“And was it very old when it died?” asked my friend, falling in with my drift.

“Four to five hundred years old,” I reported quite truthfully, “and various of its relatives reached an even more advanced age.”

“You mean, without ever being laid to rest in a book?”

“As far as I know, they were moving from one pair of lips to another the whole time.”

“They didn’t even take time off to sleep?”

“Oh, yes, immediately upon rising from the lips of a singer, they took up residence in a heart, where it was warm and dark.”

“Were people so quiet, then, that songs could sleep in their hearts?” Ewald seemed quite incredulous.

“That must have been the case. It is said that they talked less, danced dances that rose slowly to a climax and had a nice swaying quality to them, and above all, they didn’t laugh loudly the way we hear people doing today, in spite of the generally higher level of culture.”

Ewald was just about to ask another question, but he thought better of it and smiled: “I keep asking one question after the other—but maybe you have a story in mind?” He looked at me with anticipation.

A story? Oh, I don’t know. I only wanted to tell you that these songs were passed down in certain families. One generation took them and passed them on to the next, not entirely unused, showing the wear and tear of daily use, but nevertheless undamaged—somewhat the way old Bibles get passed down from grandparents to grandchildren. A disinherited person was distinguished from his fully entitled kin by the fact that he couldn’t sing, or at least knew only a fraction of the songs of his fathers and grandfathers and had lost along with the rest of the songs that crucial body of experience that all these bylini and skaski¹ represented for the people. Thus, for example, Yegor Timofeyevitch, against the will of his father, old Timofei, had married a beautiful young woman and moved with her to Kiev, the holy city, in the vicinity of which are the tombs of the greatest martyrs of the holy Orthodox Church. Father Timofei, known as the most accomplished singer for ten days’ journey all around, cursed his son and told his neighbor that he often felt pretty sure he’d never had a son. Nevertheless, in his trouble and sorrow he became mute and turned away all the young people who crowded into his hut to receive the heritage of many songs that was shut up in the old man as in a dust-laden violin:

“Father, our little father, just sing us this or that song. You see, we want to take them back to our villages, and then you would hear them in all the yards as soon as evening came and the animals had settled down for the night.”

The old man just kept sitting on the stove shaking his head the whole day long. He did not hear well anymore, and since he was never sure that one of the young people who were now always hovering around his house had not asked for a song again, he set his white head to shaking: no, no, no, until he fell asleep, and for a while longer afterward. He would have gladly satisfied the young people; it made him sad to think that maybe very soon his own mute, dead dust would lie over the songs. But if he had tried to teach something to one of the lads, then surely he would have had to remember his own Yegoruschka, and who knows what would have happened then! For only because he was altogether silent had no one ever seen him cry. For him, behind every word lay a sob, and he always had to be careful to keep his mouth closed, for otherwise, out they would have come.