The Little Devil and Other Stories

by Alexei Remizov

  Boris married early. The young nun Glafira would visit his mother Agrafena at the Divilin house. And it was Glafira he married.

  They had a baby girl.

  Soon after, the darkest of dark events happened at the house. One night a “black carriage” drove up to the house. Men got out of the carriage. Went into the house. Took Boris. Put him in the carriage with them. The carriage drove off. Boris left. And never returned.

  Boris never returned to the house.

  He just vanished—no word of him again.

  Twelve years passed, and still no one knows, and no matter how hard they thought, they didn’t come up with anything, and no one can say: how, what, or why?

  Twelve years since the old man died, and Boris has not returned and only God knows if he ever will.

  The old man died of grief.

  From the day they took Boris away, he did not sleep, he could not sleep.

  The old man spent every night in Boris’s room in his usual place at the table, and propping up his head, elbow on the table, he stared at where Boris used to sit with his books.

  “Why does death come and people are born and why is his heart shriveling?” the old man muttered.

  And so he died.

  After his death, a few months later Agrafena gave birth to their last child. She christened him Denis in honor of his grandfather.

  Neither the old man’s death nor the incident with her son disturbed her even, steady life day in, day out.

  Only once did her blue eyes flash with a blue flame. Only once—and then they dimmed.

  Serenely, meekly. Pray and sigh, pray and sigh.

  Pray about what? Sins.

  But what sins?

  4

  The entire house and the entire Divilin household were now in daughter-in-law Glafira’s hands. And she dealt with it all as if it were hers.

  As dry as kindling, as skinny as a match, bloodless, predatory, and as mean as Yaga the witch on a splintery broomstick—she was a real Yaga.

  Back in the convent, she had been quiet by necessity, humble by vow, but here she took over completely in the empty house with its separate apartments, hallways, passages and half-landing, corners, endless stairways and innumerable rooms.

  Glafira married Boris … who the hell knows why she married him. For love, or was she calculating something, or it was just time … now she was free and she could freely do whatever she wanted.

  But what was there for her to do except run the household, in that empty house?—Why nothing.

  What do you mean nothing?

  She scolded Antonina and Deniska.

  Run around the yard or go somewhere beyond it: ride a boat, go fishing—oh no no no!

  It was only on big holidays that Yaga took the children and walked with them to the other side of town, to the convent beyond the city gate. And she badgered them the whole way and nagged them in church—what kind of fun was that, worse than detention, where Deniska often ended up for laziness and mischief.

  Deniska is a tall kid, and his chest is iron.

  In the breaks and often during class, unbuttoning his jacket, he shows the other boys his chest. And they all agree, and how could they not, that his chest, is indeed, iron, and if you knock on it, it has a great sound.

  When Deniska first started at the gymnasium, he was greeted with the nickname—after his father—of Drowned Man. The very first day he beat up one of the reckless and wild boys in the school, and ever since they fear him.

  He’s horribly lazy, you can’t get him to sit with a book. His only passion: he loves to draw. All he does is draw faces, teachers, and various things. His pockets are full of pencils, gum elastic, and other erasers.

  An eraser was good not just for removing dots of ink but for trouble-making. An eraser is an object that just begs to go in your mouth. The smell of an eraser is pleasant, especially when it is fresh and peels off the paper, leaving a yellow membrane behind.

  Deniska liked chewing the eraser; he’d chew a while, and then make a little figure out of it: a frog or something silly or whatever would make the whole class howl as one and stopping them would be impossible. Then he would blow a bubble and then when things got quiet, he would squash the eraser so that it popped. It popped, the sound of the bubble bursting filled the classroom, but the cause was invisible.

  That eraser put Deniska into detention so many times, and he also had to come in on Sundays, and if you try to add it up, you’ll lose count.

  Reading books was like genuflecting for Deniska. And the books they sent home with students brought on such yawning from the first few lines, and he looked so angry you expected him to pick up those books and tear them to pieces.

  Deniska knew lots of stories, they came to him by various paths: he heard plenty and he made them up himself.

  The detention cell at the gymnasium was watched by Gerasim the old doorman. Sometimes, Deniska would be inside, and old Gerasim had to sit and keep an eye on Deniska through the little window: he couldn’t go anywhere; he’d be responsible if anything happened. So the old man told stories out of boredom. And what wouldn’t he tell about: battles, the village, wizards, and corpses. And when he told fairy tales—you’d be happy to spend a century in the cell!—that’s how good he was.

  Antonina also studied at the gymnasium. But last winter a catastrophe befell her, and they took her out of school.

  With the first snowfall, Antonina and Deniska ate some snow. It was like water off a duck’s back for Deniska, he developed a cough, and that was that, but Antonina ended up in bed. She was so sick that they lost all hope she would get up. But she did, except her legs were bad: she could step only on one, the left, and only on the toes, while the right leg just dangled like a tail. The girl had to use crutches.

  And what happened to her blond braid—just little tufts of hair stuck out and no sign of the braid.

  At first Antonina continued going to school after her illness. She was the naughtiest—no less than Deniska—and most talkative girl in the class, and now she sat, head back, like a hunchback, and the crutches stuck out behind her back like two devil signs.

  Her pale face would sometimes begin to contort into a silly face and her lips would twist, ready to give out a laugh that would make the teacher and blackboard roll on the floor, but nothing came out—just something pathetic, horrible, and tortured, you wanted to turn away.

  The teachers avoided calling on her, and when they did. they allowed her to reply sitting down … Yet she used to be unable to sit still for a minute! The girl was fading. So they took her out of the school.

  And now Antonina was at home from morning till night under the eye of her mother—Yaga.

  The children did not like Yaga, just as Antonina did not like her school matrons, as Deniska did not like sissies, clods, suck-ups, supervisors, the director, and the wardens. But it was the opposite with old Agrafena. The children often visited her rooms. They called her babinka, instead of babushka. That’s what they called her: babinka, babinka.

  It was warm and cozy in her room. The walls were covered with pictures; the pictures were embroidered in silk and beads: there were flowers, and terrible beasts, and a monastery, and Chinese people, Amazons on horseback and plain Amazons, swans, castles, and more Chinese. In the corner there were icons, along the sides holy things: caps, shoes, cuffs, ribbons, belts, crosses, laces—all from the relics of saints. The tables were covered with boxes—with beadwork, or leather, or painted, or crystal. Babinka wore a white kerchief, and, as if she had water in her mouth, she never said a word, she only prayed and sighed. And what a rosary she had! With white leather petals for each step, sprinkled with round pearls, the pendants on the gold velvet were on pearl branches, and the edges and trim were pearl, and every pendant was a step on the whole pearl path.

  The children rummaged in the boxes, opened trunks, took out exotic things, looked at everything, touched everything. What wasn’t there! … In the meantime, without stopping her prayers, the old woma
n unlocked one of the cupboards and took out a plate full of dried apples, and pears, and plums, and grapes and set it on the table for the children.

  “Berry, berry!” her faded lips whispered.

  The children dropped the boxes and caskets and set to eating.

  “Berry, berry!” the old woman whispered bloodlessly.

  And the plate grew empty.

  “Good-bye, Babinka, thank you!” the children kissed the old woman and went back to their nursery.

  5

  The nursery was in Boris’s rooms. After the old man’s death, all the books went in the fire, and there wasn’t a single overlooked book left in the house. Boris’s disappearance was attributed to the books.

  “Everything comes from books,” Yaga said. “Books are from the devil and keeping filth in the house only pleases him and gathers dust.”

  It was in that empty room, where every corner was once filled, that Antonina spent her days. She just waited for Deniska. Deniska was late coming home: either he’d be held there or he’d get into mischief was the boys.

  Deniska told Antonina scary and bizarre stories, and Antonina loved listening to them. She asked him to tell them.

  She took every story, every bit of bravado, with passionate pain. She knew very well that her fate was to sit right here, like this, and there could be nothing else for her to the end of her days. She chafed herself, teased herself, listening to stories and picturing the bravado she was once capable of. Looking up at the ceiling somewhere, like a hunchback, she laughed, raucously, as loudly as she could. Her eyes glittered with laughter and tears, and she bounced and the crutches behind her back bounced.

  “Denka, dear. Denka, tell me more! …”

  Deniska was about to pick up a pencil—he wanted to draw a monster.

  “Denka, about the woodpecker!” Antonina banged her fist on the table and she furrowed her brows: either she would cry or hit him with her crutch.

  The story about the woodpecker started; Deniska started the story.

  Everyone knows the folktale, about how a dog fed a man and his wife, and how they chased away the dog when she got old, and how the dog found herself in such a horrible situation you could just lie down and die.

  “So the dog decided to go out into the field and feed on field mice.” Deniska stretched out his lips and squinted cleverly, as if he were catching mice himself. “So the dog went into the field, the woodpecker saw her, and they became comrades.”

  Then come all of the dog’s adventures.

  A long and cruel story. Deniska tells it with passion, as if the fate of the dog and the woodpecker were his own.

  The woodpecker stuffed the dog with food and drink.

  “Now I’m full and drunk and I want to laugh!”

  “All right,” the woodpecker replies. They saw that workers were milling flour. The woodpecker sat on one laborer’s shoulder and pecked at the back of his head; the other fellow grabbed a stick to hit the woodpecker but knocked the worker off his feet. The dog rolled on the ground laughing, rolling and rolling …

  The crueler the dog’s tricks, the more playful Deniska’s eyes.

  The dog finally gave it up—a man was driving into town to sell pots—the dog got caught in the spokes of a wheel and died.

  The woodpecker was angry, Deniska continued, he sat on the horse’s head and started pecking her eyes out. The man ran up with a log, wanted to kill the woodpecker; he ran up and wham—the horse keeled over dead. The woodpecker flew to the load and ran around the pots, flapping his wings. The man went after the woodpecker and kept hitting his load with the log. He broke all the pots and headed back with nothing. The woodpecker flew to the man’s hut, flew right in the window. The woman was feeding the fire and a small child was sitting on the bench; the woodpecker landed on his head and started pecking. The woman noticed and started chasing him but couldn’t get him out: the woodpecker kept pecking. So she picked up a stick and hit hard: she missed the woodpecker but she killed the child. The man came home and sees: all the windows are broken, all the dishes are broken, and the child is dead. He chased the woodpecker, got all scratched and banged up but caught him. “Kill him,” the woman said.

  Deniska drew a three-inch nose, added feet, and smacked his lips.

  “No,” said the man, “that’s not enough, I’ll swallow him whole.” And he did.

  Antonina’s pale face is covered in red splotches, a nervous tic runs under her eyes, and she starts laughing.

  In the empty nursery with empty bookshelves and two beds in the corners, with long walls completely scribbled over in faces, noses, and tails, the light burned long past midnight. Then Yaga, her slippers slapping, chased them to their beds, but even in bed they keep talking, bursting into laughter, and squeaking like mice.

  The steady light of the votive lamp and the steady beat of the clock hinted and whispered to them that night in the empty house.

  6

  The only guest at the Divilins’ is the roach exterminator Pavel Fyodorov.

  The children kept away from the exterminator and the exterminator did not like children.

  “Filth,” the exterminator said. “Devil’s spawn. Conceived in sin, fed by sin, they multiply sin. Filth.”

  Burdock grew in infinite amounts in the yard, and Deniska, when he could slip away unseen by Yaga, collected the prickly burrs and surreptitiously stuck the burrs on the exterminator’s most private parts.

  If ever there was a human face with such an amazing resemblance to that of a dog, it was Pavel Fyodorov’s. Probably there never was a greater resemblance. He was simply a dog and no question. Overgrown, wiry, toothy, and a deep bark instead of a voice. Wheezing dog.

  Pavel Fyodorov went through famous merchant houses and killed cockroaches. He had a black leather bag with white poison over this shoulder and a stick with a leather tip in his hands.

  He smeared pig fat on the tip, took out a jar with white powder from the bag, carefully opened the lid and dipped the stick inside. Then he whispered some cockroach word and set to work. He walked along the wall where there were cockroaches and slowly applied his tip, so that the entire wall was covered with white circles like the white tongues of flames. The exterminator applied the tip slowly, with measure and with taste. The cockroaches, no longer fearing light, crawled to the bait and ate the white circles, crawled out of their hidden nests, all the cracks and fissures with small children, with eggs, and ate the white circles. Sated, they sleepily crawled back to the nests, crack, and fissures, never to come out again not only in light, but even at the height of the whiskered cockroach life—at night.

  The exterminator considered his work big and important. As if in the rustle of cockroaches he imagined the Devil himself, and the exterminator’s most important and primary commandment was to conquer the Devil, to wipe the Devil from the face of the earth.

  Tearing himself away from his work, he talked only of the most important issue:

  “The entire world is in thrall of the evil one, everything is caught in his nets, his satanic paws are everywhere. Children are not born to praise the Lord—filthy spawn!—they are born to do the Devil’s bidding. The end is nigh, the earth is rotting from filth and foulness. The time is near … The world is doomed, the last righteous men are dying, the devil’s sons are breeding like sand in the sea. There is no point in hiding now. He will sit on the throne, like tsar and judge, he will rule and judge his slaves from sea to sea and turn his kingdom into hell where the worm dies not and the fire is unquenched.”

  The exterminator had never seen the Devil face to face. But should the Devil appear before him, the exterminator would not fear entering into battle.

  After killing the cockroaches, Pavel Fyodorov closed his jar, put it back in the bag, hung the bag over his shoulder and started on the stick, rinsing the tip three times in boiling water, wiped it with a dry rag, put the stick on the porch, then, splashing and snorting, he washed his hands and beard and, under his beard, whispered a farewell to the c
ockroaches, prayed, and then sat at the table to have tea with plum jam.

  God forbid the jam not be made the way the exterminator liked it.

  He would refuse to sit down and give you a scolding.

  “You have to cut the plum in half first, sprinkle it with sugar, and put the pan in the oven overnight, in the morning take it out and then start cooking. Then the plum will be separate from other plums, like cockroaches from cockroaches.”

  The exterminator would take his stick, shove his hat on his head and leave. And you could ask and beg, he wouldn’t come back for anything in his anger.

  But if everything was done correctly, then a conversation begins about the most important thing over tea.

  The hosts pour out their heart, going over all the sadness and misfortunes of their family life.

  “Filthy,” the exterminator barks, “it’s all filth.”

  Wherever he went, whatever he heard, whomever he saw, it all reeked of filth, evil spirits—he imagined the Devil.

  The exterminator had never seen the Devil face to face. But should the Devil appear before him, the exterminator would not be afraid and—he believed, he believed he would vanquish Him.

  Should the Devil appear before him!

  Pavel Fyodorov’s life passed in killing cockroaches. He did not visit anyone just like that, not for work, except the Divilins. And only sometimes, and this did not happen more than five or six times a year, he tore off the black bag with white poison and tossed his stick with the leather tip any old where.

  It came on unexpectedly. Severity and grimness suddenly reached a tipping point. He started trembling, his eyes grew veiled, his teeth opened in a snarl. A canine howl rose in his chest, and if he were chained then, he would have howled like a dog. He locked all the doors, shut the curtains, rummaged in corners, looked under the bed—he was drawn, he touched every hollow object, took out glasses and cups, removed glass lampshades—he was drawn, his soul was on fire, his heart thumped, and his belly was turned inside out.

  Teeth chattering as if in a fever, the exterminator would rush out of his room and walk, enveloped in turbidity, with a heavy, dull head, his brain squashed as if a solid layer of some kind of crust lay upon it. The exterminator blindly made his way to the zoo. There, in the zoo, he wandered in silence from cage to cage, from rabbit to guinea pig, from monkey to elephant. Then just as silently and blindly, when twilight fell, he left the zoo, came out on the main street, and the nocturnal open life was awakening on the street. He walked even more tensely and agitatedly, looking straight ahead, not making room, giving way, letting others pass, barreling ahead. And if an evil spirit had moved someone to try and stop him, it’s hard to claim that he would not have choked him on the spot or if he had a knife that he would not stab the miscreant. And he walked down the street more and more slowly until he froze on the spot: then the next woman he saw was doomed. He did not lead her, he dragged her into a hotel room or a room. There he attacked—toss a hungry dog a bone, that’s how it attacks! or a fish … with the bones, skins, guts, growling and wheezing, it gobbles it all down, gnaws the rotten delicious meat bones, skin, guts and all, and there was something terrible and head-spinning about it and it lasted for hours, the whole night.