of talk, my girl,” says Ivan, “or else you’ll be in trouble.” So then she shuts up, she knows she’s gone a bit too far.’
‘Was that the kind of thing she was talking about with Anna Semeonova?’
‘She just talks,’ said Mrs Stichkov. ‘Out it all comes! Just like mother’s milk,’ she said, looking fondly down at the baby, now replete and blotto on its mother’s lap.
The houses were on the edge of town and just beyond them were open fields, still white with snow, and occasional clumps of birch trees, their branches heavy with ice. Dmitri contemplated the prospect and shuddered. Not for him the great open space of Russia, the steppe that poets sang about; for him the great open boulevards of St Petersburg, and that was exactly where he meant to be as soon as he could escape from this dump.
Back up to his left was a tanner’s yard and the smell of the yard hung over the whole area. The acrid fumes irritated his eyes and caught at his chest in a way that he did not understand until he saw the empty drums piled at the tannery gates. Chemicals were used in the yard’s processes. Little yellow rivulets ran down from the yard into the fields, colliding on the frozen surface of a small stream. Further along the stream the ice was broken and ducks, strangely discoloured, were swimming. Further along still, two women were filling pails to take up to their houses. Was this where Mrs Stichkov came to fetch her water? Where Anna Semeonova had tried to help her?
Of an impulse he went over to the two women. They put down their pails and watched him approach: a visitor from Mars.
‘I wonder if you could help me,’ he said, saluting them. ‘I’m trying to find Marfa Nikolaevna’s.’
They looked at him rather oddly. Then one of them gathered herself.
‘The tailor’s is over there,’ she said, pointing.
‘Thank you.’
He looked down at the pails. The water in them was yellowish. And, now he came to look at it, everything was yellowish. The mud was yellowish, his boots were yellowish, the broken ice on the stream was yellowish, a duck clambered out and waddled towards him and that, too, damn it, was yellowish on its underfeathers.
‘This water is not fit for drinking,’ he said sternly.
The women shrugged.
‘It’s all the water there is, Your Honour,’ said one of them.
‘You should go up beyond the yard,’ he said.
‘It’s much further,’ said one of the women quietly.
‘You should think of your children!’
‘Lev Petrovich should think of our children,’ said one of the women bitterly.
‘Lev Petrovich?’
‘He owns the yard.’
‘Someone should speak to him.’
‘Marfa Nikolaevna did,’ said the woman, ‘and see where it got her!’
‘I will speak to him.’
‘Thank you, Your Honour,’ said the other woman. ‘That may help.’
‘It won’t help,’ said the first woman dismissively. ‘He’ll just take it out on us. Thank you, Your Honour,’ she said to Dmitri. ‘It’s kindly meant, I know, but sometimes it’s best to leave things alone.’
‘Well, I’ll see … and this Marfa Nikolaevna, you say, went to see him?’
‘Yes, Your Honour.’
‘And got nowhere?’
‘She speaks too bitter,’ said the second woman.
The other woman turned on her.
‘Not this time. She spoke real civil. Agafa Sirkova was listening at the door and she said she couldn’t get over how polite she was. Not that it made any difference. He threw her out just the same.’
‘Her reputation went before her,’ said the second woman. ‘That was the trouble.’
‘It would have been the same whoever had gone.’
‘Well, that’s very true, and that’s why it’s best to leave these things alone, as you yourself were saying to this gentleman only just now.’
‘But Marfa Nikolaevna, I gather, was not one to leave things alone?’ said Dmitri.
The first woman gave a little laugh.
‘You could say that,’ she said. ‘Yes, you could certainly say that! She was a bit of a firebrand. She wasn’t one of us, Your Honour. She came from the steppes. Those Tatars, they light up at anything.’
‘Well,’ said Dmitri, ‘all this is not really my concern. I am hoping she might be able to help me on something else. The tailor’s, you say?’
As he left, he was aware again that they were looking at him rather oddly.
The snow on this side of the stream, between the houses, had become a sea of mud, through which his boots squelched noisily. Great, discoloured puddles lay everywhere. Half in one of them, half out, he could see a rat lying on its back, its body still and contorted, its feet in the air, the underside of its belly tinged with yellow. The fumes from the tannery made him cough and reach for his handkerchief. This was definitely not the place for a young woman like Anna Semeonova; nor, frankly, was it much of a place for a promising young Examining Magistrate.
Dmitri pushed open the door and went in. The room was full of women sewing. It was so dark that he was amazed that any of them could see.
‘I’m looking for Marfa Nikolaevna,’ he said.
A man in a skull cap came forward.
‘Marfa Nikolaevna?’ he said, with a worried expression on his face. ‘But, Barin, she is no longer here.’
‘No longer here?’
‘She hasn’t been here for, oh, over three weeks now. Not since they came and took her away.’
‘Where is she now?’ said Dmitri harshly.
‘Her case came up yesterday,’ said the tailor, ‘in the District Court at Kursk.’
The following morning, Anna Semeonova had still not been found.
‘It’s bad,’ said Peter Ivanovich. ‘First, because she’s a nice girl. I’ve known her since she was six. At that time she looked like a dumpling and everyone was afraid she was going to take after her father. Recently, though, she has thinned out and is becoming a beauty like her mother. Second, because her father blames us. Thirdly, because so does everyone else.’
Dmitri was always irritated by the Presiding Judge’s pedantic habit of enumerating his points.
‘She did, after all, disappear from the Court House,’ he pointed out.
‘I know; very inconsiderate of her,’ said Peter Ivanovich. ‘Why couldn’t she have disappeared from her home? We would still have been blamed, but we wouldn’t have looked quite as stupid. And now I’m afraid they will send someone down from St Petersburg.’
‘To take charge of the case?’
Dmitri wasn’t sure that he liked this. It was his case; and thus far in his career he had not been assigned so many that he could afford to be blasé. This was, actually, if you included the ridiculous affair of the old woman and the cow, only his second case. And were they now going to take even that from him?
‘We must resist,’ he said sternly.
Peter Ivanovich looked at him pityingly.
‘Tell