Silently, without looking, the exterminator abandoned not a human being, not a woman, but silently, without looking, the exterminator abandoned a corpse, and went along home, to fall into a deep sleep, and refreshed, start his ordinary life and his work—killing cockroaches.
7
The exterminator’s adventures remained a deep secret. As mysterious stories, they occasionally floated up to the surface, but no one would have believed they were his handiwork. Everyone considered the exterminator unusual and not simple, but to do that … it would never occur to anyone.
The exterminator was on everyone’s tongue. Recently people were interested in his visits to the Divilins: he won’t cross the threshold of anyone’s house without a job, but the Divilins—look!—he’s there every Saturday. The house is isolated, you can’t get near it, and there’s no way to find out what he’s doing there. But everyone was very curious about finding out what he’s doing there.
Someone joked: “Everyone in the house is long dead, not a nostril left of them, and instead of people there are cockroaches, and the exterminator is socializing with the cockroaches; what a jerk!”
“What about Deniska?” someone countered the mocker. “The boy’s gallivanting to school every day!”
Jokes aside, you can’t get by with jokes here. So then the guesses started. They recalled the old man—the drowned man. Couldn’t get by without the drowned man.
They said: “The drowned man had no intention of dying, he’s alive and in hiding, he only talks with the exterminator.”
They said: “The exterminator and the Divilin women want to start a new religion.”
And others said: “The exterminator can’t make a new religion, all the religions are already made, he’s just having affairs with the Divilin women; with Glafira out of love and with the old woman, as with a child, by deceit.”
“He’s not human at all,” the clever ones noted. “Humans are given power over creatures, and him the cockroaches obey.”
“A cockroach is not a cow,” interrupted the interrupter, “be it cow, horse, ewe, or sheep or other cattle, they are all blessed by God to serve man, but a cockroach is not under man’s power, there’s nothing said about cockroaches or mice anywhere.”
There were women, the women insisted that they had seen with their own eyes how the exterminator turned into a cockroach and then heard with their own ears how he grunted like a pig.
“What does a pig have to do with it?” demanded the ingenious man of the ingenious women. “The point is not about pigs, and pigs have nothing to do with it, but what happened to the drowned man’s elder son, Boris?”
“The books.”
“Of course, the books. But which books? An ordinary one won’t kill you: he was reading a black book.”
“And where did he get it?”
“From the drowned man.”
“And where did he get it?”
“Well, that’s why he’s the drowned man.”
“There is no black book.”
“What do you mean?”
“Just that, very simple, there isn’t any.”
“Wait, are you saying then that God doesn’t exist, either?”
And if not for Fedosei, they would have beaten the poor fellow so hard he would remember a long time.
Fedosei is a wise man; you can’t get a word out of him, but if he starts, he doesn’t have to look far for words.
“The black book exists,” Fedosei said in ringing tones, and everybody bit their tongues, “the black book was written by the Serpent, from the Serpent it went to Cain, from Cain to Ham. When the flood came, Ham hid the book in a stone. When the flood was over, Ham came out of the ark, went to the stone, rolled it back, took the book and gave it to his son Canaan. The book went from son to son in the Ham tribe. And the sons of Ham decided to mock God the way their father Ham had mocked his father Noah. The sons of Ham decided to build the great tower of seven rays, to join what God had separated—sky and earth. But God was angered and he mixed up languages, scattered people over the face of the earth, and the book ended up in Sodom. There wasn’t a crime that the cursed city didn’t commit. The cursed city collapsed, sins and evildoing, but the cursed lake would not take the book and fire would not burn it. The book came to King Nebuchadnezzar. And all kinds of iniquity transpired. And iniquity lasted forty-two human generations, until the kingdoms were destroyed and the book landed on the bottom of the sea. There, under the fiery Alatyr stone, the book lay for unknown time. And then an Arab was taken prisoner for his sins by a righteous king and imprisoned in a copper tower. But the devil liked the Arab and taught the Arab how to get the book. Through evil spells the righteous city was burned down, the righteous king died and his Christ-loving army, and that Arab came out of the copper tower, went down to the sea bottom and got the black book. And it began moving around the world until it was locked up in the walls of the Sukharev tower. And to this day it is there and no one has yet been able to get it out of the walls of the Sukharev tower. It is bound by a horrible curse for nine thousand years plus a thousand.”
“How did he get to that wall; you can’t get close to that object bare-handed!”
“No problem for the drowned man, some brain you are!”
“It’s not the drowned man at all, it’s the exterminator.”
“Of course, the exterminator!” they all gabbled at once.
“Stop running in circles,” a commonsensical man interposed. “You keep trying to solve a puzzle when it’s as clear as daylight. The Divilins, thank God, are not pinchers, they observe the law, you have to have services, you can’t live like a dog, so the exterminator comes to them to perform the services and nothing more.”
“The women are awfully suspicious …” someone said doubtfully.
“You keep harping, the women, the women; you’re no better than an old woman yourself!”
“They say old Agrafena knew the evil one and she bore the older son who vanished from the devil, and that Glafira is a real Yaga.”
“And what’s the reason the drowned man’s granddaughter Antonina sits legless? No-no, something is wrong here.”
The guessing resumed. Tongues wagged. They argued, and fought, and made up again. Inappropriate things were discussed. Extremely inappropriate.
There was a man of their kind, who not only read books but wrote some divine things. They went to him with questions, but they learned nothing and grew even more confused. The man hurled a word at them that made their knees quake and their beards shiver.
“It may turn out that Misha has started working in cockroaches, too,” they decided, not having decided the main question.
There were some so diligent that they watched to see who went to the Divilin house, but they did not encounter anyone but the exterminator.
They agreed on one thing, that something extraordinary was going on in the house. And with time, no one doubted that there was evil in the house.
But what goes on in the house is not revealed to a single soul.
Every Saturday the exterminator Pavel Fyodorov came to the Divilin house. They all gathered in the icon room. Pavel Fyodorov donned robes and the service began. The service lasted a long time. When the evening vigil ended, exhausted Antonina was practically carried by Glafira to the nursery and Deniska was hurried off to bed with a smack and slap. On Sunday morning, the liturgy was served. After the service they dined. And the exterminator went home.
That was all.
That is the way it was when the old man was alive. That is the way it was now, after his death. Back then the drowned man was the priest and the exterminator the deacon, now the exterminator was the priest and Glafira-Yaga the deacon.
That was all.
The services were done exactly as written and strictly as the fathers had once decreed. The exterminator served in a singsong, his voice resounding throughout the house, and it’s a good thing the walls are thick; otherwise the fish in the river would be spooked. The exterminator’s ro
sary was a leather strap, with red petals and white and blue branches, Yaga’s rosary had black velvet blossoms with a blue border, embroidered in gold, and they glowed like stars in the candlelight.
That was all.
And people … what won’t people say!
8
Once after the long vigil Deniska was chased off to bed. Deniska lay down, but he wasn’t sleepy. He lay there and then called to Antonina. Antonina did not respond, snoring—she was exhausted by all the standing and genuflecting. Nothing to it, Deniska got out of bed, walked around the room, and he got the idea to wander around the house in the dark and if he could, scare Yaga. Scare Yaga so she would stop smacking him on the head. Thinking about how best to do it, Deniska left the nursery, went down the stairs, and was about to open the door to the hallway that circled the women’s part, but the door wouldn’t budge, the door was locked. What was this? He walked around. He put his ear to the keyhole—he could hear nothing. He came from the other end, and it was the same thing. And so he went back with nothing.
Deniska tossed in bed a long time, his head working on the problem: why was the door locked—the door was never locked—and he could hear nothing, not even the whine of a mosquito. Deniska had dreams all night of terrible robbers, the robbers either wanted to swallow him live or chop off his head—do something or other truly horrible. But Deniska was made of stern stuff; he bit the chief robber’s finger and woke up.
“This business has to be investigated; it can’t be left like this!” decided Deniska, and, making a plan with Antonina, he pretended to be sick the following Saturday. He scratched, and twitched, and coughed, and rubbed his eyes, and then his arm was numb, and all the unshowable parts were drying up, and something was drilling right into his brains, really hard, and the ringing in his ears—so much more than the peal of Ivan the Great! By the time of the evening vigil, they naturally left him alone; how could you bother someone like that: at death’s door, ready to inhale incense.
When the service began, Deniska leaped out of bed, jumped down hard into the corridor, and pocketed the key from one of the doors. He went back to the nursery and got into bed. The service ended, Yaga brought Antonina, and he was tossing and turning as if with a high fever, making rude signs and sticking out his tongue. Yaga shut the door, shuffled a bit on the landing, and then went down. The house grew still.
Deniska bided his time and then went quietly into the corridor to the door. He thought now he would see, rubbing his hands in satisfaction. But no, not at all—he pushed, but the door would not open—it was blocked. Deniska looked around thoroughly, pushed hard with his chest—made a small crack and slipped through. And went. He went past the dining room, the storeroom, the small prayer room, and the icon room. He put his ear to the icon room and heard: the exterminator was gabbling on about something, but he couldn’t understand what. Just gabbled and gabbled. Then silence. Then more gabbling, banging on like a woodpecker. Deniska waited, listened, and had just decided to leave when out of nowhere someone’s gigantic foot appeared—and stepped on him with a big boot. Good thing Deniska had an iron chest, he’d have been nothing but a wet spot, the boot would have crushed him as easily as swatting a fly. Deniska rolled up into a pea, shut his eyes and crawled on the floor, rolled on the floor, rolled to the door, through the crack, along the corridor, up the stairs into the nursery, and fell into bed. His ears were full of the exterminator’s gabbling.
What was this magic? Deniska and Antonina racked their brains. Deniska tried to talk to Babinka, he tried every approach, but the old woman wouldn’t give him even half a word; she just prayed and sighed, prayed and sighed. Pray about what? Sins.
But what sins?
9
The rumors that things were not right in the Divilin house traveled many roads and at last reached the gymnasium.
The geography teacher, nicknamed Woodlouse, asked Deniska, as if inadvertently, “Hey you, Divilin, is it? What devils are being summoned at your house?”
Deniska stuck his tongue out at Woodlouse.
Woodlouse went into a fury: he made Deniska stand for an entire hour, without moving, and stood opposite him, watching constantly. Deniska, sticking out his iron chest, stood the entire hour, not only not moving but not even blinking once. Not because he feared and obeyed Woodlouse but out of bravado and stubbornness.
“And I’ll do it, so—eat that!” every muscle hardened on his tender child’s face.
But the affair did not end with Woodlouse. They called Deniska into the director’s office. When a pupil was called to see the director, it meant that he was going to be expelled from the gymnasium. Deniska went there expecting that.
The director harassed Deniska for a long time. Deniska stood and looked at the director.
The director’s shaved lip rose repeatedly, showing his canine tooth, and then was sucked in completely.
“What do your parents do?” asked the director, without looking at him.
“My father is dead,” replied Deniska.
“What do your parents do at the present time?”
“Chop cabbage.”
The director scowled.
“I’m not asking you about cabbage,” he said, his finger drumming on the table.
Deniska was silent.
“You’ll work hard for me, obnoxious boy!” the director’s finger threatened him and the sharp stone on the ring sparkled and went right into his eyes. “Stay after school.”
Deniska thought even harder than before. He had unlocked the door of the corridor with the hidden key, made his way to the icon room, eavesdropped, and heard the exterminator’s gabble and nothing more.
And then, as if for spite, there were events at the gymnasium, such that there was no possibility of continuing his observations. Deniska had to spend many Saturdays standing at detention.
Over a trifle.
Once at the lunch break, running past the inspector, Deniska came nose to nose with him and shouted:
“Leonid Franzevich, in which ear do I hear ringing?”
“The left,” the inspector replied, without thinking, and suddenly turned red: he was so stunned by Deniska’s unexpected, unacceptable, actually impossible question.
And for that question, or rather because the inspector replied to his intolerable question, he was punished cruelly. Deniska had to do his time in detention standing up. He stood like a post, on the director’s orders, hands along the seams, head like that. And the old doorman Gerasim, his gray soldier’s brows furrowed, also and watched through the window, as if he were before the Turk. Deniska stood there, but his thoughts were on what was happening at their house, people were actually asking, and everyone wanted to know, yet he not only didn’t know but couldn’t even find out.
Returning late in the evening from detention, missing dinner, exhausted by the long all-night vigil, Deniska talked for a long time with Antonina and tried to guess, and it was all about one thing, their house, what was going on in their house?
Antonina said, “Maybe they’re making children there …”
“That’s not how you make children,” Deniska replied seriously. “You don’t understand anything.”
“Well what else is there to do?” Antonina tried to correct her statement. “There are no cards in the house, the exterminator took them away.”
“I hate that dog, he’s such a dog,” snarled Deniska.
“And you think Babinka …” Antonina stretched out the words and was figuring something out.
“Babinka is crazy.”
“That’s a sin to say; she’s your mother.”
“Who?”
“Babinka.”
“And your mother is Yaga.”
Antonina did not respond, she just frowned in a bad way.
“Yaga says your father vanished from books, of course, that’s Yaga. Teachers are made from books.”
“I don’t like the exterminator, either,” said Antonina.
“You know, Antonina, I’ve figured it out.
I’ll climb through the window.”
“You can’t see anything through the window,” she said, shaking her head.
“Then here’s what I’ll … Antonina! I’ll drill a hole in the icon room, a small hole.”
The girl’s eyes flashed.
“And you’ll see everything!”
“Of course, I will, and how!”
“And you’ll tell me!”
They slapped each other’s hands.
But precautions were being taken in the house. Either it was rumors in town, or other suspicions, or simply intuition: but now it was not only on Saturday night but in ordinary times that all the doors and all the rooms were locked, so that there was no opportunity or almost none to penetrate into the corridor.
Glafira acted like Yaga, the exterminator like the devil. Only old Agrafena meekly and serenely prayed and sighed, prayed and sighed.
Be that as it may, Deniska managed under various excuses to find a few minutes to dig a hole in the door. He worked for several weeks, and the hole was done for one of the Saturdays.
The Little Devil and Other Stories Page 9
