The Big Book of Classic Fantasy

by The Big Book of Classic Fantasy (retail) (epub)

  The rain was pouring outside, and I entered this abandoned house to wait out the weather and saw him…he forgot to disappear as would be proper.

  “It doesn’t even matter,” he told me in a voice resembling a combative parrot, “no one will believe that you saw me anyway.”

  Just in case, I folded my fingers into the sign of a snail’s horns, and said, “Don’t worry. You won’t receive neither a silver coin shot nor a spell from me. But the house is empty.”

  “And yet how hard is it to leave it despite that,” the little domovoi argued. “Just listen. I’ll tell you but only because my teeth hurt—I feel better when I talk…much better, oy. My dear friend, it was just one hour—and this is why I got stranded here. You see, it is important to understand the whys and the hows. Mine—my kin…” He signed plaintively. “Mine—I mean, ours—they all are already brushing horses’ tails on the other side of the mountains, they all left here. But I cannot, because I have to understand.

  “Look around—there are holes in the walls and the ceiling, but imagine that everything is aglow with warmest, shiniest copperware, the curtains are white and gauzy, and there are as many flowers inside as in the meadows and the forest; the floor is polished, the cold stove you are sitting on like it’s a grave marker is red-hot, and the dinner bubbling in pots is exhaling scrumptious steam.

  “There used to be mines not far from here—granite pits. And in this house, there used to live a husband and a wife—a rarest pair. His name was Philipp, and hers—Annie. She was twenty years old, and he was twenty-five. Look, look, do you like this?” The domovoi grabbed at a tiny flower that sprang in the dirt that accumulated over the years in the crack of the windowsill, and ceremoniously handed it to me. “This is what she was like. I loved her husband too, but I liked her better—she was so domestic…and we like people who are just like us, we find charm in that. Sometimes she would go to the nearby creek and try to catch fish with her bare hands, or strike a great stone at the crossroads and listen how long it would take to go silent, and laughed at the yellow sun dapples on the wall. Don’t think her strange—there is magic in things like that, a great knowledge, but only us, goat-legged can read the signs of a great soul; people are not insightful.

  “ ‘Annie!’ the husband would call joyfully when he came home for lunch from the mine where he was a bookkeeper. ‘I am not alone—I brough Ralph with me.’ He made this joke so often that Annie smiled and without hesitation set the table for two. And they would meet as if they were just discovering each other—she ran to meet him, and he brought her back in his arms.

  “At night, he would take out Ralph’s letters—Ralph was his friend he spent many years of his youth with before he met Annie, and he read them out loud. Annie would rest her head on her folded arms and half-listen to the familiar words about the sea and the shining of miraculous rays on the other side of our enormous earth, about volcanoes and pearl-divers, storms and great battles in the shade of gigantic forest trees. And every word resonated like a heavy singing stone at the crossroads, which makes a drawn-out peal every time it is struck.

  “ ‘He will arrive soon,’ Philipp would say. ‘He will visit us when his three-masted Sinbad sails to Gres. From there, it is just an hour by train and another hour from the train station to our house.’

  “Sometimes Annie would ask a question about Ralph’s life, and then Philipp would launch into tales of Ralph’s bravery and oddness and generosity, and his fate resembling a fairy tale: poverty and striking gold, how he bought his ship, the lace of the legends spun from ship’s rigging, seafoam, games and trade, danger and surprises. Eternal game. Eternal excitement.

  Eternal music of the sea and the shore.

  “I never heard them fight—and I hear everything. I never saw them look at each other coldly—and I see everything. ‘I’m sleepy,’ she would say at night, and he would wrap her up in a blanket and carry her to bed like a child. As she was falling asleep, she would ask, ‘Phil, who’s whispering in the treetops? Who’s walking on the roof? Whose face do I see reflected in the creek next to yours?’ And he would answer, looking into her half-closed eyes with worry,

  “ ‘There’s a crow on the roof, the wind blowing through the trees, stones are shining in the creek—go to sleep, and don’t walk around barefoot.’

  “He would then sit at his desk to finish his latest report, wash his face, prepare the logs for the morning fire, and when he went to bed he fell asleep immediately and always forgot his dreams. And he never went to the crossroads to strike the singing stone, where fairies spin magnificent carpets from dust and moonrays.”

  II

  All right, so listen. There isn’t much left of this story of three people who so perplexed the domovoi.

  “It was a sunny day, a full blooming of the earth, when Philipp, his ledger in hand, was taking stock of the granite pit daily output, and Annie, coming home from the station where she did her shopping, stopped by her stone and made it sing with the strikes of her house keys. Now, the stone was a shard from a great mountain, taller than your waist. When you strike it, it rings for a long time, quieter and quieter, and just when you think it went silent, you can press your ear against it and still hear its almost silent voice inside.

  “Our forest roads are gardens. Their beauty grasps your heart, the flowers and boughs over your head are watching the sun through their fingers. The sun changes color and your eyes too get tired of it and wander about aimlessly, as its yellow and lilac and dark-green colors dapple the white sand. There is nothing better on such a day than cold water.

  “Annie stopped and listened to the forest singing in her very chest, and struck the stone again, smiling every time the new wave of sound caught up and drowned the previous, dying one. She never thought she was being watched, but a man came around the turn of the road and approached her. His steps grew slower until he stopped; she was still smiling when she looked up and saw him—she didn’t start or step back, as if he always was there.

  “He was tanned—very tanned, and the sea has carved his face into sharpness, like a running wave. And it was beautiful because it reflected an untamed and gentle soul, and his dark eyes looked into Annie’s, growing darker and brighter, and her pale eyes looked mildly back.

  “You would be correct in thinking that I always followed her—there are snakes in the forest.

  “The stone had fallen silent some time ago and they still looked, smiling, wordless, silent. He stretched his hand toward her and she—slowly—extended hers to meet his. He took her head into his hands carefully, so carefully that I was afraid to breathe, and kissed her lips. Her eyes closed.

  “Then they stepped away from each other, the stone separating them. Annie turned to see Philipp, coming their way. ‘Look, Philipp! Ralph’s finally here.’

  “Philipp couldn’t get a word out at first. Finally, he tossed his hat into the air and shouted, ‘Ralph! I see you already met Annie. Look, it’s her!’ His kind, rough face shone with excitement. ‘Ralph, you’ll stay with us, we’ll show you around. And finally we’ll talk and catch up. Look, my friend, my wife…she also was waiting for you.’

  “Annie rested her hand on her husband’s shoulder and looked at him with her warmest, most generous expression, and then looked at their visitor with the same gaze, as if both were equally dear to her.

  “ ‘Phil, I’ll have to go back,’ Ralph said. ‘I mixed up your address and thought I was taking the wrong road…this is why I left my luggage at the station. I have to go get it.’

  “They made plans to meet later and each went their own way. And that’s all, hunter, murderer of my friends, I know about it. And I don’t understand. Maybe you can explain this to me.”

  “Did Ralph come back?”

  “They waited for him but he wrote from the station that he ran into an acquaintance who offered him a lucrative opportunity he
could not turn down.”

  “What about them?”

  “Died…Died a long time ago, maybe thirty years. Cold water on a hot day—she was the first, caught a cold. He walked behind her coffin, half-gray, and then disappeared. Locked himself in the room with the firepit, I hear. But before that—what happened? My teeth hurt and I cannot understand.”

  “And it will be so,” I said, politely, shaking his hairy unwashed paw good-bye. “Only we, five-fingered, can read the signs of the heart; domovois are not insightful.”

  Aleksandr Grin (1880–1932) was a Russian writer who wrote under the name Grin. His full name was Aleksandr Stepanovich Grinevsky. He was a fan of the adventure stories of Robert Louis Stevenson as well as Jules Verne. He created a world called Grinlandia in his most famous work of fiction, Scarlet Sails, what some have called the Russian Treasure Island. He wrote a lot of fiction set in this fantasy world. He was also influenced by the work of Edgar Allan Poe, and it was rumored he used to carry a photograph of the American writer with him wherever he went. He wrote several well-received novels, as well as more than three hundred short stories. “The Ratcatcher” is one of his longer stories, translated into English for the first time.

  The Ratcatcher

  Aleksandr Grin

  Translated by Ekaterina Sedia

  There, over still waters, stands Chillon

  There, in the dungeon, seven columns

  Covered in centuries-old moss…

  I

  IN THE SPRING OF THE YEAR 1920, specifically in March, specifically on the twenty-second—let’s give the accuracy its due, so we may join the lap of sworn documentarists, without which the curious reader would probably start asking questions of the publishers—I went to the market. I went to the market on March 22 of, I repeat, the year 1920. It was the Sennaya Market. I cannot tell you that I positioned myself on a certain corner, nor can I remember what the newspapers were writing about on that day. I did not stand on a corner but instead paced back and forth in front of the ruined building of the market. I was selling a few books—the last of my possessions.

  Cold and wet snow, sifting over the heads in the crowd like a cloud of white sparks, gave the scene a repellent air. Fatigue and chill illuminated all faces. I had no luck. I walked around for over two hours, and only three persons asked what I wanted for my books, but even they found my price of five pounds of bread exceedingly high. Meanwhile, it was getting darker—the circumstance most unfortunate for selling books. I stopped on the sidewalk and leaned against a wall.

  To my right, there was an old woman in a hooded cloak and an old black hat with glass beads. With a clockwork shaking of her head, she offered in her knotted fingers two baby bonnets, ribbons, and a stack of yellowed shirt collars. To my left, securing a warm gray kerchief under her chin with her free hand, stood with a rather independent expression a young woman, holding the same wares as I—books. Her small, quite sturdy, shoes, a skirt falling quietly all the way to the toe—unlike those knee-length squirmy skirts that even old women started wearing those days—her flannel jacket and old warm gloves with the fingertips peeking through the holes, and also her demeanor as she looked at the passersby—without a smile or enticements, sometimes angling her long lashes at the books, and how she held them, how she suppressed a sigh with a small grunt when a passerby, having glanced at her hands and then face, walked off, as if surprised and stuffing his mouth with sunflower seeds—everything about her was endearing.

  We are curious about people who fit our idea of a person in certain circumstances, and so I asked the girl if her small enterprise was going well. She coughed lightly, turned her head to draw her attentive gray-blue eyes at me, and said, “Same as yours.”

  We exchanged observations about selling things in general, and at first she only spoke enough to be understood. Then, a man in blue glasses and jodhpurs bought her Don Quixote, and she livened up.

  “No one knows that I take the books to sell,” she said, trustingly showing me a counterfeit bill, wedged among others by the thoughtful citizen, and waving it about absentmindedly. “I mean, I don’t steal them, I take them from the shelves when Father is asleep. When Mother was dying. We sold everything then, almost everything. We had no bread or firewood or kerosene. You understand? But my father will be angry if he finds out that I come here. So I come and bring books on the sly. I miss the books, but what can you do? Thank god, we have so many. Do you have a lot too?”

  “N-n-no,” I said, with the shiver—I already caught a cold and was rasping a bit. “I don’t think I have a lot. At least these are all I have.”

  She looked at me with naive attention—just like peasant children watch a visiting official drinking tea—and, with her bare fingertips, touched the collar of my shirt. It, as well as the collar of my light coat, was missing buttons; I lost them and had never sewn on their replacements, since I have not cared enough about myself for quite a long while already, have given up on my past as well as the future.

  “You’ll catch a cold,” she said, automatically clutching her own kerchief tighter, and I understood that her father loved her, that she was spoiled and frivolous, but kind. “You’ll catch a cold because you run around with your collar whipped open. Come closer, citizen.”

  She stuffed her books under her arm and walked under the arched gates. There I lifted my head with a stupid smile and let her near my throat. She was well built but significantly shorter than I, and once she found all the necessities with the same mysterious, absent expression women have when they fuss with their pins, she put her books on a stoop, made a small effort somewhere under her jacket, and, breathing with great concentration and importance, pinned the edges of my shirt and my coat together with a safety pin.

  “Tender like a calf,” a stout woman walking by said.

  “Well!” The girl critically examined her handiwork. “That’s it. You can go for a walk now.”

  I laughed and wondered. I haven’t seen much of such simplicity. We either don’t believe in it or don’t see it, and we only see it when things are quite bad.

  I took her hand and shook it, and thanked her, and asked her name.

  “It won’t take long to say, but why?” she said, looking at me with pity. “Not worth it. Although write down our phone number; maybe I’ll ask you to sell some books.”

  I wrote it down, smiling, watching her index finger tracing the air as she enunciated each digit like a schoolmarm. Then a crowd running from the horseback-mounted raid surrounded and separated us; I dropped my books and when I picked them up, she was already gone. The alarm was not major enough to leave the market altogether, and an old man in round glasses and a goatee bought my books a few minutes later. He didn’t offer much, but I was glad regardless. Only as I was approaching my house did I realize that I also sold the book with the phone number in it and had now irreversibly forgotten it.

  II

  At first I took it with a light consternation of any minor loss. Still not slaked hunger shielded my perceptions. I thoughtfully boiled the potatoes in the room with waterlogged, rotten windows. I had a small iron stove. As for firewood…in those days, many ventured into the attics, and so did I—walked along the slanted darkness of the roofs like a thief, listening to the wind blaring in the chimneys, and spying a pale splotch of the sky through the broken window as the snowflakes settled over the debris. I found splinters remaining from the times they axed down the beams, old window frames, fallen-apart sills and carried it all back to my basement room, listening on the stairwell landings for the clanking of the front door key, letting out a late visitor.

  Behind the wall lived a washerwoman; I spent entire days listening to the strong movement of her hands in the washtub, producing the sound reminiscent of the rhythmic chewing of a horse. In the same room, like the clock gone mad, a sewing machine often clanked into deep night. A bare table, a bare bed,
a stool, a cup without a saucer, a frying pan, and a kettle I used to boil my potatoes—but enough of these reminders. The spirit of the everyday turns away from the mirror, which the precisely educated people keep pointing at it, and their profanities under the new orthography are as proficient as the old one.

  When the night fell, I remembered the market and vividly relived every moment as I studied my safety pin. Carmen did not do much—she only tossed a flower at a lazy soldier. No more was committed today. For a long while I had been thinking about meeting someone—first looks, first words. They are memorable and always carve their impression if there is nothing superfluous. There is a perfect purity of such characteristic moments, which could be entirely converted into sentences or a drawing—this is the part of life that gives rise to the arts. A true event, encased in an untroubled simplicity of a natural and true voice, which we hope for with our every step, is always filled with magic. So little, but so fully realized is such an impression.

  And this is why I returned to the safety pin again and again, repeating from memory what was said by me and by the girl. Then I grew tired, lay down and came to, but as soon as I got up I fell unconscious. It was the beginning of the typhus, and in the morning, they took me to the hospital. But I had enough memory and wits to put my safety pin into a tin box where I kept my tobacco, and not to separate from it until the end.

  III

  With a fever of 41 degrees my delirium took shape of visitations. People from whom I have not heard in several years came to see me. I had long conversations with all of them, and asked every one of them to bring me some sour milk. But as if they all conspired with each other, they kept telling me that sour milk was forbidden by the doctor. Meanwhile I secretly waited to spy among their faces, blinking in and out as if in banya fog, the new sister of mercy—who, I reasoned, must be no other than the girl with the safety pin. From time to time she walked past behind the wall among the tall flowers, in a golden crown against the golden sky. How mildly, how joyfully her eyes shone! Even when she made no appearance, her unseen presence filled the ward, flickering with suppressed lights, and from time to time I pushed the safety pin in its box with my fingers. By the morning, five of us were dead and the red-cheeked orderlies carried them out, and my thermometer showed 36 and a fraction, after which a sober and merry recovery followed. I was discharged from the hospital three months later, when I could walk although with some pain in my legs, and I found myself homeless. My room was already given to an invalid, and I was morally incapable of going from office to office to solicit new housing.