Vladimir Sorokin - The Blizzard

Crouper, no less tired than the doctor, dozed a bit. He remembered that before setting off he’d left the station boy to close the oven flue so the house would be warm when he returned. The house had warmed up, that was certain, but its master had spent the night elsewhere. He imagined his izba , unheated since morning, and Hoop, the hog, who would be hungry by now. He thought that if the boar squealed with hunger this morning, his neighbor, Fyodor Kirpaty, would think to look in and give him some feed. He thought about the clock ticking alone in the dark, unheated house. Or maybe the clock had already stopped … That’s right, it’d stopped, of course, he hadn’t wound it … He felt chilled and uncomfortable.

“Hey!” the doctor shoved him. “What are you doing? Sleeping? You can’t sleep, you’ll freeze.”

Crouper turned and shook himself, coming to his senses. He began to shiver.

“Naw, I’s … just resting up a bit.” He took hold of the steering rod and tugged on the reins.

The horses moved without urging, apparently feeling the smooth road. The sled carried on.

The road went straight and, miraculously, the strong wind bared it, blowing the snow into drifts on the side. Thus they crossed the field fairly fast and easily; but then the road sloped down and was lost in the snow. Crouper hurried and walked alongside. No sign of the road remained: in the hollow, the snow was equally smooth everywhere while the blizzard whirled and wailed above it.

“I’ll … Damnation.” The wind knocked Crouper down, but he held on to the steering rod.

The wind in the hollow blew so hard that the sled swayed. They lost the road right away and the sled halted in deep snow. Without a word, the doctor got down and walked on ahead through the snow. He found the road quickly; he tested it with his feet and kept going. Crouper followed in his path.

Slowly, step by step, they moved ahead. The doctor kept walking … He stumbled, sank into the snow, and staggered in the wind—but he didn’t lose the road. The hollow went on and on. Suddenly, the doctor saw a hill coming closer, then realized that it wasn’t a hill but some sort of whirling snow cloud, racing toward them. He crouched. Over his head flew an impenetrable vortex of snow; his pince-nez was torn from his face and fluttered on its ribbon.

“Lord Almighty, forgive me for my sins…,” the doctor muttered, falling down on all fours.

The tornado stormed by, and to the doctor it seemed like a vast helicopter of impossible size. The horses neighed in fright under the hood. Crouper squatted, too, but didn’t let go of the steering rod.

This frightful thing passed over them and disappeared.

The doctor put on his pince-nez and looked at the rise ahead, the way out of the hollow. He saw the bared road.

“There’s the road!” he shouted to Crouper.

But Crouper had already seen it himself. Pleased, he waved his mitten at the doctor: “Yep!”

They made it to the road, sat back down, and drove on. The sled emerged from the hollow onto a gently sloping hillock, and Crouper stopped abruptly: there was a fork in the road. He didn’t remember this fork. In good weather he wouldn’t have noticed it, he would have gone the way everyone did. But now he had to decide which way—right or left.

“Old Market is ’bout two versts from the grove,” Crouper thought, pushing his hat back on his forehead, which was damp from sweat and snow. “That means it’s real close by, prob’ly to the left, and the road on the right, now, must lead around to the meadow. The meadow here’s a beauty, nice and smooth … So … we go left.”

The doctor silently awaited the driver’s decision.

“Left!” Crouper shouted, turning the steering rod to the left and giving the reins a jerk.

The sled edged to the left.

“Where are we?” yelled the doctor.

“In Old Market! We c’n rest up here, and afterward the road runs straight.”

The doctor nodded joyfully.

Crouper had been in Old Market only twice: for Matryona Khapilova’s wedding, and with his little brother, who bought a couple of piglets from the old man Avdei Semyonich, whom everyone called Fat Ass. But that had been in the fall and spring, not in the winter in a blizzard. Crouper liked Old Market: there were only nine households, all of them well kept and prosperous. The people there made a living by carving, threshing, and making counterweights. And their meadows were fine. Crouper and his brother and the piglets rode back by way of the meadows because the high road was muddy with the spring thaw. The smoothness and expanse of the Old Market meadows had impressed Crouper. But right now they were all under the snow.

The sled crawled across the flat land. Crouper remembered that just before Old Market there was a little grove, maybe linden, maybe oak.

“As soon as the grove shows up—Old Market’s right there. We’ll knock on a door to warm up. We’ll sit an hour or so and move on. Not far now…,” Crouper thought.

Sensing a village, the horses quickened to a trot even though the road was beginning to disappear under the snow and was soon entirely gone.

“I’ll have to change my boots right away…” The doctor wiggled his toes, which were wet and already beginning to freeze.

Crouper glanced back at the doctor. “The grove’ll be comin’ up now, and then Old Market,” he said to cheer up the doctor.

The doctor looked spent. His nose and pince-nez stuck out comically from the snow-covered figure hunched over the seat.

“Like a snow woman…,” Crouper chuckled to himself. “The old elephant, he’s tuckered now. Such bad luck he’s got with the weather…”

They moved at a slow pace along the white fluffy desert, but the grove of trees didn’t appear.

“Not a mistake here ’bouts, too?” Crouper thought, gazing into the storm with his eyelids forced wide open, though they drooped with exhaustion and threatened to stick together.

Finally the trees could be seen up ahead.

“Thank God…” Crouper laughed.

They reached the grove. The trees were huge, old. Crouper remembered very young trees with the first May leaves.

“Couldn’t have growed up so fast.” He rubbed his eyes.

Suddenly he made out a cross under the trees. Then another, and a third. They came closer. There were more and more crosses, sticking out of the snow.

“Lordy, it’s a cem’tery…” Crouper exhaled, pulling back on the reins.

“A cemetery?” The doctor began furiously wiping his pince-nez.

“A cem’tery,” Crouper repeated, dismounting.

“Well, where’s the village?” muttered the doctor, staring at the tilted crosses around which the blizzard danced and twined as though teasing and mocking them.

“Huh?” said Crouper, bending away from the wind.

“I said, where’s the village?!” the doctor shouted in a voice filled with hatred, for the storm, the cemetery, and that idiot birdbrain Crouper who had led him who knows where. He was angry at his wet toes freezing in his boots; at his heavy, fur-lined, snow-covered coat; at the ridiculous painted sled with its idiotic midget horses inside that idiotic plywood hood; at the blasted epidemic, brought to Russia by some swine from far-off, godforsaken, goddamned Bolivia, which no decent Russian person had any need for at all; at that scientific, pontificating crook Zilberstein, who cared only about his own career and had left earlier on the mail horses without a thought for his colleague, Dr. Garin; at the endless road surrounded by drowsy snowdrifts; at the snakelike, snowy wind whipping ominously above them; at the hopeless gray sky, tattered like the sieve of some stupid, grinning, sunflower-seed-cracking old woman, which kept sowing, sowing, and sowing these accursed snowflakes.