Vladimir Sorokin - The Blizzard

The sled moved along the sleigh tracks; Crouper held the reins loosely, and the doctor smoked.

Soon the forest grew taller and thicker, the road began to descend, and the sled entered a birch grove. Crouper yanked the reins:

“Whoooaa!”

The horses stopped.

Crouper got down and fussed about under the hood.

“What happened?” asked the doctor.

“Gonna cover the horses,” the driver explained, unfurling a burlap tarp.

“Good idea,” the doctor agreed, squinting in the windstorm. “It’s snowing.”

“It’s snowing.” Crouper covered the hood with the canvas tarp, fastening it at the corners. He sat back down and smacked his lips: “Heigh-yup!”

The horses set off again.

“It’s calmer in the forest—there’s just one road, you can see it, no way to get lost…,” thought the doctor. He brushed the snow from his collar.

“How long ago did you decide to use the little horses?” the doctor asked Crouper.

“’Bout four years ago.”

“Why was that?”

“My little brother as lived in Khoprov, Grisha, he died. He left twenty-four horses. And his wife, stands to reason, didn’t wanna take care of ’em. She says: ‘I’m gonna sell ’em.’ Then God’s angel up and made me ask her: ‘How much?’ ‘Three apiece.’ And I had sixty rubles right then. I says: ‘I’ll buy ’em for sixty.’ So we made a deal. I put ’em in a basket and brought ’em back with me to Dolbeshino. Then I got lucky: our bread man, Porfiry, he went off to live in town with his son. I bought his sled fer a good price, and traded a radio fer more horses. And took his place delivering bread. Thirty rubles. That’s what we got to live on.”

“Why didn’t you buy an ordinary horse?”

“Oooorrrrdinaar-y!” Crouper puckered his lips and stretched them forward, which made him look just like a jackdaw in profile. “Cain’t cut enough hay fer an ordinary one. I’m on my lonesome, yur ’onor, like a heron standin’ in a swamp, wher’m I gonna sow that hay! Even fer a cow you cain’t never cut enough hay. I don’t even keep a cow no more, got rid of it. But fer the little ones—nothin’ to it: I plant a row of clover, cut it down, dry it—and it’ll last ’em the whole winter. Grind some oats fer ’em, give ’em a little water—quick as a wink and that’s the end of it.”

“But these days people keep big horses, too,” the doctor pointed out. “In Repishnaya we have a family that keeps a big horse.”

“But that’s a family, yur ’onor!” said Crouper, shaking his head so hard that his hat slipped down even further over his eyes.

Adjusting his hat, he asked the doctor:

“What kinda horse is it?”

“Twice the size of regular ones.”

“Twice? That ain’t much. I seen bigger’uns at the station. You see the new stable there?”

“No.”

“In the fall they builded a ginormous one. I heard tell on the radio how at the Nizhny market there was a cart horse tall as a four-story building.”

“Yes, there are horses that size.” The doctor nodded seriously. “They’re used for extra-heavy work.”

“You seen ’em?”

“I’ve seen them from a distance, in Tver. A draught horse that size was pulling a coal train.”

“Whaddye know!” exclaimed Crouper with a click of the tongue. “How much oats do a horse like that eat in a day?”

“Well,” said the doctor, squinting ahead and wrinkling his nose, “I think that…”

Suddenly the sled jerked and twisted, and a crack was heard; the doctor nearly flew headlong into the snow. Underneath the tarp the horses snorted.

“What…” Crouper only had time to exhale, as his hat fell off and he tumbled chest-first onto the steering rod.

The doctor’s pince-nez sailed off his nose and got tangled in the lace attached to it. He caught it and put it back on. The sled stood at the side of the road, listing to the right.

“Darn you…” Crouper slid down, rubbing his chest. He walked around the sled, squatted, and looked underneath it.

“What’s the problem?” asked the doctor without getting up.

“We banged into somethin’…” Crouper moved to the right side of the road and immediately plunged into deep snow; he turned over, grunting, and squeezed under the sled.

The doctor waited in the listing sled. Finally Crouper’s head appeared:

“Just a sec…”

He threw back the tarpaulin, which the falling snow had already covered, and pulled back on the reins, without returning to his seat:

“C’mon now, c’mon…”

The horses, snorting and huffing, began to prance backward. But the sled simply sputtered in place.

“Why don’t I get off…” The doctor unfastened the bearskin and stepped down.

“C’mon now, c’mon!” Crouper pushed against the sled, helping the horses backstep.

The sled jerked backward, once, twice, and moved off of the unfortunate spot. It came to a halt crosswise on the road. Crouper ran around to the front and squatted. The doctor came over in his long, hooded coat. The tip of the right runner was split.

“There ye go, damnation … Ugh!” Crouper spat on the snow.

“It cracked?” asked the doctor, leaning over to get a closer look.

“It splitted,” Crouper said in an anguished voice, making a squelching sound.

“What did we hit?” asked the doctor, looking in front of the sled.

There was only loose snow, and new flakes falling on it. Crouper began to rake the snow away with his boot, and suddenly kicked something hard, which slid out. The driver and passenger leaned over, trying to see what it was, but couldn’t make out anything. The doctor wiped his pince-nez, put it on again, and suddenly saw it:

“Mein Gott…” He reached down cautiously.

His hand touched something smooth, hard, and transparent. Crouper got down on all fours to look. A transparent pyramid about the size of Crouper’s hat could just barely be discerned in the snow. The passenger and driver felt it. It was made of a dense, clear, glasslike material. The storm swirled snowflakes around the perfectly even facets of the pyramid. The doctor poked it—the pyramid easily slid to the side. He took it in his hands and stood. The pyramid was extraordinarily light; indeed, one could almost say that it weighed nothing at all. The doctor turned it in his hands:

“What the devil…”

Crouper looked it over, wiping the snow off his eyebrows:

“What’s that?”

“A pyramid,” said the doctor, wrinkling his nose. “Hard as steel.”

“That’s what hit us?” asked Crouper.

“Apparently.” The doctor turned the pyramid around. “What the hell is it doing here?”

“Maybe it fell off a wagon?”

“But what’s it for?”

“Oh now, yur ’onor…” Crouper brushed the snow away in annoyance. “Nowadays there’s so many things that ye cain’t figure out what they’s for…”

He grasped the broken tip of the runner and moved it carefully:

“Looks like it didn’t break all the ways.”

With a sigh of returning irritation, the doctor tossed the pyramid aside. It disappeared in the snow.

“Yur ’onor, we gotta tie that runner with somethin’. And turn right back ’round the way we come.” Crouper wiped his nose with his mitten.

“Back? What do you mean, back?”

“We only gone ’bout four versts. But down there in the hollow the snow’s bound to be deeper, and we’ll get stuck with a runner what’s tied. And that’ll be the end of the story.”

“Wait, what do you mean, go back?” said the doctor. “People are dying out there, orderlies are waiting, there’s an epi-dem-ic! We can’t go back!”

“We’ve got our own … epi-demic.” Crouper burst out laughing. “Just take a look-see how that runner splitted.”