by Teffi
On the corner right by his house, Ivan came to a halt, bewitched by the grocer’s window display.
“Well, well, what have we here then? Liqueurs? Who, I ask you, needs liqueur on an empty stomach? Yet they’ve stuck them in the window. Fools! And what’s that? Cognac? Well, I’m not going to be tempted! Those with will-power, my friend, have nothing to fear. I’ll even go one better! I’ll go in, buy a bottle and take it home with me. Yes I will! Just like that! Those who have will-power…”
On arriving home, he immediately locked the cognac away in the sideboard and sat down to lunch. He dished up his soup and fell into thought.
“I’ve put it away in the sideboard… But no, I can go one better than that, I’ll put it on the table. Yes, that’s what I’ll do: I’ll put it on the table… and even uncork it! Those who have will-power will never crack, my friend. No, not even if you pour out cognac right onto their noses!”
So he uncorked the bottle. He sat down, looked at it and began to think, moving his spoon around the bowl. Suddenly, he decided: “I can do better than that! I’ll take the bottle and pour out a glass. And why stop there? I’ll even drink one glassful. Yes! That’s what I’ll do. Why shouldn’t I? After all, those with will-power can stop whenever they want… and doing a little experiment on oneself can be fun!”
He drained the glass and, eyes bulging, looked around with surprise. He swallowed a couple of spoonfuls of soup and said with conviction: “No, I can do better still—I’ll drink a second glass!”
He drank the second glass, grinned and winked.
“No, even better—let me do something I have never done before: let me drink a third glass. Really, it would be silly not to! Firstly, it will be enjoyable, and secondly, if I have will-power and can always stop in time, what do I have to fear? Why, for example, shouldn’t I drink a fourth? Or better than that, a fourth and a fifth immediately after it! Yes, that’s what I’ll do. And then I’ll send someone to get some more cognac. So there. Those with will-power…”
That evening, a friend saw a light at the window and decided to drop in. He was dumbfounded by the scene before him: Ivan Matveyich sitting on the dining-room floor, wagging his finger knowingly and resolutely at the table leg, saying with great feeling, “Perhaps you can’t, my friend, but I can! I’m drunk. There, I admit it. And I’m going to go one better. I’m going to get drunk every day from now on. And why, you may ask? Well, because those with will-power… will-pow-er… can drink without anything to fear. And I have will-power aplenty, my friend, oh yes, I do. And because I have will-power, it means…”
1915
THE HAT
VARENKA ZVEZDOCHETOVA, a member of the chorus of the Private Opera,1 could have done with a bit more sleep, but she awoke in high spirits all the same.
She was short on sleep because she had stayed up half the night trying on a new hat—a deep-blue hat with a deep-blue bow and a deep-blue bird, a true bluebird of happiness.
And she was in high spirits because the poet Sineus Truvorov had promised to take her out for a drive.
The poet was someone very interesting.
He had not yet written any poems—he was still trying to come up with a pen name—but in spite of this he was very poetic and mysterious, perhaps even more so than many a real poet with real, ready-made poems.
Varenka quickly got dressed, grabbed her new hat and once again began trying it on.
“Absolutely stunning! Especially like this, from the side…”
Oh! What a woman can get away with when she’s wearing a hat like this! Things that a woman wearing any old hat wouldn’t even dare to dream of.
She can be arch, she can be tempestuous, or dreamy, or haughty. She can be anything—and whatever she does she can carry it off with style.
For the sake of comparison, Varenka took out her shabby old black hat and started putting on first it, then the dark-blue dream. She pinned on each hat, fastened her veil and tried out identical expressions with both. How tasteless, how pathetic they looked under the black hat, how irresistible under the wings of the bluebird of happiness.
At the sound of the bell and a familiar voice she dashed headlong into the front hall.
The poet with no poems was already standing there, smiling and gazing at her adoringly.
“Let’s get going, the driver’s waiting…”
She wanted to run back to her room and look at herself in the mirror one more time, but he wouldn’t let her. He just bundled her into her coat and pulled her to the door.
“There’s something about you today,” he whispered, pressing her elbow to his side. “I don’t understand what it is, but I just can’t take my eyes off you.”
“I know what it is,” thought Varenka. “It’s my new hat.”
But she did not say this to the poet. Let him think she’s always this pretty. After all, where would a true confession get her?
In response she just smiled and gave him a playful sideways look, and he pressed her arm still closer.
How lovely it was out of doors! It was a city spring, smelling of mould and cats, but the sun was the real thing, the same sun that shone on fields and meadows all over the world, the entire silly round world, and whirling about the sun were high-spirited little clouds—the lamb’s-fleece clouds of spring.
On the bridge a little boy was selling lilies of the valley. He was running after the carriages, calling out in a heart-rending voice that he was selling the flowers at a loss.
The driver flicked the reins and the boy dropped behind. Mud splashed out from under the wheels—the high-spirited mud of spring. It splashed right onto the boy and a lady who was passing by. Varenka felt rich and important, and modestly pursed her lips so that the passers-by she had splashed with mud would not be too jealous.
“You are particularly lovely today,” said the poet joyfully. “You are utterly, utterly remarkable…”
Indeed she was remarkable on this day. Her awareness of her own elegance lent her a certain boldness and gaiety of spirit.
Ah, if only she were rich, and every day, every single day, she could put on a new hat, and every day she would be beautiful in some new way!
“How do you like my hat?” she couldn’t help but ask.
He glanced at it distractedly and said, “Oh yes, very much.”
“Don’t you love this deep blue?”
“Blue? Well, yes… but it’s a very dark blue, almost black.”
Varenka smirked. How poorly men understood colours! Even poets. Yes! Even when they are poets!
On the stairs they said goodbye. He had to hurry off somewhere. But, after he’d gone down a few steps, he suddenly ran back up and kissed Varenka right on the lips.
And then, leaning over the banister, she watched him go. She watched him adoringly, and brightly, and exultantly—in the way you can watch only when you are wearing a new hat, a hat with a bluebird of happiness on the brim.
Humming to herself, she went to her room.
Ah, if only she were rich, and every day she could wear a new…
She stopped in her tracks and her jaw fell open in surprise, practically in fright: there, on the table, next to its box, lay her deep-blue hat, her new deep-blue hat, with the deep-blue ribbon and the bluebird.
“Good heavens! I don’t believe it!”
She ran to the mirror.
Yes, she was wearing her old black hat!
It must have been when she was trying on and comparing the two hats. She’d put on the old one, and when the poet appeared she had got confused and forgotten which hat she was wearing…
“That means he liked me for myself, and not because of the hat. How very strange! But what made me so very pretty today?”
She sat down on her bed and fell into thought.
Her brilliant philosophy about the happiness of those who were richly endowed with hats began to totter. It began to totter and then it collapsed—and there was nothing to plug the gap it left behind.
Varenka sighed,
sat down in front of the mirror and began trying on first one hat, and then the other…
1918
Notes
1 Savva Mamontov’s Private Opera was an important opera house in late-1800s Moscow. It brought together many of the finest voices and composers of the day.
THE LIFELESS BEAST
THE CHRISTMAS PARTY was fun. There were crowds of guests, big and small. There was even one boy who had been flogged that day—so Katya’s nanny told her in a whisper. This was so intriguing that Katya barely left the boy’s side all evening; she kept thinking he would say something special, and she watched him with respect and even fear. But the flogged boy behaved in the most ordinary manner; he kept begging for gingerbread, blowing a toy trumpet and pulling crackers. In the end, bitter though this was for her, Katya had to admit defeat and move away from the boy.
The evening was already drawing to a close, and the very smallest, loudly howling children were being got ready to go home, when Katya was given her main present—a large woolly ram. He was all soft, with a long, meek face and eyes that were quite human. He smelt of sour wool and, if you pulled his head down, he bleated affectionately and persistently: “Ba-a-a!”
Katya was so struck by the ram, by the way he looked, smelt and talked, that she even, to ease her conscience, asked, “Mama, are you sure he’s not alive?”
Her mother turned her little bird-like face away and said nothing. She had long ago stopped answering Katya’s questions—she never had time. Katya sighed and went to the dining room to give the ram some milk. She stuck the ram’s face right into the milk jug, wetting it right up to the eyes. Then a young lady she didn’t know came up to her, shaking her head: “Oh, dearie me, what are you doing? Really, giving living milk to a creature that isn’t alive! It’ll be the end of him. You need to give him pretend milk. Like this.”
She scooped up some air in an empty cup, held it to the ram’s mouth and smacked her lips.
“See?”
“Yes. But why does a cat get real milk?”
“That’s just the way it is. Each according to its own. Live milk for the living. Pretend milk for the unliving.”
The woollen ram at once made his home in the nursery, in the corner, behind Nanny’s trunk. Katya loved him, and because of her love he got grubbier by the day. His fur got all clumpy and knotted and his affectionate “Ba-a-a” became quieter and quieter. And because he was so very grubby, Mama would no longer allow him to sit with Katya at lunch.
Lunchtimes became very gloomy. Papa didn’t say anything; Mama didn’t say anything. Nobody even looked round when, after eating her pastry, Katya curtsied and said, in the thin little voice of a clever little girl, “Merci, Papa! Merci, Mama!”
Once they began lunch without Mama being there at all; by the time she got back, they had already finished their soup. Mama shouted out from the hall that there had been an awful lot of people at the skating rink. But when she came to the table, Papa took one look at her, then hurled a decanter down onto the floor.
“Why did you do that?” shouted Mama.
“Why’s your blouse undone at the back?” shouted Papa.
He shouted something else, too, but Nanny snatched Katya from her chair and dragged her off to the nursery.
After that there were many days when Katya didn’t so much as glimpse Papa or Mama; nothing in her life seemed real any longer. She was having the same lunch as the servants—it was brought up from the kitchen. The cook would come in and start whispering to Nanny, “And he said… and then she said… And as for you!… You’ve got to go! And he said… And then she said…”
There was no end to this whispering.
Old women with foxy faces began coming in from the kitchen, winking at Katya, asking Nanny questions, whispering, murmuring, hissing: “And then he said… You’ve got to go! And she said…”
Nanny often disappeared completely. Then the foxy women would make their way into the nursery, poking around in corners and wagging their knobbly fingers at Katya.
But when they weren’t there it was even worse. It was terrifying.
Going into the big rooms was out of the question: they were empty and echoing. The door curtains billowed; the clock over the fireplace ticked on severely. And there was no getting away from the endless “And he said… And then she said…”
The corners of the nursery started to get dark before lunch. They seemed to be moving. And the little stove—the big stove’s daughter—crackled away in the corner. She kept clicking her damper, baring her red teeth and gobbling up firewood. You couldn’t go near her. She was vicious. Once she bit Katya’s finger. No, you wouldn’t catch Katya going near that little stove again.
Everything was restless; everything was different.
The only safe place was behind the trunk—the home of the woollen ram, the lifeless beast. The ram lived on pencils, old ribbons, Nanny’s glasses—whatever the good Lord sent his way. He always looked at Katya with gentle affection. He never made any complaints or reproaches and he understood everything.
Once Katya was very naughty—and the ram joined in too. He was looking the other way, but she could see he was laughing. Another time, when he was ill and Katya bandaged his neck with an old rag, he looked so pitiful that Katya quietly began to cry.
It was worst of all at night. There was scampering and squealing everywhere, all kinds of commotion. Katya kept waking up and calling out.
“Shh!” said Nanny, when she came in. “Go back to sleep! It’s only rats. But you watch out—or they’ll bite your nose off!”
Katya would draw the blanket over her head. She would think about the woollen ram, and when she sensed him there, dear and lifeless, she would fall peacefully asleep.
One morning she and the ram were looking out of the window when they suddenly saw someone brown and hairless trotting across the yard. He looked like a cat, only he had a very long tail.
“Nanny, Nanny! Look! What a nasty cat!”
Nanny came to the window too.
“That’s not a cat—it’s a rat! And it isn’t half big! A rat like that could make mincemeat of any cat. Yes, some rat!”
She spat out the last word so horribly, grimacing and baring her teeth as if she herself were an old cat, that Katya felt frightened and disgusted. She felt sick to the pit of her stomach.
Meanwhile, the rat, belly swaying, trotted up, in a businesslike, proprietorial way, to a nearby shed and, crouching down, crawled under a slat and into the cellar.
The cook came in and said there were so many rats now that soon they’d be eating your head off. “Down in the storeroom they’ve gnawed away all the corners of the master’s suitcase. The cheek of them! When I come in they just sit there. They don’t stir an inch.”
In the evening the fox-women came, bringing a bottle of something and some stinking fish. Along with Nanny, they took swigs from the bottle, swallowed down mouthfuls of fish and then started laughing at something or other.
“You still with that ram of yours?” a rather stout woman asked Katya. “He’s only fit for the knacker’s yard. He’s going bald—and look at that leg of his! It’s hanging on by a thread. I’d say he’s had it.”
“Stop teasing her,” said Nanny. “Don’t pick on a poor orphan!”
“I’m not teasing her. Just telling it how it is. The stuffing will all fall out and that’ll be the end of him. A live body eats and drinks—and that’s how it stays alive. You can mollycoddle a rag all you like but it’ll always fall apart in the end. Anyway, the girl’s not an orphan. For all we know, her mother drives past the house laughing into her sleeve: Tee-hee-hee!”
The women had worked up quite a sweat with laughing so much. Nanny dipped a lump of sugar in her glass and gave it to Katya to suck. The sugar lump clawed at Katya’s throat and there was a ringing in her ears. She tugged at the ram’s head.
“He’s special. I tell you—he really bleats!”
“Tee-hee! You are a silly girl,” said the stout woman,
with more sniggering. “Even a door squeaks if you push it. A real ram squeals all by itself. You don’t need to pull its head.”
The women drank some more and went back to whispering the same old words: “And he said… You’ve got to go!… And then she said…”
Along with the ram, Katya went behind the trunk in the nursery, to be well and truly miserable.
The ram wasn’t very alive. He was going to die soon. His stuffing would all fall out—and that would be the end of him. If only she could get him to eat—if only she could find a way to get him to eat even the very littlest of little nibbles.
She took a baked rusk from the window sill, held it to the ram’s mouth and looked the other way, in case he felt shy. Maybe he would bite a little bit off… She waited, then turned round again: no, the rusk was untouched.
“I’ll nibble a little bit off myself. Maybe that’ll encourage him.”
She bit off a tiny corner, held the rusk out to the ram again, turned away and waited. And once again the ram did not touch the rusk.
“No? You can’t? You can’t ’cos you’re not alive?”
And the woollen ram, the lifeless beast, answered with the whole of his meek, sad face, “I can’t! I’m not a living beast. I can’t!”
“Call out to me then! By yourself ! Say ‘Ba-a-a!’ Go on: ‘Ba-a-a!’ You can’t? You can’t?”
And Katya’s soul overflowed with pity and love for the poor lifeless one. She went straight to sleep, face pressed to her tear-soaked pillow—and found she was walking down a green path, and the ram was running along beside her, nibbling the grass, calling to her, shouting “Ba-a-a!” all by himself and laughing out loud. How strong and healthy he was. Yes, he would outlive the lot of them!
Morning came—dismal, dark and anxious—and suddenly there was Papa. He was looking grey and angry, his beard all shaggy, and he was scowling like a goat. He poked his hand out so Katya could kiss it, and he told Nanny to tidy everything up because a lady teacher would be coming soon. And off he went.
