Владимир Короткевич - King Stach's Wild Hunt

Wildly I yelled, and as if in answer to my yell, the silence was broken by a mad stamping of horses' hoofs.

I jumped out into a clearing and saw the shadows of ten retreating horsemen who turned about in the bushes at a gallop. And under the pines I saw a human figure slowly settling down on the earth.

By the time I had run up to him, the man had fallen down face upward, with hands widely outstretched, as if wishing to protect his land from bullets with his body. I had time yet to send a few shots in the direction of the murderers, it even seemed to me that one of them had reeled in his saddle, but this unexpected woe made me throw myself down at once on my knees at the side of the body lying there.

“Brother! Brother mine! My brother!”

As if alive he lay there, and only a tiny little wound from which almost no blood flowed, told me of the truth, a cruel and irremediable truth.

The bullet had pierced his temple and left through the back of the head. I looked at him, at the ruthlessly ruined young life, I grasped him in my arms, called to him, pulled at him and howled like a wolf, as if that might help.

Then I sat up, put his head in my lap and began to smooth his hair.

“Andrej! Andrej! Wake up! Wake up, my dear friend!”

In death he was beautiful, unusually beautiful. With his face tnrown back, his head hanging down, his slender neck as if carved from marble, he lay in my lap. The long, light-coloured hair had become entangled with the dry yellow grass which caressed it. His mouth was smiling as if death had solved one of life's riddles for him, his eyes were closed peacefully, and his long eyelashes overshadowed them. His hands so beautiful and strong, hands which women might have kissed in moments of happiness, lay alongside his body, as if in rest.

As a mother grieving over her son did I sit there, on my knees my son who had undergone torture on the cross. I howled over him and cursed God who was merciless towards people, towards the best of His sons.

“God! God! All-Knowing, Ail-Powerful One! May You perish! You Apostate, having sold Your people!”

Overhead something thundered, and in the following instant an ocean of water, a terrible shower, came pouring down on the swamp and the waste land, so lost and forgotten in the forests of this territory. The firs, bent down under it to the earth, moaned and groaned. It beat against my back, slashed at the earth.

I sat as one having lost his senses, noticing nothing. Ringing in my ears were the words that I had heard uttered some hours ago by one of the best of people.

“My heart aches... they go on, stray, perish, because it is shameful to stand still... and there is no resurrection for them after the crucifixion... But do you think that all were strangled? Years and years are ahead! What a golden, magic expanse is ahead! The sun!”

I began to groan. The future, murdered and growing cold in the rain, was lying here in my lap.

I wept, the rain flooded my eyes, my mouth. And my hands continued stroking this youth's golden head.

“My country! Wretched mother! Weep!”

Crows sense a corpse from afar. The following day a police officer, a handsome man with a moustache, appeared in the Janoŭski region. He arrived without a doctor, examined the place of the murder, and with an air of importance that became a murder, said that because of the shower it was impossible to discover any traces of the crime. (Ryhor, who had accompanied him, only smiled bitterly into his moustache.) After examining the body of the murdered man, he turned the head around with his white fingers, and in a solemn voice, said:

“We-well! Finished him off how? Fell immediately.”

Then he drank vodka and had a bite to eat in Svetilpvich's house, in the room next to the hall in which the old servant was bitterly crying, his tears choking him, while I was sitting literally crushed by woe and remorse. At this time nothing existed for me besides the thin candle which Andrej held in his hands: it was throwing rosy streaks of light on his white shirt, the front of which was made of lace. It was an old shirt that the servant had dug out from a trunk. But I had to find out what the authorities thought about this murder and what they intended to do.

“Nothing, to our regret, nothing,” the police officer answered, his voice pleasant and well-modulated, his black velvety eyebrows playing. “This is a wild corner — impossible to carry out investigations here. I appreciate your noble grief... But what can be done here? Some years ago there was a vendetta here.” He pronounced it ‘vandetta’ and it was apparent he liked the word very much. “And we were powerless to do anything. Such a really damnable place. For example, we could have made you, too, answerable for this, because, as you yourself say, you applied a weapon against these... m-m... hunters. We won't do that. It's none of our business, not at all. Perhaps he was murdered because of a person of the beautiful sex. People say he was in love with this (he moved his eyebrows in satisfaction)... this lady, the mistress of Marsh Firs. Not bad... Or perhaps, this was a suicide? The deceased was a ‘melancholic’ fellow, ha-ha, suffered for the people.”

“But after all I myself saw the Wild Hunt.”

“Allow me not to believe you. Fairy-tales have outlived themselves... It seems to me that your acquaintance with him is, in general, somewhat m-m-... s-suspicious. I have no desire to complicate matters for you, however... it is also highly suspicious of you striving so stubbornly to shift the attention of the investigation onto others, onto some Wild Hunt.”

“I have a paper showing that he was enticed out of his house.”

The police-officer turned purple, his eyes became shifty.

“What paper?” he asked avidly, and he reached his hand out to me. “You must hand it over, and if it is considered that this scrap of paper is worth something, it will be filed with other material concerning this case.”

I hid the paper because neither his eyes nor his greedily outstretched hand inspired trust.

“I'll hand it over myself when and to whom I consider it necessary.”

“Well, so be it,” the police-officer swallowed something, “that's your own affair, most respected one. But I advise you not to tempt fate. The population here is a barbarous one,” he significantly looked at me, “they can kill.”' “I am not very much afraid of that. I can only say that if the police engage in discoursing instead of fulfilling their direct obligations, then it becomes necessary for the citizens themselves to take up their own defence. If the authorities exert all their efforts to hush up an affair, things give off a most unpleasant odour and make people think the most unpleasant thoughts.”

“What is this?” The brows of the police-officer began creeping smartly somewhere towards his hair: “Insulting the authorities, are you?”

“God forbid! But this gives me the right to send a copy of this letter to the provincial centre.”

“That's as you like,” the police-officer said, picking his teeth. “However, my dear Mr. Biełarecki, my advice to you is to reconcile yourself to things. And besides, it will hardly be pleasant for the authorities in the province to learn that a scientist is defending a former sedition-ary in this way.”

Gallantly, in a chesty baritone, he was persuading me: a father could not have been more attentive to his son than he was to me.

“Just a moment,” I said, “is there any such law that liberals are outcasts and must be outlawed? A villain can murder them and bear no responsibility?”

“Don't magnify things, my dear Mr. Biełarecki,” the dandy said, drawing out his words, “you are prone to magnifying life's horrors.”