The Nose and Other Stories

by Nikolai Gogol

  Granddad slept for a long time, and only when the sun had already been burning the top of his shaved head for quite a while did he jump to his feet. He stretched a couple of times and scratched his back, and then noticed that there were not as many wagons in the yard as the night before. Apparently the chumaks had set off before dawn. He turned to his companions—the Cossack was sleeping, but the Zaporozhian Cossack was gone. Granddad asked around, but no one seemed to know anything. All that was left lying there was the Zaporozhian’s outer jerkin. Granddad was overcome by fear and doubt. He went to check on the horses—neither his horse nor the Zaporozhian’s horse was there! What could this mean? Let’s suppose the Evil Power took the Zaporozhian, but who took the horses? After he thought it all over, Granddad concluded that apparently the devil had come on foot, and since hell is quite a ways off, he’d swiped Granddad’s horse. Granddad was deeply pained that he had failed to keep his Cossack word.

  “Well,” he thought, “I have no choice, I’ll have to go on foot. Maybe I’ll meet a horse dealer coming from the fair and I’ll buy a horse from him.”

  He reached for his cap—but his cap was gone. My late Granddad threw up his hands when he remembered that the night before, he and the Zaporozhian had swapped caps for a while. The Evil One must have gone off with the cap. So there’s a hetman’s courier for you! So that’s how he delivered the letter to the empress! At this point Granddad started treating the devil to such epithets that I think the Evil One had to sneeze more than once down in hell.12 But you can’t do much with cussing. No matter how much he scratched the nape of his neck, Granddad just couldn’t think of anything. What was he to do?

  He hurried to get advice. He gathered all the good people who were there in the tavern, chumaks and just plain travelers, and he told them the misfortune that had happened. The chumaks thought for a long time, leaning their chins on their whips. They just twisted their heads and said that they had never heard of such a strange thing in the world of the baptized as that the devil should have swiped a letter from the hetman. Some of the others added that when the devil or a Rooskie steals something—you can just kiss it good-bye. Only the tavern keeper was sitting silently in the corner. So Granddad went up to him. If a person is keeping silent, that means he’s stored up a lot of brains. But the tavern keeper wasn’t real generous with his words, and if Granddad hadn’t reached into his pocket for five twenty-kopeck coins, he would have just kept standing there in front of him for nothing.

  “I’ll teach you how to find the letter,” the tavern keeper said, leading Granddad off to the side. Granddad felt relieved. “I can see by your eyes that you are a Cossack, not a woman. So listen! Near the tavern there will be a turn to the right into the woods. As soon as it starts to get dark, you should be ready to go. Gypsies live in the woods, and they come out of their lairs to forge iron on the nights when only witches travel on their pokers. What they are actually making, you don’t need to know. There will be a lot of hammering in the woods, but don’t go in the direction in which you hear the hammering. You will see a little path running past a charred tree, and you should start walking, walking, walking along that path… You’ll be scratched by blackthorns, a hazel tree will block the path—you just keep walking, and don’t stop until you come to a little stream. That’s where you’ll see the one you need, but don’t forget to take in your pockets the stuff that pockets are made to carry… You know that both devils and humans love that good stuff.” Having said this, the tavern keeper went off to his little hole and wouldn’t say another word.

  My late granddad was not one of the cowardly sort. If he met a wolf, he’d take it right by the tail; if he went through a bunch of Cossacks wielding his fists, they’d all tumble to the ground like pears. Nevertheless, his flesh started to creep when he went into the woods on such a dark night. There wasn’t even a little star in the sky. It was as dark and deserted as in a wine cellar. All you could hear was the cold wind playing in the tops of the trees, high, high up overhead, and the trees swayed freely like tipsy Cossack heads, whispering drunkenly with their leaves. All of a sudden came such a wave of cold that Granddad thought of putting on his sheepskin coat, and suddenly it was as if a hundred hammers started hammering in the woods so loudly that his head rang. The woods were lighted up for a moment as if by summer lightning. Granddad immediately caught sight of a little path making its way among sparse bushes. And there were the charred tree and the blackthorn bushes! Everything was just the same as he’d been told; the tavern keeper hadn’t deceived him. But it wasn’t a lot of fun making his way through the prickly bushes. He’d never in all his life seen the damned thorns and branches scratch so painfully. At almost every step he wanted to scream.

  Gradually he made his way out into a clear spot, and he noticed that the trees were becoming sparser, and the farther he walked the broader they became, such as he had never seen this side of Poland. Lo and behold, there was the stream flashing among the trees, as black as blued steel. Granddad stood for a long time on the bank, looking in all directions. On the opposite bank a fire was burning. It would seem that it was about to go out, and then it would glimmer in the stream, which was trembling like a Polish nobleman in a Cossack’s paws. And there was a little bridge! Well, it was so narrow that only the devil’s cabriolet would be able to cross it. But Granddad stepped onto it boldly, and he was on the other side before another man could have gotten out his snuff horn. Only now could he see that there were people sitting around the fire, and their snout-faces were so pretty that at any other time he would have given God knows what just to slip away from having to make their acquaintance. But now there was no help for it, he had to get tied up in it.

  So Granddad bowed to them, almost to the waist: “May God help you, good people!” Not one of them even nodded to him. They sat silently, strewing something into the fire. Seeing a vacant place, Granddad sat right down without any preliminaries. The pretty snout-faces said nothing; Granddad said nothing. They sat silently for a long time. Granddad was starting to get bored. He started rummaging in his pocket, got out his pipe, looked around—not one of them was looking at him. “My dear benefactors, please do me a good turn, be so kind: it’s sort of like, one might say, in a certain sense…” (Granddad had lived in society, he knew how to spin out his talk, and if the occasion arose he wouldn’t have been at a loss even before a king.) “So that, so to speak, so as to help myself but not offend you—I have a pipe, but I don’t have a devil of a thing to light it with.” And they said not a word in answer to this speech; only one of the snouts shoved a burning firebrand right at Granddad’s forehead, so that if he hadn’t moved a little to the side he might have said farewell forever to one of his eyes. Seeing finally that time was passing to no purpose, he made up his mind to tell his business, whether the evil tribe was going to listen or not.

  They pointed their horns and ears and stretched out their paws. Granddad guessed what was up: He gathered all the money he had and threw it into their midst as if to a pack of dogs. As soon as he threw the money, everything got jumbled up before his eyes, the earth began to tremble, and somehow, he himself couldn’t have explained how, he found himself nearly in hell itself. “My God!” Granddad groaned when he had a good look: “What a bunch of monsters!” One mug was uglier than the next, as they say. There was a pile of witches as big as the pile of snow that sometimes falls at Christmastime: all dressed up, all made up, like young noblewomen at a fair. And all of them were dancing some kind of devil’s trepak as if they were drunk.13 God forbid the kind of dust they kicked up! Any baptized person would be seized by trembling if he saw how high that demon tribe was leaping. Despite all his terror, Granddad couldn’t help laughing when he saw how the devils with dogs’ snouts wriggled around the witches on their little German legs, twisting their tails, like lads around beautiful maidens. The musicians banged on their cheeks as if they were drums, and blew with their noses as if they were French horns.

  The moment they saw Granddad, they
all turned toward him in a horde. Pig snouts, dog snouts, goat snouts, bustard snouts, horse snouts, they all stretched out and tried to kiss him. Granddad spat, it was so disgusting! Finally they grabbed him and sat him down at a table that was about as long as the distance from Konotop to Baturyn. “Well, this isn’t so bad,” Granddad thought when he saw on the table pork, sausages, onions chopped up with cabbage, and lots of other goodies—“it seems these devilish bastards don’t observe the fasts.”14 My late Granddad himself, you should probably know, didn’t miss many opportunities to have a bite or two. He had a good appetite. So without bothering to ask, he took hold of a bowl full of slices of fatback and a hunk of ham, he took a fork that wasn’t much smaller than the forks peasants use to pitch hay, he grabbed the weightiest piece he could find, pillowed it on a crust of bread, and—lo and behold, he put it into someone else’s mouth. It was right up next to his ear, and somebody’s mug was chewing and clicking their teeth loud enough for the whole table to hear. Granddad didn’t turn a hair. He grabbed another piece, and he seemed to already be hooking it with his lips when again it went into somebody else’s gullet. A third time—he missed again. Granddad blew his top. He forgot his fear and forgot whose clutches he was in. He jumped up and yelled at the witches: “You Herod’s tribe! Are you trying to make fun of me? If you don’t give me back my Cossack’s cap right this minute, may I be a Catholic if I don’t twist all your pigs’ snouts so they’re facing backward!”15

  No sooner had he uttered these words than all the monsters bared their teeth and laughed so loudly that Granddad’s heart nearly stopped beating. “All right!” squealed one of the witches, who Granddad decided was the most senior of all because her face was almost “prettier” than all the rest—“We’ll give you back your cap, but not before you play three games of ‘fools’ with us!” So what was he supposed to do? That a Cossack should play “fools” with a bunch of women! Granddad tried and tried to refuse, but finally sat down. They brought the cards, which were as greasy as the ones our priest’s daughters use to tell fortunes about prospective bridegrooms. “Listen!” the witch barked. “If you win even once, the cap is yours, but if you end up the ‘fool’ all three times, then please don’t take offense, but not only won’t you ever see your cap again, you might not see the world again!”

  “Come on and deal, you old hag! Whatever will be, will be.”

  So the cards were dealt out. Granddad took his hand—what trash. If only there’d been one trump card just for laughs. His highest card was a ten, he didn’t even have any pairs, and the witch kept piling up five at a time. He ended up the fool! As soon as Granddad ended up the fool, all the snouts started whinnying, barking, and oinking: “Fool! Fool! Fool!”

  “I hope you all bust a gut, you tribe of devils!” Granddad yelled, stopping up his ears with his fingers. “Well,” he thought, “the witch was doing the shuffling. Now I get to deal.” He dealt. He turned up the trump card. He looked at his cards: He had a great hand, this time he did have some trumps. And at first things went really well, but then the witch put down five cards, including some kings! Granddad had only trump cards in his hand. Without taking long to think about it, he grabbed those kings by the whiskers with his trumps.

  “Hee-hee-hee, that’s not a very Cossack-like thing to do! What are you covering them with, brother?”

  “What do you mean? With trump cards!”

  “Maybe you think those are trump cards, but we don’t!”

  Lo and behold, indeed they weren’t from the trump suit. What devilish doings! He ended up the fool yet again, and the pack of devils started yelling again: “Fool, fool!”—so that the table shook and the cards jumped around.

  Granddad got mad as blazes; he dealt the last round. Again things were going well. The witch put five down again. Granddad covered them and then got a whole hand full of trump cards. “Trump!” he cried, thumping the card on the table so hard that it bent. The witch silently covered it with an eight of another suit.

  “What are you trying to trump with, you old devil!” The witch lifted the card: under it was an ordinary six.

  “It’s some kind of demonish cheating!” Granddad said, and pounded the table with his fist as hard as he could. At least it was good that the witch had a bad hand; Granddad, as if on purpose, had pairs. He started picking cards from the deck with all his might. It was all such trash that Granddad lost heart. There wasn’t a single good card in the deck. So without even looking he played a simple six. The witch took it.

  “Hey, wait a minute! What’s this? Hey, hey, something’s not right!”

  You see, Granddad had made the sign of the cross over the cards under the table, and lo and behold, in his hand appeared an ace, king, and jack of trumps, and instead of a six he had played a queen.

  “So you called me the fool! You called me the fool! King of trumps! Well, can you take it? Huh? You cat’s spawn! You want an ace? An ace! A jack!”

  Thunder rumbled all through hell; the witch starting writhing, and seemingly out of nowhere—his cap came flying right into his face. “No, that’s not enough!” Granddad shouted, putting on his cap with a new sense of courage. “If my dashing steed does not appear before me this very minute, then may I be struck down by lightning on this very evil spot if I don’t make the sign of the holy cross over all of you!” He started to raise his arm, when a bunch of horse bones came clattering right in front of him. “There’s your steed!” The poor man burst into tears like a small child when he looked at them. He felt so sorry for his old comrade! “Well, give me some kind of horse so I can get out of your nest!” The devil cracked a whip—and a fiery steed came flying up under him, and Granddad went soaring up like a bird.

  He got really scared on the journey, though, when the horse, refusing to obey his shouts or the reins, went galloping over hollows and swamps. You’d start trembling just to hear him tell about what places he’d been in. He’d happen to look down below his feet, and he’d get even more scared: an abyss! a sheer drop! And the satanic animal didn’t mind a bit, it would just go right across. Granddad tried to hold it back, but it was no use. It flew headlong over stumps, over hillocks into a hollow, and it hit the ground at the bottom so hard that it knocked the breath out of Granddad. At any rate, he couldn’t remember a thing that had happened to him during that time, and when he finally came to and looked around, it was already getting light. He caught glimpses of familiar places, and he was lying on the roof of his own hut.

  Granddad climbed down and crossed himself. What devilish doings! What an abyss, what strange things they did to a man! He looked at his hands—they were all bloody; he looked into a barrel full of water—and saw that his face was also covered in blood. He washed up so that he wouldn’t scare the children, and went quietly into the hut. He looked and saw the kids backing up toward him and pointing in fear, saying, “Look! Look! Mother’s jumping like a crazy woman!” Indeed the woman was sitting asleep in front of her loom, holding her spindle in her hands and sleepily jumping on the bench. Granddad quietly took her hand and tried to wake her up: “Hello, my wife! Are you all right?” She looked bug-eyed at him for a bit, and finally she recognized Granddad and told him that she had been dreaming that the stove was riding around the hut, chasing the pots and washtubs out with a spade, and the devil knows what else.

  “Well,” Granddad said, “you dreamed it, and I saw it for real. I can see we’re going to have to have our hut consecrated, but right now I have no time to lose.” After he rested a bit, Granddad got a horse, and now he didn’t stop either by day or by night until he made it to his destination and gave the letter to the empress herself. Granddad saw so many wonders there that it took him a long time to tell the tale afterward. How they led him into grand halls with such high ceilings that if you put ten huts one on top of another, even then they wouldn’t reach the top. He looked into one room—nothing; into another—nothing; into a third—still nothing; in a fourth there was nothing either; but in the fifth room, lo and beho
ld, she herself was sitting there wearing a golden crown and a brand-new gray caftan and red boots, and eating golden dumplings. How she ordered him to fill his cap with blue five-ruble notes, how… I can’t remember it all. Granddad forgot even to think about all his troubles with the devils, and if anyone happened to mention it, Granddad would be silent, as if it had nothing to do with him, and you had to work really hard to get him to tell the whole story the way it happened. And apparently as a punishment for the fact that he hadn’t thought to get the hut consecrated right away, every year at exactly that same time, such a strange thing would happen to his wife: She would start dancing, and she couldn’t do anything about it. No matter what she tried to do, her legs would have a mind of their own, and they’d just grab her and go into a squatting Cossack dance.