Михаил Лермонтов - A Hero of Our Time [New Translation]

A full moon shone on the reed roof and white walls of my new living quarters. Another peasant house, smaller and more ancient, stood next to it in a courtyard, which was enclosed by a stone wall. The land fell away in a precipice to the sea at the very walls of this peasant house, and dark-blue waves lapped below with relentless murmurings. The moon quietly watched the element, which was restless but submissive to her, and under her light, I could make out two ships, far offshore, whose black rigging, resembling a cobweb, was in motionless silhouette against the pale line of the horizon. “There are ships at the pier,” I thought. “Tomorrow I’ll set off for Gelendzhik.”

A Cossack from the front line was fulfilling the duties of an orderly under my command. Having instructed him to unload my valise and release the coach driver, I called the proprietor. Silence. I knocked. Silence. What was this? At last, a boy of about fourteen years crawled out of the vestibule.

“Where is the proprietor?”

“No.” The boy spoke in a Ukrainian dialect.

“What? He’s not here at all?”

“Not at all.”

“And the proprietress?”

“Run off to the slobodka. ” [3] slobodka: A settlement exempted from normal State obligations.

“Who then will open the door for me?” I said, kicking it with my foot. The door opened. A dampness blew softly from the peasant house. I struck a sulfur match and put it up to the boy’s nose. It illuminated two white eyes. He was blind, completely blind from birth. He stood in front of me without moving, and I began to scrutinize the features of his face.

I confess that I have a strong prejudice against the blind, the cross-eyed, the deaf, the mute, the legless, the armless, the hunch-backed and the like. I have noticed that there is always a sort of strange relationship between the exterior of a person and his soul. It is as if, with the loss of a feature, the soul loses some kind of sensibility.

I started to scrutinize the face of this blind boy. But what would you suggest I read in a face that has no eyes?… I looked at him with involuntary pity for a while, when suddenly a barely visible smile scampered across his thin lips, and, I don’t know why, but it produced in me a most unpleasant impression. The suspicion that this blind boy wasn’t as blind as he seemed was born in my mind. In vain I tried to persuade myself that you couldn’t mimic a walleye, and why would you? But what was I to do? I am often prone to prejudice…

“Are you the son of the proprietress?” I asked him eventually.

“No.”

“Who are you then?”

“An orphan, a cripple.”

“And does the proprietress have children?”

“No. There was a daughter, ran away cross the sea with a Tatar.”

“Which Tatar?”

“The devil knows! A Crimean Tatar, a boatman from Kerchi.”

I went into the shack. The sum total of furniture inside consisted of two benches and a table and an enormous trunk by the stove. There wasn’t a single image on the wall—a bad sign! The sea wind burst into the room through a broken windowpane. I pulled the end of a wax candle out of my valise and, having lit it, started to unpack my things, putting my saber and rifle down in the corner. I put my pistols on the table, spread out my felt cloak on the bench, while my Cossack put his on the other. After ten minutes he started snoring, but I couldn’t get to sleep. In the darkness the boy with the wall-eyes continued to circle before me.

Thus an hour passed. The moon shone through the window, and its light played on the earthen floor of the peasant house. Suddenly, a shadow flew through a bright ray that cut across the floor. I half-rose and looked through the window. Someone ran past it a second time and hid God knows where. I couldn’t imagine that this being had run down the steep slope to the water; however, there was nowhere else to go. I stood up, threw on my beshmet, girded myself with my dagger-belt, and quietly exited the peasant house. The blind boy was standing in front of me. I hid by the fence, and with a sure but careful gait he walked past me. He was carrying some kind of bundle under his arm, and turning toward the jetty, he descended a narrow and steep path. “On that day the dumb shall cry out and the blind shall see,” [4] On that day the dumb shall cry out: A reference to the Bible, Isaiah 35:5-6: “Then shall the lame man leap as an hart and the tongue of the dumb sing.” I thought, following him at a distance from which I wouldn’t lose sight of him.

In the meantime, the moon was becoming shrouded in clouds, and a fog rose on the sea. The lamp on the stern of the nearest ship just barely shined through it—and closer to shore, foam glittered on the boulders, which threatened to sink it at any moment. I descended with difficulty, stole down the steep slope, and this is what I saw: the blind boy paused, then turned right at the bottom. He walked so close to the water that it seemed as if a wave might grab him and take him away at any moment. But it was evident that this wasn’t his first walk along these parts, judging from the conviction with which he stepped from stone to stone, avoiding the grooves between them. At last he stopped, as though he was listening for something, sat on the ground and put the bundle down beside him. Hiding behind a protruding part of the rock-face, I observed his movements. Several minutes later a white figure appeared on the other side of him. She walked up to the blind boy and sat next to him. The wind brought me their conversation from time to time:

“So, blind boy,” said the female voice, “the storm is fierce. Yanko won’t come.”

“Yanko isn’t afraid of storms,” he replied.

“The fog is thickening,” the female voice rejoined in a sad tone.

“Fog is better for getting past patrol ships,” was the reply.

“And if he drowns?”

“Well then, on Sunday you’ll have to go to church without a new ribbon.”

A silence followed. But I was shocked by one thing: before, the blind boy had spoken to me in a Ukrainian dialect, and now he was expressing himself cleanly in Russian.

“You see, I’m right,” said the blind boy again, clapping his palms, “Yanko isn’t afraid of the sea or the wind or the fog or the shore patrol. Listen now. You won’t fool me—that isn’t water lapping, those are his long oars.”

The woman jumped up and began peering into the distance with an anxious look.

“You’re delirious, blind boy,” she said, “I don’t see anything.”

I admit, as hard as I tried to make out in the distance anything that resembled a boat, I was unsuccessful. Thus passed about ten minutes. And then, a black dot appeared between the mountains of waves. It grew larger and smaller in turns. Slowly climbing up to the peak of a wave, and quickly falling from it, a boat was approaching the shore. Brave was the seaman who decided to set out across the strait at a distance of twenty verst s on such a night, and important must his reason have been, to have induced him to it! Thinking this, with an involuntary beating of my heart, I looked at the poor boat, but like a duck, it dived under and then, rapidly waving its oars, like wings, sprang out of the depths in a spray of foam. And I thought to myself, it is going to strike against the shore with all its might and fly into pieces. But it turned deftly to one side, and hurdled unharmed into a small bay. A man of medium height, in a Tatar sheepswool hat, emerged from it. He waved an arm and the three of them took to dragging something out of the boat. The load was so great that even now I don’t understand how it hadn’t sunk. Each took a bundle onto his shoulder and they set off along the shoreline; and soon I lost sight of them. I had to go back, but I confess that all these odd things had perturbed me, and I barely managed to wait until morning.