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trees here and there, enormous stone boulders, and the green windows of the quagmire, into one of which we had, evidently, almost fallen yesterday. At seeing this I grew cold with terror.
    A lonely crow was circling above this distressing place.
    I returned home from the farmstead towards evening, so exhausted I could hardly pull myself together. I began to think that this would last forever. These brown plains, the quagmire, the people more dead than alive from feverish mania, the park that was dying of old age – all this hopeless land was nevertheless my own, my native land, covered in the day by clouds, and in the night by a wild moonlight, or else by an endless rain pouring down over it.
    Nadzezhda Yanovsky awaited me in the same room and again that strange expression on her distorted face, that same indifference to her clothes. There were some changes only on the table where a late dinner was served.
    The dinner was a most modest one and did not cost the mistress a kopeck, for all this food was prepared from local products. In the middle of the table stood a bottle of wine and it too was apparently from their own cellars. The rest was a firework of flowers and forms. In the middle stood a flower vase and in it two small yellow maple branches. Beside it, though probably from another set, a large silver soup bowl, a silver salt cellar, plates, several dishes. However, it was not the layout of the table that surprised me, not even that the dishes were all from different sets, darkened with age, and here and there, somewhat damaged. What surprised me was the fact that they were of ancient local workmanship.
    You no doubt know that two or three centuries ago, the silver and gold dishes in Belarus were mainly of German make and were imported from Prussia. These articles, richly decorated with “twists and turns”, with figures of holy men and angels, were so sugary sweet that it was nauseating, but nothing could be done about it, it was the fashion.
    But this was our own. The clumsy stocky little figures on the vase, a characteristic ornament. And the women depicted on the salt cellar had even the somewhat wide face of the local women.
    There stood also two wine glasses of iridescent ancient glass which today cannot be bought even for gold. The edge of one wineglass, the one standing at my hostess’s place, was somewhat chipped.
    The last and the only sun ray that day shone in through the window, lighting up in it dozens of varicoloured little lights.
    The mistress had probably noticed my look and said:
    “This is the last of three sets which were left by our forefather, Roman Zhysh-Yanovsky. But there is this stupid belief that the set had probably been presented to him by King Stakh.”
    Today she was somehow livelier, did not even seem to be so bad-looking, she evidently liked her new role.
    We drank wine and finished eating, talking almost all the time. It was a red wine, red as pomegranate, and very good. I became quite cheerful, made the mistress laugh, and two not very healthy pink spots appeared on her cheeks.
    “But why did you add to the name of your ancestor this nickname ‘Zhysh’?”
    “It’s an old story,” she answered, becoming gloomy again. “It seems it happened during a hunt. An aurochs charged the somewhat deaf king behind his back and the only one who saw it was Roman. He shouted: ‘Zhysh’! This in our local dialect means ‘Beware’. And the King turned about, but running aside, fell. Then Roman shot, at the risk of killing the King, and the bullet struck the aurochs in the eye. The aurochs fell down almost beside the King. After that a harquebus was added to our coat-of-arms and the nickname ‘Zhysh’ to our surname.”
    “Such incidents could have occurred in those days,” I confirmed. “Forgive me, but I know nothing that concerns heraldry. The Yanovskys, it seems to me, go back to the 12th century?”
    “To the 13th,” she said. “And better if they didn’t. These laws