“For instance, I was sitting in the police station after the horse-stealing affair. ‘They will send me to Siberia,’ I was thinking when the constable began to rage because the stove in his new house smoked.
I said to him,
‘This is a business which I can set right for you, your Honor.’
He shut me up.
‘It is a thing,’ he grumbled, ‘which the cleverest workman could not manage.’
Then I said to him,
‘Sometimes a shepherd is cleverer than a general.’ I felt very brave toward every one just then. Nothing mattered now, with Siberia before me.
‘All right; try,’ he said, ‘but if it smokes worse afterwards I will break all your bones for you.’
In two days I had finished the work. The constable was astonished. ‘AchP he cried, ‘you fool, you blockhead!
Why, you are a skilled workman, and you steal horses! How is it?
I said to him,
‘That was simply a piece of foolery, your Honor.’
‘That’s true,’ he said, ‘it was foolery. I am sorry for you.’
‘Yes, I am sorry,’ he repeated.
Do you see”?
A man in the police force, carrying out his duties without remorse, and yet he was sorry for me.”
“Well, what happened then?” I asked him.
“Nothing.
He was sorry for me.
What else should happen?”
“What was the use of pitying you? You are like a stone.”
Yaakov laughed good-naturedly. “Funny fellow!
A stone, you say?
Well, one may feel for stones. A stone also serves in its proper place; streets are paved with stones.
One ought to pity all kinds of materials; nothing is in its place by chance.
What is soil?
Yet little blades of grass grow in it/’
When the stoker spoke like this, it was quite clear to me that he knew something more than I could grasp.
“What do you think of the cook?” I asked him.
“Of Medvyejenok?” said Yaakov, calmly.
“What do I think of him?
There is nothing to think about him at all.”
That was true.
Ivan Ivanovich was so strictly correct and smooth that one’s thoughts could get no grip on him.
There was only one interesting thing about him: he loved the stoker, was always scolding him, and yet always invited him to tea.
One day he said to him: “If you had been my serf and I had been your master, I would have flogged you seven times each week, you sluggard!”
Yaakov replied in a serious tone: “Seven times? That’s rather a lot!”
Although he abused the stoker, the cook for some reason or other fed him with all kinds of things. He would throw a morsel to him roughly and say: “There. Gobble it up!”
Yaakov would devour it without any haste, saying: “I am accumulating a reserve of strength through you, Ivan Ivanovich.”
“And what is the use of strength to you, lazy-bones?”
“What is the use?
Why, I shall live all the longer for it.’
“Why should you live, useless one?”
“But useless people go on living.
Besides, you know, it is very amusing to be alive, isn’t it?
Living, Ivan Ivanovich, is a very comforting business.”
“What an idiot!”
“Why do you say that?”
“I-di-ot!”
“There’s a way of speaking!” said Yaakov in amazement, and Medvyejenok said to me: “Just think of it! We dry up our blood and roast the marrow out of our bones in that infernal heat at the stoves while he guzzles like a boar!”