by Teffi
I remember those “Moshka days” well.
An outbuilding; a small, empty, whitewashed room; planks, boards and sawdust.
A long black figure would be bent over a wide board and running a little box along it. From under the box cascaded delicate, silky curls of fragrant shavings.
My sister and I would stand in the doorway, holding our breath, watching Moshka. I think we stood there for hours at a time.
Moshka said nothing; he paid no attention to us at all. He would plane and saw and chisel. His movements were slow, as if unconscious, his eyes half closed. His movements lulled us into a kind of hypnotic trance. We would start breathing deeply and evenly, as if we were asleep. Our eyes, too, were half closed and rolled back. Something strange, pleasant and irresistible would come over us, enchanting us, bewitching us, taking away our strength and will.
At a call from our elders we would make an effort to rouse ourselves and then run back into the house. At table, our mother would say how pale we looked.
But the moment we were left to our own devices, we would run off to watch Moshka. This quiet, dark man held an inexplicable attraction for us.
Many years later, a landowner from Simbirsk told me how a Kalmyk had cured his six-year-old son of childhood epilepsy. The Kalmyk asked for a pound of pure silver, took a little hammer and began beating out a hollow cone. For nine days he shaped the silver, tapping with the hammer, slowly rotating the shining chunk of metal and humming very softly. The sick boy was told to stand beside him and watch. The boy turned calm and sleepy. After nine days the cone was finished, and the boy was cured.
In old Moshka’s movements, too, there must have been something that had a hypnotic effect upon us.
But in the meantime, the legends around Moshka couldn’t but inflame people’s imaginations.
Just think—a man who has been carried off by the devil! How often in our humdrum world do you come face to face with something like that?
Once the story of his disappearance had been thoroughly picked over, it began to feel unsatisfying. It was hard to leave it at that. And so people’s minds set to work.
The housekeeper kept bustling in; the laundress kept saying things in a whisper.
“Why are you always running off to see Moshka?” Nanny would grumble. “You shouldn’t look at him. His kind bring harm—you mustn’t look at them for long.”
“What ‘kind’? What kind is Moshka?”
“The kind that walk.”
How mysterious and macabre the words sounded.
“Where does he walk, Nanny?”
“Here. He ought to stay there, but he comes and walks here. No good will come of it.”
“But where’s there?”
“Where he’s bur-r-r-ried!”
The way she said the word, we didn’t dare ask more. Evidently, Moshka had been buried somewhere and then got out…
In the evening the housekeeper was whispering something about the cemetery. It was scary. We understood that Moshka had been buried there—and now here he was, coming here from there.
There was another Jew working on our estate at the time. He was a sociable, talkative fellow. He was making bricks for the barn and he kept promising to build a little house for me and my sister. Knowing he had a loose tongue, we decided to ask him about Moshka.
Thanks to our house-building plans we were on the friendliest of terms: yes, he was sure to tell us everything.
And so off we went.
“Itska, tell us about Moshka. Is it true he’s already been buried?”
Our question didn’t surprise Itska, although I suspect now that he simply didn’t understand us. But his response was so eloquent that it’s stayed with me throughout all my long life:
“Moshka? Why does everyone keep on about Moshka? And why Moshka? Why not not-Moshka? Let me tell you once and for all—Moshka is simply Moshka.”
And that was that.
That evening, in the nursery, there was an entire assembly. It was attended not only by the housekeeper, but also by the laundress, the kitchen woman and some witch in a brown headscarf whose connection to the household seemed rather distant; she might have been the coachman’s mother-in-law.
Here we learnt—and deliberated upon—the most astonishing news. Moshka’s carpentry work, we discovered, was just a cover. The cunning man was using it to divert attention from his real business: running a bathhouse for the dead.
Everything had been confirmed by statements from witnesses. Someone had a friend who had left town late on a Sunday evening. He’d had a bit too much to drink so he went the wrong way and ended up at Moshka’s bathhouse. And then—heavens above! He heard a knocking and a crashing—like metal pails rolling about on the floor—and then it seemed as if lots of non-human voices were arguing. The man ran off in terror. But he went back the next morning and looked through the window: shelves had been overturned, boards were lying about on the floor and pails had been thrown all over the place. No doubt about it—something had been going on in the night. He told his friend—a clerk and a man of the world. This man of the world just grinned at him.
“What? Are you serious?” he asked. “Everyone’s known for ages. Any fool could have told you that Moshka runs a bathhouse for the dead. Why else would the bathhouse be right next to the cemetery?”
“But… that bathhouse hasn’t been used for years.”
“Of course no one goes there,” said the man of the world. “How many people are going to frequent a place like that? Only the kind that walk. Was all this on a Sunday?”
“Yes. It was Sunday.”
“What Christian soul would go to the bathhouse on a Sunday? You know very well what I’m saying. You’re not a child.”
This entire story was narrated to the meeting in whispers, interspersed with little sobs.
Then we heard about the aunt of some woman who made communion bread. Her husband’s brother had gone to the bathhouse one night on purpose. He’d looked through the window and seen two naked dead men sitting and steaming themselves with cold water. The brother-in-law took such a fright that he was struck dumb for the rest of his life.
And now the same mute brother-in-law was telling everyone to knock out the bathhouse windows, to take the door off its hinges and keep a good watch on the place. It was time to smoke Moshka out. Why should anyone round here give him work if he was the kind that walk?
Soon after this, Moshka disappeared. Some said he must have gone to find work in Kiev, others had seen with their very own eyes how he had been dragged off again by the devil.
Then it emerged that while Moshka was working for us in his usual way, planing his boards, someone had indeed gone to the trouble of smashing in the bathhouse windows and going off with the bathhouse door. And Moshka could hardly go on living there with no windows or doors. After all, his kind need to be able to hide away from people.
I may only have been little, but I could see that it was impossible to live without windows or doors. Although such things may not have mattered to Moshka. After all, he wasn’t going to catch cold if he was the kind that walk.
But the story of him going to Kiev was, of course, no more than idle gossip. Because what did our herdsman find, on the nesting box next to the outbuilding, but an old galosh? Who did it belong to if not to Moshka? And how could it have got up there? It had fallen from the sky, of course, as Moshka was being carried off by the devil.
All in all, people felt a little regretful.
“He was a good sort. Quiet, hard-working, honest. The trouble is, he wasn’t a human being. If he had been, none of this would have happened. It’s a good thing he went away of his own accord. Otherwise… well, people were already beginning to talk about aspen stakes.”
The galosh was solemnly burnt. Because people knew that if it wasn’t destroyed Moshka was sure to come back for it. If not now—then in thirty years’ time.
“It’s better if he doesn’t walk any more,” said the kitchen woman. “Enough’s enoug
h.”
1936
THE DOG
(A STORY FROM A STRANGER)
DO YOU REMEMBER that tragic death? The death of that artful Edvers? The whole thing happened right in front of my eyes. I was even indirectly involved.
His death was extraordinary enough in itself, but the strange tangle of events around it was still more astonishing. At the time I never spoke about these events to anyone. Nobody knew anything, except the man who is now my husband. There was no way I could have spoken about them. People would have thought I was mad and I would probably have been suspected of something criminal. I would have been dragged still deeper into that horror—which was almost too much for me as things were. A shock like that is hard to get over.
It’s all in the past now. I found some kind of peace long ago. But, you know, the further my past recedes from me, the more distinctly I can make out the clear, direct, utterly improbable line that is the axis of this story. So, if I am to tell this story at all, I have to tell you all of it, the way I see it now.
If you want to, you can easily check that I haven’t made any of this up. You already know how Edvers died. Zina Volotova (née Katkova) is alive and well. And if you still don’t believe me, my husband can confirm every detail.
In general, I believe that many more miracles take place in the world than we think. You only need to know how to see—how to follow a thread, how to follow the links in a chain of events, not rejecting something merely because it seems improbable, neither jumbling the facts nor forcing your own explanations on them.
Some people like to make every trivial event into a miracle. Where everything is really quite straightforward and ordinary, they introduce all kinds of personal forebodings and entirely arbitrary interpretations of dreams made to fit their stories. And then there are other, more sober, people who treat everything beyond their understanding with supreme scepticism, dissecting and analysing away whatever they find inexplicable.
I belong to neither of these groups. I do not intend to explain anything at all. I shall simply tell you everything truthfully, just as it happened, beginning at what I myself see as the story’s beginning.
And I myself think the story begins during a distant and wonderful summer, when I was only fifteen.
It’s only nowadays that I’ve become so quiet and melancholic—back then, in my early youth, I was full of beans, a real madcap. Some girls are like that. Daredevils, afraid of nothing. And you can’t even say that I was spoilt, because there was no one to spoil me. By then I was already an orphan, and the aunt who was in charge of me, may she rest in peace, was simply a ninny. Spoiling me and disciplining me were equally beyond her. She was a blancmange. I now believe that she simply wasn’t in the least interested in me, but then neither did I care in the least about her.
The summer I’m talking about, my auntie and I were staying with the Katkovs, who lived on a neighbouring estate, in the province of Smolensk.
It was a large and very sweet family. My friend Zina Katkova liked me a lot. She simply adored me. In fact the whole family were very fond of me. I was a pretty girl, good-natured and lively—yes, I really was very lively indeed. It seemed I was charged up with enough joy, enough zest for life to last me till the end of my days. As things turned out, however, that proved to be far from the case.
I had a lot of self-confidence then. I felt I was clever and beautiful. I flirted with everyone, even with the old cook. Life was so full it filled me almost to bursting. The Katkovs, as I’ve said, were a large family and—with all the guests who had come for the summer—there were usually about twenty people around the table.
After supper, we used to walk to a little hill—a beautiful, romantic spot. From it you could see the river and an old abandoned mill. It was a mysterious, shadowy place, especially in the light of the moon, when everything round about was bathed in silver, and only the bushes by the mill and the water under the mill wheel were black as ink, silent and sinister.
We didn’t go to the mill even in daytime—we weren’t allowed to, because the wooden dam was very old and, even if you didn’t fall right through it, you could easily sprain your ankle. The village children, on the other hand, went there all the time, foraging for raspberries. The canes had become dense bushes, but the raspberries themselves were now very small, like wild ones.
And so we would often sit in the evenings on the little hill, gazing at this old mill and singing all together, “Sing, swallow, sing!”
It was, of course, only us young who went there. There were about six of us. There was my friend Zina and her two brothers—Kolya, who was the elder by two years, and Volodya, who is now my husband. At the time he was twenty-three years old, already grown-up, a student. And then there was his college friend, Vanya Lebedev—a very interesting young man, intelligent and full of mockery, always able to come up with some witticism. I, of course, thought he was madly in love with me, only trying his best to hide it. Later the poor fellow was killed in the war… And then there was one more boy—red-haired Tolya, the estate manager’s son. He was about sixteen years old and still at school. He was a nice boy, and even quite good-looking—tall, strong, but terribly shy. When I remember him now, he always seems to be hiding behind somebody. If you happened to catch his glance, he would smile shyly and quickly disappear again. Now, this red-haired Tolya really was head-over-heels in love with me. About this there could be no doubt at all. He was wildly, hopelessly in love with me, so hopelessly that no one even had the least wish to make fun of him or to try to laugh him out of it. No one teased him at all, though anyone else in his position would have been granted no mercy—especially with people like Vanya around. Vanya even used to make out that Fedotych, the old cook, was smitten with my charms: “Really, Lyalya, it’s time you satisfied poor Fedotych’s passion. Today’s fish soup is pure salt.1 We can’t go on like this. You’re a vain girl. You may enjoy his suffering—but what about us? Why should we be punished?”
Tolya and I often used to go out for walks together. Sometimes I liked to get up before dawn and go out to fish or pick mushrooms. I did this mainly in order to shock everyone. People would walk into the dining room in the morning for a cup of tea and say, “What’s this basket doing here? Where have all these mushrooms come from?”
“Lyalya picked them.”
Or some fish would suddenly appear on someone’s plate at breakfast.
“Where’s this come from? Who brought it?”
“Lyalya went fishing this morning.”
I loved everyone’s gasps of astonishment.
So, this red-headed Tolya and I were friends. He never spoke to me of his love, but it was as if there were a secret agreement between us, as if everything were so entirely clear and definite that there was no need to talk about it. Tolya was supposed to be a friend of Kolya Katkov’s, although I don’t really think there was any particular friendship between them. I think Tolya just wanted to be a part of our group; he just wanted the opportunity to stand behind someone and look at me.
And then one evening we all of us, including Tolya, went off to the hill. And Vanya Lebedev suddenly decided that each of us should tell some old tale or legend, whatever they could remember. The scarier, the better—needless to say.
We drew lots to decide who should begin. The lot fell to Tolya.
“He’ll just get all embarrassed,” I said to myself, “and he won’t be able to think of any stories at all.”
But, to our general astonishment, Tolya began straight away: “There’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you all for a long time, but somehow I’ve never got round to it. A story about the mill. The story’s quite true—only it’s so strange you’d swear it was just a legend. I heard it from my own father. He used to live six miles away, in Konyukhovka. It was when he was a young man. The mill had been out of use for a long time even then. And then an old German with a huge dog suddenly came along and rented the mill. He was a very strange old man indeed. He never spoke to anyone at all; he
was always silent. And the dog was no less strange; it would sit opposite the old man for days on end, never taking its eyes off him. It was only too obvious that the old man was terribly afraid of the dog, but there seemed to be nothing he could do about it. He seemed quite unable to get rid of the dog. And the dog just kept watching him, following the old man’s every movement. Every now and then it would suddenly bare its teeth and growl. But the peasants who went there for flour said the dog never attacked any of them. All it ever did was look at the old man. Everyone found this very odd. People even asked the old man why he kept such a devilish creature. But there was no chance of getting any reply out of him. He simply never answered a word… And then it happened. All of a sudden this dog leapt on the old man and bit through his throat. Then the peasants saw the dog rushing away, as if someone were chasing it. No one ever saw the dog again. And the mill’s been empty ever since.”
We liked Tolya’s old legend. Vanya Lebedev, however, said, “That’s splendid, Tolya. Only you missed out a few things. And really, it should have been scarier. You should have added that the mill has been under a spell ever since. Whoever spends one whole night there will be able, if ever he wishes, to turn himself into a dog.”
“But that’s not true,” Tolya replied shyly.
“How do you know? Maybe it is true. We simply don’t know. I’ve got a feeling that’s the way it is. It’s just that no one’s tested this out yet.”
We all laughed. “But why? What’s so special about turning into a dog? If one could turn oneself into a millionaire, that would be different. Or some hero or other, or a famous general—or a great beauty, for that matter. But who wants to turn into a dog? Where would that get you?”