Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida (Penguin Classics)

by Chandler, Robert

  11

  Platov was afraid to report to the Emperor in person, because it was awful how noticeable and memorable Tsar Nicholas was – he never forgot anything. Platov knew he was bound to ask him about the flea. And even though he was afraid of no enemy on earth, right here he got cold feet: he carried the little casket into the palace and very quietly laid it down in the hall behind the stove. With the box hidden he presented himself to the Emperor in his office and quickly began reporting on the intimidating conversations he’d had with the Cossacks on the silent Don. He figured he would try to keep the Emperor busy with this. Then if the Emperor remembered and started talking about the flea, he would have to hand it over and answer, but if the Emperor didn’t say anything about it, he could just keep quiet. He would tell the Emperor’s servant to hide the little casket and lock up Lefty in a fortress cell so as to keep him handy in case he might be needed.

  But Emperor Nicholas forgot about nothing, and Platov had barely finished about the intimidating conversations when he asked at once, ‘And how about it – how did my Tula craftsmen justify themselves against the English nymphusoria?’

  Platov answered the way the matter looked to him.

  ‘Your Majesty,’ he says, ‘the nymphusoria is still lying in that same space, and I have brought it back, but the Tula craftsmen couldn’t make anything more marvellous.’

  The Emperor replied, ‘You are a courageous old man, but what you report to me cannot be so.’

  Platov tried to convince him and told him how the whole thing had happened, and when he got to the part where the Tula workmen asked him to show the flea to the Emperor, Tsar Nicholas slapped him on the back and said, ‘Give it here. I know my men won’t let me down. Something has been done here that is past all understanding.’

  12

  They brought the little casket out from behind the stove, they took the cloth cover off, they opened the gold snuffbox and the diamond nut – and there the flea was, lying just the way it had before.

  The Emperor took a look and said, ‘What a misfortune!’ But his faith in his Russian craftsmen didn’t slacken, and he sent for his favourite daughter Aleksandra and commanded her, ‘You have slender fingers: hasten, take that little key and wind up the bellyworks of that nymphusoria.’

  The princess began to wind it up, and the flea at once started wiggling its whiskers, but it didn’t move its feet. Aleksandra pulled on the whole works, but still the nymphusoria wouldn’t do a single dansez or fairiation, the way it used to.

  Platov turned green all over and shouted, ‘Oh those rascally dogs! Now I understand why they wouldn’t tell me anything. It’s lucky I brought one of their blockheads along with me.’

  With these words he ran out to the entrance, grabbed Lefty by the hair, and began to swing him back and forth so hard that tufts of it started flying. When Platov had stopped beating him, Lefty straightened himself out and said, ‘That’s the way all my hair got pulled out while I was an apprentice. I don’t know what need there is now to go through all that again.’

  ‘That’s because I’d counted on you and vouched for you,’ said Platov, ‘and then you went and spoiled that rarity.’

  Lefty answered, ‘We’re mighty glad you vouched for us, and as for spoiling – we didn’t spoil nothing. Just blow it up in your strongest nitroscope and take a look.’

  Platov ran back to tell them about the nitroscope, but to Lefty he only warned, ‘I’ll give you this-that-and-the-other even yet.’

  He ordered the scurriers to twist Lefty’s arms even harder behind his back, and he himself went up the steps, puffing and blowing and repeating the prayer, ‘Blessed Tsar’s Most Blessed Mother, immaculate and pure,’ and so on, as needed. And the courtiers who were standing on the steps all turned their backs on him. They thought, ‘Platov is done for now, and he’ll soon be chased out of the palace,’ because they couldn’t stand him on account of his bravery.

  13

  As soon as Platov reported Lefty’s words to the Emperor, he said full of joy, ‘I know my Russian men will not let me down.’ And he ordered the nitroscope to be brought forward on a pillow.

  The nitroscope was brought forward that very minute, and the Emperor took the flea and laid it under the glass, first on its belly, then on its side and then on its back. In a word, it was turned in every direction, but nothing could be seen. Still the Emperor didn’t lose faith. He only said, ‘Bring hither at once that gunsmith who is waiting below.’

  Platov reported, ‘They’d have to dress him up. He’s still got the clothes on he was caught in, and now he’s in bad shape.’

  But the Emperor replied, ‘Never mind; bring him in just as he is.’

  Platov said, ‘Come in here, now, you so-and-so, and answer to the Emperor before his eyes.’

  Lefty replied, ‘Why, sure, I’ll go like this and I’ll answer.’

  He went like he was: in ragged boots, with one trouser-leg tucked in and the other dangling, with an old jacket that wouldn’t fasten because the hooks were lost, and with the collar that was torn; but it didn’t matter – he wasn’t embarrassed.

  ‘What of it?’ he thought. ‘If the Emperor wants to see me, I’ve got to go, and if I ain’t got a grasp port, it ain’t my fault, and I’ll tell him how it happened.’

  As soon as Lefty came in and bowed, the Emperor said to him, ‘What does this mean, my good man? We have looked this way and that and have blown it up in the nitroscope and we still can’t find anything remarkable.’

  Lefty answered, ‘Did Your Majesty be so kind as to look at it the right way?’

  The nobles motioned to him to tell him that was not the way to talk, but he didn’t understand how to talk courtier language – with flattery or cunning – and he kept on talking simply.

  The Emperor said to them, ‘Stop making things complicated for him; let him answer as he knows how.’

  And then he explained to Lefty, ‘This is the way we laid it,’ he says. And he put the flea under the nitroscope. ‘Look at it yourself,’ he says. ‘You can’t see a thing.’

  Lefty answered, ‘You can’t see nothing that way, Your Majesty, because our work is a lot too secret for that size.’

  The Emperor asked, ‘Then how do we manage it?’

  ‘You have to put just one of its feet in detail under the whole nitroscope, and look one at a time at each foot it walks on.’

  ‘Goodness Gracious,’ said the Emperor. ‘That’s powerfully small.’

  ‘But what else can you do,’ answered Lefty, ‘if that’s the only way you can get a look at our work? Then you can see the whole amazement.’

  They laid it down the way Lefty said and as soon as the Emperor looked in the upper glass, he beamed all over. He grabbed Lefty just the way he was – dirty, dusty, unwashed – and put his arms around him and kissed him on the cheek, and then he turned to all the courtiers and said, ‘You see, I knew better than everybody that my Russians would not let me down. Just look: why, the rascals have taken the English flea and nailed flea-shoes on its feet!’

  14

  They all came up to look: all the flea’s feet really were shod with genuine flea-shoes, and Lefty reported that this was not the only marvel.

  ‘If you had a better nitroscope,’ he said, ‘one that would blow it up five million times, then you could be so kind as to see that a craftsman’s name was put on each shoe, so as to show which Russian gunsmith made that shoe.’

  ‘Is your name there too’?’ asked the Emperor.

  ‘No, sir,’ answered Lefty. ‘Mine is the only one that ain’t.’

  ‘Why isn’t it?’

  ‘Because I did smaller work than these flea-shoes,’ he said. ‘I made the nails the shoes were fastened on with, and they are too small for any nitroscope to blow them up.’

  The Emperor asked, ‘But where is your nitroscope, which you used to produce this marvel?’

  Lefty answered, ‘We are poor people – too poor to own a nitroscope, so we just sharpened our eyes.�
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  Seeing that Lefty’s business had turned out well, the other courtiers began to kiss him and Platov gave him a hundred roubles and said, ‘Forgive me, brother, for dragging you around by the hair.’

  Lefty answered, ‘God will forgive you – it ain’t the first time that kind of snow has fallen on my head.’

  He would say no more – and he didn’t even have time to say more, because the Emperor ordered the iron-shod nymphusoria to be packed up and sent back at once to England, as a sort of gift, to make them understand that it wasn’t any marvel to us. And the Emperor ordered the flea to be carried by a special courier who was learned in all languages, and ordered the left-handed smith to go with him so that he himself could show their work to the Englishmen and show them what kind of craftsmen we have in Tula.

  Platov made the sign of the Cross over him.

  ‘Blessings be upon you,’ he said. ‘I’ll send you some of my own grape vodka for the journey. Don’t drink too little and don’t drink too much – drink middlesome.’

  And so he did – he sent it.

  Count Nestlebroad10 gave orders to wash Lefty in the Tula Public Baths, cut his hair in a barber shop, and deck him out in the full-dress coat of a singer in the royal choir, so that he would look like he had some kind of paid government rank.

  As soon as they had worked him over this way, they filled him with tea and Platov’s grape vodka, drew up his belt as tight as possible so that his guts wouldn’t shake, and sent him off to London. That is when foreign sights started happening to Lefty.

  15

  The courier travelled powerfully fast with Lefty, so that they didn’t stop to rest anywhere between Petersburg and London, but only drew their belts another notch tighter at every station, so that their guts wouldn’t get mixed up with their lungs; but since Lefty on Platov’s orders was allotted as much government vodka as he wanted after he had been presented to the Emperor, he kept up his strength on this alone, without eating anything, and he sang Russian songs all the way through Europe – only adding a refrain of foreign words,

  Aye loolee

  Say tray Joe Lee.

  As soon as the courier got him to London, he reported to the proper authorities and handed over the box, and then put Lefty down in a hotel room; but there he soon began to get restless, and besides, he was hungry. He knocked on the door and pointed to his mouth when the servant came, and the servant took him right off to the feeding room.

  Here Lefty sat down at a table and waited. He didn’t know how to ask for anything in English. But then he figured it out, again he just tapped on the table with his finger and pointed to his mouth; the Englishmen guessed what he meant and served him, only they didn’t always bring what he wanted. But he wouldn’t take anything that didn’t suit him. They brought him their kind of hot glum pudding in flames. He said, ‘I don’t see how anybody can eat that,’ and he wouldn’t take a bite. They exchanged it for him and brought him something else to eat. He wouldn’t drink their vodka, either, because it was green – like they had flavoured it with sulphuric acid. He picked out the plainest stuff they had, and waited in the cool with his canteen for the courier.

  And the people the courier had handed the nymphusoria over to looked at it that very minute through their strongest nitroscope and sent a description right off to a calumnist on the Daily Telegraft, so that he could tell everybody about it the very next day.

  ‘And as for that craftsman,’ they said, ‘we want to see him at once.’ The courier took them to the hotel room and from there to the feeding room, where our Lefty had begun to glow very decently, and said, ‘There he is.’

  The Englishmen slapped Lefty on the back right away and took him by the hands just like their own equal. ‘Comrade,’ they said, ‘comrade, you’re a good craftsman. We’ll talk to you afterwards when there is time, but now we want to drink to your prosperity.’

  They ordered a lot of wine and gave Lefty the first glass, but out of politeness he wouldn’t be the first to drink. He thought, ‘Maybe you’re so aggravated you want to poison me.’

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘that’s not the way to do it. Even with a Polish thirst, you have to let the host drink first. You yourselves drink on ahead.’

  The Englishmen tasted all their wines in front of him and then started filling his glass. He stood up, crossed himself with his left hand, and drank to the health of them all.

  They noticed that he had crossed himself with his left hand, and they asked the courier, ‘What is he – a Lutheranian or a Protesterian?’

  The courier answered, ‘He’s not either a Lutheranian or a Protestarian; he belongs to the Russian faith.’

  ‘But why does he cross himself with his left hand?’

  The courier replied, ‘He’s a left-handed man, and he does everything with his left hand.’

  The Englishmen marvelled even more and started pumping both Lefty and the courier full of wine, and kept on this way for three whole days, and then they said, ‘Now that’s enough.’ They symphonied some water out of a bottle with impressed air, and when they were refreshed all over they started asking Lefty all about where had he studied, and what had he studied, and how far had he gone in arithmetic.

  Lefty answered, ‘Our learning is simple – according to the Psalter and the DreamBook. We don’t know no arithmetic at all.’

  The Englishmen looked at each other and said, ‘That’s amazing.’

  And Lefty answered, ‘It’s that way all over in our country.’

  ‘But what sort of book is that in Russia,’ they asked, ‘that dreambook?’

  ‘That book,’ he said, ‘refers to if King David didn’t reveal some fortune-telling clearly in the Psalter, then you can get some extra fortunes out of the DreamBook.’

  They said, ‘That’s too bad. It would be better if you at least knew the four rules of addition; that would be a lot more utilifying to you than your whole DreamBook. Then you would be able to understand that every machine has its balance of forces. As it is, even though you are mighty skilful with your hands, you didn’t realize that such a little machine as the one in the nymphusoria was calculated for the most accurate exactness, and it can’t carry the flea-shoes. That’s why the nymphusoria won’t jump or dance any dansez.’

  Lefty agreed, ‘About that there ain’t no argument,’ he said. ‘We didn’t get very far in book-learning, but only faithfully serve our fatherland.’

  And the Englishmen said to him, ‘Stay here with us; we’ll give you a big education and you’ll turn out to be a superbluous craftsman.’

  But Lefty wouldn’t agree. ‘I’ve got my parents at home,’ he said.

  The Englishmen offered to send his parents money, but Lefty wouldn’t take it.

  ‘We are devoted to our country,’ he said, ‘and my daddy’s an old man and my mother’s an old woman, and they’re used to going to church in their own parish, and it would be mighty lonely here for me all by myself, because I’m still a bachelor by calling.’

  ‘You’ll get used to it,’ they said. ‘You’ll accept our laws, and we’ll get you married.’

  ‘That can never be,’ answered Lefty.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because,’ he answered, ‘our Russian faith is the rightest one, and the way our forefathers believed is just the way their dissentants have to believe.’

  ‘You don’t know our faith,’ said the Englishmen. ‘We’ve got the same Christian law and hold to the same Gospel.’

  ‘It’s true,’ said Lefty, ‘that everybody’s got the same Gospel, but our books are thicker than yours, and our faith is fuller.’

  ‘How can you judge that way?’

  ‘We’ve got all the evident proofs of it,’ he answered.

  ‘What kind?’

  ‘Why, we’ve got God-wondering icons and prism-working relics, and you ain’t got nothing – except for Sunday you ain’t even got any special holidays. And the second reason is that even if I was married in the law to an English girl it would be con
fusing to live with her.’

  ‘How’s that?’ they asked. ‘Don’t turn up your nose at our girls – they too dress neatly and they’re good housekeepers.’

  But Lefty said, ‘I don’t know them.’

  The Englishmen replied, ‘That’s no problem – you’ll get to know them. We’ll fix up a roundy-view for you.’

  Lefty started blushing. ‘What’s the use of stringing the girls along for no reason?’ he said, and he wouldn’t budge. ‘That’s something for fine gentlemen. It wouldn’t suit us. And if they found out about it at home, in Tula, they’d make fun of me something awful.’

  The Englishmen got curious, ‘Then suppose we did it without a roundy-view,’ they said. ‘How do you manage in your country so as to make a favourable choice?’

  Lefty explained our way to them. ‘In our country,’ he said, ‘when a man wants to reveal a circumstantial intention in regard to a girl, he sends over a conversational woman, and when she has made a preposition, they politely go to the house together and look the girl over without concealment, and in front of all the relationships.’

  They understood, but they answered that they had no conversational women and followed no such custom, and Lefty said, ‘That’s all the better, because if you go in for that kind of thing you have to do it with a circumstantial intention, and since I don’t feel none towards a foreign nation, what’s the use of stringing the girls along?’

  The Englishmen were pleased with him for these opinions too, and so they started off again in their friendly way, slapping him on the back and the knees, and they asked: ‘Just out of curiosity,’ they said, ‘we’d like to know what signs of defects you’ve noticed in our girls, and why you keep away from them?’

  At this Lefty answered them frankly, ‘I don’t mean to run them down; I just don’t like the way their dresses sort of swish back and forth, so that you can’t make out just what they’ve got on and what it’s for. There’ll be one thing here, and below something else will be pinned on, and on their arms they’ll have some kind of socks. In them velveteen coats of theirs they look just like capuchin monkeys.’