Ilitch! Could anything more lewd and filthy be invented? And our proverbs! ‘One man who has been soundly thrashed is worth two who have not been.’ ‘Simplicity is worse than thieving.’ ”
“So, according to you, the best way for a man to live is like an arrant fool?” inquired Tikhon Ilitch with a sneer.
And Kuzma joyfully snapped up his words: “Well, that’s right, that’s the idea! There’s nothing in the whole world so beggar-bare as we are, and on the other hand there’s nobody more insolent on the ground of that same nakedness. What’s the vicious way to insult a person? Accuse ’em of poverty! Say: ‘You devil! You haven’t a morsel to eat.’ Here’s an illustration: Deniska—well, I mean the son of Syery, he’s a cobbler—said to me the other day—”
“Wait a minute,” interrupted Tikhon Ilitch. “How’s Syery himself getting on?”
“Deniska says he’s ‘perishing with hunger.’ ”
“A good-for-nothing peasant!” said Tikhon Ilitch with conviction. “Don’t sing any of your songs about him to me.”
“I’m not singing!” retorted Kuzma angrily. “But I ought to do it. For his name is Krasoff. However, that’s another story. You’d better listen to what I have to say about Deniska. Well, he told me this: ‘Sometimes, in a famine year, we foremen would go to the neighbourhood of the cemetery in the Black Suburb; and there those public women were—regular troops of them. And they were hungry, the lean hags, extremely hungry! If you gave one of them half a pound of bread for her work she’d devour it to the last crumb, there under you. It was downright ridiculous!’ Take note,” cried Kuzma sternly, pausing: “ ‘It was downright ridiculous’!”