The Little Devil and Other Stories

by Alexei Remizov

  Pyotr stood up.

  “The law says: whoever leaves his wife, if she has not committed adultery, and takes another wife is an adulterer. I have no reason to be separated from Fevronia!”

  “We agree!” the boyars barked. “Go with her.”

  Fevronia moved away from the table, gathering crumbs from the table. Holding them in her fist she came to the center of the room. She threw them high over her head—and with a crack precious treasures fell like rain—gold, silver, stones, jewelry.

  “For your wives, let them show off. And you”—her eyes suddenly blazed, lit up and burned, you couldn’t look at them, even a lynx would squint, not sunny fire but hellfire—“be damned! You won’t hurt but you will be damned.”

  She took Pyotr by the hand. And they left the banquet.

  Loaded with Murom goods, the vessels sailed on the Oka—the path to the Volga and to the Bolgars. Pyotr and Fevronia had left Murom and were sailing to find new places. For a long time, seeing them off with white churches, their native town watched them leave. And then it was covered by the blue land of deep woods.

  In the cool sun rays the pusher toadstools stopped pushing. The sun set. Damp air came from the river.

  They decided to spend the night on shore.

  Pyotr began to think: had he done the right thing, leaving his home city? And for what? He looked at Fevronia reproachfully.

  “Don’t grumble,” Fevronia said, understanding without words, “we will live better than in the past, you’ll see.”

  Pyotr had to believe—there was clarity in Fevronia’s voice. But a nagging regret remained: “If we could go back!”

  The kettle for dinner was hanging on forked branches stuck into the ground.

  “Look, these are dry branches,” Fevronia said, “in the morning, you’ll see, trees will grow from them and the leaves will be green!” Looking at the black branches smoking with steam, she whispered something and blew.

  Night came, without looking, dark as the forest, lulling them into a sleep without dreams. It sometimes happens when your soul is shaken up—all the doors will slam shut: no memory, just darkness.

  The morning woke them with hope and the first thing Pyotr noticed, and it was as if in a dream, was that the place where the forked branches had been set up and the kettle had hung was now filled with people pointing and nodding. Pyotr came closer. It was like a dream and everyone was dreaming it, so marvelous and unbelievable: overnight the dry branches came alive and were covered in leaves and were rising as green trees above the kettle.

  “Will it be like this for us?” thought Pyotr and looked at Fevronia.

  She responded with a smile, the kind you use with frightened children.

  And when they were coming aboard to sail on, they saw a boat appear on the river, white oars glistening in the sun, waving their arms—either they couldn’t stand up or they worried they would be too late.

  “Could they be from Murom?” And so they were: the boat landed, a boyar came out, took off his hat and bowed deeply.

  “I am from the city of Murom,” he said, catching his breath, turning to Pyotr, “and from all the boyars who are still standing and still have their heads. No sooner had you gone from view that a rebellion started: everyone called himself the prince of Murom and wants to hear no argument: so many stupid heads and as many wild men. They killed many people in their fights, and were killed themselves. In the city the stores are in pieces, the houses stand with doors torn from their hinges, there isn’t a single stone without blood in the Kremlin. They killed Laska, he never hurt a beast, but he ended up killed by a man. Come back to still the storm! We will serve you!” And turning to Fevronia, he bowed even lower—“Forgive us and our women, come back!”

  Here was the miracle, what a miraculous day—everything was mixed up in Pyotr and he had no words to reply. Fevronia ordered the boats to turn homeward—to Murom.

  III

  The tale is finished. What is left is the riddle of life: inseparable love—Tristan and Isolde, Romeo and Juliet, Pyotr and Fevronia.

  Pyotr ruled Murom inseparably with Fevronia. I will record this as a happy year, the time of the Murom Principality, the eve of Batu, when Batu Khan and his Golden Horde invaded Russia in 1237.

  The end of life was approaching.

  Pyotr was tonsured as a monk, taking the name David, and finished his days in the city’s Epiphany Monastery. Fevronia spent hers under the name Efrosinia outside the city in the Exaltation of Cross Convent, where the Agrik sword was immured in the altar wall.

  When they parted, Fevronia said: “Death will come for you and me at the same hour.”

  Pyotr did nothing in his cell, he could not, and his melancholy hastened his time. He thought that Olga looked into his window and beckoned him: he had freed her, now it was her turn. That is how he understood it and sent to Fevronia to say:

  “I feel the end, come to me and we will leave the earth together.”

  Fevronia was embroidering the air: trees, grasses, flowers, birds, and animals, her favorite Hare—they each took on her melancholy a single silk thread at a time.

  “Wait a little,” she replied, “let me finish.”

  But you can’t stop time, and the deadline does not change. Feeling cold—it was summer, but he was freezing!—he sent a second time.

  “The final minutes. I’m waiting for you.”

  But she still had a trifle—to embroider the hare’s whiskers.

  “Wait.”

  He sent a third time:

  “Can’t wait, there’s”—

  She stuck the needle in the air—let them finish it.

  “I’m coming.”

  Her soul, dressed in flowers and herbs, went out beyond the wall to meet the other inseparable soul that came out at the same time.

  June 14, 1228

  in the Russian land.

  In his lifetime he had a sarcophagus made, carved out of stone with a partition for two by the Nativity icon in the Cathedral:

  “Lay us both here,” he willed.

  The people decided it differently: it was not right for a prince to lie with a beekeeper, and a monk should not be with his wife.

  They left the sarcophagus in the Cathedral empty; they buried Pyotr in the Cathedral and Fevronia separately at the Exaltation of the Cross Convent.

  The night of the funeral a storm came over Murom. At midnight it thundered. The road from the city to the convent was churned up—restless, Fevronia broke through the coffin lid, went up with the storm and flew to the Cathedral, to Pyotr. Lightning flashes illuminated her path, white fire burst from her tightly shut eyes and her lip trembled with unspoken words of damnation.

  In the morning at the Cathedral they found Pyotr’s coffin empty, with its mangled lid, and Fevronia’s body was not at the Exaltation of the Cross Convent.

  Pyotr and Fevronia lay in the sarcophagus at the Cathedral next to each other without a partition.

  And every year in Moscow, on the day of death of Pyotr and Fevronia, during the solstice, the swan bell carried from the Kremlin throughout the Russian land the story about inseparable love, not sundered by human will.

  13

  GRIGORY AND KSENIA

  REMIZOV’S VERSION OF THE OLD RUSSIAN TEXT STRESSES THE ROLE OF FATE IN HUMAN LIFE. IN THE SLAVIC PRE-CHRISTIAN TRADITION, THE SUDICE, THE WISE WOMEN, DETERMINE DESTINY WITH THEIR SPELLS. A LOVE TRIANGLE—YAROSLAV, KSENIA, GRIGORY—CAUSES PAIN AND LOSS OF FRIENDSHIP. BUT SACRIFICE LEADS TO THE CREATION OF A HOLY PLACE, A MONASTERY.

  There is another world in the world—not the primordial one, but the work of human hands—the will of a determined soul—enchanted places: for happiness, for death, for quiet.

  I see three candles—they illuminate the world. And I see flame: black flame; blinking, teasing lights; quiet, quiet flickering. There, where the breathing is easy; and where the treasure is hidden; and where death is inevitable.

  The glowing corners of the earth are not random. They will not reveal t
hemselves without a sacrifice: a living creature must inevitably be crushed. The prefiguration is Golgotha.

  Malevolence is death; a golden treasure; quietude, to my eye, is a feeling.

  You can cast a spell for anything but the fate of the doomed: why and for what am I sentenced to die, or for someone to end up head down in a pit—a dead end? Or for someone to get rich—treasure? Or for someone to find peace “for an exhausted soul”? There is no deciding fate.

  “Fate” is the final determining word in life. Obedience to fate, submission, how to avoid asking Fate herself about your fate—such darkness and confusion.

  Fate’s will in the world is done by the messengers of Fate—the Sudice: the Sudice foretell a person’s lot—they join person to person with the gift of love—the betrothed bride and groom. They separate them, too. But is Fate powerful enough in separating the betrothed—to divide the power of love? Love is indivisible and its flower never fades.

  Just as a person’s soul flourishes and glows not from nothing, so does the earth—its gravelly rubble is softened by man’s labor. Pain beautifies the soul and the world is illuminated by pain. The paths will be lost with time, but the way of the cross will not be trampled forever.

  There is another world in the world. Its solidity is spectral, happiness will flare up and then go out. The godforsaken place of death will grow empty, and quiet will be reborn as execution.

  “For the creation of a holy place on earth three are destined: Grigory—Ksenia—Yaroslav. The Sudice messengers have distributed the lots, three gifts:

  For Yaroslav—power, love, crime;

  For Ksenia—wisdom, love, separation;

  For Grigory—love, separation, light.

  I

  It came to pass in the reign of the great prince of Tver Yaroslav Yaroslavovich in Rus—in the lost Rus: the land was war torn, fractured, cities destroyed, the Russian land was a Tatar possession, the tsar was Khan Nevrui.

  Prince Yaroslav had a page, his favorite, Grigory, and Grigory loved Yaroslav and was faithful to him in everything. They were the same age—and they weren’t even twenty. And so dissimilar: Yaroslav and Grigory. The strength of the forest and the airiness of glades.

  On Yaroslav’s orders, Grigory came to collect the prince’s tribute in the village of Edemonovo on the Volga, forty versts from Tver.

  He stayed with Afanasy, the Solun sacristan. His house was near the church of the Great Martyr Dimitri of Solun—the show place of the village of Edemonovo. The sacristan was famed for his knowledge of the church and even more for his daughter, Ksenia.

  Some called Ksenia wise, others called her blessed, still others wild, stupid. For her reasoning, wise; for not being like others in eyes, voice, and movement, blessed; and for the strangeness and puzzling nature of her answers, unexpected and unusual, wild and “stupid.”

  From their first encounter Ksenia recognized Grigory and it showed in her meek gaze—and he, when he looked at her—his eyes inhaled all of her—to put it in the language of spells, all of her, “with meat, blood, liver, and overliver.” Her image filled his stunned soul. And her simple words were not a shell, they filled out for him like a ripe berry. He fastened his eyes on her, waiting—she’ll say something now—and he felt his heart flutter.

  Did she look at him that way? Day after day he recognized his trembling in the reflection of her eyes.

  Neither said a word, but each felt without words: I’m in love.

  Grigory opened up to her father about his decision to marry.

  Afanasy did not know what to say: a man close to the great prince and a sacristan’s daughter.

  “I will ask the prince, he will not refuse, he will give his permission, and I will live here with you.”

  The final word was Ksenia’s.

  When Afanasy told Ksenia about his conversation with Grigory and his decision to marry, Ksenia said, and her answer sounded prophetic—as only words spoken under the influence of a higher power can sound: “Do everything as he wishes, accept his will. God has willed it—it is fate. And it will be so.”

  Grigory did not reveal his secret to his comrades, and when he finished the prince’s assignment, he left the village of Edemonovo with the other collectors.

  Thus God planted heaven on the bank of the Volga River under the tsar Nevrui.

  When Grigory left, Ksenia said to her father and mother, “I love Grigory, it will be hard for me to be parted from him. But one cannot avoid fate. Fate will turn things its own way: he will not be my husband, but the one God indicates for me.”

  II

  When Grigory told Yaroslav about meeting Ksenia and asked permission to marry her, Yaroslav was saddened.

  “A sacristan’s daughter,” said the prince, “is not your equal. If you have decided to marry, take a wife from your circle. You will be mocked, and I will be criticized, and we will have to part.”

  Yaroslav’s words dismayed Grigory, but his will held: he could not even think of being parted form Ksenia, without Ksenia there was no life for him.

  “Ksenia loves me and I do not want another betrothed.”

  He repeated his request and it sounded like life or death.

  And Yaroslav agreed.

  Grigory interested Yaroslav with his stories of Ksenia, her extraordinariness: wise, blessed. Yaroslav did not try to talk him out of it, and he offered: he would help his favorite page to have an opulent wedding that would be remembered all his life. Grigory would travel down the Volga, while the wedding train, on horseback with music and singers, would follow along.

  That night happy Grigory went off to Edemonovo to get married, and Yaroslav ordered his falconers to prepare for a hunt in the morning. That night Yaroslav had a dream—he was hunting, and his favorite falcon chased away all the birds and placed a dove at his knees, as they sing in the wedding song—her face glowed with happiness but tears shone in her eyes.

  Yaroslav awoke with a hidden feeling, what did it mean: a dove? In the morning he went off with hawks and falcons in the direction that Grigory had gone the night before to have his wedding—and spent the day amusing himself with hunting.

  Grigory and his groomsmen had reached the village of Edemonovo. Without waiting for the prince’s train, he sent a message from the dock to tell Ksenia to prepare everything for the wedding.

  Ksenia replied that everything would be done and she would let him know because she had not heard that he was coming. At home she said, “The matchmaker has arrived, but the bridegroom is not here yet—he was delayed hunting, but he will be here.” The family was very confused, what bridegroom? But she said nothing and started preparing the honor gifts.

  Yaroslav spent the whole day hunting; that night in the field he had the same dream as the night before: his favorite falcon laid a dove on his lap. Her face glowed with happiness, but tears burned in her eyes. Yesterday’s hidden dream, filled with longing, aroused him, he felt elevated and light.

  Grigory waited all day and the night passed in expectation. There were no people from the prince. “What if the prince changed his mind and demands my return!” Without waiting for word from Ksenia, he and his groomsmen went to the village to Afanasy’s house. Everything was ready, but Ksenia asked them not to hurry: she was expecting a guest, and he would be the first and dearest of them all.

  Yaroslav ordered all his birds let loose—hawks and falcons circled over his head, that churning force energized him. Many swans were caught, a successful hunt. All the victorious birds flew back, but his favorite falcon flew off. Yaroslav chased after it.

  “Whose village is this?” he asked.

  “The village of Edemonovo,” they told him, “belongs to the great prince Yaroslav Yaroslavovich, the church of Dimitri of Solun.” Yaroslav saw his falcon. Sitting on the cupola near the cross, smoothing its feathers and preening.

  “The village of Edemonovo,” Yaroslav suddenly remembered, “Grigory’s wedding.” And he headed to the house of the sacristan Afanasy.

  A crow
d was gathered near the house to see the bride and groom head to the church.

  Grigory was sitting with Ksenia when Yaroslav appeared among the curious. Ksenia said, “Rise, go meet the great prince.” He was dressed, like his retinue, in hunting clothes. Everyone rose, apologizing for not meeting him. Yaroslav asked them to sit.

  Grigory and Ksenia are visible to all—the minute is approaching; they will be led to the church. Grigory was shining with happiness, his dream had come true and his beloved prince appeared unexpectedly for this happy hour. Ksenia, with a flash, said to Grigory, “Step away from me. Give your place to the great prince, my bridegroom, and you were my matchmaker.” Yaroslav looked at Ksenia: she was the dove from his dream!—his heart caught fire and his thoughts scrambled: “Go away from here,” he said harshly to Grigory, “go find yourself a bride.”

  And Grigory got up.

  What did he feel? His hands were in cuffs, his legs in shackles, and there was a block behind his back. He went. What a slow path, lost—from life. What a piercing sorrow accompanied him—Ksenia’s farewell look. There was a throng in the doorway—they crowded him. It was as if they raised him into the air, swung him back and forth, and smashed him against the wall. The wall broke. The block tore off and crushed him. He freed himself and went on, through—“Obedient to death!” He was attacked, and arms with rolled-up sleeves came from everywhere. They beat him wherever they could reach. Sparks scattered from his eyes. Apologizing, he stayed on his feet, not falling. Someone’s true hand struck him in the chest with a knife. Before his eyes, through a thick black veil—he sees his cut-out heart. A black flame flared into his face and flew off to the table.

  Yaroslav took Grigory’s place. With songs of celebration bride and groom were led to the church to be wed.

  Everyone looked at the great prince of Tver and no one noticed how the crushed Grigory left the house—into such a dark night, on the edge of the abyss. His hand did not lift to defend himself and his eyes did not look at the light.