Author’s note: “Weekend Short” is a recurring column profiling short stories. Analysis from the readership is encouraged in the comments section.
Welcome to the weekend!
Today’s short story is a dour Russian account from Anton Chekhov, the Russian doctor and author who lived during the latter half of the 19th century and who met with success early enough and frequently enough to support his family from his teenage years onward. In his time, Chekhov was chastised by critics and writers for the absence of obvious political intent in his writing, preferring to leave his subjects as he found them and eschewing the authorial tyranny many writers grant themselves for a circumspect reserve concerning his characters’ lives and intentions.
“A Dead Body” finds us on a roadside with two men and the remains of a third. The two living stand vigil against old night so that the deceased might enter glory on the third day. If one has never found himself in the woods with naught but a small fire and questionable company, you cannot know just how lively and grasping a place it can be.
Chekhov writes:
A still August night. A mist is rising slowly from the fields and casting an opaque veil over everything within eyesight. Lighted up by the moon, the mist gives the impression at one moment of a calm, boundless sea, at the next of an immense white wall. The air is damp and chilly. Morning is still far off. A step from the bye-road which runs along the edge of the forest a little fire is gleaming. A dead body, covered from head to foot with new white linen, is lying under a young oak-tree. A wooden ikon is lying on its breast. Beside the corpse almost on the road sits the “watch”—two peasants performing one of the most disagreeable and uninviting of peasants’ duties. One, a tall young fellow with a scarcely perceptible moustache and thick black eyebrows, in a tattered sheepskin and bark shoes, is sitting on the wet grass, his feet stuck out straight in front of him, and is trying to while away the time with work. He bends his long neck, and breathing loudly through his nose, makes a spoon out of a big crooked bit of wood; the other—a little scraggy, pock-marked peasant with an aged face, a scanty moustache, and a little goat’s beard—sits with his hands dangling loose on his knees, and without moving gazes listlessly at the light. A small camp-fire is lazily burning down between them, throwing a red glow on their faces. There is perfect stillness. The only sounds are the scrape of the knife on the wood and the crackling of damp sticks in the fire.
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It’s a short story (imagine that), saying little and insinuating much. At first blush, we get little more than two men taking part in an unwelcome duty that has them freezing and uncomfortable in the middle of the woods. The color of the story depends on the entrance of the third living man, the Orthodox pilgrim. Innocently enough, he asks the watchmen for directions to his uncle’s brickyard and it’s only upon realizing their grisly obligation that he seemingly unravels. Ultimately, he convinces the younger of the men to accompany him down the road, abandoning the elderly simple man and the soul of the deceased to the predations of that land.
I find two parts especially interesting. One, the oak tree that the dead man lies under is an oak, a tree with significant pagan meaning in Slavic folklore that has the ability to bridge between the world of the living and that of the dead. The pilgrim appears to be a Christian, claiming to travel from monastery to monastery, yet, seemingly his knowledge of Christian rites is incomplete (or else he’s testing the men), while his knowledge of the Bible is passable. I can’t help but think of the temptation of Christ and Satan’s selfsame use of the Psalms to misrepresent God’s word. I think it fair to assume that the pilgrim is a demon, a pagan trickster, who is intent on consuming the soul of the dead man.
Second, the story seems an Eden-like temptation of the younger man’s (Syoma’s) pride. We know he thinks himself saddled with a dimwitted man for a job no one wants, and goes so far as to berate his twitchy, elderly companion. When the pilgrim arrives, he treats exclusively with the younger man and has Syoma confirm that none of them know the reason for the man’s death and then hazard that it could have been a suicide (not worth Syoma’s time, then). The pilgrim then makes mention of money, something of which the peasant boy has little to none. He then asks the older man if he would accompany him to town, pricking the boy’s pride. Ultimately, the boy is convinced that he should abandon his post to advance himself while given the face-saving excuse that he is accompanying a timid pilgrim to his final destination. The simple man does exactly as one expects and snoozes as the spirit of the deceased is seized upon by the darkness under the oak’s eaves.
Like Tolstoy’s (a contemporary of whom Chekhov was both a student and critic) “How Much Land Does a Man Need?,” this Faustian account is a warning against pride relative to station. We know the young man knows what he ought to do, but without the correction of his elder, he chooses wrongly and likely damns all three of them. It must be Sunday morning.
It has been the wettest, most verdant summer in recent memory, and while those of us averse to humidity have had to wade through life, one cannot deny the benefits. “Knee high by the Fourth of July” is the rule of thumb for corn, but it was waist high then and it’s now somewhere well above eight foot (I stand 6’6″ in boots and helmet and am completely dwarfed).
EAA’s AirVenture is just wrapping up now, so we’ve had the pleasure of seeing old birds, prototypes, and all other description of airborne contraptions in the skies these past weeks. Earthbound by birth and inclination, I’ve been tearing up and down the backroads on my modified Suzuki FA50 (59 ccs, baby), and just finished up some overdue maintenance last night.
The smell of 80W-90 gear oil is arguably one of the most nauseating of the otherwise pleasing garage scents. It always brings to mind a weekly PMS check on the USS Carl Vinson‘s vacuum swing absorption cryogenic oxygen generator. There is no purgatory quite like waiting in line for two hours for hazmat, another two for tag-outs, just for one minute of topping up a system that rarely, if ever, worked. The rimey, Suessian LPGeeco was so much better.
Anyway, I hope your summer is treating you well and that the deer, squirrels, and rabbits haven’t completely devastated your flowerboxes and garden beds.
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Author’s note: If there’s a short story you’d like to see discussed in the coming weeks, please send your suggestion to label@nationalreview.com.