence, is a devastating portrait of the vulnerability of lower-class women in service.
• The coachman who has worked for the same master for twenty years, sending almost all his wages home to his brother except what he drinks—his story too is compressed into a few lines.
• “Un je ne sais quoi” (a certain something) in Meri’s defense of decadent painting underscores the vacuousness of upper-class cultural conversation.
• The final parallel structure—“Nikolai Semyonych was pleased… Meri was calm… The doctor was pleased… Valya was pleased”—emphasizes how each person in this privileged world measures satisfaction in terms of their trivial concerns, while the peasant children have spent their day in actual labor and life.
• The title “Berries” captures the irony: the same strawberries that cause anxiety and family quarrels in one world are the source of twenty kopecks’ income (hard-earned from dawn to market) in another.
• A desyatin is about 2.7 acres; “many thousands of desyatins” means Nikolai Semyonych is an extremely wealthy landowner.