“ ‘You know, Nikolai Ivanovich—it will be ticklish … Masha will feel awkward that she received a dowry from you and her sisters didn’t … It’s sure to cause envy and hostility towards her in her sisters … No, forget the money—let it stay with you and … someday, when a favorable chance comes for you to be reconciled with your other daughters, you’ll give to all of them equally. And then it will bring us all joy … But to us alone … better not!’
“Again he got up, again he paced the room, and, stopping outside the bedroom door, called:
“ ‘Marya!’
“Masha was already in her peignoir and came out.
“ ‘I congratulate you,’ he says.
“She kissed his hand.
“ ‘Do you want to be happy?’
“ ‘Of course I do, papa, and … I hope to be.’
“ ‘Very good … You’ve chosen yourself a good husband, old girl!’
“ ‘I didn’t choose, papa. God gave him to me.’
“ ‘Very good, very good. God gave, and I’ll give on top. I want to add to your happiness. Here are three banknotes, all the same. One for you, and two for your sisters. Give them to them yourself—say it’s your gift …’
“ ‘Papa!’
“Masha first threw herself on his neck, then suddenly lowered herself to the ground and, weeping joyfully, embraced his knees. I looked—he was weeping, too.
“ ‘Get up, get up!’ he says. ‘Today, in the words of the people, you are a “princess”—it’s not proper for you to bow down to me.’
“ ‘But I’m so happy … for my sisters! …’
“ ‘Well, there … And I’m happy, too! … Now you can see there was nothing for you to be afraid of in the pearl necklace. I’ve come to tell you the secret: the pearls I gave you are false; a bosom friend of mine duped me with them long ago—and not a simple friend, but one blended from the races of Rurik and Gediminas.9 While you have a husband with a simple but genuine soul: to dupe such a one is impossible—the soul can’t bear it.’ ”
“There you have the whole of my story,” our interlocutor concluded, “and I truly think that, despite its modern origin and its nonfictional character, it answers to the program and form of a traditional Christmas story.”
* With Cupid’s darts (gems made from rutilated quartz). Trans.
The Spook
Fear has big eyes.
A SAYING
I
My childhood was spent in Orel. We lived in Nemchinov’s house, somewhere not far from the “little cathedral.” Now I can’t make out exactly where this tall wooden house stood, but I remember that from its garden there was an extensive view over the wide and deep ravine with its steep sides crosscut by layers of red clay. Beyond the ravine spread a big field on which the town warehouses stood, and near them soldiers always drilled in the summer. Every day I watched how they drilled and how they were beaten. That was common practice then, but I simply couldn’t get used to it and always wept over them. To keep that from being repeated too often, my nanny, Marina Borisovna, an elderly soldier’s widow from Moscow, took me for walks in the town garden. There we would sit over the shallow Oka and watch little children swimming and playing in it. I envied their freedom very much then.
The main advantage of their unfettered condition, in my eyes, lay in their wearing neither shoes nor shirts, because they took their shirts off and tied the sleeves to the collar. Adapted like that, the shirts turned into little sacks, and by holding them against the current, the boys caught tiny, silvery fish in them. They were so small it was impossible to clean them, and that was considered sufficient grounds for cooking them and eating them uncleaned.
I never had the courage to find out how they tasted, but the fishing performed by those diminutive fishermen seemed to me the height of happiness that freedom could afford a boy of the age I was then.
My nanny, however, knew some good reasons why such freedom would be completely improper for me. Those reasons consisted in my being the child of a noble family and my father being known to everyone in town.
“It would be a different matter,” my nanny said, “if we were in the country.” There, among simple, boorish muzhiks, I too might be allowed to enjoy something of that sort of freedom.
I think it was precisely because of those restrictive arguments that I began to feel an intense yearning for the countryside, and my rapture knew no bounds when my parents bought a small estate in the Kromy district. That same summer we moved from the big house in town to a very cozy but small village house with a balcony and a thatched roof. Woods in the Kromy district were costly and rare even then. This was an area of steppes and grain fields, well irrigated besides by small but clean streams.
II
In the country I at once struck up a wide and interesting acquaintance with the peasants. While my father and mother were intensely occupied with setting up the estate, I lost no time in becoming close friends with the grown-up lads and the little boys who pastured horses on the “kuligas.”* The strongest of all my attachments, however, was to an old miller, Grandpa Ilya—a completely white-haired old man with huge black mustaches. He was more available for conversation than all the others because he didn’t go away to work, but either strolled about the dam with a dung fork or sat over the trembling sluice-gate, pensively listening to whether the wheels were turning regularly or water was seeping in somewhere under the gate. When he got tired of doing nothing, he fashioned spare maple shafts or spindles for the cogwheel. But in all the situations I’ve described, he easily left off work and entered willingly into conversation, which he conducted in fragments, without any connection, but with his favorite system of allusions, and in the process making fun maybe of himself, maybe of his listeners.
Through his job as a miller, Grandpa Ilya had rather close connections with the water demon who was in charge of our ponds, the upper and the lower, and of two swamps. This demon had his main headquarters under an unused sluice-gate at our mill.
Grandpa Ilya knew everything about him and used to say:
“He likes me. Even when he comes home angry over some disorder, he does me no harm. If anybody else is lying in my place here on the sacks, he pulls at him and throws him off, but he won’t ever touch me.”
All the young people assured me that the relations I’ve described between Grandpa Ilya and the “old water demon” really existed, but that they held out not at all because the water demon liked him, but because Grandpa Ilya, being a real, true miller, knew a real, true miller’s word, which the water demon and all his little devils obeyed as unquestioningly as did the grass snakes and toads that lived under the sluiceways and on the dam.
I went fishing with the boys for the gudgeons and loaches that abounded in our narrow but clear little river Gostomlia; but, because of the seriousness of my character, I kept company more with Grandpa Ilya, whose experienced mind opened to me a world full of mysterious delight that was completely unknown to a city boy like me. From Ilya I learned about the house demon, who slept on a counter, and the water demon, who had fine and important lodgings under the mill wheel, and the kikimora,1 who was so skittish and changeable that she hid from any immodest gaze in various dusty corners—now in the threshing barn, now in the granary, now at the pounding mill, where hemp was pounded in the fall. Grandpa knew least of all about the wood demon, because he lived somewhere far away by Selivan’s place and only occasionally visited our thick willow grove, to make a new willow pipe and play on it in the shade by the soaking tubs. Anyhow, Grandpa Ilya saw the wood demon face-to-face only once in all his richly adventurous life, and that was on St. Nicholas’s day, which was the feast day of our church. The wood demon came up to Ilya pretending to be a perfectly quiet little muzhik and asked for a pinch of snuff. And when Grandpa said, “Here, devil take you!” and opened the snuffbox, the demon could no longer keep up his good behavior and played a prank: he hit the snuffbox from underneath, so that the good miller got an eyeful of snuff.
All these lively and interesting stories seemed fully probable to me then, and their dense imagery filled my fantasy to the point that I almost became a visionary myself. At least when I once peeked, at great risk, into the pounding shed, my eye proved so keen and sharp that I saw the kikimora, who was sitting there in the dust. She was unwashed, wearing a dusty headdress, and had scrofulous eyes. And when, frightened by this vision, I rushed out headlong, another of my senses—hearing—discovered the presence of the wood demon. I can’t say for sure exactly where he was sitting—probably on some tall willow—but when I fled from the kikimora, the wood demon blew into his green pipe with all his might and held my foot so fast to the ground that the heel of my boot tore off.
Nearly out of breath, I told about it all at home, and for my candor I was put in my room to read the Holy Scriptures, while a barefoot boy was sent to a soldier in the nearby village who could mend the damage the wood demon had done to my boot. But by then even reading the Holy Scriptures didn’t protect me from belief in the supernatural beings, to whom, it might be said, I had grown accustomed through Grandpa Ilya. I knew well and loved the Holy Scriptures—to this day I willingly read them over—and yet the dear, childish world of the fairy-tale creatures Grandpa Ilya told me about seemed indispensable to me. The forest springs would have been orphaned if they had been deprived of the spirits popular fantasy attached to them.
Among the unpleasant consequences of the wood demon’s pipe was that my mother reprimanded Grandpa Ilya for the course in demonology he had given me, and he avoided me for a while, as if unwilling to continue my education. He even pretended to drive me away.
“Get away from me, go to your nanny,” he said, turning me around and applying his broad, calloused palm to my seat.
But I could already pride myself on my age and considered such treatment incompatible with it. I was eight years old and by then had no need to go to my nanny. I let Ilya feel that by bringing him a basin of cherries left over from making liqueur.
Grandpa Ilya liked cherries. He took them, softened, stroked my head with his calloused hand, and very close and very good relations were restored between us.
“I tell you what,” Grandpa Ilya said to me. “Always respect the muzhik most of all, and listen to him, but don’t go telling everybody what you hear. Otherwise I’ll chase you away.”
After that I kept secret all that I heard from the miller, and I learned so many interesting things that I was now afraid not only at night, when all the house and forest demons and kikimoras become very bold and insolent, but even in the daytime. This fear seized me because it turned out that our house and our whole area were under the sway of a really scary brigand and bloodthirsty sorcerer named Selivan. He lived only four miles from us, “at the fork,” that is, where the big high road divided in two: one, the new road, went to Kiev, and the other, the old one, with hollow willows “of Catherine’s planting,”2 led to Fatezh. That road was now abandoned and gone to waste.
Half a mile beyond that fork was a fine oak forest, and by the forest a most wretched inn, completely exposed and half fallen down, in which they said nobody ever stayed. That was easy to believe, because the inn offered no comforts for a stay, and because it was too close to the town of Kromy, where, even in those half-savage times, one could hope to find a warm room, a samovar, and second-rate white rolls. It was in this terrible inn, where nobody ever stayed, that the “empty innkeeper” Selivan lived, a terrible man whom nobody was glad to meet.
III
The story of the “empty innkeeper” Selivan, in Grandpa Ilya’s words, was the following. Selivan was of Kromy tradesman stock; his parents died early, and he lived as an errand boy at the baker’s and sold white rolls at a tavern outside the Orel gate. He was a good, kind, and obedient boy, but people kept telling the baker that he ought to be careful with Selivan, because he had a fiery red mark on his face—and that was never put there for nothing. There were such people as knew a special proverb for it: “Beware of him whom God hath marked.” The baker praised Selivan highly for his zeal and trustworthiness, but everybody else, as his sincere well-wishers, said that all the same real prudence called for wariness and warned against trusting him too much—because “God hath marked” him. If a mark had been put on his face, it was precisely so that all overly trusting people would be wary of him. The baker didn’t want to lag behind intelligent people, but Selivan was a very good worker. He sold his rolls assiduously and each evening conscientiously poured out for his master from a big leather purse all the ten- and five-kopeck pieces he had earned from passing muzhiks. However, the mark was not on him for nothing, but waiting for a certain occasion (it’s always like that). A “retired executioner” named Borka came to Kromy from Orel, and they said to him: “An executioner, Borka, so you was, and now you’ll have a bitter life with us,” and everybody tried the best they could to make these words come true for the man. When the executioner Borka came from Orel to Kromy, he had with him a daughter of about fifteen who had been born in jail—though many thought it would have been better for her not to have been born at all.
They came to live in Kromy by assignment. It’s incomprehensible now, but the practice then was to assign retired executioners to some town, and it was done just like that, without asking anyone’s wishes or consent. So it happened with Borka: some governor ordered that this old executioner be assigned to Kromy—and so he was, and he came there to live and brought his daughter with him. Naturally, the executioner was not a desirable guest for anybody in Kromy. On the contrary, being spotless themselves, they all scorned him, and decidedly nobody wanted to have either him or his daughter around. And the weather was already very cold when they came.
The executioner asked to be taken into one house, then another, and then stopped bothering people. He could see that he aroused no compassion in anybody, and he knew that he fully deserved it.
“But the child!” he thought. “The child’s not to blame for my sins—somebody will take pity on the child.”
And Borka again went knocking from house to house, asking them to take not him, but only the girl … He swore that he would never even come to visit his daughter.
But that plea was also in vain.
Who wants to have anything to do with an executioner?
And so, having gone around the little town, these ill-fated visitors asked to be taken to jail. There they could at least warm up from the autumnal wetness and cold. But the jail did not take them either, because they had already served their term and were now free people. They were free to die by any fence or in any ditch they liked.
Occasionally people gave the executioner and his daughter alms, not for their own sake, but for Christ’s, of course, but no one let them in. The old man and his daughter had no shelter and spent their nights in clay pits under the riverbank or in empty watchmen’s huts by the kitchen gardens along the valley. Their hard lot was shared by a skinny dog who had come with them from Orel.
He was a big, shaggy dog, whose fur was all matted. What he ate, having beggarly owners, no one knew, but they finally figured out that he had no need to eat, because he was “gutless,” that is, he was only skin and bones and yellow, suffering eyes, but “in the middle” he had nothing and therefore required no food at all.
Grandpa Ilya told me how this could be achieved “in the easiest way.” Take any dog while it’s still a pup and make it drink melted tin or lead, and it will become without guts and have no need to eat. But, naturally, for that you had to know “a special magic word.” And since the executioner obviously knew that word, people of strict morals killed his dog. This had to be done, of course, so as not to give indulgence to sorcery; but it was a great misfortune for the beggars, because the girl slept with the dog, who shared with her some of the warmth he had in his fur. However, there naturally could be no pandering to magic for the sake of such trifles, and everyone was of the opinion that destroying the dog was perfectly right. Sorcerers should not be allowed to fool right-mind
ed people.
IV
After the destruction of the dog, the executioner himself kept the girl warm in the huts, but he was already old and, luckily for him, did not have to keep up this care, which was beyond his strength, for very long. One freezing night, the child felt that her father was colder than she, and she was so frightened that she moved away from him and even fainted from terror. Till morning she remained in the embrace of death. When the sun rose and people on their way to church peeked into the hut out of curiosity, they saw the father and daughter frozen stiff. They somehow managed to warm up the girl, and when she saw her father’s strangely immobile eyes and wildly bared teeth, she realized what it meant and burst into sobs.
The old man was buried outside the cemetery, because he had lived badly and died without repentance, and his girl they more or less forgot about … Not for long, it’s true, just for a month or so, but when they remembered her a month later, she was nowhere to be found.
One might have thought that the orphan girl had run away to some other town or gone begging in the villages. Far more curious was another strange circumstance connected with the girl’s disappearance: even before she turned up missing, it was noticed that the baker’s boy Selivan had vanished without a trace.
He vanished quite unexpectedly, and more heedlessly, besides, than any other runaway before him. Selivan took absolutely nothing from anybody. All the rolls given him to sell even remained on his tray, and all the money for those he had sold was there as well. But he himself did not return home.
These two orphans were regarded as lost for a whole three years.
Suddenly one day a merchant came back from a fair, the man who also owned the long-abandoned inn “at the fork,” and said he had had an accident: he was driving along a log road, misguided his horse, and was nearly crushed under his cart, but an unknown vagabond saved him.
The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories Page 56