When we sat down to eat, a serf girl covered Afanasy Ivanovich with a napkin—and it was very well she did, because otherwise he would have spilled sauce all over his dressing gown. I tried to entertain him by telling him various bits of news; he listened with the same smile, but at times his look was completely insensible, and thoughts did not wander but vanished into it.
Often he would raise a spoonful of kasha and, instead of putting it into his mouth, put it to his nose; instead of stabbing a piece of chicken with his fork, he stabbed the decanter, and then the serf girl would take his hand and guide it to the chicken. Sometimes we had to wait several minutes for the next dish. Afanasy Ivanovich would notice it himself and say, "Why are they so long in bringing the food?" But I could see through the chink of the door that the boy who served the food gave no thought to it at all and was asleep with his head on the bench.
"This is the dish," Afanasy Ivanovich said when we were served mnishki14 with sour cream, "this is the dish," he went on, and I noticed that his voice was beginning to tremble and a tear was about to come from his leaden eyes, while he made every effort to hold it back, "this is the dish that the la—, the la—, the late . . ." and all at once the tears poured down. His hand fell on the plate, the plate overturned, fell off and broke, sauce got all over him; he sat insensibly, insensibly holding his spoon, and like a stream, like a ceaselessly flowing fountain, the tears poured down in torrents onto the napkin covering him.
"God!" I thought, looking at him, "five years of all-destroying time—already an insensible old man, an old man whose life seems never to have been disturbed by a single strong feeling of the soul, whose whole life seems to have consisted entirely of sitting on a high-backed chair, of eating little dried fish and pears, and of good-natured storytelling—and such a long, burning sorrow! And which is stronger in us—passion or habit? Or do all our strong impulses, all the whirlwind of our desires and boiling passions, come merely from our bright youth and seem deep and devastating only because of that?" Be it as it may, just then all our passions seemed childish to me compared with this long, slow, almost insensible habit. Several times he attempted to pronounce the dead woman's name, but halfway through it his calm and ordinary face became convulsively disfigured, and I was struck to the heart by his childlike weeping. No, these were not the tears usually shed so generously by old folk describing their pitiful situation and misfortunes to you; neither were they the tears they weep over a glass of punch—no! these were tears that flowed without the asking, of themselves, stored up in the bitter pain of an already cold heart.
He did not live long after that. I learned of his death recently. It's strange, however, that the circumstances of his end had some resemblance to the death of Pulkheria Ivanovna. One day Afanasy Ivanovich decided to take a little stroll in the garden. As he was slowly walking down the path with his usual unconcern, having no thoughts at all, a strange incident occurred with him. He suddenly heard someone behind him say in a rather distinct voice:
"Afanasy Ivanovich!" He turned around, but there was absolutely no one there; he looked in all directions, peeked into the bushes— no one anywhere. It was a calm day and the sun was shining. He pondered for a moment; his face somehow livened up, and he finally said: "It's Pulkheria Ivanovna calling me!"
It has undoubtedly happened to you that you hear a voice calling you by name, something simple people explain by saying that a soul is longing for the person and calling him, and after that comes inevitable death. I confess I have always feared this mysterious call. I remember hearing it often in childhood: sometimes my name would suddenly be distinctly spoken behind me. Usually, at the moment, it was a most clear and sunny day; not a leaf stirred on any tree in the garden, there was a dead silence, even the grasshoppers would stop chirring at that moment; not a soul in the garden; yet I confess that if night, most furious and stormy, with all the inferno of the elements, had overtaken me alone amid an impenetrable forest, I would not have been as frightened of it as of this terrible silence amid a cloudless day. Usually I would flee from the garden then, breathless and in the greatest fear, and would calm down only when I happened to meet somebody whose look would drive away this terrible heart's desert.
He submitted wholly to his soul's conviction that Pulkheria Ivanovna was calling him; he submitted with the will of an obedient child; he wasted away, coughed, dwindled like a candle, and finally went out the way a candle does when there is nothing left to feed its poor flame.
"Lay me next to Pulkheria Ivanovna" was all he said before he died.
His wish was fulfilled and he was buried near the church, beside Pulkheria Ivanovna's grave. There were fewer guests at the funeral, but just as many simple folk and beggars. The master's house was now completely empty. The enterprising steward, together with the village headman, dragged over to their own cottages all the remaining old things and junk that the housekeeper had not managed to steal. Soon some distant relation arrived from God knows where, the heir to the whole estate, who before that had served as a lieutenant in I don't remember which regiment, a terrible reformer. He noted at once the utter disorder and neglect in matters of management; he resolved to root it out, to correct it without fail, and to introduce order in everything. He bought six fine English sickles, nailed a special number on each cottage, and finally managed so well that in six months the estate was taken into custody.
This wise custody (consisting of a former assessor and some staff captain in a faded uniform) did not take long putting an end to all the chickens and eggs. The cottages, which lay nearly on the ground, collapsed completely; the peasants took to drinking hard and were counted mostly as runaways. The actual owner himself, who incidentally lived quite peaceably with his custody and drank punch with it, rarely visited his estate and never stayed long. To this day he goes to all the fairs in Little Russia, inquires thoroughly into the prices of various major products that are sold wholesale, such as flour, hemp, honey and so on, but buys only small trifles such as little flints, a nail for cleaning his pipe, and generally anything that doesn't go beyond a wholesale price of one rouble.
VIY*
AS SOON AS the booming seminary bell that hung by the gates of the Bratsky Monastery in Kiev rang out in the morning, crowds of schoolboys and seminarians1 came hurrying from all over the city. Grammarians, rhetoricians, philosophers, and theologians, notebooks under their arms, trudged to class. The grammarians were still very small; as they walked they pushed each other and quarreled among themselves in the thinnest trebles; their clothes were almost all torn or dirty, and their pockets were eternally full of various sorts of trash, such as knucklebones, whistles made from feathers, unfinished pieces of pie, and occasionally even a little sparrow that, by chirping suddenly amidst the extraordinary silence of the classroom, would procure for its patron a decent beating on both hands, and sometimes the cherrywood rod. The rhetoricians walked more sedately: their clothes were often perfectly intact, but instead their faces were almost always adorned with some rhetorical trope: one eye completely closed, or a big bubble instead of a lip, or some other mark; these swore by God and talked among themselves in tenors. The philosophers dropped a whole octave lower: there was nothing in their pockets except strong, coarse tobacco. They kept nothing stashed away and ate whatever came along on the spot; the smell of pipes and vodka sometimes spread so far around them that a passing artisan would stand for a long time sniffing the air like a hound.
The marketplace at that time was usually just beginning to stir, and women with bagels, rolls, watermelon seeds, and poppyseed cakes tugged those who had them by their coattails of thin broadcloth or some sort of cotton.
"Young sirs! Young sirs! Here! Here!" they said on all sides. "There are good bagels, poppyseed cakes, twists, rolls! Fine ones, by God! with honey! homemade!"
Another woman, holding up something long made of twisted dough, cried: "Here's an icicle, young sirs! Buy an icicle!"
"Don't buy anything from that one! Look how foul she is�
��her nose is awful and her hands are dirty . . ."
But they were afraid to pester the philosophers and theologians, because the philosophers and theologians liked to sample things, and always by the handful.
On reaching the seminary, the whole crowd settled by classes in low-ceilinged but rather spacious rooms with small windows, wide doors, and dirty desks. The classroom would suddenly be filled with the hum of many voices: the monitors listened to their charges, the ringing treble of a grammarian would fall in tune with the jingling of the windowpanes in the small windows, the glass echoing with almost the same sound; from the corner came the low buzz of a rhetorician whose mouth and thick lips ought to have belonged to philosophy at the least. He buzzed in a bass, and from afar all you heard was: boo, boo, boo, boo . . .The monitors, as they heard the lessons, looked with one eye under the desk, where a roll or dumpling or pumpkin seeds stuck out of their subordinate's pocket.
If all this learned crowd managed to come a little earlier, or if they knew that the professors would be later than usual, then, with universal agreement, a battle would be planned, and in this battle everyone had to take part, even the censors, whose duty was to look after the order and morals of all the student estate. Usually two theologians decided how the battle would go: whether each class should stand separately for itself, or they should divide themselves into two halves, the boarders and the seminary. In any case, it was the grammarians who would begin it first, but as soon as the rhetoricians mixed in, they would flee and stand on higher ground to watch the battle. Then philosophy with long black mustaches would step forth, and finally theology in terrible ballooning trousers and with the thickest necks. The usual end was that theology would beat them all, and philosophy, rubbing its sides, would be hustled into class, where it settled down to rest at the desks. A professor who had once taken part in such battles himself, on entering the classroom, would know at once from his students' flushed faces that it had been a fine battle, and while he gave the rhetorics a knuckle-rapping, in another class another professor would be applying the wooden slats to the hands of philosophy. With the theologians it was done in a totally different way: each was allotted, as the professor of theology put it, a measure of "big peas," dealt out with a short leather whip.
For feast days and solemnities, the boarders and seminarians went around visiting houses with miracle plays. Sometimes they performed a comedy, and on such occasions some theologian, nearly as tall as the Kiev belfry, would always distinguish himself playing Herodias or the wife of the Egyptian courtier Potiphar. 2As a reward they might get a length of linen, or a sack of millet, or half a boiled goose, or the like.
All these learned folk, both seminary and boarders, while living in some sort of hereditary hostility among themselves, had extremely poor means of obtaining food and were at the same time extraordinarily voracious; so that to count how many dumplings each of them gobbled up at supper would have been a quite impossible task; and therefore the voluntary donations of wealthy citizens were never enough. Then a senate comprised of philosophers and theologians would send out the grammarians and rhetoricians, under the leadership of one philosopher—and would sometimes join them itself—sacks over their shoulders, to lay waste people's kitchen gardens. And pumpkin gruel would appear in the school. The senators ate so much melon and watermelon that the monitors would hear two lessons instead of one from them the next day: one proceeding from the mouth, the other growling in the senatorial stomach.
Boarders and seminary wore what looked like some sort of long frock coats which reached heretofore, a technical term meaning below the heels.
The most solemn event for the seminary was vacation, beginning with the month of June, when the boarders used to be sent home. Then the whole high road would be covered with grammarians, philosophers, and theologians. Whoever did not have his own refuge would go to one of his friends. Philosophers and theologians would go on conditions—that is, they would undertake to teach or prepare the children of wealthy people for school, and would earn a new pair of boots by it and occasionally enough for a frock coat. This whole crowd would string along together like a Gypsy camp, cook kasha3 for themselves, and sleep in the fields.
Each dragged a sack on his back with a shirt and a pair of foot-rags. The theologians were especially thrifty and neat: to avoid wearing out their boots, they would take them off, hang them on a stick, and carry them over their shoulder, especially when there was mud. Then, rolling their trousers to the knee, they would go splashing fearlessly through the puddles. As soon as they caught sight of a farmstead, they would turn off the high road and, approaching a cottage that looked better kept than the others, would line up in front of the windows and begin a full-throated hymn. The cottager, some old Cossack peasant, would listen to them for a long time, leaning on both arms, then weep very bitterly and say, turning to his wife: "Wife! what these students are singing must be something very intelligent; bring out some lard for them and whatever else we've got!" And a whole bowl of dumplings would be poured into a sack. A decent hunk of lard, a few white loaves, and sometimes even a trussed-up chicken would go in as well. Fortified with these supplies, the grammarians, rhetoricians, philosophers, and theologians would continue on their way. However, the further they went, the smaller the crowd became. Almost all of them would have reached home, leaving only those whose parental nests were further away than the others.
Once during such a journey three students turned off the high road in order to provide themselves with victuals at the first farmstead they happened upon, because their sack had long been empty. These were: the theologian Khalyava, the philosopher Khoma Brut, and the rhetorician Tiberiy Gorobets.
The theologian was a tall, broad-shouldered man, and of an extremely strange character: whatever lay near him he was sure to steal. On other occasions his character was extremely glum, and when he got drunk he would hide in the weeds, and it would cost the seminary enormous efforts to find him there.
The philosopher Khoma Brut was of a merry disposition. He liked very much to lie about and smoke his pipe. When he drank, he was sure to hire musicians and dance the trepak. He often got a taste of the "big peas," but with perfectly philosophical indifference, saying what will be, will be.
The rhetorician Tiberiy Gorobets did not yet have the right to grow a mustache, drink vodka, and smoke a pipe. All he had was his topknot, 4 and therefore his character was not much developed at that time; but judging by the big bumps on the forehead with which he often came to class, one could suppose he would make a fine warrior. The theologian Khalyava and the philosopher Khoma often pulled him by the topknot as a sign of their patronage and employed him as their deputy.
It was already evening when they turned off the high road. The sun had just gone down and the warmth of the day was still in the air. The theologian and the philosopher walked along silently smoking their pipes; the rhetorician Tiberiy Gorobets knocked the heads off burdocks growing on the roadside with a stick. The road went among stands of oak and hazel bushes that dotted the meadows. The plain was occasionally disrupted by slopes and small hills, green and round as cupolas. A field of ripening grain showed in two places, making it known that some village must soon appear. But it was more than an hour since they had passed the strips of grain and no dwelling had come along yet. Twilight was already darkening the sky, and only in the west was there a pale remnant of vermilion radiance.
"What the devil!" said the philosopher Khoma Brut. "It certainly looked as if there'd be a farmstead."
The theologian said nothing; he looked around, then put his pipe back in his mouth, and they all went on their way.
"By God!" the philosopher said, stopping again. "It's as dark as the devil's fist."
"Maybe there'll be some farm further on," said the theologian, without releasing his pipe.
Meanwhile, however, it was already night, and a rather dark night at that. Clouds made it gloomier still, and by all tokens neither stars nor moon were to be expected. The stud
ents noticed that they had lost their way and for a long while had not been walking on the road.
The philosopher, after feeling in all directions with his feet, at last said abruptly: "But where's the road?"
The theologian pondered silently and observed: "Yes, it's a dark night."
The rhetorician stepped to one side and tried to feel for the road on all fours, but his hands kept ending up in fox holes. Everywhere there was nothing but steppe where it seemed no one passed. The travelers made another effort to move forward a bit, but everywhere was the same wilderness. The philosopher tried shouting, but his voice was completely muffled on all sides and met no response. Only a little later came a faint wailing that resembled the howling of a wolf.
"Well, what do we do now?" said the philosopher.
"Why, we stay and spend the night in the fields!" said the theologian, and he went to his pocket to get his tinderbox and light up his pipe again. But the philosopher could not agree to that. He had always been in the habit of packing away a ten-pound hunk of bread and some four pounds of lard before going to bed and this time felt a sort of unbearable solitude in his stomach. Besides, for all his merry disposition, the philosopher was somewhat afraid of wolves.
"No, Khalyava, we can't," he said. "What, lie down and stretch out like some dog without fortifying ourselves? Let's try again, maybe we'll happen onto some dwelling and manage to get at least a glass of vodka for the night."
At the word vodka the theologian spat to one side and observed: "Sure, there's no point staying in the fields."
The students went on and, to their greatest joy, fancied they heard a distant barking.
Figuring out the direction, they listened, set off more cheerfully and, after going a little further, saw a light.
"A farmstead! By God, a farmstead!" said the philosopher.
His anticipation did not disappoint him: in a short while they indeed saw a small farmstead that consisted of just two cottages sharing the same yard. There was light in the windows. A dozen plum trees stuck up by the paling. Peeking through cracks in the boards of the gates, the students saw a yard filled with ox carts. Just then stars appeared here and there in the sky.
The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol Page 19
