The Little Devil and Other Stories

by Alexei Remizov

  How he managed to stand through the vigil, God only knows.

  When things quieted down, he went down from the nursery, unlocked the door with his key, made his way into the corridor and through the dining room, storeroom, and side room—right to the hole.

  Antonina could not fall asleep waiting for him. She waited a whole hour for Deniska. Crippled thoughts passed through her head, vile, not childlike—crippled, and they teased and attracted and raised her hair in horror and squeezed her painful parts. The minutes dragged, they seemed to be passing on crutches, too.

  Deniska raced headlong into the nursery.

  “Do you know what they’re doing?”

  “What?” Antonina asked fearfully.

  “Praying.”

  Antonina burst into tears. She was exhausted by crippled thoughts and the expectation of something horrible and unusual.

  Deniska knew no peace. One thought nagged at him, he kept thinking and thinking: how best to hurt the exterminator and Yaga at the same time, what could he come up with, what trick to pull while they were praying?

  Evening after evening passed this way.

  He couldn’t concentrate on anything. Deniska wasted so much paper: he’d start drawing and then tear it up.

  “They pray,” he repeated and tried to catch a thread, a path that led him to a hilarious prank. “The three of them stand in a row … they kiss … that dog and Yaga … they pray …”

  “What are they praying about?”

  “Praying. You can only see that their lips move, and then the lash of the leather rosaries, they’re whipping themselves.”

  Antonina grew wary.

  “What if … Antonina, you know, I’ve got it! This Saturday I’ll sneak into the icon room.” Deniska shook with laughter and burned with the thought that had flashed in his crazy head. “Understand, Antonina? Do you?” He whispered right into her ear, squinted at the door, rubbed his hands in glee, and grabbing the eraser from the table, chewed as hard as he could in pleasure.

  Red splotches blazed on the girl’s pale face, her eyes lit up with laughter and tears, and she suddenly broke into laughter, laughing, choking, as loudly as she could laugh, bouncing, and the crutches behind her back bounced, too.

  “Him?” Deniska winked as he took out the gum eraser from his mouth and started making a strange devilish figure with it.

  “Him!” Antonina laughed all in tears.

  10

  Saturday was a special one—during Maslenitsa, the week before Lent begins. They had overindulged in blini all week; their bellies were huge, like mountains! It wouldn’t even go down the throat, the soul didn’t want any, but still they ate. And it wasn’t plain old Maslenitsa but Wide Maslenitsa, the last four days.

  The service dragged on with so many innumerable genuflections and such difficult ones: you kneel and then can’t even get up unaided. Yaga took Antonina to the nursery, the girl was simply falling down, but Deniska hung around, went to fix the votive light beneath the icon of Three Joys. And he was taking too much time about it, so the exterminator pulled him off the chair and kneed him in the back. The exterminator was very severe and grim that Saturday. Either from the blini or because that was coming on again—his soul was catching fire, his heart thumping, his belly turning inside out—God only knows. When he sang, when he read the prayers nasally, his teeth were bared, and he shuddered as if in the throes of a vicious fever, the most vicious of all of Herod’s daughters. Deniska tumbled around on the threshold, but the exterminator picked him up and hit him so hard that Deniska was in his bed in a second.

  Antonina and Deniska pretended to be asleep.

  Waiting.

  Their hearts hammered—so hard!

  The house was dark and quiet. All the doors shut and locked. Yaga tries the key of the icon room once again.

  The prayers began.

  He is supposed to arrive today, the Devil himself would arrive, and not in a hidden form but in his manifest countenance. This terrible day is supposed to be the last day. They are ready. Let Him appear to them. They will enter into battle. And He will be vanquished.

  They are three. Three faithful ones. The world and the earth are in sin. Sin is growing. With every hour sin enters deeper into the heart, into the roots of the heart. But they are three. Three faithful ones amidst disbelief and sin. The guardian angel is leaving earth. With weeping and bitterness, the angel is flying up to heaven. His censer is empty. No incense of prayers and repentance. No human deeds pleasing unto God. The Devil has won.

  But they are prepared. Let Him appear to them. They will overcome Him.

  And so they swear. In the name of God, the name of Christ, the name of the Holy Spirit. They swear by their love of them. God, Christ, and the Holy Spirit.

  They swore. They would lay down their own soul, destroy their soul, to preserve it.

  They are prepared. Let Him appear to them. They will annihilate Him.

  They will burn like a bonfire. The earth and all creatures will burn with them. And the earth and all creatures will be white and radiant like the white radiant garb of the Lord.

  And now it is meet for them to repent before one another.

  Glafira and Agrafena have a great sin on their souls: there was a chance to show their faith and love for God, but the Devil confused and muddled them: they rejected faith and love in God in the name of love for a person—filth. When the old man died, the exterminator proposed sacrificing Antonina, but even though Glafira and Agrafena did undertake it, they couldn’t do it.

  They repented before each other.

  “You told me,” Glafira confessed, “that the child I had borne was the most beloved thing I had, and in the name of my love of God it had to die. You ordered me to give the child to mother. I gave her the little girl. And as you said, I remained alone in the room. I knew what was being done beyond the wall and listened. I heard the girl squeak. Then everything grew still. I scratched the wall with my nails and my heart blazed with grief. I couldn’t stand it anymore. I disobeyed. I rushed into the room to mother, and the girl was still alive, my daughter, sitting on her lap and her mouth laughing. I fell on my knees and begged mother: ‘Mother, do not kill her, leave her!’ Lord! Lord! Lord! Forgive me!”

  “You ordered me to choke the infant,” old Agrafena whispered, “and I took Antonina from my daughter-in-law and brought her here into the icon room. I sat her on my lap, put a noose around her neck, and the child smiled, it was funny for the little one, the noose tickled her neck. I pulled the noose tighter, I pulled on the rope, and the girl started to cry, it hurt, she wept bitterly. I released the noose, took it from her neck and put it on mine, like a game, and the girl was smiling and laughing and clapping her hands, the tiny infant, Antoninushka. Forgive me, Lord!”

  “What about now?” The exterminator’s eyes stopped terribly.

  Glafira lunged at him, predatory, her nostrils flaring, like a mare’s.

  It is meet to magnify you, Mother of God,

  The most pure and praised

  Immaculate Virgin, Theotokos …

  sang the exterminator and turning sharply to Glafira, lashed her face with his leather rosary belt.

  Yaga did not move, but a line of crimson blood flickered on Yaga’s deadly pale face.

  “What if we are not worthy to see Him?” the exterminator asked in a whisper and then shouted loudly, his eyes piercing the red votive light: “I adjure you by the living God, the Holy Trinity, the Mother of God, stand here, Satan, stand here! Stand! Stand!”

  A heavy, unbearable silence enveloped the icon room. It took you by the throat and suffocated you.

  “Cold, oh, it’s so cold!” screamed Yaga and fell dead: a star on her rosary flashed on the floor.

  The exterminator, making fists, ran his horrible eyes around the room. The old woman’s blue eyes blazed with a blue flame, she bent over and it seemed she would attack the exterminator, dig her teeth into his throat and drink his blood the way the Devil himself would drink i
t. The exterminator grabbed her white pearl rosary from her hands and reeled back, shuddering from head to toe.

  On the icon of the Three Joys, where the pearl robe of the Virgin Mary merges with the pearl shirt of the Infant, near the Infant’s hands raised in a blessing, a black devil was affixed, its skinny legs spread and its mouse-like tail twirling.

  And it came on. The hour of the exterminator. The curtains and embroidered towels on the icons bled before him in long bloody streams, the flame of the voice light engorged. It was coming.

  The old woman smiled … Her blue eyes flared with a blue light.

  The exterminator’s teeth chattered, as if they were not his, as cold as ice. A veil came over his eyes. He was suffocating. It was coming inexorably and fast, coming closer, reaching his heart, shaking him with all its might as never before back there at home with the locked door and the hollow vessels and glasses, or at the zoo, or on the street, or in the filthy hotel rooms.

  Suddenly it struck and stunned him.

  The exterminator dashed at the icon and brandishing and whipping the pearl rosary in the air, he jumped up inhumanly, and he jumped and jumped, hitting her, white, snowy, immaculate, tearing off the white robes and whipping, whipping her.

  It is meet to magnify you, Mother of God,

  The most pure and praised

  Immaculate Virgin, Theotokos …

  The little black devil on the surviving pearl of the infant where the Virgin’s pearl robes merge with the infant’s shirt, latched on with its tail, invincible, seemed to be fidgeting and spreading its skinny legs.

  The pearls rained down like hail, showering the exterminator, hitting his eyes. The pearls flew, jumping on the floor, dancing on Yaga, and blazed in a blue flame in the old woman’s eyes.

  A deep canine howl cut through the night, the night and the room, as if a thousand dogs were howling and growling, fighting over the only piece of filthy sweet meat.

  The old woman was smiling.

  Deniska, face in his pillow, choked on laughter.

  “Him!” squealed Deniska. “I attached him to the Three Joys!”

  “The Three Joys,” Antonina repeated with hot lips, pressing her crippled body to Deniska’s iron chest.

  The maddened howls from below and a virginal scream coming seemingly from the earth, from the blood, did not disturb the laughter, did not disconcert the hot embraces, hot and happy.

  “Him,” Deniska choked, “black, with paws and tail.”

  “With a tail,” Antonina’s hot lips whispered.

  And Deniska and Antonina fell asleep this way.

  Deep slumber filled the nursery.

  The faces and tails on the walls slept, the empty shelves slept, pencils and erasers and pieces left over from the little devil slept, as did the impenetrable gray walls of the Divilin slumber in wakeless sleep.

  Through the dream, it seemed there was a nameless one who guarded the sleepers’ slumber. Who was he? What was his name? Where did he come from and why?

  He stood on the landing, opened the door slightly, and boneless, quietly tiptoed to the beds.

  Antonina and Deniska, turning onto the other side, opened their frightened eyes under the enormous penetrating fire of his sharp eyes.

  He was like the Amazon in the picture in Babinka’s room, except his head did not seem to be on his neck but on a screw, it kept turning, not finding a place for itself, kept turning as if on a screw. His long thin lips—repulsive—were smiling slightly.

  “Him,” muttered Deniska.

  “Him,” repeated Antonina.

  The dawn was showing gray, the gray day was rising out beyond the window. There, beyond the window, lay the river, covered in gray rumpled ice. Smoke hung over the city from warm chimneys. People were stoking the stoves early for the last day before Lent—Forgiveness Sunday.

  05

  THE PROFANER

  THIS STORY IS SET IN THE TURBULENT PERIOD OF THE AGRARIAN REVOLT OF 1905–1906. LOCAL VILLAGERS LAUNCHED ATTACKS ON THE PROVINCIAL ESTATES, LOOTING AND SETTING FIRE TO THE MANOR HOUSES. IN THE OCTOBER MANIFESTO, NICHOLAS II GRANTED SOME CIVIL LIBERTIES, WHICH WAS SEEN AS LICENSE TO APPROPRIATE LAND FROM THE GENTRY. IN THIS STORY, THE BOYS (BOTH THE SON OF THE LANDOWNER AND THE BOYS FROM THE VILLAGE) PLAY AT EXPROPRIATION, A VERSION OF COPS AND ROBBERS CAPTURING A MOMENT OF SOCIAL TRUTH.

  1

  Everyone talked about the old Versenev house.

  Krutovrag was an unclean place.

  They said a lot of curious, and of course, terrifying things about the house.

  Sergei Sergeyevich Versenev himself was not an eloquent man, and anyway he kept to himself, but Elizaveta Nikolayevna and the children—gymnasium students Gorik and Buba—liked to talk about the olden days, and with pleasure, the way Nanny Solomovna liked to talk with the chef Prokofy Konstantinovich and the valet Zinovy over tea, only in a whisper.

  In the garden by the sand hill, they pointed out the shady pond built in the serf days by children and old men, which in the fiercest cold of winter froze only on the edges around the icy swift-flowing spring which, they assured people, was bottomless.

  Allegedly a troika drove out of the pond at night, turned down the linden allée, and silently pulled right up to the balcony: a gray old man got out—Versenev’s grandfather—went up onto the balcony and strolled sniffing the flowers or, full of flowers, went through the salon to the cellars and then returned by troika to his bottomless pond.

  Two vaulted stone cellars lay beneath the house: the big empty one and the small one, where the wines were kept.

  At night moans were heard from the empty cellar, where they had punished serfs, and in the small one, which had held the Versenev treasures in the olden days, ringing noises were heard, like the clink of gold being counted.

  In the house, guests were first taken upstairs to the corner room, where the window opened on the road.

  Ancient dresses and fancy shoes, grandmother’s finery, were in the wardrobes of this room.

  They said that Sergei Sergeyevich’s mother, Fedosya Alexeyevna, abandoned by her husband in Krutovrag, sat by the window day and night and died by the window, watching the road, vainly ruining her eyes.

  It was sad in the bright sad room and eerie, eerier and emptier than in the big cellar, the walls of which were sprinkled with brown drops, as if of blood. No one lived in the room next to Fedosya Alexeyevna’s; toys were put away there.

  They took down the gallery, which divided the house into two halves, and brought it across the spacious entry into the tall, two-story hall with tall narrow mirrors between the balcony windows.

  The mirrors, reflecting the chandelier, insistently followed their heavy mirrored gaze.

  To the right were the inner rooms, ending with an added-on kitchen, to the left, the formal rooms.

  In the living room beneath family portraits were card tables, which had known high-stakes nights in their time.

  At night, eyewitnesses reported, the father of Sergei Sergeyevich appeared, Sergei Petrovich, a wild gambler, who blew his abandoned wife’s enormous fortune abroad: he wandered from table to table, raising a leaf and feeling under the cloth, apparently hoping to find a forgotten gold coin.

  From the living room, people were taken to see the library and study.

  It was here, in the study by the cabinet with the dark astronomical globe, huddled in the corner, that Sergei Petrovich had died, having seen before his death the most real devils, i.e., without horns and tails.

  Only Sergei Sergeyevich knew about this, his father allowed only him to come to him before death, but the story of real Versenev devils, without horns and tails, could be heard all over Krutovrag, in every corner, from all the animals, starting with the deaf gardener Uncle Gordei and ending with Krutovrag’s all-mighty seamstress, Anna Fyodorovna Rafael.

  The late Sergei Petrovich called every simple, ordinary person without exception an animal.

  Having seen the formal rooms and the inner bedrooms of the right half, sep
arated by a wide, dark corridor, and having peeked into both cellars, the guests were invited to the dining room, where recently wine had poured the way, recently ringing gold had showered down in the living room.

  In the long and low-ceilinged dining room the Versenev talk and reminiscences ended.

  There were many more curious and of course terrifying things said about the house.

  That is why candles burned so long in the bedrooms, and were not extinguished, and at night the creak of the parquet floor chased away sleep from the house.

  The white columns, as heavy as elephant legs, supported the sturdy roof that rang in the wind and they alone seemed to dream calmly, day and night, unbothered by the stories, or the nocturnal bedroom fears, or the bats that landed on them like flies did on Nanny Solomovna, and also the old trees, poplars that had grown taller than the house, rustled on clear days and cloudy ones.

  The doors of the Versenev house were wide open: come in whoever and whenever you want.

  The Versenevs have guests continually; it was a name day party year round.

  Relatives and friends, neighbors and people from town often descended on Krutovrag, and as in grandfather’s day, not alone or in couples, but with the whole household—with the family.

  The Versenevs managed even on the most discordant days to get along with everyone and were happy to welcome everyone.

  It must have been fun in Krutovrag.

  And why shouldn’t it be fun in Krutovrag? It’s not all nighttime with its horrors, there is also daytime. And what is night, even if it is a Versenev one with all its silly horrors?

  Elizaveta Nikolayevna, who enjoyed all kinds of amusements and was a top horse breeder, did not inhibit her children and gave them free rein.

  Gorik and Buba had many peers: Gorik had boys from the gymnasium and Buba had girls. They put on plays, charades, tableaux vivants; there were constant fireworks, picnics, and all kinds of riding in carriages, horseback, and in boats.