But the old woman said not a word and kept trying to grab him.
He jumped onto his feet, intending to run away, but the old woman stood in the door, fixed her flashing eyes on him, and again started coming up to him.
The Philosopher wanted to push her away, but to his amazement he noticed that he couldn’t raise his arms, and his legs would not move, and he saw with horror that even his voice made no sound from his mouth. The words stirred soundlessly on his lips. He heard nothing but his heart beating; he saw the old woman come up to him, fold his arms, bend his head down, and jump onto his back with the swiftness of a cat. She struck his side with a broom, and prancing like a saddle horse, he carried her away on his shoulders. This all happened so fast that the Philosopher could hardly come to his senses and grab his own knees, trying to hold his legs back, but to his great amazement, they lifted against his will and galloped faster than a Circassian trotter. Only when they had already left the farmstead and a flat valley opened up before them, and woods as black as coal stretched out to the side, did he say to himself: “Aha! She’s a witch.”
The inverted sickle of the moon was shining in the sky. A timid midnight radiance, like a transparent veil, lay lightly on the earth and gave off smoke. Woods, meadows, sky, valleys—everything seemed to be sleeping with open eyes. If only a wind would flutter up somewhere. There was something moist and warm in the nocturnal freshness. Like comets, the shadows of trees and bushes cast dark wedge-shaped shadows on the sloping plain. That was the kind of night it was when the Philosopher Khoma Brut galloped with a weird rider on his back. He felt a kind of agonizing, unpleasant, and at the same time sweet feeling rising up to his heart. He lowered his head and saw that the grass that had been right under his feet seemed to be growing deeply downward and that above it was water as clear as a mountain spring, and the grass seemed to be the bottom of a sort of sea that was bright and transparent to its very depths. At least he could see clearly how he was reflected in it together with the old woman sitting on his back. He saw some sort of sun shining there instead of the moon; he heard bluebells ringing as they bent their little heads. He saw a water nymph swim out from behind some sedge, and caught a glimpse of her back and her leg, which was plump and springy, made all of gleaming and trembling. She turned toward him—and now her face, with bright, sparkling, piercing eyes that sang their way into his soul, was getting close to him, was on the surface, and then moved away, trembling with sparkling laughter—and now she had turned over onto her back, and her cloudlike breasts, with a matte surface like unglazed porcelain, shone translucent in the sun along the edges of their white, tenderly elastic roundedness. Water bestrewed them in little beadlike bubbles. She was all trembling and laughing in the water…
Was he seeing this or not? Was this in waking life or in a dream? And what’s that over there? The wind or music: It rings, it rings, and it twines, and it approaches, and it pierces the soul with a kind of unbearable trill…
“What is this?” the Philosopher Khoma Brut thought, looking beneath him as he flew at full speed. Sweat was pouring from him. He felt a demonically sweet sensation, he felt a kind of piercing, agonizingly frightening pleasure. It often seemed to him as if his heart was no longer in him, and in fright he tried to grasp it with his hand. Exhausted, bewildered, he started recalling all the prayers he knew. He went over in his mind all the incantations against evil spirits—and suddenly he felt a kind of refreshment; he felt that his pace was getting lazier, and the witch was holding onto his back more feebly. The thick grass touched him, and he no longer saw anything unusual about it. The bright sickle shone in the sky.
“All right, good!” the Philosopher Khoma thought to himself, and started uttering the incantations almost out loud. Finally he leaped out from under the old woman with the speed of lightning and jumped up onto her back in his turn. The old woman started running with a quick, rhythmic pace, so fast that her rider could hardly catch his breath. He could just barely glimpse the earth beneath him. Everything was clear in the moonlight, although the moon was not full. The valleys were smooth, but he was glimpsing everything vaguely and in fragments because of the speed they were going. He grabbed a log that was lying on the road and started whacking the old woman with it with all his might. She uttered wild howls. At first her howls were angry and threatening, then they became feebler, more pleasant, purer, and finally they were just barely ringing softly, like fine little silver bells, and they sank deeply into his soul. Involuntarily the thought flashed in his head: Is this really the old woman? “Oh, I can’t do it any more,” she said in exhaustion and fell to the ground.
He stood on his feet and looked into her eyes: The dawn blazed up, and the golden domes of the churches of Kyiv gleamed in the distance. In front of him lay a beautiful woman with a disheveled plait of luxuriant hair, with eyelashes that were as long as arrows. Insensibly, she flung her bare white arms out to the sides and moaned, raising her tear-filled eyes upward.
Khoma began trembling like a leaf. Pity and a kind of strange excitement and cowardice, which he himself did not understand, overcame him; he started running as fast as he could. On the way, his heart pounded in agitation, and he could not explain to himself what this strange new feeling was that had overcome him. He no longer wanted to go to any farmsteads, and he hurried back to Kyiv, meditating on this inexplicable incident the whole way.
There were almost no bursaks in the city. They had all dispersed to various farmsteads, either on condition or without any sort of conditions, because at Little Russian farmsteads one can eat small dumplings, cheese, sour cream, and stuffed dumplings the size of a broad-brimmed hat, without paying a cent. The large dilapidated building in which the bursa was housed was completely empty, and no matter how the Philosopher rummaged in all the corners and even felt all the holes and depressions in the roof, he could find neither a piece of fatback nor an old roll that might have been hidden away by the bursaks, as was their habit.
But the Philosopher soon found a way to solve his problem. He walked three times through the marketplace, whistling. At the very end he winked at a young widow wearing a yellow cap and selling ribbons, shot, and wheels—and that very day he was given his fill of stuffed wheat dumplings, chicken… in short, it’s impossible to list everything he had at the table that was set for him in a small earthen house in the middle of a cherry orchard. That same evening the Philosopher was seen in a tavern. He was lying on a bench, smoking his pipe, as was his custom, and everyone saw him throw the Jewish tavern-keeper half a gold piece. A tankard stood in front of him. He watched the people coming in and going out with indifferent and contented eyes and was no longer thinking at all about the unusual incident that had happened to him.
■ □ ■
Meanwhile rumors spread everywhere that the daughter of one of the richest Cossack lieutenants, whose farmstead was located about thirty miles from Kyiv, had returned one day from a walk all beaten up.9 She had hardly had the strength to make it to her father’s house, she was on her deathbed, and before her hour of death she had expressed the desire to have the prayers for the dying read for her for the three days after her death by one of the Kyiv seminarists: Khoma Brut. The Philosopher learned this from the rector himself, who had officially summoned him into his room and declared that he must quickly set off, without any delay, and that the eminent Cossack lieutenant had sent servants and a wagon expressly for him.
The Philosopher shuddered with a kind of instinctive feeling that he himself would not have been able to explain. A dark premonition told him that something evil was awaiting him. Without himself knowing why, he declared straight out that he would not go.
“Listen, Mister Khoma!” the rector said (on certain occasions he could speak very politely to his subordinates), “no one gives a good goddamn whether or not you want to go. All I’ll say to you is that if you’re going to kick up your heels and try to be smart, I’ll order them to whip your back and other bodily parts with a young birch so that you wo
n’t need to go to the bathhouse.”10
The Philosopher went out of the room, scratching lightly behind his ear, not saying a word, and planning at the first opportunity to place his hopes in his own legs. Deep in thought, he descended the steep staircase that led into the courtyard planted with poplars, and he stopped for a moment, hearing distinctly the voice of the rector, who was giving orders to his steward and to someone else, probably one of the people the lieutenant had sent to get him.
“Thank his lordship for the millet and eggs,” the rector was saying, “and tell him that as soon as those books he wrote about are ready, I’ll send them immediately. I’ve already given them to the scribe to copy. And don’t forget, my dear man, to add that I know they have some good fish, especially sturgeon, on their farm, and ask him to send some when he has a chance. The fish they have in the markets here is of poor quality and expensive. Yavtukh, give each of the lads a glass of vodka. And tie up the Philosopher, or he’ll surely make a run for it.”
“Look what a son of the devil he is!” the Philosopher thought to himself. “He’s sniffed me out, the long-legged rascal!”
He went down and saw a covered wagon that at first he took for a grain-drying barn on wheels. Indeed, it was as deep as an oven for baking bricks. It was the usual Krakow carriage in which fifty Jews will set off with their goods to all the towns in which they can sniff out a fair. About six hearty and strong Cossacks, already of middle age, were waiting for him. Their caftans made of fine cloth with tassels showed that they belonged to a quite notable and rich proprietor. Their small scars indicated that they had at one time played a not inglorious role in war.
“What is to be done? Whatever will be, will be,” the Philosopher thought to himself, and turning to the Cossacks, he said loudly, “Hello, comrade brothers!”
“Greetings, Mister Philosopher!” some of the Cossacks answered.
“So I’m to sit with you? This is quite a splendid carriage!” he continued as he climbed in. “All you have to do is hire some musicians, and you could have a dance in it.”
“Yes, it’s a well-proportioned carriage!” one of the Cossacks said as he took a seat on the box alongside the coachman, who had wound a rag around his head to replace the cap he had left behind in a tavern. The other five men together with the Philosopher climbed into the depths of the carriage and took their seats on sacks filled with various goods they had bought in the town.
“It would be interesting to know,” the Philosopher said, “if, for example, you were to fill this carriage with some kind of goods—let’s say salt or iron wedges—how many horses would you need then to pull it?”
“Yes,” the Cossack on the box said after a moment’s silence, “you’d need a pretty good number of horses.”
After this satisfactory answer the Cossack considered himself fully justified in remaining silent for the rest of the journey.
The Philosopher very much wanted to find out in more detail: who was this lieutenant; what was his disposition; what did people know about his daughter, who had returned home in such an unusual fashion and was now at death’s door, and whose story was now somehow tied to his own; how did they live and what went on in their home? He addressed his questions to the men, but apparently the Cossacks were also philosophers, because they answered him by remaining silent and smoking their pipes as they lay on the sacks. Only one of them addressed the driver on the box with the terse order: “Watch out, Overko, you’re such an old scatterbrain. As soon as you get to the tavern on the Chukhrailovsky Road, don’t forget to stop and wake me and the other lads up, if any of us has happened to fall asleep.” After saying this, he fell asleep rather loudly. These instructions were quite superfluous, however, because hardly had the gigantic carriage come near the tavern on the Chukhrailovsky Road than they all shouted in one voice: “Stop!” Moreover, Overko’s horses were so well trained that they stopped in front of every tavern all by themselves.
Despite the hot July day, they all got out of the carriage and went into the low-ceilinged dingy room where the Jewish innkeeper rushed to receive his old acquaintances with signs of joy. The Jew brought some pork sausages hidden under his shirt, and after laying them on the table, he immediately turned his back on this fruit forbidden by the Talmud. They all took seats around the table. Earthenware tankards appeared in front of each guest. The Philosopher Khoma was obligated to take part in the general carousal. And since Little Russians, when they go on a binge, never fail to start kissing or crying, soon the whole hut was filled with the sounds of kissing: “Oh, Spirid, let’s kiss!”—“Come here, Dorosh, I’ll give you a hug!”
One Cossack who was a little older than the others, with a gray mustache, propped his cheek on his hand and started sobbing with deep feeling about the fact that he had neither father nor mother and had ended up all by his lonesome in the world. Another was a great thinker and kept consoling him, saying, “Don’t cry, by God, don’t cry! What’s all this… God knows what all this is.”
The one named Dorosh got very curious and kept addressing questions to the Philosopher Khoma: “I’d like to know what they teach you in that bursa. Do they teach you the same thing the lector reads out in church, or something else?”
“Don’t ask!” the great thinker drawled out. “Just let everything be the way it was. God knows how things should be; God knows everything.”
“No, I want to know,” Dorosh said, “what’s written in those books. Maybe it’s something entirely different from what the lector reads.”
“Oh, my God, my God!” the well-respected preceptor said. “Why say such things? It’s as God’s will has decreed. Whatever God has given, no one can change.”
“I want to know everything that’s been written. I’ll go to the bursa, honest to God, I’ll go! You think I can’t learn it all? I’ll learn it all, all of it!”
“Oh, my God, my God!” the consoler said and lowered his head to the table, because he no longer had the strength to hold it up on his shoulders.
The other Cossacks were talking about landowners and about why the moon shines in the sky.
The Philosopher Khoma, seeing the state all their heads were in, resolved to make use of it and slip away. At first he turned to the gray-haired Cossack who was grieving about his father and mother: “Why are you weeping, old fellow,” he said, “I’m an orphan myself! Lads, let me go free! What am I to you?”
“Let’s let him go free!” some of them responded. “He’s an orphan, after all. Let him go wherever he wants.”
“Oh, my God, my God!” the consoler said, raising his head. “Let him go! Let him go on his way!”
And the Cossacks were ready to lead him out into the open field, but the one who had displayed his curiosity stopped them, saying:
“Don’t touch him. I want to talk to him about the bursa. I’m going to the bursa myself.”
But this escape could hardly have succeeded anyway, because when the Philosopher tried to get up from the table, his legs seemed to have turned to wood, and he was seeing such a multitude of doors in the room that he could hardly have figured out which was the real one.
Only in the evening did this whole company remember that they needed to continue their journey. They clambered into the carriage and set off, urging on the horses and singing a song whose words and meaning no one would have been able to make out. After traveling the greater part of the night, constantly losing their way although they knew it by heart, they finally went down a steep hill into a valley, and the Philosopher noticed a paling or wattle fence stretching out on either side, with short trees and roofs peeking out from behind them. This was the large hamlet that belonged to the lieutenant. It was long past midnight; the sky was dark, and tiny little stars twinkled here and there. No light could be seen in a single hut. They rode into the farmyard, accompanied by the barking of dogs. On either side one could see barns and little houses with straw roofs. One of them, located right in the middle opposite the gates, was larger than the others and see
med to be the residence of the lieutenant. The carriage stopped in front of a small simulacrum of a barn, and our travelers went to find sleeping places. The Philosopher, however, wished to look around the master’s mansions from the outside for a while; but no matter how he strained his eyes, nothing would appear in a clear form: instead of a house he’d see a bear; a chimney would become the rector. The Philosopher gave up and went to find a place to sleep.
When the Philosopher woke up, the whole house was in motion: The pannochka had died in the night.11 The servants were rushing back and forth. Some of the old women were crying. A crowd of curious people were looking through the fence at the master’s farmyard, as if they could catch sight of something.
The Philosopher began to inspect at his leisure the places he hadn’t been able to discern the night before. The master’s house was a small, low building of the kind that used to be built in the old days in Little Russia. It had a straw roof. A small gable with a sharp, tall peak and a little window that looked like an upraised eye was decorated with painted light-blue and yellow flowers and red crescents. It was supported by oak pillars that were round from halfway up and hexagonal below that, with fancifully carved tops. Under this gable was a small porch with little benches on each side. On the sides of the house were canopies supported on the same sort of pillars, some of which were in the form of a spiral. In front of the house was a tall green pear tree with a pyramidal crown and trembling leaves. Several storehouses stood in front of the house in two rows, forming a kind of broad street leading to the house. Behind the storehouses, up against the gates, stood two triangular wine cellars, one opposite the other, also roofed in straw. Each cellar’s triangular wall had a low door and was decorated with various painted images. On one was painted a Cossack sitting on a barrel, holding a tankard over his head, with the caption: “I’ll drink it all.” On the other was a bottle and flasks, and to enhance the beauty, on the sides were painted an upside-down horse, a pipe, tambourines, and the caption: “Wine is the Cossack’s joy.” From a huge dormer window in the attic of one of the barns a drum and some brass trumpets peeped out. Two cannons stood by the gates. Everything showed that the master of the house liked to have a good time and that his yard often heard the resounding shouts of a drinking bout.
The Nose and Other Stories Page 5
