The Little Devil and Other Stories

by Alexei Remizov

  When the hungry months came, a time of grumbling for the brothers, except for the select, Lisii fasted wonderfully, without getting into arguments or whining.

  Lisii chewed on some sedge, and it turned out that foxes ate that very sedge.

  When the little monk Panka told the cellarer Didim about the fox sedge, it came as a revelation to the latter.

  “Brothers!” Didim exclaimed. “We didn’t notice, he really is of the fox breed, I swear to God!”

  That’s when the whispering started that Lisii was a fox, and since he was a monk, then he was venerable.

  “Venerable Lis!” Didim dubbed him.

  And Lis himself did not reject it.

  Once, someone shouted, “Hey, Venerable Lis!”

  Lis turned, folded his hands at his chest, and bowed.

  And so it started.

  3

  Having spent his life in wandering, Lisii knew many marvelous and useful things, which he could recount and recommend.

  And yet, he had no rancor.

  Lisii became popular and the brethren all liked him.

  But the elders rebelled: the fox sedge strengthened their distrust and the fact that Lisii readily responded to Lis elicited only anger and even greater suspicion.

  “A skinny rascal,” the cellarer said, encouraging the elders. “We have to test him and see how Lis will act.”

  Twice a month they brought in women from the neighboring village to wash the monastery floors. On such days the devil watched the brothers very closely. And even though the methods against lewd thoughts indicated in the Nilov regulations on monastery life were applied very strictly, falling was inevitable: if not one then another—someone would be tempted by the devil.

  They usually started the battle with psalms, after the psalms came the prayer to the martyr Fomaida, but the attacks by the foe did not cease, and the final part was raising eyes and hands to the heavens.

  The brothers’ raised hands let pilgrims know that the church was closed: floors were being washed.

  It was difficult for everyone, but hardest of all for the one who had to supervise the washing.

  And the cellarer blessed Lisii to do the task.

  The women were all of a kind: all young, strong, and tall. In high-tucked skirts, white shirts, rosy with heat, they brought in a lot of confusion, disgrace, and shame.

  Lisii, his vulpine eyes modestly lowered, gave orders in a business-like way. The most suspicious eye would not have seen the slightest tremor of his being.

  The abbot who came in unexpectedly was amazed by the diligence and order and praised him encouragingly.

  Now Lisii had the abbot himself, and no one dared make a peep.

  “Didn’t work!” the cellarer moaned, and purposely appointed Lisii to that difficult task the next few times.

  I can say this, Lisii was inscrutable and elusive.

  4

  A year passed and Lisii was now the most necessary monk in all domestic affairs, they turned to him for every trifle and not in vain: with his skill, knowledge, and quick wit he established model order and appropriate cleanliness.

  In a year or two, every female pilgrim knew Father Lis.

  Yet the elders did not quiet their distrust, the elders only tolerated him.

  Lisii tried and sought all kinds of means to support the priory and completely selflessly.

  Once he asked the abbot to bless him to go collect.

  “I know,” he said, sniffing in his way, “many places in this country and to the south, I can go ask on behalf of our priory.”

  Listing the needs of the monastery, he pointed to the urgency of renovation and renewal of the church.

  Renovation and renewal hit the bull’s eye.

  A few days later, with sack and folding icon, Lisii came out from the vaulted gate and, his thin hair shaking merrily, he stepped on the bridge.

  “Mark my words,” said Didim the cellarer, “we’ll never see him again, like our own ears.”

  The elders cheered up: you couldn’t fool their eyes and sense.

  “Judge not!” the silent monks repeated dispassionately.

  As for the abbot, not a day went by that he did not mention Lisii, he worried about him and waited for him impatiently.

  Despite the gossip and cellarer’s assurance that Lisii would certainly trick them, Lisii appeared earlier than planned under the vaulted gate.

  Lisii had been strange, but now he was a real fox: the hair tucked behind his pointy ears, the cheekbones like two fists, the deep-set black eyes, and the nose sniffing the air.

  “Oh Lis, is it you!” the gatekeeper monk was stunned.

  Nose twitching, Lisii lumbered with heavy steps into the cellar.

  The monks came running: everyone wanted to see their Lis, they were very happy to have him back.

  When Lisii began pulling rolls in rags and money from his pockets and gold showered onto the table, Memnon the reader proclaimed loudly:

  “Wisdom!” and kissed Lisii thrice.

  The abbot came in.

  Receiving his blessing, Lisii said modestly, indicating his haul: “Not as much as I expected: a bad harvest!”

  “Go get some rest!” the abbot said kindly. “You look awful.”

  And he truly did.

  Lisii went to his cell, lay down, and stayed there: his body shuddered mercilessly, and he shut his eyes, rambling in a whisper “To bite—I’ll bite—the ear …”

  Upon hearing this Didim the cellarer merely winked and repeated the mysterious “To bite—the ear.”

  The wordless elders nodded their beards: Lisii’s delirium confirmed their distrust—the nonhuman breed was showing itself.

  5

  Whether it was the going after alms or the illness from which Lisii arose—all skin and bones—his way of life changed sharply: he was no longer interested in housekeeping and if he continued visiting the gardens and haggling with calling merchants, it was only out of obedience so as not to sadden the abbot.

  Lisii spent entire services kneeling and sighing, the tears pouring from his eyes. They always found a puddle on the cast-iron stove where he usually prayed: the tears were so copious.

  “It is unseemly to raise yourself insolently!” the elder Mardarii told him.

  “You’re not soaring, father!” the elder Siluyan lectured him.

  But Lisii responded, just as he had to the name Lis, with hands folded at his chest and a bow.

  Tearful prayer was not the limit of his feat, he ate almost nothing, and his answer to the abbot’s exhortation “Don’t exhaust yourself immeasurably” was a meek, “I’m not hungry, Father Abbot.”

  His strength was fading visibly.

  And once he did not get up from the bench.

  To the abbots’ question: “What hurts?”

  He whispered barely audibly: “My side.”

  And after much effort and almost by force they got a doctor: it was a feat just to get to the monastery. The doctor found Lisii in bad shape and needing to be cut open.

  “They’re going to chop up Lis!” The spoiled little monk Panka rushed boldly into the refectory. “Will you do it?”

  “That’s the trapper’s job!” replied Meletii the cook, a serious monk.

  “It’s God’s will, I won’t be treated!” Lisii whispered clearly at the doctor’s decisive sentence and never said another word.

  6

  Lisii took three days in silence to die. In those three days everything was upside down in the monastery.

  Mitrofan the baker announced that he had seen a tail on the dying man.

  “A sort of trembling of a tail and waving.”

  Some were found who believed.

  “Yes.”

  Others did not believe and said:

  “No.”

  And the brotherhood was divided into tails and tailless.

  It started as a joke but ended in seriousness: the tails and the tailless began accusing each other of the gravest sins and not face-to-face but sli
nking among the pilgrims.

  It was a great temptation.

  Lisii was silently counting the minutes of life while all around there was a commotion: does he have a tail or not? His minutes were hard, but he was not left in peace for a second, they disturbed him: the doubters, not only monks but pilgrims, too, came into his cell and used all kinds of excuses to look for a tail.

  And when the last minute arrived and the deceased was thoroughly examined without any embarrassment, there was no alien tail, as was to be expected. The affair did not end there; an argument ensued: was Lisii a saint or a sinner?

  The clamor lasted at least a day and night; and why hide the sin?—There were blows and blood, and in the end Lis’s holiness prevailed: the abbot was on his side.

  The burial took place in reverent silence.

  Many wept.

  Lisii lay in the coffin under a veil, and his inhuman big-nosed face showed stiff beneath the veil.

  A plump pale woman in a white scarf stood apart behind the coffin and with her were two little girls, wrapped in gray knit shawls, in mittens, one pointy-nosed, the other red-haired—fox kits.

  10

  MARTIN ZADEKA

  REMIZOV BELIEVED THAT DREAMS FORETOLD THE FUTURE. HE KEPT DREAM BOOKS AND WROTE MANY STORIES ABOUT DREAMS. MARTIN ZADEKA WAS A POPULAR GUIDEBOOK TO DIVINATION THROUGH THE EXPLANATION OF DREAMS, AND TATIANA LARINA TURNS TO IT AFTER HAVING A TROUBLING DREAM IN PUSHKIN’S EUGENE ONEGIN. THIS STORY WAS WRITTEN IN PARIS, WHERE REMIZOV MOVED IN 1923, AFTER EMIGRATING FROM THE SOVIET UNION TO BERLIN TWO YEARS EARLIER.

  DREAM BOOK

  Neither Scott, nor Byron, nor Seneca,

  Not even the Ladies Fashion magazine

  Could entrance like this:

  It was Martin Zadeka

  Head of the Chaldean wise men,

  Fortuneteller, interpreter of dreams.

  Pushkin, Eugene Onegin

  POLODNI OF THE NIGHT

  Was von Menschen nicht gewusst

  Oder nicht bedacht,

  Dutch das Labyrinth der Brust

  Wandelt in der Nacht.

  Goethe, An den Mond.

  All that steals, by men unguessed,

  Or by men unknown,

  Through the maze of his own breast

  In the night alone.

  (Margarete Münsterberg, ed., trans., A Harvest of German Verse, 1916)

  They call it “polodni” when a heavy warm steam rises from the thawing earth in spring—the earth is breathing. “Polodni” of the night are dreams—the breath of the night.

  1

  As far back as I can remember myself, I have always had dreams. And if you didn’t knock on my window or ring, I would no longer be able to distinguish hectic reality from hot visions—the thinness of my night. A night without dreams is like a “lost” day for me.

  After the necessary awakenings into daytime, I wander through “life” half-asleep; there are always remnants of sleep in my memory—the fringe on my day clothes.

  An enviably rich fate—my world, what a great reality!—but it is therefore harshly avenged in life. Even though reality is not at all as clear and mathematical as people like to conclude from their sober dull eye, just think of “coincidence” in life!—but in dreams there is more than nonsense and incongruity under the sign of “coincidence.”

  A dream is like a conversation with a “touched” person: you listen and everything seems human but invariably somewhere they will break off, without a “because” or with some very unexpected definition—he’ll be talking about veal and suddenly the veal will turn out not to be meat but “planetary meat.”

  But you have to live, how else could it be: dream and reality are tightly bound and interpenetrating. But it is wrong to swagger and insist that there are immutable “laws of nature”: life could easily come to fit completely different laws if you look at it from your dreams and not from the laboratory. But living with nothing but dreams is a losing proposition—mush and confusion, I know from my own experience.

  My watch has only one hand, the big one fell off, and it’s always fast, I live approximately, not distinguishing days, objects, and events clearly. But I have noticed: when I cut my finger sharpening a pencil or cutting pages in a book or peeling potatoes, blood sobers me up immediately. So I think: blood is reality and there can be no reality without blood.

  Cold also brings me to life, but that’s also related to blood. I can go weeks without food, I won’t notice—I don’t know what hunger is, only thirst.

  When I have coffee and cigarettes, everything seems to move by itself—yesterday’s spectral dreams continue in bloody reality.

  You would think this is the place for an interesting story with all kinds of twists and transformations and comic laughter over the imagined confidence of the “right person”—judge of “measure and number,” the soul of things quick and dead. But in fact, I don’t have anything in particular to tell. Not for lack of memory—now I can judge myself, I have memory enough for the day and the night, no, my poverty is in my nature: it’s my soul—I don’t dig deep and I don’t see far.

  Or it’s human nature, it’s become ossified even compared to the time of Shakespeare and Erasmus, the perception of another world has coarsened and we see only what it is under our noses or what we can feel. Or on your own, at your own risk, even if you are bottomless, you won’t achieve much. For success you must have a ladder—“material,” as in Novalis or Nerval, some kind of cabbalistic-occult support. Or Dostoevsky’s epilepsy, Edgar Alan Poe’s and E. T. A. Hoffmann’s alcohol. You need some kind of twist, “vice” for the skin to crack and blood to boil, or to translate that into speech, for the “primal sound” of the word to resound clearly.

  I’m first and foremost “normal,” healthy blood, strong heart, a singer’s lungs—I feel embarrassed before those “marked” people with a deeply cleft soul, whom I love and revere. And of the cabbala and occultism, I know nothing.

  2

  Every night I have dreams and in the morning I write them down. Over several years I kept a graphic diary: I drew the dream and around it the day’s events.

  In the books On the Cornices and Whirlwind Russia I tried an experiment: to show the overlap of dreams into reality—the incidents of the night immediately appearing in the events of the day.

  People who dream cannot help noticing them and do not go past their nights indifferently, but usually they recall and recount one dream, maybe two, no more.

  Or this happens: before some event you have a dream, the contents have vanished but this remains for the rest of your life: I dreamed something special, but I can’t remember.

  That happened to S. T. Aksakov; he writes in his memoirs about a prophetic dream that vanished without a trace.1

  Dreams are very short—or is one’s memory for dreams short? But there are dreams of “high breathing”—if you write them down there’s enough for several pages: one after another, like a dismantled day; there are days like that, it starts in the morning and on it goes, something keeps happening, right until nighttime.

  However incongruous a dream may be, and the less justified, the more “dreamy” it is, the measure of daytime consciousness holds it tight: even in the dream you can say, “I’m dreaming this.”

  In literary dreams—dreams in stories—it is always interesting to see where the daytime (reality) of the dream will “crack.” The art is in that crack. Leo Tolstoy had great artistry in describing dreams; he observed his own dreams and noted the law of “lawlessness” in dreams.

  Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Leskov, Pushkin, Gogol, and Lermontov also have that great art.

  Gorky writes dreams, good ones that approximate the sleeping soul, but are just a “caliber smaller.”

  Lacking in dream talent were Goncharov, painfully so, he called the best chapter in Oblomov “Oblomov’s Dream,” and Korolenko with his “Makar’s Dream,” and strangely enough, Chekhov, who wrote “The Black Monk.”

  3

  In dreams t
he daytime forms of consciousness are destroyed or cracked, and the dreams seem to proceed in the habitual forms of waking: when asked 2 times 2 you reply with great thought and uncertainty, “I think 5.” But space, with its geometry and trigonometry, is shot to hell—that happens in a hot dream, from which one awakens as if from a shock, and your pulse races. In a boring dream everything remains in place, as in life: “I dreamed I was knitting a sock …” (from the dreams of our witchlike concierge).

  There is no past, no future—time spins like a top: events that have not yet happened but will occur pile up onto yesterday’s events, which appear in the present—not before and not after.

  The action in a dream is not “because” but “how terrific” and “for no reason.” The law of “causality” in life hits you over the head—everything that happens is “because,” yet is everything in life explicable? But in dreams it’s total confusion.

  Action in dreams can be imagined as a series of accumulations. With no meaning, in the usual sense of the word. A true dream is always nonsense, meaningless, gibberish; somersaults and messes.

  “He who does nothing can never be judged for anything.” But in fact that’s not the case: they judge and how—they sentenced people to death.

  “He who keeps silent can’t tell secrets.” But people go and chatter and give everyone away.

  “A bass can’t squeak in descant!” Listen, he’s squeaking, incredibly, and yet so clearly.

  It’s all untrue about the do-nothing and the silent one and the squeaking bass; it’s all from out of the dream “gibberish”—from the truth of dreams.

  A dream is the image of every crime. Crime is the soul of all actions in dreams. Unpunished. Yet crime is the daydream of life, in the inexorable reality wrapped up in laws, in the kingdom of punishment.

  Macbeth’s “murder sleep” is the last and final word of death.

  4

  Is dreaming tied only to life or does life only capture dreams, coloring or mixing in its crimson color and squeezing them into its form? “To dream” means “to be.” Therefore “being” and “dreaming” are one. Then I can say that a person leaving life enters into pure dreaming, or this: dreaming continues after life, but without awakening.