“In my girlhood I was awfully strong,” Katerina Lvovna said, again not restraining herself. “It wasn’t every man who could beat me.”
“Well, then, your hand please, ma’am, if that’s really true,” the handsome fellow asked.
Katerina Lvovna became embarrassed, but held out her hand.
“Aie, the ring, it hurts, let go!” Katerina Lvovna cried, when Sergei pressed her hand in his, and she shoved him in the chest with her free hand.
The young man let go of his mistress’s hand, and her shove sent him flying two steps back.
“Mm—yes, and you figured she’s just a woman,” the little peasant said in surprise.
“Then suppose we try wrestling,” Sergei retorted, tossing back his curls.
“Well, go on,” replied Katerina Lvovna, brightening up, and she cocked her elbows.
Sergei embraced the young mistress and pressed her firm breasts to his red shirt. Katerina Lvovna was just trying to move her shoulders, but Sergei lifted her off the floor, held her in his arms, squeezed her, and gently sat her down on the overturned measuring tub.
Katerina Lvovna did not even have time to show her vaunted strength. Getting up from the tub, red as could be, she straightened the jacket that had fallen from her shoulders and quietly started out of the storehouse. Sergei coughed dashingly and shouted:
“Come on, you blessed blockheads! Pour, look sharp, get a move on; if there’s a plus, the better for us.”
It was as if he had paid no attention to what had just happened.
“He’s a skirt-chaser, that cursed Seryozhka,” the cook Aksinya was saying as she trudged after Katerina Lvovna. “The thief’s got everything—the height, the face, the looks. Whatever woman you like, the scoundrel knows straight off how to cajole her, and he cajoles her and leads her into sin. And he’s fickle, the scoundrel, as fickle as can be!”
“And you, Aksinya …” said the young mistress, walking ahead of her, “that is, your boy, is he alive?”
“He is, dearest, he is—what could happen to him? Whenever they’re not wanted, they live.”
“Where did you get him?”
“Ehh, just from fooling around—you live among people after all—just from fooling around.”
“Has he been with us long, this young fellow?”
“Who? You mean Sergei?”
“Yes.”
“About a month. He used to work for the Kopchonovs, but the master threw him out.” Aksinya lowered her voice and finished: “They say he made love to the mistress herself … See what a daredevil he is, curse his soul!”
III
A warm milky twilight hung over the town. Zinovy Borisych had not yet returned from the dam. The father-in-law, Boris Timofeich, was also not at home: he had gone to a friend’s name-day party and had even told them not to expect him for supper. Katerina Lvovna, having nothing to do, had an early meal, opened the window in her room upstairs, and, leaning against the window frame, was husking sunflower seeds. The people in the kitchen had supper and went their ways across the yard to sleep: some to the sheds, some to the storehouses, some up into the fragrant haylofts. The last to leave the kitchen was Sergei. He walked about the yard, unchained the watchdogs, whistled, and, passing under Katerina Lvovna’s window, glanced at her and made a low bow.
“Good evening,” Katerina Lvovna said softly to him from her lookout, and the yard fell silent as a desert.
“Mistress!” someone said two minutes later at Katerina Lvovna’s locked door.
“Who is it?” Katerina Lvovna asked, frightened.
“Please don’t be frightened: it’s me, Sergei,” the clerk replied.
“What do you want, Sergei?”
“I have a little business with you, Katerina Lvovna: I want to ask a small thing of your honor; allow me to come in for a minute.”
Katerina Lvovna turned the key and let Sergei in.
“What is it?” she asked, going back to the window.
“I’ve come to you, Katerina Lvovna, to ask if you might have some book to read. I’m overcome with boredom.”
“I have no books, Sergei: I don’t read them,” Katerina Lvovna replied.
“Such boredom!” Sergei complained.
“Why should you be bored?”
“For pity’s sake, how can I not be bored? I’m a young man, we live like in some monastery, and all I can see ahead is that I may just waste away in this solitude till my dying day. It sometimes even leads me to despair.”
“Why don’t you get married?”
“That’s easy to say, mistress—get married! Who can I marry around here? I’m an insignificant man: no master’s daughter will marry me, and from poverty, as you’re pleased to know yourself, Katerina Lvovna, our kind are all uneducated. As if they could have any proper notion of love! Just look, if you please, at what notion there is even among the rich. Now you, I might say, for any such man as had feeling in him, you would be a comfort all his own, but here they keep you like a canary in a cage.”
“Yes, it’s boring for me” escaped Katerina Lvovna.
“How not be bored, mistress, with such a life! Even if you had somebody on the side, as others do, it would be impossible for you to see him.”
“Well, there you’re … it’s not that at all. For me, if I’d had a baby, I think it would be cheerful with the two of us.”
“As for that, if you’ll allow me to explain to you, mistress, a baby also happens for some reason, and not just so. I’ve lived among masters for so many years now, and seen what kind of life women live among merchants, don’t I also understand? As the song goes: ‘Without my dearie, life’s all sad and dreary,’ and that dreariness, let me explain to you, Katerina Lvovna, wrings my own heart so painfully, I can tell you, that I could just cut it out of my breast with a steel knife and throw it at your little feet. And it would be easier, a hundred times easier for me then …”
Sergei’s voice trembled.
“What are you doing talking to me about your heart? That’s got nothing to do with me. Go away …”
“No, please, mistress,” said Sergei, trembling all over and taking a step towards Katerina Lvovna. “I know, I see very well and even feel and understand, that it’s no easier for you than for me in this world; except that now,” he said in the same breath, “now, for the moment, all this is in your hands and in your power.”
“What? What’s that? What have you come to me for? I’ll throw myself out the window,” said Katerina Lvovna, feeling herself in the unbearable power of an indescribable fear, and she seized hold of the windowsill.
“Oh, my life incomparable, why throw yourself out?” Sergei whispered flippantly, and, tearing the young mistress from the window, he took her in a firm embrace.
“Oh! Oh! Let go of me,” Katerina Lvovna moaned softly, weakening under Sergei’s hot kisses, and involuntarily pressing herself to his powerful body.
Sergei picked his mistress up in his arms like a child and carried her to a dark corner.
A hush fell over the room, broken only by the measured ticking of her husband’s pocket watch, hanging over the head of Katerina Lvovna’s bed; but it did not interfere with anything.
“Go,” said Katerina Lvovna half an hour later, not looking at Sergei and straightening her disheveled hair before a little mirror.
“Why should I leave here now?” Sergei answered her in a happy voice.
“My father-in-law will lock the door.”
“Ah, my soul, my soul! What sort of people have you known, if a door is their only way to a woman? For me there are doors everywhere—to you or from you,” the young fellow replied, pointing to the posts that supported the gallery.
IV
Zinovy Borisych did not come home for another week, and all that week, every night till dawn, his wife made merry with Sergei.
During those nights in Zinovy Borisych’s bedroom, much wine from the father-in-law’s cellar was drunk, and many sweetmeats were eaten, and many were the kisses on the mistress’s suga
ry lips, and the toyings with black curls on the soft pillow. But no road runs smooth forever; there are also bumps.
Boris Timofeich was not sleepy: the old man wandered about the quiet house in a calico nightshirt, went up to one window, then another, looked out, and the red shirt of the young fellow Sergei was quietly sliding down the post under his daughter-in-law’s window. There’s news for you! Boris Timofeich leaped out and seized the fellow’s legs. Sergei swung his arm to give the master a hearty one on the ear, but stopped, considering that it would make a big to-do.
“Out with it,” said Boris Timofeich. “Where have you been, you thief you?”
“Wherever I was, I’m there no longer, Boris Timofeich, sir,” replied Sergei.
“Spent the night with my daughter-in-law?”
“As for where I spent the night, master, that I do know, but you listen to what I say, Boris Timofeich: what’s done, my dear man, can’t be undone; at least don’t bring disgrace on your merchant house. Tell me, what do you want from me now? What satisfaction would you like?”
“I’d like to give you five hundred lashes, you serpent,” replied Boris Timofeich.
“The guilt is mine—the will is yours,” the young man agreed. “Tell me where to go, and enjoy yourself, drink my blood.”
Boris Timofeich led Sergei to his stone larder and lashed him with a whip until he himself had no strength left. Sergei did not utter a single moan, but he chewed up half his shirtsleeve with his teeth.
Boris Timofeich abandoned Sergei to the larder until the mincemeat of his back healed, shoved a clay jug of water at him, put a heavy padlock on the door, and sent for his son.
But to go a hundred miles on a Russian country road is not a quick journey even now, and for Katerina Lvovna to live an extra hour without Sergei had already become intolerable. She suddenly unfolded the whole breadth of her awakened nature and became so resolute that there was no stopping her. She found out where Sergei was, talked to him through the iron door, and rushed to look for the keys. “Let Sergei go, papa”—she came to her father-in-law.
The old man simply turned green. He had never expected such insolent boldness from his sinful but until then always obedient daughter-in-law.
“What do you mean, you such-and-such,” he began shaming Katerina Lvovna.
“Let him go,” she said. “I swear on my conscience, there’s been nothing bad between us yet.”
“Nothing bad!” he said, gnashing his teeth. “And what were you doing during the nights? Plumping up your husband’s pillows?”
But she kept at it: “Let him go, let him go.”
“In that case,” said Boris Timofeich, “here’s what you’ll get: once your husband comes, you honest wife, we’ll whip you in the stable with our own hands, and I’ll send that scoundrel to jail tomorrow.”
So Boris Timofeich decided; but his decision was not to be realized.
V
In the evening, Boris Timofeich ate a bit of kasha with mushrooms and got heartburn; then suddenly there was pain in the pit of his stomach; he was seized with terrible vomiting, and towards morning he died, just as the rats died in his storehouses, Katerina Lvovna having always prepared a special food for them with her own hands, using a dangerous white powder entrusted to her keeping.
Katerina Lvovna delivered her Sergei from the old man’s stone larder and, with no shame before people’s eyes, placed him in her husband’s bed to rest from her father-in-law’s beating; and the father-in-law, Boris Timofeich, they buried without second thoughts, according to the Christian rule. Amazingly enough, no one thought anything of it: Boris Timofeich had died, died from eating mushrooms, as many had died from eating them. They buried Boris Timofeich hastily, without even waiting for his son, because the weather was warm, and the man sent to the mill for Zinovy Borisych had not found him there. He had had the chance to buy a woodlot cheaply another hundred miles away: he had gone to look at it and had not properly told anyone where he was going.
Having settled this matter, Katerina Lvovna let herself go entirely. She had not been a timid one before, but now there was no telling what she would think up for herself; she strutted about, gave orders to everyone in the house, and would not let Sergei leave her side. The servants wondered about it, but Katerina Lvovna’s generous hand managed to find them all, and the wondering suddenly went away. “The mistress is having an intriguery with Sergei, that’s all,” they figured. “It’s her business, she’ll answer for it.”
Meanwhile, Sergei recovered, unbent his back, and, again the finest of fellows, a bright falcon, walked about beside Katerina Lvovna, and once more they led a most pleasant life. But time raced on not only for them: the offended husband, Zinovy Borisych, was hurrying home after his long absence.
VI
In the yard after lunch it was scorching hot, and the darting flies were unbearably annoying. Katerina Lvovna closed the bedroom shutters, covered the window from inside with a woolen shawl, and lay down to rest with Sergei on the merchant’s high bed. Katerina Lvovna sleeps and does not sleep, she is in some sort of daze, her face is bathed in sweat, and her breathing is hot and heavy. Katerina Lvovna feels it is time for her to wake up, time to go to the garden and have tea, but she simply cannot get up. At last the cook came and knocked on the door: “The samovar’s getting cold under the apple tree,” she said. Katerina Lvovna turned over with effort and began to caress the cat. And the cat goes rubbing himself between her and Sergei, and he’s so fine, gray, big, and fat as can be … and he has whiskers like a village headman. Katerina Lvovna feels his fluffy fur, and he nuzzles her with his nose: he thrusts his blunt snout into her resilient breast and sings a soft song, as if telling her of love. “How did this tomcat get here?” Katerina Lvovna thinks. “I’ve set cream on the windowsill: the vile thing’s sure to lap it up. He should be chased out,” she decided and was going to grab him and throw him out, but her fingers went through him like mist. “Where did this cat come from anyway?” Katerina Lvovna reasons in her nightmare. “We’ve never had any cat in our bedroom, and look what a one has got in!” She again went to take hold of him, and again he was not there. “Oh, what on earth is this? Can it really be a cat?” thought Katerina Lvovna. She was suddenly dumbstruck, and her drowsiness and dreaming were completely driven away. Katerina Lvovna looked around the room—there is no cat, there is only handsome Sergei lying there, pressing her breast to his hot face with his powerful hand.
Katerina Lvovna got up, sat on the bed, kissed Sergei, kissed and caressed him, straightened the rumpled featherbed, and went to the garden to have tea; and the sun had already dropped down quite low, and a wonderful, magical evening was descending upon the thoroughly heated earth.
“I slept too long,” Katerina Lvovna said to Aksinya as she seated herself on the rug under the blossoming apple tree to have tea. “What could it mean, Aksinyushka?” she asked the cook, wiping the saucer with a napkin herself.
“What’s that, my dear?”
“It wasn’t like in a dream, but a cat kept somehow nudging into me wide awake.”
“Oh, what are you saying?”
“Really, a cat nudging.”
Katerina Ivanovna told how the cat was nudging into her.
“And why were you caressing him?”
“Well, that’s just it! I myself don’t know why I caressed him.”
“A wonder, really!” the cook exclaimed.
“I can’t stop marveling myself.”
“It’s most certainly about somebody sidling up to you, or something else like that.”
“But what exactly?”
“Well, what exactly—that’s something nobody can explain to you, my dear, what exactly, only there will be something.”
“I kept seeing a crescent moon in my dream and then there was this cat,” Katerina Lvovna went on.
“A crescent moon means a baby.”
Katerina Lvovna blushed.
“Shouldn’t I send Sergei here to your honor?” Aksinya hazarde
d, offering herself as a confidante.
“Well, after all,” replied Katerina Lvovna, “you’re right, go and send him: I’ll have tea with him here.”
“Just what I say, send him here,” Aksinya concluded, and she waddled ducklike to the garden gate.
Katerina Lvovna also told Sergei about the cat.
“Sheer fantasy,” replied Sergei.
“Then why is it, Seryozha, that I’ve never had this fantasy before?”
“There’s a lot that never was before! Before I used to just look at you and pine away, but now—ho-ho!—I possess your whole white body.”
Sergei embraced Katerina Lvovna, spun her in the air, and playfully landed her on the fluffy rug.
“Oh, my head is spinning!” said Katerina Lvovna. “Seryozha, come here; sit beside me,” she called, lying back and stretching herself out in a luxurious pose.
The young fellow, bending down, went under the low apple tree, all bathed in white flowers, and sat on the rug at Katerina Lvovna’s feet.
“So you pined for me, Seryozha?”
“How I pined!”
“How did you pine? Tell me about it.”
“How can I tell about it? Is it possible to describe how you pine? I was heartsick.”
“Why is it, Seryozha, that I didn’t feel you were suffering over me? They say you can feel it.”
Sergei was silent.
“And why did you sing songs, if you were longing for me? Eh? Didn’t I hear you singing in the gallery?” Katerina Lvovna went on asking tenderly.
“So what if I sang songs? A mosquito also sings all his life, but it’s not for joy,” Sergei answered drily.
There was a pause. Katerina Lvovna was filled with the highest rapture from these confessions of Sergei’s.
She wanted to talk, but Sergei sulked and kept silent.
“Look, Seryozha, what paradise, what paradise!” Katerina Lvovna exclaimed, looking through the dense branches of the blossoming apple tree that covered her at the clear blue sky in which there hung a fine full moon.
The moonlight coming through the leaves and flowers of the apple tree scattered the most whimsical bright spots over Katerina Lvovna’s face and whole recumbent body; the air was still; only a light, warm breeze faintly stirred the sleepy leaves and spread the subtle fragrance of blossoming herbs and trees. There was a breath of something languorous, conducive to laziness, sweetness, and obscure desires.
The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories Page 4