Read Online The Naked Year by Boris Pilnyak - Free Book Online

cursing!
    â€œKsenya Lvovna! Time you were off to market, the samovar’s on the table and Grandmother’s cursing!”
    Arina Davidovna in the dining room at an oak table is cutting slices of bread and drinking tea. Yelena Yermilovna noiselessly pours out the tenth cup.
    â€œYegor Yevgrafovich returned during the night, Marfon’ka brought him, then they called in on Gleb Yevgrafovich. He had sold all his clothes for drink. Gleb Yevgrafovich gave him his own… he opened the door for him.” Yelena Yermilovna speaks with a lisp. “Boris Yevgrafovich also dropped in to see Gleb Yevgrafovich, and then to see father, the Prince. Father prayed till morning. Natalya Yevgrafovna lay down to sleep after eleven, after a walk down the street. She again went with the Bolshevik Arkhip Arkhipov… Tonya also supports the Bolsheviks, he smashed his glass and called me a filthy name.”
    â€œWhat name?” Arina Davidovna’s lips sag heavily one onto the other–and the third; in her eyes, once brown, now yellow–power.
    â€œBitch, sister!”
    â€œOh!”
    â€œLidia Yevgrafovna with her daughter and Katerina Yevgrafovna returned from the “Venice” at twelve-thirty, Olenka Kuntzova was with them. They sang ballads in the garden…”
    â€œOh… oh, Lord!”
    As if he had broken away from a chain, Anton rattled like huge knives through the house.
    â€œMarfushka, where’s my shopping bag?!”
    In the dining room Anton noisily drinks boiled rye, wheezes and whistles, and his feet, like a setter-pup with fleas, twitch under the table. Yelena Yermilovna is stooping by the samovar.
    â€œHello, Tony, good morning,” she says.
    â€œGood morning,” gloomily answers Anton in a deep, rooster-like bass. “I’m off to enroll in the Youth Organization today. And what tales have you been spreading about people to Grandmother?”
    â€œEe-ee-ee! Aren’t you ashamed? Aren’t you ashamed, speaking to old folks like that?”
    â€œNow we know! Slander of the first order! If you were even on the second rung in our organization, we would smash your mug and beat you black and blue every time you said anything like that.”
    â€œBarge hauler! Furriner!–I’ll just go and tell your sister…”
    â€œWhat did I say?!–You’re a spy!.. You should’ve been in the Cheka a long time ago! That’s what I’ll say to the organization.”
    â€œBut surely I’m not against the power of the Soviets?”
    â€œWe know!… Marfushka… Where’s my shopping bag?!” –again through the whole house various kinds of chains snapped.
    In a white dress, alien, silent, Natalya Yevgrafovna drinks tea in the dining room and goes off to the hospital. The three-bucket-capacity samovar has already sung its aria, grows quiet, squeaks like a fly with a spider. The princess is putting on her “bonnet”-hat and is going with Marfusha and Ksenya to the bazaar with bundles, to sell–those old dresses, which have survived from her grandmothers. With them from the bazaar the Tatars will come in nice new galoshes, and they’ll all go down into the lumber room. In the lumber room there is a smell of rats and decay, the walls are lined with stacked drawers, trunks, suitcases, a set of rusty old scales are hanging up. The Tatars will grab at any old hand made candle sticks, silver, porcelain, moth-eaten Uhlan, Hussar, Cavalry officers’, simple gentry and civilian uniforms (of the Ordinin princes) and winter overcoats (of the Popkov merchants), will pitilessly find fault, suggest ridiculous terms and prod with their dried-up little hands in order to do a deal. The Princess will come across some forgotten trinket, dating from her childhood, and will cry bitterly, hiding the trinket, in order to sell it next time. Then the Tatars will gabble in their own language, increase the amount, the