The Trousers That Couldn't Handle Youth

There's a certain trouble old men have: the music's still playing in the head, the eyes still follow the women, the soul has already pulled its boots on for the dance, but the lower household sits up on the stove and says: "Start without me." This story is about just such an old man, Did Mykyta. His wife, Baba Odarka, dropped by my inn the other day for salt, and while I was weighing it out she got to talking about how things stood between her and the old man.

Forty years they've been together. The day before yesterday the old man found, at the bottom of the chest, his bachelor trousers - the ones he once courted her in. He looked in the mirror, sighed that his chief manly weapon had been serving purely for decoration these five years, and resolved to restore its former glory without delay.

And male pride is a stubborn thing. Mykyta set out to prove to his old woman that his old powder flask still had something to shoot with. But since the natural fire had long since gone out, the old man decided to approach the matter with learned cunning. He remembered an old recipe for getting the blood moving: rub everything below the belt with fierce homemade horseradish mixed with mustard. And rub himself he did, with all his heart.

Especially there where, in his opinion, the great breakthrough was meant to happen. Two minutes passed, and Mykyta understood that his blood hadn't just got moving - it had boiled over, together with what was left of his common sense. It burned in his trousers as if someone had tipped in a bucket of hot coals from the stove. To take his mind off the hellish pain somehow, and to hide his screams from the neighbours, the old man ran to his old abandoned smithy.

Mykyta had once been the first blacksmith for two villages around. But the smithy had stood locked to this day, hung with cobwebs, because his back ached at every turn of the weather. So he began feverishly pumping the bellows, fanning the fire and pounding the hammer on the anvil to drown out his own howling. Soot flying, smoke pouring, horseradish burning, eyes bulging out of his head, and the old man hopping around the anvil like a ritual shaman.

From all that frantic squatting, the old bachelor trousers couldn't take the strain. They split, front and back, with a sound like a cannon going off. And at that very moment the smithy door swings open, and on the threshold stands Odarka, who had come running at the sight of black smoke.

A picture in oils: there stands her Mykyta in the shreds of his trousers, black with soot, tears the size of beans in his eyes, his hands convulsively covering the very spot he had just been trying to resuscitate for feats of love. And from that spot, it seemed, a faint steam was even rising. At first Odarka took fright, and then she understood everything. She laughed so hard she had to sit down on a pile of hay.

She took the heavy hammer from him, took him by the hand and led him to the well - to douse his extinguished but very hot manly youth with cold water from the bucket. That evening they sat under the pear tree. The old man pressed cold cabbage leaves to the afflicted places, and Odarka held him in her arms.

You fool of mine, she says, I haven't needed your gunpowder in a long while - the main thing is that you don't burn yourself up on me. Real closeness warms all by itself, without any horseradish.