The estate seemed rather big to him; two forests, of birch and of pine, like two wings, one darker and one lighter, stood to right and left of it; in the middle could be seen a wooden house with a mezzanine, a red roof, and dark gray or, better, natural sides—a house like those built here for military settlements and German colonists.18 It was obvious that during its construction the architect had been in constant conflict with the owner’s taste. The architect was a pedant and wanted symmetry, the owner wanted convenience and, evidently as a result of that, boarded up all the corresponding windows on one side and in their place poked through one small one, probably needed for a dark storeroom. The pediment was also not at all in the center of the house, however much the architect had struggled, because the owner had ordered a column on one side thrown out, so that instead of four columns, as in the original design, there were only three. The yard was surrounded by a strong and exceedingly stout wooden lattice. The landowner seemed greatly concerned with solidity. For the stable, sheds, and kitchens stout and hefty logs had been used, meant to stand for centuries. The village cottages of the muzhiks were also a marvel of construction: the sides were not adzed, there were no carved patterns or fancywork, but everything was snugly and properly fitted together. Even the well was housed in such strong oak as is used only for gristmills and ships. In short, all that he looked upon was sturdy, shakeless, in some strong and clumsy order. As he drove up to the porch, he saw two faces peek almost simultaneously out the window: a woman’s, in a bonnet, narrow, long, like a cucumber; and a man’s, round, broad, like those Moldavian gourds called crooknecks, from which balalaikas are made in Russia, light two-stringed balalaikas, the jewel and delight of a snappy twenty-year-old lad, a winker and a fop, winking and whistling at the white-bosomed, white-necked lasses who have gathered to listen to his soft-stringed strumming. Having peeked out, the two faces hid at the same moment. A lackey in a gray jacket with a light blue standing collar came to the porch and led Chichikov into the front hall, where the host himself had already come. Seeing the visitor, he abruptly said: “Please!” and led him to the inner rooms.
When Chichikov glanced sidelong at Sobakevich, it seemed to him this time that he looked exactly like a medium-sized bear. To complete the resemblance, the tailcoat he was wearing was of a perfect bear color; his sleeves were long, his trousers were long, his feet shambled this way and that, constantly stepping on other people’s toes. His face was of a roasted, hot color, such as one sees on copper coins. It is well-known that there are many faces in the world over the finishing of which nature did not take much trouble, did not employ any fine tools such as files, gimlets, and so on, but simply hacked them out with round strokes: one chop—a nose appears; another chop—lips appear; eyes are scooped out with a big drill; and she lets it go into the world rough-hewn, saying: “Alive!” Of such strong and marvelous fashioning was the visage of Sobakevich: he held it rather more down than up, did not swivel his neck at all, and, on account of this non-swiveling, rarely looked at the person he was speaking to, but always either at the corner of the stove or at the door. Chichikov gave him one more sidelong glance as they were going through the dining room: a bear! a veritable bear! If there were any need for such strange approximation, he was even named Mikhailo Semyonovich.19 Knowing his habit of stepping on people’s toes, he himself stepped very carefully and let him go ahead. The host seemed sensible of this failing himself, and at once asked him: “Have I inconvenienced you?” But Chichikov thanked him, saying that so far he had suffered no inconvenience.
Going into the drawing room, Sobakevich pointed to an armchair, saying “Please!” again. As he sat down, Chichikov glanced at the walls and the pictures hanging on them. They were all fine fellows in the pictures, all Greek generals, engraved at full length: Mavrocordato in red pantaloons and officer’s jacket, with spectacles on his nose, Miaoulis, Canaris. These heroes all had such fat haunches and unheard-of mustaches as sent shivers through one’s whole body. Among these sturdy Greeks, who knows how or why, Bagration had lodged himself, skinny, thin, with little banners and cannons underneath, in the narrowest of frames. Then again there followed the Greek heroine Bobelina, whose leg alone seemed bigger than the entire body of one of those fops who fill our present-day drawing rooms.20 The host, being a healthy and sturdy man himself, seemed to want his room, too, to be adorned with sturdy and healthy people. Near Bobelina, just by the window, hung a cage from which peered a thrush of a dark color with white speckles, also very much resembling Sobakevich. Host and guest had managed to be silent for no more than two minutes when the drawing-room door opened and the hostess came in, a rather tall lady in a bonnet with ribbons dyed in homemade colors. She came in decorously, holding her head erect, like a palm tree.
“This is my Feodulia Ivanovna!” said Sobakevich.
Chichikov went up to kiss Feodulia Ivanovna’s hand, which she almost shoved into his lips, affording him the occasion to observe that her hands had been washed in pickling brine.
“Sweetie,” Sobakevich went on, “allow me to introduce Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov! I had the honor of meeting him at the governor’s and at the postmaster’s.”
Feodulia Ivanovna invited him to sit down, also saying “Please!” and making a motion with her head, as actresses do when playing queens. Then she seated herself on the sofa, covered herself with her merino shawl, and thereafter moved neither eye nor eyebrow.
Chichikov again raised his eyes and again saw Canaris with his fat haunches and interminable mustaches, Bobelina, and the thrush in the cage.
For the space of nearly a whole five minutes, they all preserved their silence; the only sound was the tapping of the thrush’s beak against the wood of the wooden cage, on the bottom of which he was fishing for grains of wheat. Chichikov glanced around the room once more: everything that was in it, everything, was solid, clumsy in the highest degree, and bore some strange resemblance to the master of the house himself; in the corner of the drawing room stood a big-bellied walnut bureau on four most preposterous legs, a veritable bear. The table, the chairs, the armchairs—all was of the most heavy and uncomfortable quality—in short, every object, every chair seemed to be saying: “I, too, am Sobakevich!” or “I, too, am very like Sobakevich!”
“We were remembering you at the head magistrate’s, at Ivan Grigorievich’s,” Chichikov said finally, seeing that no one was disposed to begin the conversation, “last Thursday. We had a very pleasant time there.”
“Yes, I wasn’t at the magistrate’s then,” replied Sobakevich.
“A wonderful man!”
“Who is?” said Sobakevich, staring at the corner of the stove.
“The magistrate.”
“Well, maybe it seemed so to you: he’s a mason, but otherwise as big a fool as the world has yet produced.”
Chichikov was a bit taken aback by this rather sharp definition, but then recovered himself and went on:
“Of course, no man is without weaknesses, but the governor, on the other hand, is such an excellent man!”
“The governor is an excellent man?”
“Yes, isn’t it true?”
“The foremost bandit in the world!”
“What, the governor a bandit?” said Chichikov, totally unable to understand how the governor could come to be a bandit. “I confess, I would never have thought it,” he went on. “But allow me, nevertheless, to observe: his actions are not like that at all, on the contrary, there is even a good deal of softness in him.” Here he held up as evidence even the purses embroidered by his own hands, and spoke with praise of the gentle expression of his face.
“And he has the face of a bandit!” said Sobakevich. “Just give him a knife and set him out on the highway—he’ll stick it in you, he’ll do it for a kopeck! He and the vice-governor—they’re Gog and Magog!”21
“No, he’s not on good terms with them,” Chichikov thought to himself. “I’ll try talking with him about the police chief: it seems he’s a friend of his.”
>
“Anyhow, as for me,” he said, “I confess, I like the police chief most of all. He has a direct, open sort of character; there’s something simple-hearted in his face.”
“A crook!” Sobakevich said very coolly. “He’ll sell you, deceive you, and then sit down to dinner with you! I know them all: they’re all crooks, the whole town is the same: a crook mounted on a crook and driving him with a crook. Judases, all of them. There’s only one decent man there: the prosecutor—and to tell the truth, he, too, is a swine.”
After such laudatory, if somewhat brief, biographies, Chichikov saw that there was no point in mentioning any other officials, and remembered that Sobakevich did not like to speak well of anyone.
“Now then, sweetie, let’s go and have dinner,” Sobakevich’s spouse said to him.
“Please!” said Sobakevich.
Whereupon, going up to the table where the hors d’oeuvres were, guest and host fittingly drank a glass of vodka each, and snacked as the whole of Russia snacks in towns and villages—that is, on various pickled things and other savory blessings—and they all flowed into the dining room; at their head, like a gliding goose, swept the hostess. The small table was set for four. The fourth place was very quickly claimed, it is hard to say positively by whom, a lady or a young maid, a relation, a housekeeper, or simply a woman living in the house: something without a bonnet, about thirty years old, in a motley shawl. There are persons who exist in the world not as objects, but as alien specks or spots on objects. They sit in the same place, hold their head in the identical manner, one is ready to take them for furniture and thinks that in all their born days no word has ever passed those lips; but somewhere in the servants’ quarters or the pantry it turns out simply—oh-ho-ho!
“The cabbage soup is very good today, my sweet!” said Sobakevich, having slurped up some soup and heaped on his plate an enormous piece of nyanya, a well-known dish served with cabbage soup, consisting of a sheep’s stomach stuffed with buckwheat groats, brains, and trotters. “Such nyanya you’ll never get in town,” he went on, addressing Chichikov, “they’ll serve you the devil knows what there!”
“The governor, however, keeps a rather good table,” said Chichikov.
“But do you know what it’s all made from? You wouldn’t eat it if you found out.”
“I don’t know how it’s prepared, I can’t judge about that, but the pork cutlets and poached fish were excellent.”
“It seemed so to you. I know what they buy at the market. That rascal of a cook, who learned from a Frenchman, buys a cat, skins it, and serves it instead of hare.”
“Pah! what an unpleasant thing to say,” said Sobakevich’s spouse.
“But, sweetie, that’s what they do, it’s not my fault, that’s what they all do. Whatever they’ve got that’s unusable, that our Akulka throws, if I may say so, into the pig bucket, they put into the soup! into the soup! right plop into it!”
“What things you’re always telling about at the table!” Sobakevich’s spouse objected again.
“But, my sweet,” said Sobakevich, “it’s not as if I were doing it myself, but I’ll tell you right to your face, I will not eat any vileness. No frog, even if it’s pasted all over with sugar, will ever go near my mouth, and no oyster either: I know what oysters are like. Take this lamb,” he went on, addressing Chichikov, “this is a rack of lamb with buckwheat groats! It’s not that fricassee they make in squires’ kitchens out of lamb that’s been lying around the marketplace for four days! It was German and French doctors who invented it all, I’d have the whole lot of them hung for it! They invented the diet, the hunger treatment! With their thin-boned German nature, they fancy they can take on the Russian stomach, too! No, it’s all wrong, all these inventions, it’s all …” Here Sobakevich even shook his head angrily. “They say: enlightenment, enlightenment, and this enlightenment—poof! I’d use another word, only it wouldn’t be proper at the table. With me it’s not like that. With me, if it’s pork—let’s have the whole pig on the table, if it’s lamb—drag in the whole sheep, if goose—the whole goose! Better that I eat just two courses, but eat my fill, as my soul demands.” Sobakevich confirmed this in action: he dumped half of the rack of lamb onto his own plate, ate it all up, gnawed it, and sucked it out to the last little bone.
“Yes,” thought Chichikov, “there’s no flies on this one.”
“With me it’s not like that,” Sobakevich said, wiping his hands on a napkin, “with me it’s not like with some Plyushkin: he owns eight hundred souls, yet he lives and eats worse than my shepherd!”
“Who is this Plyushkin?” asked Chichikov.
“A crook,” replied Sobakevich. “Such a niggard, it’s hard to imagine. Jailbirds in prison live better than he does: he’s starved all his people to death …”
“Indeed!” Chichikov picked up with interest. “And you say his people are actually dying in large numbers?”
“Dropping like flies.”
“Like flies, really! And may I ask how far away he lives?”
“Three miles.”
“Three miles!” exclaimed Chichikov, and he even felt a slight throb in his heart. “But if one were driving out your gate, would it be to the right or the left?”
“I wouldn’t advise you even to know the way to that dog’s!” said Sobakevich. “It’s more excusable to go and visit some indecent place than him.”
“No, I wasn’t asking for any reason, but just because I’m interested in learning about all sorts of places,” Chichikov replied to that.
After the rack of lamb came cheesecakes, each much bigger than a plate, then a turkey the size of a calf, chock-full of all sorts of good things: eggs, rice, livers, and whatnot else, all of which settled in one lump in the stomach. With that dinner ended; but when they got up from the table, Chichikov felt himself a good ton heavier. They went to the drawing room, where a saucer of preserves was already waiting—not pear, not plum, not any other berry—which, however, neither guest nor host touched. The hostess stepped out in order to put more in other saucers. Taking advantage of her absence, Chichikov addressed Sobakevich, who was lying in an armchair, only letting out little groans after such a hearty dinner and producing some unintelligible sounds with his mouth, crossing and covering it with his hand every moment.22 Chichikov addressed him in the following words:
“I would like to talk with you about a little business.”
“Here’s more preserves,” said the hostess, returning with a saucer, “black radish, cooked in honey.”
“We’ll get to it later!” said Sobakevich. “You go to your room now, Pavel Ivanovich and I are going to take our coats off and rest a bit.”
The hostess at once expressed a readiness to send for feather beds and pillows, but the host said: “Never mind, we’ll rest in the armchairs,” and the hostess left.
Sobakevich inclined his head slightly, preparing to hear what the little business was about.
Chichikov began somehow very remotely, touched generally on the entire Russian state, and spoke in great praise of its vastness, saying that even the most ancient Roman monarchy was not so big, and foreigners are rightly astonished … Sobakevich went on listening, his head bent. And that according to the existing regulations of this state, unequaled in glory, the souls listed in the census, once their life’s path has ended, are nevertheless counted equally with the living until the new census is taken, so as not to burden the institutions with a quantity of petty and useless documents and increase the complexity of the already quite complex state machinery … Sobakevich went on listening, his head bent—and that, nevertheless, for all the justice of this measure, it was often somewhat burdensome for many owners, obliging them to pay taxes as if for the living object, and that he, feeling a personal respect for him, would even be ready to take this truly heavy responsibility partly upon himself. With regard to the main object, Chichikov expressed himself very cautiously: he never referred to the souls as dead, but only as nonexistent.
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sp; Sobakevich went on listening in the same way, his head bowed, and nothing in the least resembling expression showed on his face. It seemed there was no soul in this body at all, or if there was, it was not at all where it ought to be, but, as with the deathless Koshchey,23 was somewhere beyond the mountains, and covered with such a thick shell that whatever stirred at the bottom of it produced decidedly no movement on the surface.
“And so …?” said Chichikov, waiting not without some anxiety for an answer.
“You want dead souls?” Sobakevich asked quite simply, without the least surprise, as if they were talking about grain.
“Yes,” replied Chichikov, and again he softened the expression, adding, “nonexistent ones.”
“They could be found, why not …,” said Sobakevich.
“And if so, then you, undoubtedly … would be pleased to get rid of them?”
“If you like, I’m ready to sell,” said Sobakevich, now raising his head slightly, as he realized that the buyer must certainly see some profit in it.
“Devil take it,” Chichikov thought to himself, “this one’s already selling before I’ve made a peep!” and said aloud:
“And, for instance, about the price? … though, anyhow, it’s such an object … that a price is even a strange thing to …”
“Well, so as not to ask too much from you, let’s make it a hundred apiece!” said Sobakevich.
Dead Souls: A Novel Page 13
