Vladimir Sorokin - The Blizzard

“Oh my God in heaven,” muttered the doctor.

“Well, that’s the thing of it…,” Crouper said with a doomed nod.

The doctor squatted next to the head and brushed the snow off the covered eye. It, too, was half closed. The mouth was hidden in a snowy beard, and the tip of the sled hung above it. Attached to the giant’s protruding ear was a heavy copper earring in the form and size of a sixty-pound weight. It sparkled in the snow.

The doctor touched the earring cautiously. He touched the enormous, frozen nose with its rough, greasy, pimply skin. He turned around. Crouper stood there, and from the sorrowful expression on his face one might have thought that the sled had driven into the nostril of his long-lost brother.

The doctor began laughing and fell back into the snow. His laughter rang out amid the firs. The horses replied with uneasy whinnies from inside the sled. This elicited a new fit of laughter from the doctor. He writhed on his back in the snow, laughing, his pince-nez sparkling and his fleshy mouth open wide.

Crouper stood still, like a wet jackdaw. Then he began to cluck his tongue. He smiled and shook his absurdly large hat.

“You’re a real master, Kozma!” The doctor wiped the tears of laughter from his eyes.

“Well now, how on earth?… No one’d believe it, if’n we told ’em, yur ’onor.”

“They certainly wouldn’t!” exclaimed the doctor, shaking his hat.

He stood up and brushed off the snow. Limping, he stepped back and looked:

“That lug must be about six meters tall … Had to go and kick the bucket here…”

Crouper noticed a large, round object under the snow next to the giant’s corpse. He pushed the object with his foot, knocking the snow off. A basket of woven twigs appeared. Crouper brushed off the snow with his mitten: glass sparkled. He cleaned the snow off the object. It turned out to be a large, three-bucket, green glass bottle set in a basket holder.

“So that’s it, yur ’onor…” Crouper cleared the snow from the enormous bottleneck, and sniffed it. “Vodka!”

He kicked the crust of ice on the bottle, knocked it off, and turned it over. Not a drop came out.

“Drunk up the whole thing, he did,” Crouper concluded reproachfully.

“He drank it,” the doctor agreed, “and gave up the ghost right on the road. There you have it, good old Russian stupidity.”

“Coulda least leaned up against a tree,” said Crouper, scratching his rear end. He realized he’d said something silly: this giant could only have leaned against a hundred-year-old fir, not one of the young saplings all around.

“Get drunk and collapse on the road … Utter idiocy! Russian stupidity!” The red-faced doctor smiled wryly; he took out his cigarette case and lit up the last papirosa .

“The worst part is—it’s the same runner crashed again, yur ’onor.” Crouper sniffed and scratched himself. “If only it hadn’t of…”

“What?” The doctor didn’t follow. He puffed on his cigarette.

“It’s the same runner what cracked back apiece.”

“You’re kidding! The same one? Damn it! So what are you standing around for?! Pull it out of that lout!”

“Just a minute, yur ’onor…”

Crouper looked in at the horses, leaned hard against the sled, and clucked:

“C’mon, c’mon, c’mon!”

Snorting, the horses began to step backward. But the sled didn’t budge. Crouper realized what the problem was; he looked under the sled and clucked sorrowfully:

“We’re just hanging in air, yur ’onor. The drive belt ain’t even touchin’ the snow.”

“Come on, then…” Reeking of alcohol and having forgotten about his knee, the doctor clenched the cigarette in his teeth and put his shoulder to the sled. “Come on, nooowww!”

Crouper leaned in, too. The sled shook, but the giant’s head didn’t release the runner.

“Stuck…,” Crouper exhaled.

“Right in the nose!” the doctor exclaimed, and laughed again.

“Have to chop it off.” Crouper reached into the coachman’s seat for the axe.

“The runner?!” The doctor raised an indignant eyebrow.

“The nose.”

“Chop away, my man, chop away.” The doctor took one last drag and tossed his cigarette butt aside.

The moon shone brightly. The fir trees stood around like part of a living Christmas card.

The doctor unfastened his coat; he was hot. Crouper approached the head, holding the axe in hand. He eyed the head and began to chop at the nostril that the runner had entered. Panting heavily, the doctor leaned his elbow against the sled and watched Crouper’s work.

Pieces of frozen flesh flew out from under the axe. Then came a dull thud as the axe struck bone.

“Just don’t chop up the runner,” the doctor commanded.

“A’course not…,” Crouper muttered.

As he hacked away at the enormous frozen nose, Kozma remembered the first time he’d ever seen one of the big people. He was ten at the time. He wasn’t living in Dolbeshino but in his father’s home in the prosperous village of Pokrovskoye. That summer the autumn fair was moved from Dolgoye to Pokrovskoye. The local merchants decided to cut down Rotten Grove and build stands for the fair. The ancient oak grove had been in Pokrovskoye since the olden days, when there was a landowner’s estate house, which had been burned down during the Red Troubles. The oaks in the grove were enormous, dried out, and some of them were decaying and rotting. Boys played war or werewolves in the huge hollows of these oaks. And now they’d decided to cut the grove down. The merchants of Pokrovskoye had hired three giants for this: Avdot, Borka, and Viakhir. On a warm summer evening, they entered Pokrovskoye, each carrying a knapsack, a saw, and a cleaver on his shoulders. Like the frozen creature on the road, these giants were five to six meters tall. Boys greeted them with hoots and whistles. But the big ones treated the little boys like sparrows and paid them no mind. They set up in the old threshing barn of the merchant Baksheev, and in the morning began clearing the oaks. Little Kozma was both frightened and excited as he watched them work: when the big ones went about their task, everything cracked and collapsed. They not only toppled all the oaks, sawed them into logs, and chopped them into pieces, but also pulled the huge oak stumps out by the roots and split them into firewood. In the evenings, they drank about three buckets of milk apiece and ate mashed potatoes with lard; they sat on oak stumps and sang in rough, thundering voices. Kozma remembered one song, which lop-eared, red-faced Avdot had sung in a slow, deep, scary voice:

You carried me, Mátushka,

In your womb,

You wailed, Kasátushka,

Over my tomb.

Then Avdot and Viakhir fought over money. Viakhir beat Avdot, who got mad and left Pokrovskoye without waiting until the work was finished. As the womenfolk told it, he spit blood all along the road from Pokrovskoye to Borovki. Since Avdot left, the Pokrovskoye merchants paid the giants a third less. So they had their revenge the last night and took a dump in merchant Baksheev’s well. It took him three days to clean his well after that; they hauled out buckets and buckets of giant shit …

Crouper had trouble chopping through the nose cartilage. The runner that had caught in the nostril was visible now. Crouper and the doctor rocked the sled, but the runner wouldn’t come loose.

“The runner pierced the maxillary sinus and got stuck there,” said the doctor, examining the situation. “Chop right here, from the top!”

Crouper tore off his mittens, spit on his hands, and began to chop at the frontal bone. The bone proved hard and thick. Crouper rested twice as he chopped deeper into it. Pieces of white bone flew out from under the axe, sparkling in the moonlight.