Владимир Короткевич - King Stach's Wild Hunt

I understood that were a gun put into the hands of such a man, he would with that sincere smile of white teeth, come up to the tyrant, put a bullet into him and then calmly say to death: “Come here!” He will undergo the greatest suffering and if he doesn't die in prison of his thirst for freedom, he will come up calmly to the scaffold.

So boundless was the faith which this man called forth in me, that our hands met in a strong handshake and my smile was a friendly one.

“Why were you expelled?”

“Oh, some nonsense. It began when we decided to honour the memory of Shevchenko. We were threatened that the police would be brought into the university.” He even began to blush. “Well, we rebelled. And I shouted that if they only dared to do that with our sacred walls, we would wash that shame off them with our blood, and the first bullet would strike the man who had given that order. Then it became noisy and I was grabbed. And in the police-station, when I was asked my nationality, I answered: “Write — Ukrainian.”

“Well said.”

“I know it was very imprudent for those who had taken up the struggle.”

“No, that was good for them, too. One such answer is worth dozens of bullets. And it signifies that everybody is fighting a common enemy. There is no difference between the Belarusian and the Ukrainian if the lash is held over them.”

We looked at the dancers silently until Śvieciłovič winced.

“Dancing. The devil knows what it's like. A waxworks show of some kind... antedeluvian pangolins. In profile not faces but ugly mugs. Brains the size of a thimble, and paws like a dinosaur's with 700 teeth. And their dresses with trains. And the frightening faces of these curs... We are after all an unfortunate people, Mr. Biełarecki.”

“Why?”

“We have never had any really great thinkers among us.”

“Perhaps it's better so,” I said.

“And nevertheless we are a people without a land to settle on. This infamous trade of one's country over a period of seven centuries. In the beginning it was sold to Lithuania [6] This illustrates the myth about the “conqering” of Belarusian land by Lithuania (Litva) tribe. , then, before the people had hardly become assimilated, to the Poles, to everybody and anybody, regardless of honour and conscience.”

The dancers began to cast glances at us.

“You see, they are looking at us. When a person's soul is screaming, they don't like it. They all belong to one gang here. They trample on the little ones, they repudiate honour, sell their young daughters to old men. You see that one over there — Sava Stachoŭski? — I would not put a horse into the same stable with him, for the horse's morals would be endangered. And this Chobaleva, a provincial Messalina. And this one, Asanovič, drove a serf's daughter into her grave. Now he can't do that, hasn't got the right to, but all the same he continues to lead a dissolute life. Unfortunate Belarus! A kind, complaisant, romantic people in the hands of rascals. And so it will always be while this nation allows itself to be made a fool of. It gives up its heroes to the rack and itself sits in a cage over a bowl of potatoes or turnips, looking blank, and understanding nothing. Much would I pay the man who at last shook off from his people's neck this decaying gentry, these stupid parvenues, these conceited upstarts and corrupt journalists, and made the people become masters of their own fate. For that I would give all my blood.”

Apparently my senses had become very sharp: all the time I felt somebody's look on my back. When Śvieciłovič had finished, I turned around and was stupified. Standing behind us was Nadzieja Janoŭskaja, and she had heard everything. But it was not she, it was a dream, a forest sprite, a being out of a fairy-tale. Her dress was like that worn by women in the Middle Ages: no less than 50 lengths of Vorša golden satin had gone into its making. And this dress had over it another, a white one, with free designs in blue that seemed as if of silver as the colours played in the numerous cuts hanging from the sleeves and the hem of the dress. Her tightly tied waist was bound by a thin golden cord falling almost to the floor in two tassels. On her shoulders was a thin “robok” made of a white and silver tinted cloth. Her hair was gathered in a net, an ancient head-dress reminding one somehow of a little ship woven from silver threads. From both hornlets of this little ship a thin white veil hung down to the very floor.

This was a Swan-Queen, the mistress of an amber palace, in a word, the devil alone knows what, but only not the previous ugly duckling. I saw Dubatoŭk's eyes popping out of his head, his jaws sagging: he, too, had evidently not expected such an effect. The violin screamed. Silence fell.

This attire was quite uncomfortable and it usually fetters the movement of a woman unaccustomed to it, makes her heavy and baggy, but this girl was like a queen in it, as if she had all her life worn only such clothing: her head proudly thrown back, she floated dignified and womanly. From under her veil her large eyes smiled archly and proudly, stirred by a feeling of her own beauty.

Dubatoŭk grunted even, so surprised was he, and he came up to her with quickening steps. With an incomprehensible expression of pain in his eyes, he took her face in the palms of his hands and kissed her on the forehead, muttering something like “such beauty”.

And then his lips again broke out into a smile.

“A Queen! My Beauty! I have lived to see this, holy martyrs! Janoŭskaja to her very finger-tips!!! Allow me, dear daughter, your little foot.”

And this enormous bear, grunting, spread himself out on the floor and put his lips to the tip of her tiny slipper. Then he arose and began to laugh:

“Well, my little daughter, with such capital you should sit as quiet as a mouse, otherwise somebody will steal you.”

And he suddenly winked:

“And why not recall the old days, the clays of your childhood when we used to dance together? Give this old beaver one dance, and then let death come.”

The white queen held out her hand to him.

“Come on, my swans, my beauties!” Dubatoŭk shouted to the invalids. “In the beginning give us our ‘Light Breeze’ — two circles, and then from my place — you know which one, don't you? — change to a mazurka!”

And in a whisper he turned to me:

“Our dances are good in all respects, but there just isn't such a fiery one as the Polish mazurka. Only ‘Lavonicha’ might dispute it, but to dance that there must be several pairs, and can these hags and snivellers dance it? For this you need ballet legs, like mine here.”

And he burst out laughing. But I looked in fright at his legs that were like hams and thought: “What he will make of this good dance!”

In the meantime everybody moved aside to clear the space for them. I heard a voice:

“He, Dubatoŭk... will dance!”

I did not leave this profanation, because I wished to see this forgotten dance about which I had heard more than once, and which, people said, had been widespread some 80 years ago.

The enormous bulk that was Dubatoŭk straightened up, and took Janoŭskaja by the limpid transparent wrist of her left hand.

From the first notes of “Light Breeze” he kicked his heels, made a three-step with the right, ant. then with the left foot. This huge man moved with unexpected ease, at first kicking his heels after every three steps, and then simply on the tips of his toes. And at his side she floated, simply floated in the air, a golden, white and blue being, as if she were a bird-of-paradise, her veil soaring in the air.

Then they whirled, floated, sometimes drawing together, sometimes drawing apart, sometimes crossing each other's path. No, this was not a profanation, just as the dance of an old man, once a great dancer, but now grown heavy, is not a profanation. It was in the full sense of a light breeze changing gradually into a storm, and the veil was circling in the air, the feet flashing by... And suddenly the musicians started a mazurka. As a matter of fact it was not a mazurka but some kind of an ancient local variation of its theme, including in itself elements of the “Light Breeze”.