Sometimes dark birds rise from the kurgans. Sometimes wild songs plunge into the darkening people and disappear deep within them, as the birds disappear into the far reaches of the sky. In all directions, everything seems endless. The very houses cannot provide a shield against this immensity; their small windows are filled with it. Only in the dark corners of the rooms the old icons stand like milestones of God, and the shimmer of a small light passes through their frames like a lost child through the starry night. These icons are the sole reference point, the only reliable signpost along the way, and no house can exist without them. New ones are always needed—when one falls apart from age or decay, when someone gets married and builds a new hut, or when somebody—for example, old Abraham—dies with the desire to take Saint Nicholas, the wonder-worker, along with him in his hands joined in prayer, doubtless so he can compare the saints in heaven with this picture and acknowledge this most highly venerated one above all the others.

This is how it happens that Peter Akimovitch, though really a shoemaker by trade, also paints icons. When he is tired of one kind of work, he changes over, after having crossed himself three times, to the other one, and over both his sewing and hammering and his painting the same piety presides. By now he is already an old man, but fairly vigorous nonetheless. His back, which he bends over his boots, he straightens up again when he paints, and thus he has maintained good posture and a certain balance in his shoulders and lower back. He has spent the better part of his life entirely alone, not getting in the least involved in the turmoil that came about when his wife Akulina bore him children and when these died or got married. Only in his seventieth year did Peter begin to relate to those who remained in the house and to regard them as really and truly there.

They were Akulina, his wife, a quiet, humble person, who had spent herself almost to the dregs on her children; an aging, ugly daughter; and Alyosha, a son who had been born inordinately late and was just seventeen years old. Peter wanted to train Alyosha to paint; for he saw that before long he would not be able to fill all the orders that were coming in. But he soon dropped the lessons. Alyosha had painted the Holy Virgin but had come up with something so far from the strict and proper paragon that his concoction looked like a picture of Mariana, the daughter of the cossack Golokopytenko, that is to say, like something thoroughly sinful; and old Peter, having crossed himself, hastened to paint over the offending board with a picture of Saint Dimitri, who for unknown reasons he prized above all the other saints.

Alyosha also did not try to paint any more pictures. When his father had not ordered him to gild a halo, he was usually out on the steppes, no one knew where. No one kept him at home. The mother was bewildered by him and was shy of talking to him, as if he were a stranger or an official. His sister had beaten him while he was still a child, and now, since Alyosha had grown up, she had begun to despise him because he did not beat her. And in the village, too, there was no one who cared about the youth. Mariana, the cossack’s daughter, had laughed at him when he declared that he wanted to marry her, and after that Alyosha had not asked any of the other girls to accept him as their groom. No one wanted to bring him into the Zaporozhian Sich,¹ because he looked too weakly and perhaps was also a bit too young.