Free The Greatest Russian Stories of Crime and Suspense by Otto Penzler

solid grey but as thick as in his youth now long past.
    “I don’t hold it against you, Vladimir, that you called me Corporal Prishibeyev, for you are still young and silly. You don’t even understand how things have changed since Corporal Prishibeyev’s time. If you called a police officer that in those days …” Aniskin gave a listless wave of his hand. “Oh well, what’s the use.… You wouldn’t understand.”
    Without another glance at the teacher, Aniskin plodded down the village street, leaving round tracks in the dust with his sandals and shaking his head every three steps. He did not hurry, but his stride was long and he soon disappeared in the sun’s rosy glow.
    * Corporal Prishibeyev is a character from Chekhov’s story of the same title who keeps pulling people up and playing a volunteer policeman in the hope of introducing his beloved army order everywhere.—Tr.

3
    Aniskin awoke about eight o’clock in the evening, his usual time, opened his eyes, lay for a while silently, without stirring, listening to the noises inside the house, the tread of his wife Glafira on the floorboards, his youngest daughter Zinaida whispering with a girl-friend in the next room and the cow chewing its cud in the shed. It was hot and stuffy under the cotton bed-curtain, but Aniskin was not sweaty, for he had not been making any strenuous movements in his sleep.
    The inspector thought about this and that: the Kolotovkins had been missing a calf these five days; the Murzins were expecting a son to come on leave from his military service and could well be planning to make some illicit homebrew; the first team had two harrows missing, old ones, to be true, but quite good, with a horse; Vanka, the tractor-driver, had again spent the night at Panka Voloshina’s; the lad was nearing twenty and his parents hoped he would marry soon; Grandfather Anisim, the fisherman, was selling sterlet on the sly and it was the forbidden season for sterlet fishing. A lot of thoughts crowded into Aniskin’s head, but one was uppermost, and only now he admitted to himself that ever since the morning he had been turning it over in his big head, as incessantly and heavily as the river current rolls over smooth stone, “Will he go or won’t he?”
    All the while Aniskin was making his way to the teacher’s house, talking to him, thinking about things past or lying down for his afternoon nap, the same thought was boring into his mind, “Will he go or won’t he?” But if he had avoided thinking about it all day and chased the thought away, now, as he lay under the curtain cool with inactivity, he began thinking about Genka Paltsev full blast. And as soon as he let his thoughts dwell on him, he understood that his visit to the teacher and his sleep under the curtain and his present meaningless lolling were all manoeuvres to escape Genka Paltsev.
    The last thought stuck with Aniskin, and he kept turning it this way and that, letting it sink in and then discarding it to snatch it back again the next moment. Thousands of threads took him back into the past, hit at him and caressed him, lulled him and roused him. One moment Aniskin turned himself inside out, as it were, the next he shrank into a ball. The thought puzzled and baffled him and he was caught in a mass of inexplicables.
    “Damn,” he swore finally in a whisper and suddenly noticed that he was covered with sticky sweat. It appeared that, while thinking about Genka, he had been tossing about in bed and making unnecessary movements with his arms and legs.
    “Glafira!” he called out.
    Nobody answered, there were no steps heard, but a tawny gypsy face appeared in the parting of the curtain and the sullen eyes gleamed inquiringly:
    “Well?”
    “I’m getting up. Put on the samovar.”
    “The samovar is ready.”
    Glafira disappeared as noiselessly as she had come, and Aniskin shook his finger at her back.
    “She always knows everything,” he thought in resentful wonderment, lowering