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think? Will she deliver a genius or a fool?”
    Gribshin shrugged. He didn’t care to discuss the girl and was annoyed at the familiarity with which the young man had addressed him. “I don’t know.”
    “I suppose it would depend on your opinion of the groom,” said the youth. And then he emitted a harsh laugh. “Is he a genius or a fool?”
    “Listen, boy,” Gribshin said, even though the farmhand was probably a year or two older than him. “Don’t worry about that. Just be sure to wake me if anything happens. Gallop like the wind.”
     
    Gribshin left scowling. The obscureness of the youth’s remark had left him less confident in his reliability, but he recovered his good mood on the walk back to the post-house. Tonight and in the following evenings he found himself progressively charmed by the muted colors of the night-cloaked countryside. As he became more accustomed to it, the featureless terrain was more easily distinguished. Every morning and evening some detail seemed to have been added: a little pond, a grain silo, a half-built home. Although he had left his traveling case in the house, his hosts were surprised every evening when he turned up. After some display of exasperation, the old woman Marina agreed to provide him with a samovar. Occasionally he brought the peasants foreign delicacies purchased for outrageous sums at the train station, sold by Tula or Lipetsk merchants quick to grasp a business opportunity.
    The three adults drank tea and ate German salami in the frontparlor, while the girl remained seated in her corner of the room and didn’t speak at all. They called her Galya. Sometimes she played with a small rag doll; like a four-year-old, thought Gribshin. It was Gribshin who usually initiated their table talk, which tended to revolve around the weather and the price of bread, neither of which were trite items of discussion in rural Russia. When he spoke of Moscow, or even of the goings-on at Astapovo, the peasants didn’t reply, except to mutter from time to time, “Well, that’s there !”
    No aspect of their poverty dismayed Gribshin more than the fact that they had never been to the cinema; or, worse, that they had no desire to attend the cinema. “You could see moving pictures of the Hottentots and llamas in Peru,” he told them. “Our company brought a touring show through Lipetsk last year. Crowds walking on the Champs-Elysées. The pyramids, the Parthenon, Sarah Bernhardt taking tea. Monkeys in Africa. The circus. Aeroplanes and steamships. Georges Clemenceau and the Kaiser, prizefights and horseraces. A tour of the Louvre: you can see the real Mona Lisa! A man going over Niagara Falls in a barrel!” Cinema was nothing new: the world had been attending the cinema for fifteen years already. As far as Gribshin could determine, no religious prejudice had deterred Marina and her husband Semyon.
    The couple were simply ignorant of the new century and they wished to remain that way. All the advantages of progress had escaped them: literacy, plumbing, the use of machinery to lighten their physical toil…They would live their lives out as their parents had, so would their daughter and, he presumed, so would their imminent grandchild—the thought of it nearly drove Gribshin mad. The couple’s unworldliness hung around them like a cloud. Something else was suggested as well in the crabbednessof their lives, in their reticence to speak, and even in the eagerness with which they devoured the salami and which left them looking a little ashamed afterward. Gribshin had been among peasants before and knew what to expect of them. He guessed that there was a secret and that the secret rested on the girl in the corner. Well, she was pregnant, pregnant with the secret. He regretted not having asked the farmhand what he meant to speak about.

SEVEN
    EVERY day at Astapovo more celebrities stepped down from the train onto the station platform—minor politicians, religious figures, writers, and