When Spirid had finished his story, everyone started talking about the fine qualities of the former master of hounds.
“And did you hear about Sheptun’s wife?” Dorosh said, turning to Khoma.17
“No.”
“O-ho-ho! So they don’t teach you everything there in the bursa. Well, listen! We have a Cossack in the village called Sheptun. A good Cossack! Sometimes he likes to steal and he’ll lie for no good reason, but he’s a good Cossack. His hut isn’t far from here. At just about the same time that we’ve been having supper today, Sheptun and his wife went to bed after supper, and since it was nice weather, Sheptun’s wife lay down in the yard, and Sheptun lay down in the hut on the bench; or no: It was Sheptun’s wife who lay down in the hut on the bench, and Sheptun lay down in the yard…”
“Sheptun’s wife lay down on the floor, not on the bench,” the woman interjected, standing on the threshold and leaning her cheek on her hand.
Dorosh looked at her, then looked down, then again at her, and after a brief silence, he said: “When I pull off your underskirt in front of everyone, it’s not going to be very nice.”
This warning had its effect. The old woman fell silent and did not interrupt again.
Dorosh continued: “So in the cradle that hung in the middle of the hut was lying a year-old child—I don’t know whether of the male or female sex. Sheptun’s wife was lying there, and then she heard a dog scratching at the door and howling so that you wanted to run out of the hut. She got scared, because women are such stupid folk that if you stick your tongue out at one of them from the doorway, she’ll start shaking with fear. Anyway, she thought, why don’t I just hit the damned dog in the snout, and maybe he’ll stop howling—and taking the poker, she went out to open the door. But as soon as she opened it just a little, the dog rushed between her legs and went right to the child’s cradle. Sheptun’s wife saw that it wasn’t a dog any more but the pannochka. And if only it had been the pannochka in the form she knew her in—that wouldn’t have been so bad. But here’s the thing and here’s the situation: She was all dark-blue, and her eyes were burning like coals. She grabbed the child, bit into its neck, and started to drink its blood. Sheptun’s wife just screamed: ‘Oh, my God!’ and ran out of the hut. But she saw that the doors were locked in the entryway. She went to the attic; she sat there trembling, the stupid woman, and then she saw the pannochka coming up to her in the attic; the pannochka flung herself on the stupid woman and started biting her. The next morning Sheptun dragged his wife out of there, all bitten up and turned dark-blue. The next day the stupid woman died. So those are the kinds of arrangements and seductions that happen! Although she may be of noble spawn, a witch is still a witch.”
After telling this story Dorosh looked around with self-satisfaction and stuck his finger into his pipe, preparing it for stuffing in more tobacco. There seemed to be inexhaustible stores of material about the witch. Each one in his turn rushed to tell some kind of story. One of them had seen the witch in the form of a haystack come right up to the door of his hut; she had stolen a cap or a pipe from another; she had cut off the plaits of many of the young girls in the village; she had drunk several buckets of blood from others.
Finally the whole company pulled themselves together and saw that they had gotten carried away in chattering, because night had fallen. They all started dispersing to their sleeping places, either in the kitchen or in the barns or out in the yard.
“All right, Mister Khoma! Now it’s time for us to go to the deceased woman,” the gray-haired Cossack said, turning to the Philosopher, and all four of them, including Spirid and Dorosh, set off for the church, using their whips to lash the dogs, of which there was a great multitude on the street, and who were viciously gnawing at their walking sticks.
The Philosopher, despite the fact that he had fortified himself with a good-sized tankard of vodka, secretly felt cowardice setting in as they came near the illuminated church. The tales and strange stories he had heard caused his imagination to work even harder. The gloom under the lath fence and the trees started to thin out; the place became more exposed and bare. Finally they walked through the ramshackle church paling into a small yard, beyond which there was not a single little tree, and only an empty field and meadows engulfed by nocturnal gloom opened before them. The three Cossacks and Khoma climbed a steep staircase to the porch and entered the church. Here the Cossacks left the Philosopher, wishing him a successful execution of his duties, and locked the door behind him, as the master had ordered.
The Philosopher remained alone. At first he yawned, then he stretched, then he blew into his hands, and finally he looked around. In the middle of the church stood the coffin. Candles glimmered in front of the darkened icons. Their light illuminated only the iconostasis and a bit of the center of the church. The distant corners of the narthex were wrapped in gloom. The tall, ancient iconostasis displayed its extreme decrepitude; its gilded openwork carving shone only in sparks now. In some places the gilding had fallen off, in others it had turned quite black; the visages of the saints, completely darkened, had a gloomy look. The Philosopher looked around once again.
“Well,” he said, “what is there here to be afraid of? A man can’t come in here, and for corpses and ghosts I have such prayers that as soon as I read them, the spirits can’t touch me. All right!” he repeated, waving his hand. “Let’s start reading!”
As he approached the choir, he saw several bundles of candles.
“That’s good,” the Philosopher thought. “I should light up the whole church so that one can see as well as by day. Oh, it’s just too bad that in God’s temple you can’t smoke your pipe!”
And he started sticking the wax candles to all the cornices, lecterns, and icons, not stinting on them, until the whole church was filled with light. But the gloom seemed to become even thicker up above, and the gloomy icons looked more morosely out of their ancient carved frames, whose gilding still sparkled here and there. He went up to the coffin and looked fearfully into the face of the dead woman. He couldn’t help but squint his eyes with a slight shudder.
Such terrifying, sparkling beauty!
He turned and wanted to walk away; but thanks to a strange curiosity, a strange contradictory feeling that does not leave a man especially during times of terror, he couldn’t resist looking at her one more time as he walked away, and then, feeling the same trepidation, he looked at her once more. Indeed, the sharply defined beauty of the deceased woman seemed terrifying. Perhaps she wouldn’t have inspired such panicked horror if she had been a bit uglier. But there was nothing dim, turbid, or dead in her features. The face was alive, and it seemed to the Philosopher as if she was looking at him with her closed eyes. It even seemed to him as if a tear started trickling from under the lashes of her right eye, and when it came to rest on her cheek, he could see clearly that it was a drop of blood.
He hurriedly walked over to the choir, opened a book, and in order to give himself courage, he began to read in the loudest possible voice. His voice struck the wooden church walls, which had long been silent and deaf. All alone, with no echo, his thick bass voice poured forth in the completely dead silence, seeming somewhat wild and strange even to the reader himself.
“What is there to be afraid of?” he thought to himself meanwhile. “She’s not going to rise from her coffin, because she will fear the word of God. Let her lie there! What kind of Cossack am I if I get scared? All right, so I drank a little too much—that’s why it seems scary. I’ll just take some snuff. Oh, good old snuff! Wonderful snuff! Great snuff!”
But as he turned each page, he kept looking sideways at the coffin, and it seemed that an involuntary feeling was whispering to him: “She’s going to rise now! She’s getting up now, she’s about to look out of the coffin!”
But there was dead silence. The coffin stood immobile. The candles were pouring out a whole flood of light. Fearful is a church illuminated at night, with a dead body and not a single other human soul!
Raising his voice, he started to sing in different voices, wishing to muffle the remains of his fear. But every moment he kept turning his eyes to the coffin, as if involuntarily asking the question: “What if she gets up, if she rises?”
But the coffin did not stir. If only there had been some sound, some living creature, even a cricket making an answering sound in the corner! All that could be heard was the slight crackling of a distant candle or the faint plopping sound of a drop of wax falling to the floor.
“What if she gets up?…”
She lifted her head…
He looked at her wildly and rubbed his eyes. Indeed she was no longer lying down, but was sitting up in her coffin. He turned his eyes away and then turned toward the coffin in horror. She got up… she was walking around the church with her eyes closed, constantly stretching out her arms as if trying to catch someone.
She was walking straight toward him. In terror he drew a circle around himself. He made an effort and began to read the prayers and recite the incantations that he had been taught by a certain monk who had seen witches and evil spirits his whole life long.
She came to stand almost right on the line itself, but it was clear that she did not have the power to step across it. She had turned all dark blue, like a person who has been dead for several days. Khoma did not have the courage to look at her. She was terrifying. She gnashed her teeth and opened her dead eyes. But since she couldn’t see anything, with fury expressed on her quivering face, she turned in another direction, stretching out her arms and grabbing at every pillar and corner, trying to catch Khoma. Finally she stopped, shook a threatening finger at him, and lay down in her coffin.
The Philosopher was still unable to come to his senses and kept looking in terror at the witch’s cramped dwelling place. Finally the coffin suddenly tore away from its place and started flying all around the church with a whistling sound, crossing the air in all directions. The Philosopher saw it go almost above his head, but at the same time he saw that the coffin could not cross the circle he had drawn, so he intensified his recital of the incantations. The coffin crashed down in the middle of the church and remained motionless. The corpse again got up out of it, all green and dark-blue. But at that moment the distant cry of a rooster was heard. The corpse lowered itself into the coffin and slammed the lid shut.
The Philosopher’s heart was pounding and sweat was pouring from him, but emboldened by the rooster’s cry, he quickly finished reading the pages he was supposed to have read earlier. At the first light of dawn the lector and the gray-haired Yavtukh, now in the capacity of a churchwarden, came to relieve him.
After finding his distant sleeping place, the Philosopher could not fall asleep for a long time, but his fatigue overcame him, and he slept until the midday meal. When he woke up, the whole nocturnal event seemed to have taken place in a dream. They gave him a quart of vodka to restore his strength. Over the meal he soon relaxed. He added a few remarks to what was being said and ate almost a whole somewhat old suckling pig, but because of a feeling he himself couldn’t explain, he could not bring himself to speak about the event in the church, and to the questions of the curious he answered: “Yes, there were all kinds of marvels.” The Philosopher was one of those people who conceive an extraordinary philanthropy once they’ve been well fed. Lying there with his pipe between his teeth, he looked at everyone with extraordinarily sweet eyes and kept spitting to the side.
After the midday meal the Philosopher was in very good spirits. He managed to walk all around the hamlet and meet almost everyone. He was even driven out of two huts; one pretty young peasant wife gave him a good smack on the back with a spade when he had gotten it into his head to take a feel to see what kind of material her blouse and skirt were made of. But the closer it came to evening time, the more pensive the Philosopher got. An hour before supper almost all the servants gathered to play ball or kragli—a kind of skittles that uses long sticks instead of balls, in which the winner has the right to ride on the back of another player. This game became very interesting for the spectators: Often the drover, who was as broad as a pancake, would straddle the swineherd, a short, puny man who consisted entirely of wrinkles. Another time the drover offered his back, and as he jumped up onto him, Dorosh would always say, “What a big healthy bull!” The more respectable folks were sitting by the threshold to the kitchen. They had an extremely serious look as they smoked their pipes, even when the young people would be laughing heartily at some witticism by the drover or Spirid. In vain did Khoma try to join in this game. Some kind of dark thought was sitting in his head like a nail. No matter how he tried to cheer himself up over supper, terror blazed up in him along with the darkness that was spreading over the sky.
“All right, it’s time for us to go, Mister Bursak!” the familiar gray-haired Cossack said to him, getting up along with Dorosh. “Let’s go to work.”
They took Khoma to the church in the very same way. Again they left him alone and locked the door behind him. As soon as he remained alone, cowardice again started to take root in his breast. Again he saw the dark icons, the shining frames, and the familiar black coffin standing in threatening silence and immobility in the middle of the church.
“Well,” he said, “all these strange things won’t be anything new to me. It’s only scary the first time. Yes! It’s only a little scary the first time, and then it’s not scary any more; it’s not at all scary any more.”
He quickly took up his stance in the choir, drew a circle around himself, recited a few incantations, and began to read loudly, resolving not to raise his eyes from the book and not to pay attention to anything. He had been reading for about an hour when he started to get a little tired and felt the need to cough. He took his snuff horn out of his pocket and before he brought the snuff to his nose, he cast his eyes timidly at the coffin. His heart stood still.
The corpse was already standing in front of him right on the line and was fixing him with its dead eyes that had turned green. The bursak shuddered, and he could feel coldness running all through his veins. He lowered his eyes to the book and began to read his prayers and incantations more loudly, and he could hear the corpse again gnashing its teeth and waving its arms, trying to grab hold of him. But out of the corner of his eye he could see that the corpse was trying to catch him in a place where he wasn’t standing, and apparently could not see him. She started growling faintly and speaking terrible words with her dead lips; they sobbed hoarsely, like the gurgling of boiling pitch. What they meant he could not have said, but there was something terrifying in them. The Philosopher realized with terror that she was making incantations.18
The words caused a wind to blow through the church, and there was a sound as if from a multitude of flying wings. He heard the wings beating at the glass of the church windows and their iron frames, he heard their talons squeal as they scratched at the iron, and he heard an overwhelming force battering the doors and trying to break in. His heart was pounding all this time. He squeezed his eyes closed and kept reading incantations and prayers. Finally something suddenly whistled in the distance: It was the distant cry of a rooster. The exhausted Philosopher stopped, and his spirit rested.19
The men who came to relieve the Philosopher found him barely alive. He was leaning with his back to the wall and looked with motionless, bulging eyes at the Cossacks who were shoving him. They almost had to drag him out and had to support him the whole way back. When they got to the master’s farmyard, he pulled himself together and ordered them to give him a quart of vodka. After drinking it, he ran his hand over his hair and said: “A lot of trash happens in the world! And such terrors happen that—well…” The Philosopher waved his hand while saying this.
The people who had gathered around him in a circle lowered their heads when they heard these words. Even a little urchin boy, whom all the servants felt justified in deputizing for themselves when it was time to clean out the stable or carry water, even that poor little boy gaped at him.
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br /> At that moment a wench of not quite middle age, wearing a tight-fitting skirt that showed off her rounded and firm figure, was walking past. She was the assistant to the old cook, a terrible flirt, who was always finding something to pin to her coif: either a piece of ribbon, or a carnation, or even a scrap of paper, if she couldn’t find anything else.
“Hello there, Khoma!” she said when she saw the Philosopher. “Oh my goodness! What’s wrong with you?” she screamed, throwing up her hands.
“What are you talking about, you stupid woman?”
“Oh, my God! You’ve turned all gray!”
“Hey! She’s speaking the truth!” said Spirid, looking closely at him. “You’ve turned as gray as our old Yavtukh.”
Hearing this, the Philosopher took off running to the kitchen, where he noticed a triangular piece of mirror stuck to the wall, stained by fly droppings, in front of which were stuck forget-me-nots, periwinkles, and even a garland of marigolds, indicating that the mirror was used for the dressing ritual of the stylish flirt. With horror he saw the truth of their words: In fact half of his hair had turned white.
Khoma Brut hung his head and fell into meditation.
“I’ll go to the master,” he finally said, “I’ll tell him everything and explain that I cannot read any more. Let him send me back to Kyiv this very hour.”
Lost in these thoughts, he made his way to the porch of the master’s house.
The lieutenant was sitting almost motionless in his parlor. The same despairing sadness that Khoma had earlier encountered on his face was still preserved there to this moment. The only difference was that his cheeks had grown much more sunken. One could see that he had taken very little food, or perhaps had not touched any. His unusual pallor lent him a kind of stony immobility.
The Nose and Other Stories Page 7
