interested. As soon as you've left home, a thief will find out that you have food lying about, and he'll come take a look. He'll clean you out of house and home and won't even say thank you.
That's just what thieves do: they take everything. Meat, noodles, nuts, goosebread, marshrooms, if you've got them saved up --everything. But they don't take rusht. There's plenty of it everywhere. You have to be a real lazybones not to have enough rusht! True, if it's really good rusht, dry and fluffy--then they might go after it. They might take the rusht too.
You can understand a thief. Here he is, walking through the village and he sees the izba door is closed with a stick. The owners aren't home. They're out, but there might be some rabbit meat in the izba. Mightn't there? It is possible, isn't it? Yes indeed, there might! Maybe the owner managed to hit a rabbit with a rock, or maybe he traded eggs or horsetail with his neighbors. Maybe he's got a knack for catching rabbits! The idea gets into your head and stays there. If you walk on by you'll never know. You can't help taking a peek. So the thief goes in, looks around. If he guessed right and there's meat--he'll take it. If not, he gets mad that there isn't any and he'll take whatever he can find, even worrums. And once he's pinched one thing, what's to hold him back? The izba's already been burgled, he figures, and so he'll go and clean the place out.
But Benedikt doesn't have anything to steal. He doesn't keep provisions, he eats what he catches. All that's there is a full trunk of rusht.
What's so good about rusht? Well, it's good for all sorts of things. You can smoke it, and drink it, and make ink out of it, and dye threads with it if someone wants to embroider a cloth. It makes good mead, especially when winter's coming. You can use it to keep the house warm by sticking it between the logs to fill the cracks. Some people have tried to cover the roof with it, but
that doesn't work. The bunches are round and stiff--it just falls apart. Straw is good for a roof. If you're rich, you can use wood planks.
You can find rusht in the bog. On weekends everyone grabs a basket as soon as it's light and sets off in different directions. Benedikt found a good place. Nikita Ivanich put up a post there that says "Garden Ring." There's no ring of course, just izbas in rows. The town ends there. And right beyond the izbas there's a bog full of rusht. More than you can pick. Even the locals won't shoo you away; other Golubchiks would beat you up for going near their place, but these people don't care. So you hurry along just after dawn, in winter it's murky, red, and blows cold.
From the dawn a luxurious cold Pierces the garden.
Just like Fyodor Kuzmich wrote.
We don't have gardens, of course, only maybe a Murza might, but the part about the cold--that's true enough. It goes straight through you. Benedikt's felt boots have thinned out, his feet can feel the snow. You run quick quick over Foul Bridge to the top of the hill, then down again past the Cockynork neighborhood. If a Cockynork sticks his head out you throw a rock at him to warm yourself up, and keep running. You throw the rock because the Cockynorks, they don't talk like us: all they say is blah-blah-blah and blah-blah-blah--you can't understand a thing. Why do they talk like that, why don't they want to talk like we do? Who knows. Maybe on purpose. Or maybe it's just a bad habit, that kind of thing can happen.
They're just cutting off their noses to spite their faces. What can they say in Cockynork? Our language is handier any way you look at it: you can sit down, talk things over, discuss them: such and such and thus and so. And everything's clear as day.
The Cockynorks are just plain stubborn and that's all there is to it. Some say that their noses get in their way; that they'd be happy to sit down and chat in our language, except for their noses. Their noses practically touch the ground--it's really funny. That's the
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