The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol

by Nikolai Gogol

  "Why think for so long!" said Master Danilo, seeing a tall oak tree by the window. "Stay here, lad! I'll climb the oak; from it one can look right in the window."

  Here he took off his belt, laid his sword down so that it would not clank, and, seizing the branches, climbed up the tree. The window was still lit. Sitting on a branch just by the window, holding on to the tree with his arm, he looks: there is no candle in the room, yet it is light. Odd signs on the walls. Weapons hung up, all strange, such as are not worn by Turks, or Crimeans, or Polacks, or Christians, or the gallant Swedish people. Under the ceiling, bats flit back and forth, and their shadows flit over the doors, the walls, the floor. Now the door opens without a creak. Someone comes in wearing a red jacket and goes straight to a table covered with a white cloth. "It's he, it's my father-in-law!" Master Danilo climbed down a little lower and pressed himself closer against the tree.

  But the man had no time to see whether anyone was looking in the window or not. He came in gloomy, in low spirits, pulled the cloth from the table—and suddenly a transparent blue light poured softly through the room. Only the unmingled waves of the former pale golden light played and plunged as if in a blue sea, and stretched out like streaks in marble.

  Here he put a pot on the table and began throwing some herbs into it.

  Master Danilo looked and no longer saw him in a red jacket; instead, wide balloon trousers appeared on him, such as Turks wear; pistols in the belt; on his head some wondrous hat all covered with writing neither Russian nor Polish. He looked at his face—the face, too, began to change: the nose grew long and hung over the lips; the mouth instantly stretched to the ears; a tooth stuck out of the mouth, bent to one side, and there stood before him the same sorcerer who had appeared at the captain's wedding. "True was your dream, Katerina!" thought Burulbash.

  The sorcerer began walking around the table, the signs on the wall began to change more quickly, and the bats plunged down lower, then up, back and forth. The blue light grew thinner and thinner, and seemed to go out completely. And now the room shone with a faint rosy light. The wondrous light seemed to flow into all corners with a soft tinkling, then suddenly vanished, and it was dark. Only a noise was heard, as if wind were playing at a quiet hour of the evening, whirling over the watery mirror, bending the silver willows still lower to the water. And it seems to Master Danilo that the moon is shining in the room, the stars roam, the dark blue sky flashes dimly, and the cool night air even breathes in his face. And it seems to Master Danilo (here he began feeling his mustache to see if he was asleep) that it is no longer the sky but his own bedroom that he sees: his Tartar and Turkish sabers hang on the walls; around the walls are shelves, and on the shelves dishes and household utensils; on the table, bread and salt; a cradle hanging . . . but instead of icons, terrible faces look out; on the stove seat. . . but a thickening mist covered everything and it became dark again. And again with an odd tinkling the whole room lit up with a rosy light, and again the sorcerer stood motionless in his strange turban. The sounds grew stronger and denser, the thin rosy light grew brighter, and something white, like a cloud, hovered in the room; and it seems to Master Danilo that the cloud is not a cloud but a woman standing there; only what is she made of? Is she woven of air? Why is she standing without touching the ground or leaning on anything, and the rosy light shines through her and the signs flash on the wall? Now she moves her transparent head slightly: her pale blue eyes shine faintly; her hair falls in waves over her shoulders like a light gray mist; her lips show pale red, like the barely visible red light of dawn pouring through the transparent white morning sky; her eyebrows are faintly dark . . . Ah! it's Katerina! Here Danilo felt as if his limbs were bound; he tried to speak, but his lips moved soundlessly.

  The sorcerer stood motionless in his place.

  "Where have you been?" he asked, and she who stood before him fluttered.

  "Oh, why did you summon me?" she moaned softly. "It was so joyful for me. I was in the place where I was born and lived for fifteen years. Oh, how good it is there! How green and fragrant that meadow where I played as a child: the wildflowers are the same, and our cottage, and the kitchen garden! Oh, how my kind mother embraced me! What love was in her eyes! She caressed me, kissed me on my lips and cheeks, combed out my blond braid with a fine-toothed comb . . . Father!" here she fixed the sorcerer with her pale eyes, "why did you kill my mother?"

  The sorcerer shook his finger at her menacingly.

  "Did I ask you to speak of that?" And the airy beauty trembled. "Where is your mistress now?"

  "My mistress Katerina is asleep now, and I was glad of that, I took off and flew away. I've long wished to see Mother. I was suddenly fifteen. I became all light as a bird. Why have you summoned me?”

  "Do you remember everything I told you yesterday?" the sorcerer asked, so softly that it was barely audible.

  "I remember, I remember; but there's nothing I wouldn't give to forget it! Poor Katerina! There's much she doesn't know of what her soul knows."

  "It's Katerina's soul," thought Master Danilo; but he still dared not move.

  "Repent, father! Isn't it terrible that after each of your murders the dead rise from their graves?"

  "You're at your same old thing again!" the sorcerer interrupted menacingly. "I'll have my way, I'll make you do what I want. Katerina will love me! .. "

  "Oh, you're a monster and not my father!" she moaned. "No, you will not have your way! It's true you've acquired the power, by your unclean magic, of summoning a soul and tormenting it; but only God alone can make it do what is pleasing to Him. No, never while I am in her body will Katerina venture upon an ungodly deed. Father, the Last Judgment is near! Even if you were not my father, still you would never make me betray my beloved, faithful husband. Even if my husband were not faithful and dear to me, I still would not betray him, because God does not like perjured and faithless souls."

  Here she fixed her pale eyes on the window outside which Master Danilo was sitting and stopped motionless. . .

  "Where are you looking? Whom do you see there?" cried the sorcerer.

  The airy Katerina trembled. But Master Danilo was long since on the ground and, together with his trusty Stetsko, was making his way toward his hills. "Terrible, terrible!" he repeated to himself, feeling some timorousness in his Cossack heart, and soon he was walking through his courtyard, where the Cossacks were still fast asleep, except for the one who sat on guard and smoked his pipe. The sky was all strewn with stars.

  V

  "HOW WELL YOU did to awaken me!" said Katerina, wiping her eyes with the embroidered sleeve of her nightdress and looking her husband up and down as he stood before her. "Such a terrible dream I had! How I gasped for breath! Ohh! .. I thought I was dying.. "

  "What dream—did it go like this?" And Burulbash began to tell his wife everything he had seen. "How did you find it out, my husband?" asked Katerina, amazed. "But no, much of what you tell is unknown to me. No, I did not dream that father had killed my mother, and I saw nothing of the dead men. No, Danilo, you're not telling it right. Ah, how terrible my father is!"

  "No wonder there's much you didn't see. You don't know the tenth part of what your soul knows. Do you know that your father is an antichrist? 8 Last year, when I was going together with the Polacks against the Crimeans (I still joined with that faithless people then), the superior of the Bratsky Monastery—he's a holy man, wife—told me that an antichrist has the power to summon the soul out of any person; and the soul goes about freely when the person falls asleep, and it flies with the archangels around God's mansion. From the first your father's face did not appeal to me. If I had known you had such a father, I would not have married you; I would have left you and not taken sin upon my soul by relating myself to the race of an antichrist."

  "Danilo!" Katerina said, covering her face with her hands and sobbing, "am I guilty of anything before you? Have I betrayed you, my beloved husband? How have I brought your wrath upon me? Haven't I served you
faithfully? Did I ever say anything against it when you came home drunk from your young men's feasting? Didn't I give birth to a dark-browed son for you? . . ."

  "Don't weep, Katerina, I know you now and will not abandon you for anything. All the sins lie upon your father."

  "No, don't call him my father! He's no father to me. God is my witness, I renounce him, I renounce my father! He's an antichrist, an apostate! If he were to perish, to drown—I would not reach out to save him. If he were to grow parched from some secret herb, I would not give him water to drink. You are my father!"

  VI

  IN A DEEP cellar at Master Danilo's, locked with three locks, the sorcerer sits bound in iron chains; away over the Dnieper, his demonic castle is burning, and waves, red as blood, splash and surge around the ancient walls. It is not for sorcery, not for deeds of apostasy, that the sorcerer sits in the deep cellar. God will be the judge of that. He sits there for secret treachery, for conspiring with the enemies of the Russian Orthodox land to sell the Ukrainian people to the Catholics and burn Christian churches. Grim is the sorcerer: a thought dark as night is in his head. He has only one day left to live, and tomorrow he will bid the world farewell.

  Tomorrow execution awaits him. And what awaits him is no easy execution: it would be more merciful to boil him alive in a cauldron, or flay him of his sinful hide. Grim is the sorcerer, and he hangs his head. Perhaps he is repentant before the hour of his death; only his sins are not such as God will forgive. Above him is a narrow window with iron bars for a sash. Clanking his chains, he gets himself to the window to see whether his daughter is passing by. She is meek as a dove, she does not remember evil, she might take pity on her father . . . But no one is there.

  Below runs a road; no one moves along it. Further down, the Dnieper carouses; he has no care for anyone: he storms, and it is gloomy for the prisoner to hear his monotonous noise. Now someone appears on the road—it is a Cossack! The prisoner sighs deeply. Again all is deserted. Now someone comes down in the distance .. A green cloak billows. . a golden headdress blazes. . It is she! He leans still closer to the window. Now she is drawing near . . .

  "Katerina! daughter! take pity on me, have mercy! . . ."

  She is mute, she does not want to listen, she does not even turn her eyes toward the prison, she has already passed by, already disappeared. The whole world is deserted. Gloomy is the noise of the Dnieper. Melancholy settles into the heart. But does the sorcerer know this melancholy?

  Day draws toward evening. The sun has already set. It is already gone. It is already evening: cool; somewhere an ox is lowing; sounds come wafting from somewhere—it must be people returning from work and being merry; a boat flashes on the Dnieper . . . who cares about the prisoner! A silver crescent gleams in the sky. Now someone walks down the road from the opposite direction. It is hard to make anything out in the darkness. Katerina is coming back.

  "Daughter, for Christ's sake! even fierce wolf cubs will not tear their own mother! Daughter, at least glance at your criminal father!" She does not listen and walks on. "Daughter, for the sake of your unfortunate mother! . . ." She stops. "Come and receive my last word!"

  "Why do you cry out to me, apostate? Do not call me daughter! There is no relation between us. What do you want from me for the sake of my unfortunate mother?"

  "Katerina! My end is near: I know your husband wants to tie me to a mare's tale and send me across the fields, or maybe he'll invent a still more terrible execution . . ."

  "Is there any punishment in the world that matches your sins? Wait for it; no one is going to intercede for you."

  "Katerina! It is not execution that frightens me but the torments in the other world . . .You are innocent, Katerina, your soul will fly around God in paradise; but the soul of your apostate father will burn in eternal fire, and that fire will never go out; it will flare up more and more; no drop of dew falls, no wind breathes ..."

  "It is not in my power to lighten that punishment," said Katerina, turning away.

  "Katerina! Stay for one word more: you can save my soul. You don't know yet how good and merciful God is. Have you heard about the Apostle Paul, what a sinful man he was? But then he repented and became a saint."

  "What can I do to save your soul?" said Katerina. "Is it for me, a weak woman, to think about it?"

  "If I manage to get out of here, I will abandon everything. I will repent: I will go to the caves, put a harsh hair shirt on my body, pray to God day and night. Not just non-lenten fare, but even fish will not pass my lips! I will spread out no clothes when I go to bed! And I will keep praying and praying! And if divine mercy does not lift from me at least a hundredth part of my sins, I will bury myself up to the neck in the ground, or immure myself in a stone wall; I will take neither food nor drink, and I will die; and I will give all my goods to the monks, so that they can serve panikhidas9 for me for forty days and forty nights."

  Katerina fell to thinking.

  "Even if I were to open the door, I cannot remove your chains."

  "I fear no chains," he said. "You say they have chained my arms and legs? No, I blew smoke in their eyes and held out dry wood to them instead of my arm. Here I am, look, there's not a chain on me now!" he said, stepping into the middle. "I would not fear these walls either and would pass through them, but your husband himself does not know what sort of walls they are. A holy monk built them, and no unclean power can take a prisoner out of here without unlocking it with the same key the saint used to lock his cell. I'll dig the same sort of cell for myself, when I, an unheard-of sinner, am released from here."

  "Listen, I'll let you out. But what if you deceive me," said Katerina, stopping outside the door, "and instead of repenting, again become the devil's brother?"

  "No, Katerina, I have not long to live now. My end is near, even without execution. Do you think I would give myself up to eternal torment?"

  The locks clanged.

  "Farewell! May the merciful God preserve you, my child!" said the sorcerer, kissing her.

  "Do not touch me, unheard-of sinner, go quickly! . . ." said Katerina. But he was no longer there.

  "I let him out!" she said, frightened and gazing wildly at the walls. "What will I tell my husband now? I'm lost. All that's left for me is to bury myself alive in the grave!" And, sobbing, she nearly fell onto the stump where the prisoner had been sitting. "Yet I saved a soul," she said softly. "I did a deed pleasing to God. But my husband . . . It's the first time I've deceived him. Oh, how terrible, how hard it will be to tell him a lie. Someone's coming! It's him! my husband!" she cried desperately and fell to the ground, unconscious.

  VII

  "IT’S ME, MY daughter! It's me, my dear heart!" Katerina heard, coming to her senses, and saw before her the old serving woman. The woman, bending down, seemed to whisper something, stretching her withered hand over her and sprinkling her with cold water.

  "Where am I?" Katerina said, getting up and looking around. "Before me the Dnieper rushes, behind me the hills . . . where have you brought me to, woman?"

  "Not brought you to, but brought you from, carried you out in my arms from the stuffy cellar. I locked it with the key, so that you don't get in trouble with Master Danilo."

  "Where is the key?" said Katerina, glancing at her belt. "I don't see it."

  "Your husband untied it so as to go and look at the sorcerer, my child."

  "To go and look? . . . Woman, I'm lost!" cried Katerina.

  "May God preserve us from that, my child! Only keep silent, my little mistress, and no one will find out anything!"

  "He's escaped, the cursed antichrist! Did you hear, Katerina? He's escaped!" said Master Danilo, coming up to his wife. His eyes flashed fire; his saber, clanking, shook at his side.

  His wife went dead.

  "Did someone let him out, my beloved husband?" she said, trembling.

  "Someone did, you're right; but that someone was the devil. Look, there's a log bound in the irons instead of him. God has made it so that the
devil doesn't fear Cossack hands! If any one of my Cossacks had so much as the thought in his head, and I learned of it... I wouldn't be able to find a punishment fit for him!"

  "And if it was me? . . ." Katerina said involuntarily and stopped, frightened.

  "If it was you who thought of it, then you wouldn't be my wife. I'd sew you up in a sack and drown you in the very middle of the Dnieper! . . ."

  Katerina's breath was taken away, and she fancied her hair was separating from her head.

  VIII

  ON THE BORDER road, in a tavern, Polacks have been gathering and feasting for two days.

  There are not a few of the scum. They must have come for some raid: some of them have muskets; spurs jingle, sabers rattle. The nobles make merry and boast, talking about their unheard-of deeds, mocking Orthodoxy, calling the Ukrainian people their slaves, twisting their mustaches imposingly and imposingly sprawling on the benches with their heads thrown back.

  They have a ksiadz with them. Only, the ksiadz is of the same ilk and does not even look like a Christian priest: he drinks and carouses with them and says shameful things with his infidel tongue. The servants do not yield to them in anything: the sleeves of their tattered jackets shoved back, they strut about as if they are something special. They play cards and slap each other on the nose with the cards. They have got other men's wives to come with them.

  Shouting, fighting! . . . The nobles are rowdy, they pull tricks: grab the Jew by his beard, paint a cross on his infidel brow; shoot blanks at their wenches and dance the Cracovienne with their infidel priest. Never has there been such temptation in the Russian land, not even from the Tartars. It must be that God destined her to suffer this disgrace for her sins! Amidst the general bedlam you can hear them talking about Master Danilo's farmstead beyond the Dnieper, about his beautiful wife . . . Not for anything good has this band gathered!