But mama said peaceably that you don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, and told me again:
“Go to your room and hang it over your bed. On Sunday I’ll tell the nuns to make you a little cushion for it embroidered with beads and fish scales, so that you won’t somehow crush the glass in your pocket.”
I said cheerfully:
“That can be repaired.”
“When it needs repairing, the watchmaker will replace the magnetized needle with a stone one inside, and the watch will be ruined. Better go quickly and hang it up.”
So as not to argue, I hammered in a nail over my bed and hung up the watch, and I lay back on the pillow and looked at it admiringly. I was very pleased to have such a noble thing. And how nicely and softly it ticked: tick, tick, tick, tick … I listened and listened, and fell asleep. I was awakened by loud talk in the drawing room.
VII
I hear my uncle’s voice and some other unknown voice behind the wall; and I also hear that mama and my aunt are there.
The unknown man tells them that he has already been to the Theophany and heard the deacon there, and he has also been to St. Nicetas, but, he says, “they must be placed on an equal level and listened to under our own tuning fork.”
My uncle replies:
“Do it, then. I’ve prepared everything at the Boris and Gleb Inn. All the doors between the rooms will be open. There are no other guests—shout as much as you like, there’s nobody to get annoyed. An excellent inn: only government clerks come there with petitioners during office hours; but in the evening there’s nobody at all, and there are shafts and bast sleighs standing like a forest blocking the windows on Poleshskaya Square.”
The unknown man replies:
“That’s what we need, because they’ve also got some brazen amateurs, and they’ll undoubtedly gather to hear my voice and make fun of it.”
“You don’t mean you’re afraid?”
“I’m not afraid, but their insolence will make me angry, and I’ll beat them.”
He himself has a voice like a trumpet.
“I’ll freely explain to them,” he says, “all the examples of what’s liked in our town. We’ll listen to what they can do and how they perform in all tones: a low growl when vesting a bishop, middle and upper notes when singing ‘Many Years,’ how to let out a cry for ‘In the blessed falling asleep …’ and a howl for ‘Memory Eternal.’9 That’s the long and short of it.”
My uncle agreed.
“Yes,” he says, “we must compare them and then quite inoffensively make a decision. Whichever of them suits our Elets fashion better we’ll work on and lure over to us, and to the one who comes out weaker we’ll give a cassock for his trouble.”
“Keep your money on you—they’ve got thieves here.”
“And you keep yours on you.”
“All right.”
“Well, and now you go and set out some refreshments, and I’ll fetch the deacons. They asked to do it in the evening—‘because,’ they say, ‘our people are rascals, they may get wind of it.’ ”
My uncle answers in the affirmative, only he says:
“It’s these evenings here in Orel that I’m afraid of, and soon now it will be quite dark.”
“Well,” the unknown man says, “I’m not afraid of anything.”
“And what if one of these Orelian priggers strips your fur coat off you?”*
“Oh, yes! As if he’ll strip it off me! He’d better not cross paths with me, or I may just strip everything off him!”
“It’s a good thing you’re so strong.”
“And you go with your nephew. Such a fine lad, he could fell an ox with his fist.”
Mama says:
“Misha’s weak—how can he protect him!”
“Well, have him put some copper coins in his gloves, that’ll make him strong.”
My aunt says:
“What an idea!”
“Why, did I say something bad?”
“Well, it’s clear you have your own rules for everything in Elets.”
“And what else? You’ve got a governor for setting up rules, but we haven’t got one—so we make our own rules.”
“On how to beat people?”
“Yes, we also have rules on how to beat people.”
“Well, you’d better come back before the thieves’ time, that way nothing will happen to you.”
“And when is the thieves’ time in your Orel?”
My aunt answered from some book:
“ ‘Once folk have their dinner and, after praying, go to sleep, that is the time when thieves arise and set about to rob.’ ”
My uncle and the unknown man burst out laughing. Everything mama and my aunt said seemed unbelievable or unreasonable to them.
“In that case,” they say, “where are your police looking?”
My aunt again answers from the scriptures:
“ ‘Except the Lord guard the house—the watchman waketh but in vain.’10 We have a police chief by the name of Tsyganok. He looks after his own business, he wants to buy property. And when somebody gets robbed, he says: ‘Why weren’t you asleep at home? You wouldn’t have been robbed.’ ”
“He’d do better to send out patrols more often.”
“He already did.”
“And what happened?”
“The robberies got worse.”
“Why is that?”
“Nobody knows. The patrol goes by, the priggers follow after it and rob.”
“Maybe it’s not the priggers, but the patrolmen themselves who rob?”
“Maybe it is.”
“Call in the constable.”
“With the constable it’s even worse—if you complain about him, you have to pay him for the dishonor.”
“What a preposterous town!” cried Pavel Mironych (I figured it was him), and he said good-bye and left, but my uncle went on pacing and reasoning:
“No, truly,” he says, “it’s better with us in Elets. I’ll take a cab.”
“Don’t go in a cab! The cabby will bilk you and dump you out of the sleigh.”
“Well, like it or not, I’ll take my nephew Misha with me again. Nobody will harm the two of us.”
At first mama wouldn’t even hear of letting me go, but my uncle began to take offense and said:
“What is this: I give him a watch with a rim, and he won’t show gratitude by rendering me a trifling family service? I can’t upset the whole business now. Pavel Mironych left with my full promise that I’d join him and prepare everything, and now, what, instead of that I should listen to your fears and stay home, or else go alone to a certain death?”
My aunt and mama quieted down and said nothing.
And my uncle persists:
“If I had my former youth,” he says, “when I was, say, forty years old, I wouldn’t fear the priggers, but I’m an elderly man, going on sixty-five, and if they strip my fur coat off me when I’m far from home, then, while I’m walking back without my fur coat, I’m bound to catch an inflammation in my shoulders, and then I’ll need a young leech to draw the blood off, or else I’ll croak here with you. Bury me here, then, in your church of John the Baptist, and people can remember over my coffin that in your town your Mishka let his own uncle go without a family service and didn’t accompany him this one time in his life …”
Here I felt such pity for him and such shame that I jumped out at once and said:
“No, mama, say what you like, but I won’t leave my uncle without this family service. Am I to be ungrateful like Alfred, whom the soldier mummers perform in people’s houses?11 I bow down to your feet and beg your permission, don’t force me to be ungrateful, allow me to accompany my uncle, because he’s my relation and he gave me the watch and I will be shamed before all people if I leave him without my service.”
Mama, however put out, had to let me go, but even so she ordered me very, very strictly not to drink, and not to look to the sides, and not to stop anywhere, and not to come home late
.
I reassured her in all possible ways.
“Really, mama,” I say, “why look to the sides when there’s a straight path? I’ll be with my uncle.”
“All the same,” she says, “though you’re with your uncle, come back before the thieves’ time. I won’t sleep until you’re back home.”
Outside the door she started making crosses over me and whispered:
“Don’t look too much to your uncle Ivan Leontyevich: they’re all madcaps in Elets. It’s even frightening to visit them at home: they invite officials for a party, and then force them to drink, or pour it behind their collars; they hide their overcoats, lock the gate, and start singing: ‘He who won’t drink—stays in the clink.’ I know my brother on that score.”
“All right, mama,” I reply, “all right, all right. Rest easy about me in everything.”
But mama goes on with her refrain:
“I feel in my heart,” she says, “that you’ll both come to no good.”
VIII
At last my uncle and I went out the gate and set off. What could the priggers do to the two of us? Mama and my aunt were notorious homebodies and didn’t know that I alone used to beat ten men with one fist in a fistfight. And my uncle, too, though an elderly man, could also stand up for himself.
We ran here and there, to the fish stores and wine cellars, bought everything, and sent it to the Boris and Gleb Inn in big bags. We ordered the samovars heated at once, laid out the snacks, set up the wine and rum, and invited the innkeeper of the Boris and Gleb to join our company:
“We won’t do anything bad, our only desire and request is that no outsiders hear or see us.”
“That I grant you,” he said. “A bedbug on the wall may hear you, but nobody else.”
And he was so sleepy himself, he kept yawning and making crosses over his mouth.
Soon Pavel Mironych arrived and brought both deacons with him: the one from the Theophany and the one from Nicetas. We had a little snack to begin with, a bit of sturgeon and caviar, then crossed ourselves and straightaway got down to the business of the tryout.
In three upstairs rooms, all the connecting doors stood open. We put our coats on the bed in one, in another, the far one, the snacks were set up, and in the middle one we tried out the voices.
First, Pavel Mironych stood in the middle of the room and showed what the merchants in Elets liked most from a deacon. His voice, as I said to you, was quite terrifying, as if it beat us on the face and shattered the glass in the windows.
Even the innkeeper woke up and said:
“You yourself should be the first deacon.”
“Tell me another!” Pavel Mironych replied. “With my capital, I can get along as I am. It’s just that I like to hear loudness in holy services.”
“Who doesn’t!”
And right after Pavel Mironych did his shouting, the deacons began to display themselves, first one and then the other, intoning the same things. The deacon from the Theophany was dark and soft, as if all quilted with cotton, while the one from Nicetas was redheaded, dry as a horseradish root, and his beard was small, upturned; but once they got to shouting, it was impossible to pick the better one. One kind came out better with one, but the other did another more pleasingly. Pavel Mironych began by presenting the way they liked it in Elets, so that the growling comes as if from far off. He growled out “It is meet and right,” and then “Pierce, Master” and “Sacrifice, Master,” and then both deacons did the same. The redhead’s growl came out better. For the Gospel reading, Pavel Mironych took such a low note that it was lower than the lowest, as if carried on the wind from far away: “In those da-a-ays.” Then he began rising higher and higher, and in the end gave such an exclamation that the window-panes jingled. And the deacons didn’t lag behind him.
Well, then the rest all went the same way, how to conduct the litany and how it must be kept in tune with the choir, then the joyful “and for the salvation” in “Many Years,” then the mournful “Rest Eternal.”12 The dry deacon from St. Nicetas pleased everyone so much with his howling that my uncle and Pavel Mironych started weeping and kissing him and asking him whether it might not lie within his natural powers to make it still more terrible.
The deacon says:
“Why not? It’s allowed me by religion, but I’ll have to fortify myself with pure Jamaican rum—it expands the resounding in the chest.”
“Help yourself—that’s what the rum is there for: you can drink it from a shot glass, swill it from a tumbler, or, better still, upend the bottle and down it all at once.”
The deacon says:
“No, more than a tumbler at a time is not to my liking.”
They fortified themselves—and the deacon began “Rest eternal in blessed repose” from low down and went on climbing ever higher and with an ever denser howling all the way to “the deceased bishops of Orel and Sevsk, Apollos and Dosiphey, Iona and Gavriil, Nikodim and Innokenty,” and when he reached “make their memory e-ter-r-r-nal,” his whole Adam’s apple stuck out of his throat and he produced such a howl that we were horrorstruck, and my uncle began crossing himself and shoving his feet under the bed, and I did the same. And under the bed, suddenly, something whacked us on the anklebones—we both cried out and all at once leaped into the middle of the room and stood trembling …
My uncle said in fright:
“To blazes with it all! Stop them … don’t name them anymore … they’re here already, shoving us from under the bed.”
Pavel Mironych asked:
“Who could be shoving you from under the bed?”
My uncle replied:
“Those dead ones.”
Pavel Mironych, however, did not turn coward: he seized a burning candle, thrust it under the bed, but something blew out the candle, and knocked the candlestick from his hand, and emerged looking like one of our merchants from the Meat Market near St. Nicholas.
All of us, except the innkeeper, rushed in various directions and repeated the same word:
“Begone! Begone!”
And after that another merchant crawled out from under the other bed. And it seemed to us that this one, too, was from the Meat Market.
“What’s the meaning of this?”
And the merchants both say:
“Please, it doesn’t mean anything … We simply like to hear bass voices.”
And the first merchant, who had struck my uncle and me on the legs and knocked the candle out of Pavel Mironych’s hand, apologized, saying that we ourselves had kicked him with our boots, and Pavel Mironych had nearly burned his face with the candle.
But Pavel Mironych got angry at the innkeeper and started accusing him, saying that since money had been paid for the rooms, he should not have put strangers under the beds without permission.
The innkeeper, who seemed to have been sleeping, turned out to be quite drunk.
“These gentlemen,” he says, “are both my relations: I wanted to do them a family service. I can do whatever I like in my own house.”
“No, you can’t.”
“Yes, I can.”
“And what if you’ve been paid?”
“So what if I’ve been paid? It’s my house, and my relations are dearer to me than any payment. You stay here and you’ll leave, but they’re permanent: you’ve got no call to go poking your heels at them or burning their eyes with candles.”
“We didn’t poke our heels at them on purpose, we just tucked our feet under,” says my uncle.
“You shouldn’t have tucked your feet under, you should have sat upright.”
“We did it from fear.”
“Well, there’s no harm done. But they’re devoted to lerigion and wanted to listen …”
Pavel Mironych boiled over.
“What kind of lerigion is that?” he says. “It’s only a sample for education: lerigion’s in the Church.”
“That makes no difference,” says the innkeeper. “It all comes to the same thing.”
“
Ah, you incendiaries!”
“And you’re rioters.”
“How come?”
“You dealt in dead meat. You locked up the assessor!”
And endless stupidities of the same sort followed. And suddenly everything was in an uproar, and the innkeeper was shouting:
“Away with all you millers, get out of my establishment, me and my butchers will carry on by ourselves.”
Pavel Mironych shook his fist at him.
But the innkeeper replies:
“If you threaten me, I’ll shout up such Orelian stalwarts right now that you won’t bring a single unbroken rib home to Elets.”
Pavel Mironych, being the foremost strongman in Elets, got offended.
“Well, no help for it,” he says, “call for them, if you can still stand up, but I’m not leaving this room; we laid out money for the drink.”
The butchers wanted to leave—they had obviously decided to call people.
Pavel Mironych herded them back and shouted:
“Where’s the key? I’ll lock them all up.”
I said to my uncle:
“Uncle! For God’s sake! See what we’re coming to! There may be a murder here! And mama and auntie are waiting at home … What must they be thinking! … How they’ll worry!”
My uncle was frightened himself.
“Grab your coat,” he says, “while the door’s still open, and let’s get away.”
We leaped into the next room, grabbed our coats, and gladly came barreling out into the open air; only the darkness around us was so thick you couldn’t see an inch, and a wet snow was slapping big flakes in our faces, so that our eyes were blinded.
“Lead me,” says my uncle. “I’ve somehow suddenly forgotten all about where we are, and I can’t make anything out.”
“Just run for it,” I say.
“It’s not nice that we left Pavel Mironych.”
“But what could we do with him?”
“That’s so … but he’s our foremost parishioner.”
“He’s a strong man; they won’t hurt him.”
The snow blinded us, and once we leaped out of that stuffiness, we fancied God knows what, as if somebody were coming at us from all sides.
IX
Naturally, I knew the way very well, because our town isn’t big and I was born and grew up in it, but it was as if this darkness and wet snow right after the heat and light of the room dimmed my memory.
The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories Page 65