“Just what I say. One must use sense in making one’s nest. I’ll weave me a nest, says the man, and then I’ll live as a man should. In this way and in that.”
Here Kuzma tapped his breast and his brow with his finger.
Tikhon Ilitch poured himself out another glass of liquor. Kuzma, having donned a silver-framed pair of eyeglasses, sipped the boiling-hot amber fluid from his saucer. Tikhon Ilitch gazed at him with beaming eyes; and after turning something over in his mind, he said: “Evidently, brother, that sort of thing is not for the likes of us. If you live in the country, sup your coarse cabbage-soup and wear wretched bast-shoes. Do as your neighbours do!”
“Bast-shoes!” retorted Kuzma tartly. “We’ve been wearing them a couple of thousand years, brother—the thrice-accursed things! For two thousand years we’ve been living with our mouths agape. We’re doing the devil’s work. And who is to blame? What I have to say about it is this: ’tis high time to get ashamed of casting shame for everything on our neighbours—blaming our neighbours instead of ourselves! The Tatars oppressed us, you see! We’re a young nation, you see! Just as if, over there in Europe, all sorts of Mongols didn’t oppress folks a lot, too! As if the Germans were any older than we are! Well, anyhow, that’s a special subject.”
“Correct!” said Tikhon Ilitch. “Come on, we’d better get down to business.”
Kuzma turned his empty glass upside down on the saucer, lighted a cigarette, and resumed his exposition.
“I don’t go to church.”
“That signifies that you are a molokan?” asked Tikhon Ilitch, and said to himself: “I’m lost! Evidently, I must get rid of Durnovka!”