The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories

by Nikolai Leskov

  Fedya looked at his aunt and remarked that for some reason she was very pale.

  In reply to this remark, Katerina Lvovna coughed deliberately and glanced expectantly at the door to the drawing room. A floorboard creaked softly there.

  “I’m reading the life of my guardian angel, St. Feodor Stratilatos, auntie.4 There was a man pleasing to God.”

  Katerina Lvovna stood silently.

  “Sit down if you like, auntie, and I’ll read it over to you,” her nephew tried to make up to her.

  “Wait, I’ll just go and tend to that icon lamp in the reception room,” Katerina Lvovna replied and went out with hurried steps.

  There was the softest whispering in the drawing room; but amidst the general silence it reached the child’s keen ear.

  “Auntie, what is it? Who are you whispering to there?” the boy cried with tears in his voice. “Come here, auntie, I’m afraid,” he called a second later, still more tearfully, and he thought he heard Katerina Lvovna say “Well?” in the drawing room, which the boy took as referring to him.

  “What are you afraid of?” Katerina Lvovna asked him in a slightly hoarse voice, coming in with bold, resolute strides and standing by his bed in such a way that the door to the drawing room was screened from the sick boy by her body. “Lie down,” she said to him after that.

  “I don’t want to, auntie.”

  “No, Fedya, you listen to me: lie down, it’s time, lie down,” Katerina Lvovna repeated.

  “What’s the matter, auntie? I don’t want to at all.”

  “No, you lie down, lie down,” Katerina Lvovna said in a changed, unsteady voice, and, picking the boy up under the arms, she laid him at the head of the bed.

  Just then Fedya screamed hysterically: he had seen the pale, barefoot Sergei come in.

  Katerina Lvovna put her hand over the frightened child’s mouth, gaping in terror, and shouted:

  “Quick now, hold him straight so he doesn’t thrash!”

  Sergei held Fedya by the arms and legs, and Katerina Lvovna, in one movement, covered the sufferer’s childish face with a big down pillow and pressed it to him with her firm, resilient breasts.

  For about four minutes there was a sepulchral silence in the room.

  “It’s all over,” Katerina Lvovna whispered and was just getting up to put everything in order when the walls of the quiet house that concealed so many crimes shook with deafening blows: the windows rattled, the floors swayed, the chains of the hanging icon lamps quivered and sent fantastic shadows wandering over the walls.

  Sergei trembled and broke out running for all he was worth; Katerina Lvovna rushed after him, and the noise and din followed them. It seemed as though some unearthly powers were shaking the sinful house to its foundations.

  Katerina Lvovna was afraid that, driven by terror, Sergei would run outside and give himself away by his fright; but he dashed straight upstairs.

  Having run up the stairs, Sergei struck his head against the half-open door in the darkness and fell back down with a moan, totally crazed by superstitious fear.

  “Zinovy Borisych, Zinovy Borisych!” he muttered, flying headlong down and dragging Katerina Lvovna with him, having knocked her off her feet.

  “Where?” she asked.

  “He just went flying over us with a sheet of iron. There, there he is again! Aie, aie!” Sergei cried. “It’s thundering, it’s thundering again!”

  By now it was quite clear that many hands were banging on the windows from outside and someone was breaking down the door.

  “Fool! Stand up!” cried Katerina Lvovna, and with these words she herself went flitting back to Fedya, arranged his dead head on the pillow in a most natural sleeping position, and with a firm hand unlocked the door through which a crowd of people was about to crash.

  The spectacle was frightening. Katerina Lvovna looked over the heads of the crowd besieging the porch, and there were whole ranks of unknown people climbing the high fence into the yard, and outside there was a hum of human voices.

  Before Katerina Lvovna managed to figure anything out, the people surrounding the porch overran her and flung her inside.

  XII

  This whole alarm came about in the following way: for the vigil before a major feast in all the churches of the town where Katerina Lvovna lived, which, though provincial, was rather large and a trading center, a numberless multitude of people always gathered, and in the church named for that feast, even the yard outside had no room for an apple to fall. Here a choir consisting of young merchants usually sang, led by a special director who also belonged to the lovers of vocal art.

  Our people are pious, zealous for God’s church, and, as a result of that, are to a certain extent artistic people: churchly splendor and harmonious “organ-drone” singing constitute one of their loftiest and purest delights. Wherever the choir sings, almost half of our town gathers, especially the young tradesmen: shopkeepers, errand boys, factory workers, and the owners themselves, with their better halves—everybody packs into one church; everybody wants to stand if only outside on the porch or by the window, in scorching heat or freezing cold, to hear how the octave drones and the ecstatic tenor pulls off the most intricate grace notes.

  The Izmailovs’ parish church was dedicated to the Entrance of the Mother of God into the Temple, and therefore, on the eve of this feast, just at the time of the episode with Fedya described above, all the young folk of the town were in that church and, on leaving in a noisy crowd, were discussing the virtues of a well-known tenor and the accidental blunders of an equally well-known bass.

  But not everyone was interested in these vocal questions: there were people in the crowd who were concerned with other things.

  “You know, lads, strange things are told about the young Izmailov woman,” said a young mechanic, brought from Petersburg by a merchant for his steam mill, as they approached the Izmailovs’ house. “They say,” he went on, “that she and their clerk Seryozhka make love every other minute …”

  “Everybody knows that,” replied a fleece-lined blue nankeen coat. “And, by the way, she wasn’t in church tonight.”

  “Church, ha! The nasty wench has turned so vile, she has no fear of God, or conscience, or other people’s eyes.”

  “Look, there’s light in their place,” the mechanic noticed, pointing to a bright strip between the shutters.

  “Peek through the crack, see what they’re up to,” several voices called out.

  The mechanic propped himself on the shoulders of two of his comrades and had just put his eye to the narrow gap when he screamed at the top of his voice:

  “Brothers, friends, they’re smothering somebody, they’re smothering somebody in there!”

  And the mechanic desperately banged on the shutters with his hands. Some dozen men followed his example and, running to the windows, began applying their fists to them.

  The crowd grew every moment, and the result was the siege of the Izmailov house already known to us.

  “I saw it, with my own eyes I saw it,” the mechanic testified over the dead Fedya. “The child was lying on the bed, and the two of them were smothering him.”

  Sergei was taken to the police that same evening, and Katerina Lvovna was led to her upstairs room and two guards were placed over her.

  It was freezing cold in the Izmailovs’ house: the stoves were not lit; the door was never shut; one dense crowd of curious people replaced another. They all came to look at Fedya lying in his coffin and at the other big coffin, its lid tightly covered with a wide shroud. There was a white satin crown on Fedya’s forehead, covering the red scar left by the opening of the skull. The forensic autopsy had discovered that Fedya died of suffocation, and Sergei, when brought to his corpse, at the priest’s first words about the Last Judgment and the punishment of the unrepentant, burst into tears and not only confessed openly to the murder of Fedya, but also asked them to dig up Zinovy Borisych, whom he had buried without a funeral. The corpse of Katerina Lvovna’s hus
band, buried in dry sand, was not yet completely decomposed: it was taken out and laid in a big coffin. As his accomplice in both these crimes, to the general horror, Sergei named his young mistress. Katerina Lvovna, to all questions, answered only: “I know nothing about it.” Sergei was forced to expose her at a confrontation. Having heard his confession, Katerina Lvovna looked at him in mute amazement, but without anger, and then said indifferently:

  “If he’s willing to tell about it, there’s no point in my denying it: I killed them.”

  “What for?” she was asked.

  “For him,” she answered, pointing to Sergei, who hung his head.

  The criminals were put in jail, and the terrible case, which attracted general attention and indignation, was decided very quickly. At the end of February, the court announced to Sergei and the widow of the merchant of the third guild, Katerina Lvovna, that it had been decided to punish them by flogging in the marketplace of their town and then to send them both to hard labor. At the beginning of March, on a cold, frosty morning, the executioner counted off the appointed number of blue-purple weals on Katerina Lvovna’s bare white back, and then beat out his portion on Sergei’s shoulders and branded his handsome face with three convict’s marks.

  During all this time, Sergei for some reason aroused much more general sympathy than Katerina Lvovna. Smeared and bloody, he stumbled as he came down from the black scaffold, but Katerina Lvovna came down slowly, only trying to keep the thick shirt and coarse prisoner’s coat from touching her torn back.

  Even in the prison hospital, when they gave her her baby, all she said was: “Oh, away with him!” and turning to the wall, without a moan, without complaint, she laid her breast on the hard cot.

  XIII

  The party in which Sergei and Katerina Lvovna found themselves set out when spring had begun only by the calendar, while, as the popular proverb says, “there was lots of sun, but heat there was none.”

  Katerina Lvovna’s child was given to Boris Timofeich’s old sister to be brought up, because, being counted as the legitimate son of the criminal woman’s murdered husband, the infant was now left the sole heir to the entire Izmailov fortune. Katerina Lvovna was very pleased with that and surrendered the baby quite indifferently. Her love for the father, like the love of many all too passionate women, did not extend in the least to the child.

  Anyhow, nothing in the world existed for her: neither light, nor darkness, nor good, nor bad, nor boredom, nor joy; she did not understand anything, did not love anyone, did not love herself. She waited impatiently for the party to set out on its way, when she hoped to be able to see her darling Sergei again, and she even forgot to think about the baby.

  Katerina Lvovna’s hopes were not deceived: heavily bound in chains, branded, Sergei came out of the prison gates in the same group with her.

  Man accustoms himself as far as possible to any abominable situation, and in every situation preserves as far as possible his capacity to pursue his meager joys; but for Katerina Lvovna there is nothing to adjust to: she sees her Sergei again, and with him even the convict’s path blossoms with happiness.

  Katerina Lvovna took very few valuable things with her in her canvas sack and even less money. But long before they reached Nizhny she had given it all away to the convoy soldiers in exchange for the possibility of walking beside Sergei or standing for a little hour embracing him on a dark night in a cold corner of the narrow transit prison corridor.

  Only Katerina Lvovna’s branded young man somehow became very reserved towards her: he did not so much talk as snap at her; his secret meetings with her, for which, not thinking of food or drink, she gave the necessary twenty-five kopecks from her lean purse, he did not value very highly; and more than once he even said:

  “You’d do better to give me the money you gave the soldier, instead of us rubbing against corners in the corridor.”

  “All I gave him was twenty-five kopecks, Seryozhenka,” Katerina Lvovna justified herself.

  “As if twenty-five kopecks isn’t money? Did you pick up a lot of these twenty-five kopecks on the way, that you hand them out so freely?”

  “That’s how we could see each other, Seryozha.”

  “Well, where’s the joy of seeing each other after such suffering! I could curse my whole life, not just these meetings.”

  “And for me it makes no difference, as long as I get to see you.”

  “That’s all foolishness,” replied Sergei.

  Katerina Lvovna sometimes bit her lips until they bled hearing such replies, and sometimes her eyes, not given to weeping, filled with tears of anger and vexation in the darkness of their nighttime meetings; but she endured it all, kept silent, and wished to deceive herself.

  Thus, in these new relations with each other, they reached Nizhny Novgorod. Here their party merged with another party that was going to Siberia from the Moscow highway.

  In this big party, among a multitude of people of all sorts in the women’s section, there were two very interesting persons. One was Fiona, a soldier’s wife from Yaroslavl, a splendid, magnificent woman, tall, with a thick black braid and languorous brown eyes, curtained as with a mysterious veil by thick eyelashes; and the other was a sharp-faced seventeen-year-old blonde with tender pink skin, a tiny little mouth, dimples on her fresh cheeks, and golden-brown locks, which stubbornly strayed across her forehead from under her convict’s kerchief. In the party they called this girl Sonetka.

  The beautiful Fiona was of a soft and lazy disposition. Everyone in her party knew her, and no one among the men rejoiced especially at achieving success with her, and no one was upset at seeing her grant the same success to another suitor.

  “Our Aunt Fiona is a kindly wench, she doesn’t offend anybody,” the convicts all joked unanimously.

  But Sonetka was of a completely different sort.

  Of her they said:

  “An eel: slips through your fingers, and never lingers.”

  Sonetka had taste, chose her dishes, and maybe even chose very strictly; she wanted passion to be offered to her, not blandly, but with a piquant, spicy seasoning, with sufferings and sacrifices; while Fiona was Russian simplicity, who is even too lazy to say “Go away,” and who knows only one thing, that she is a woman. Such women are very highly valued in robber bands, convict parties, and the social-democratic communes of Petersburg.5

  The appearance of these two women in one combined party with Sergei and Katerina Lvovna had tragic consequences for the latter.

  XIV

  From the first days of the combined party’s movement from Nizhny Novgorod to Kazan, Sergei openly began to seek the favors of the soldier’s wife Fiona, and suffered no lack of success. The languid beauty Fiona did not make Sergei languish, as, in her kindness, she did not make anyone languish. At the third or fourth halting place, in the early dusk, Katerina Lvovna set up a meeting with Seryozhechka by means of bribery, and lay there without sleeping: she kept waiting for the guard on duty to come at any moment, nudge her slightly, and whisper “Run quickly.” The door opened once, and a woman darted out to the corridor; the door opened again, and another woman prisoner quickly jumped up from another cot and also disappeared after the guard; finally there came a tug at the coat with which Katerina Lvovna covered herself. The young woman hurriedly got up from the cot, well polished by the sides of convicts, threw the coat over her shoulders, and gave a push to the guard standing before her.

  As Katerina Lvovna went down the corridor, in one place faintly lit by a dim lamp, she came across two or three couples who could not be made out from a distance. As Katerina Lvovna passed the male convicts’ room, she seemed to hear restrained laughter through the little window cut out in the door.

  “Having fun,” Katerina Lvovna’s guard growled, and, taking her by the shoulders, he pushed her into the corner and withdrew.

  Katerina Lvovna felt a coat and a beard with her hand; her other hand touched the hot face of a woman.

  “Who’s that?” Sergei aske
d in a half whisper.

  “And what are you doing here? Who is that with you?”

  In the darkness, Katerina Lvovna pulled the headcloth from her rival. The woman slipped aside, rushed off, stumbled against someone in the corridor, and fell.

  From the men’s quarters came a burst of guffawing.

  “Villain!” Katerina Lvovna whispered and hit Sergei across the face with the ends of the kerchief she had torn from the head of his new girlfriend.

  Sergei raised his hand; but Katerina Lvovna flitted lightly down the corridor and took hold of her door. The guffawing from the men’s quarters that followed her was repeated so loudly that the guard, who had been standing apathetically next to the lantern and spitting at the toe of his boot, raised his head and barked:

  “Quiet!”

  Katerina Lvovna lay down silently and went on lying like that until morning. She wanted to say to herself: “I don’t love him,” and felt that her love for him was still greater, still more ardent. And now before her eyes she keeps picturing again and again how his palm trembled under that woman’s head, how his other arm embraced her hot shoulders.

  The poor woman wept and unwillingly called upon the same palm to be under her head that minute and his other arm to embrace her hysterically trembling shoulders.

  “Well, give me back my kerchief anyhow,” the soldier’s wife Fiona woke her up in the morning.

  “Ah, so that was you? …”

  “Give it back, please!”

  “But why did you come between us?”

  “How have I come between you? Is it some sort of love or real interest, that you should be angry?”

  Katerina Lvovna thought for a second, then took the kerchief she had torn off at night from under her pillow and, throwing it at Fiona, turned to the wall.

  She felt relieved.

  “Pah,” she said to herself, “am I going to be jealous of that painted tub? She can drop dead! It’s nasty even comparing myself to her.”

  “The thing is this, Katerina Lvovna,” said Sergei, as they walked down the road the next day. “Please understand that, first of all, I’m no Zinovy Borisych to you, and, second, that you’re no great merchant’s wife now: so kindly don’t get so puffed up. There’s no market for butting goats with us.”