Excerpt from "The Badgers" by Leonid Leonov

The Fierce Kalafat

My grandfather heard this story from his father, and his father read it in one of the books of the Old Believers.

'Twas in the olden times when there was more elbow-room everywhere. And the airs were purer and cleaner. Fields and birds, woods and foxes, and clear springs sprouting in the gullies. Domains were so mighty in those days that no lifetime was long enough for traveling all round them. The tsars that reigned were an unsociable lot, one wilder than the other. A tsar, look you, would go up in the morning to the top of his tower and look out over the woods- very nice and open views there used to be in those days, too- and he'd see the clouds sailing peacefully in the sky, and hear the wind in the woods and the river prattling along. And the loneliness of it would come over him all of a sudden and he'd roar from the top of the tower: “Tis all mine! The woods and the river and the bogs and the gullies and the peasants and the bears and the land and everything under heaven!” The peasant didn't take any offense at that, even if he heard him. A rooster's just the same: he likes to crow from his perch about his barnyard, and they feed him ant-eggs for it. And what if it was a tsar crowing from his perch instead of a cock? Folks lived their lives, then, without harming one another.....

Well, about the middle of those times a son was born to one of these rooster kind of tsars. And the son grew big and was overgrown with hair. He could have been famous for his hair alone. 'Twas no joke-it grew out of his eyes even! And when he was rising nine he came to his father, the tsar, and said:

“This is no way to live, papa,” says he, “no system about it. Your kingdom's got no order in it whatsoever. Now, tell me if you can: how many blades of grass there are in the field, and how many trees in the woods? How many stars in the heavens, how many fish in the rivers? You ought to know to the last blade of grass how much you've got. Aha, but you don't know?”

His papa scratched his head: things like this had never come into it before. “Why, I'll say this,” he answers, “twelve generations of us have lived the same way. We ate our fill and took our time over it, and slept well, and, it seems to me, we had a grand life of it, taking it all round.”

“You're wrong,” says the son. “Now there's a science called 'yeometry,' and you have to live according to that science. We'll put a number on every fish, and on every star as well, on every blade of grass-plain or flowery. Well, I'm off to the mountains. I'm going to study yeometry there....”

And so it was: he just took a little house on his back and went off to the mountains.

Eleven years he sat in that little house. Another fellow would have ploughed I don't know how much land in that time, and he did no more than his yeometry. To cut a long story short, he learnt it till he came to a full stop. When he was twenty he came home to his father. “How do you do, papa?” he says, “how's your heath these days?” His father got a fright when he saw him. “Why,” he says, “you've certainly shot up and filled out a lot, haven't you?” And he had. He would go out when there was a thunderstorm and just wave his cap about the sky and blow the clouds away. “Well now,” says the son, “I'm letting you retire and I'm going to look after things myself. My name from now on is going to be Kalafat, see! (In their tongue 'tis supposed to mean: I'll get everywhere I want to). “Now,” says he, “I know what'll make the world sit up!” His papa was quite willing: “You clever folks go ahead and sing your song and we poor ignorant fools will sit here and listen!” So he made his father retire and set to work to earn his living in the sweat of his brow. He branded the fish, issued passports to the birds and wrote down every blade of grass in a book. Then everything around him got so downhearted. And it was no joke, everything in nature was topsy-turvy all of a sudden. The bear pined away, not knowing whether he was man or beast, now that he'd been given a passport. And Kalafat had taken it into his head to build a tower up to the skies. “I want to have a look and see what sort of a view there'll be from it,” says he, “and while we're about it we'll label the stars!” And 'twas this idea of his that brought about the end of the world.

So the days of Kalafat began. He collected peasants from all over his dominion and went to fight. He conquered seven distant countries and two gave in to him of their own free will. From there Kalafat rushed down to the sea, and conquered another people. All these captives were intended to build his tower for him.

Just as he was going home he fell in with an old man of the woods. The old man had on a hat made of bark and a bow in his hand. “Don't go against what I say,” said the old man, “let the whole army go home, don't do harm to yourself; you'd do better to learn cobbling!” “That I'll not,” said the other, “I'm going to build a tower.” “But there are other ways to do that,” says the old man. “I want to grow,” says Kalafat. “But you're big enough as it is. They say a sparrow swelled up on you till it weighed ten pounds.” “Oh, that's nothing,” Kalafat bragged. “I've got a louse on me swelled up to five pounds!” At that the old man laughed out loud. “What's the sense in your growing, then, if a louse is going to grow up alongside of you? It'll only have more of you to eat? You're as big as a mountain already and the louse will only be half as big again.” Kalafat turned away from the old man: 'twas plain he didn't know any yeometry.

And then everything started to swell. Folks swelled up with strength and fury; trees became the pride of the earth; night stretched out twice as long as the day; Kalafat's tower grew till it reached the skies. It took him twenty years, it would take us twenty ages. You would want a year to go all round it. The clouds broke against it and ran in rivers down the walls.

Then one day the head stonemason came up to Kalafat and said: “We can't go any farther. We've struck against the sky. And it's pretty damp, too. And there are a lot of rogues trying to get in first!” 'Twas true: while the building had been going on, a terrible number of rogues, one to every brick, nearly, had sprung up.

In the springtime Kalafat started out to get to the top of the tower, to heaven, in short. He picked seven of the more honest of the rogues, and bolted all the doors so that none of the common folks could follow him; after all, it was his ascension to heaven......

He climbed for five years. Five of the rogues had died already; they couldn't stand the damp. The others climbed up and up. At the end of the fifth year the sky above grew a bit clearer. Kalafat got up steam and reached the very top in no time. He looked round and he howled. The Old Believers say that there isn't a single lost dog that could howl like that tsar howled. All his yeometry had gone whistling down the wind.

While he had been climbing the tower, the building hadn't been able to stand Kalafat's weight, and it had sunk. He hadn't got an inch higher: every time he'd make a step up, the tower would sink a step into the ground. And there were the woods with the wind moaning in them, and the foxes in the woods, just as before. The fields were sweet with the smell of flowers, and the birds sang over them. Nature had thrown off Kalafat's passport and was herself again.

So it all ended in nothing.