The Melekho farm was right at the end of Tantak village.

The Melekho farm was right at the end of Tantak village.
The gate of the cattle yard opened northward towards the Don. A steep, sixty foot slope between chalky, grass grown banks, and there was the shore. A pearly drift of mussels shells, a grey, broken edging of a shingle, and then - the steely blue rippling surface of the Don, seething beneath the wind. To the east, beyond the willow wattle fence of the threshing floor, was the Hetman’s high way, greyish, wormwood scrub, vivid brown, hoof trodden knotgrass, a shrine standing at the fork of the road, and then the steppe, enveloped in a shifting mirage. To the south a chalky range of hills. On the west the street, crossing the square and running towards the leas.
The Cossack Prokoffey Melekhov returned to the village during the last war with Turkey. He brought back a wife – a little woman wrapped from head to foot in a shawl. She kept her face covered, and rarely revealed her yearning eyes. The silken shawl was redolent of strange, aromatic perfumes; its rainbow hued patterns aroused the jealousy of the peasant women. The captive Turkish woman did not get on well with Prokoffey’s relations and ere long old Melekov gave his son his portion, The old man never got over the disgrace of the separation, and all his life he refused to set foot inside his son’s hut.
Prokpffey speedily made shift for himself; carpenters built him a hut, he himself fenced in the cattle yard, and in the early autumn he took his bowed , foreign wife to her new home. He walked with her through the village, behind the cart laden with their wordly goods. Everybody from the oldest to the youngest rushed into the street. The Cossacks laughed discreetly into their beards, the women passed vociferous remarks to one another, a swarm of unwashed Cossack lads called after Prokoffey. But with overcoat unbuttoned he walked slowly along as though over newly ploughed furrows, squeezing his wife’s fragile wrist in his own enormous swarthy palm, defiantly bearing his lint white, unkempt head. Only the wens below his cheekbones swelled and quivered and the sweat stood out between his stony brows.
Thence forth he went but rarely into the village, and was never to be seen even at the market. He lived a secluded life in his solitary hut by the Don. Strange stories began to be told of him in the village. The boys who pastured the calves beyond the meadow road declared that of an evening, as the light was dying, they had seen Prokoffey carrying his wife in his arms as far as the Tartar mound. He would seat her, with her back to an ancient weather beaten, porous rock, on the crest of the mound, he would sit down at her side, and they would gaze fixedly across the steppe. They would gaze until the sunset had faded and then Prokoffey would wrap his wife in his coat and carry her back to home. The village was lost in conjecture, seeking an explanation for such astonishing behaviour. The women gossiped so much that they had not time to hunt for their fleas. Rumour was rife about Prokoffey’ wife also; some declared that she was of an entrancing beauty; others maintained the contrary. The matter was set at rest when one of the most venturesome of the women, the soldier’s wife Maura, ran along to Prokoffey on the pretext of getting some leaven: Prokoffey crawled into the cellar for the leaven, and Maura had time to notice that Prokoffey’s Turkish conquest was a perfect fright.
From the book ‘And quiet Flows the Don’ by Mikhail Sholokhov, translated by Stephen Garry