Swans

A Jewish boy named Levka proved to be another good friend. He was thin, red-headed, and freckled, very lively and spry. The Petrov boys were drawn to him right away, and he enriched their store of knowledge with amazing tricks. He could turn his eyelids inside out. These turned-out eyelids were bright red, like blood; he would run around with them like that, frightening all the children. He knew how to make peculiar guttural founds, a skill he quickly taught Kolya and Volodya [Bukharin's oldest brother]. They mastered this art to perfection despite the protests of their mother, who called them "idi-atic noises" -- but her authority as a mother had nearly disappeared. Levka knew how to pass a string up his nose, then spit the end out of his mouth, and "saw" it back and forth. He also could swallow spent bullets, which he found near the town's military barracks. Like him, the Petrov boys would "saw" through their noses and swallow bullets. Then they would watch carefully to see when the bullets came out, checking their feces, and rejoiced when a bullet reappeared in the world, having completed its cycle as it was supposed to. In a word, Levka was an all-around expert.

But he did read a little, and sometimes liked to blurt out radical remarks. He didn't believe in God and treated the clergy with irony, though not with malice. In general, he was not capable of malice: he would flare up, then his anger would die away; he had to be "reheated" for angry feelings to stay alive. In his life he was not a systematic person, but he was kind. There was a saying about him, "Ivan Antonych goes out to buy sausage and comes home with a canary."

Periodically certain people came to see Ivan Antonych on business-so-called commercial intermediaries, advocates for the owners of stores or businesses that had been shut down, representatives of the commercial caste. They usually came in a group: Raful, a Jewish elder, wearing his Orthodox peisy [sidecurls] and a large, uncombed beard, gray and greasy; his red eyes, forever watering, were wasting away, and his eyelids, stricken by trachoma, were shot to pieces; swollen, dark-blue veins stood out on his skinny arms; his gaunt body, in a long, soiled gaberdine, always seemed to be trembling from the weakness and infirmity of age; his scratchy voice seemed to know how to hit only two notes: pathos and supplication. But to a large extent this was a pose developed over decades of subservience to the flock of carrion crows -- the chinovniks.

For Bukharin, as for Russia's pre-Marxist radicals, the political quintessence of czarism had been its "chinovnik state" ruling despotically over a hapless people through official lawlessness or "arbitrariness." Revolution promised a break with this tradition -- the advent of a non-chinovnik state of and for the people, what Lenin had called a "commune state" and what was for Bukharin the hopeful antithesis of contemporary history's drift toward a "New Leviathan." Throughout the early and mid-twenties, having rejected his own brief enthusiasm for "statization," Bukharin had worried aloud about the possibility of "a new state of chinovniki" and a new "official lawlessness" in Soviet conditions. He had seen this danger in the Left's "monopolistic philosophy" and "willful impulses;" but he had looked above all to the party to guard against the natural chinovnik habits and abuses of state officialdom, and to be the paladin of the people.

After the repast everyone went for a walk in the depths of the forest, which lured them with its breathing air of freshness. The handsome beech trees, with trunks it would take several people to reach around, trunks as smooth as the body of an immense caryatid, marked only here and there with blotches of dark brown moss, lifted their crowns up toward the sky, but those crowns were lost in the overall green chaos. The sprawling oaks with their wrinkled, wizened bark, like the skin of centenarians, spread their branches in all directions, like gnarled and knotty arms, and their carved and fretted leaves enframed their solid torsos with a scattering of green. Hiding in deep shadow were the tender little white bells of Solomon's seal, hanging in rows beneath the dark green leaves. Stubby little branches of wintergreen rose from the earth, giving off a gentle, barely perceptible aroma. Jutting up among the ferns were light green horsetails, remote descendants of colossal species long extinct. And stalks of willow herb, with their tender pink flowers, were sticking up high . . . The subtle aromas of fresh grass and rotting leaves were carried in the air, which was filled with primordial delights. Somewhere above, a woodpecker tapped. Titmice chirped. Onto the half rotten trunk of a large fallen tree there hopped, out of some thicket, a teensy little wren; it began to chatter, flicked its tail, and darted like a baby mouse into a heap of fallen branches. "Papa! The wild pear tree! How big it is!"