“What are you doing, you serpent?” he barely brought himself to utter, not getting up from his armchair.
“Question us about what you know so well,” Katerina Lvovna replied insolently. “You thought you’d scare me with a beating,” she went on, winking significantly. “That will never be; but what I knew I would do to you, even before these threats of yours, that I am going to do.”
“What’s that? Get out!” Zinovy Borisych shouted at Sergei.
“Oh, yes!” Katerina Lvovna mocked.
She nimbly locked the door, put the key in her pocket, and again sprawled on the bed in her little jacket.
“Now, Seryozhechka, come here, come, darling,” she beckoned the clerk to her.
Sergei shook his curls and boldly sat down by his mistress.
“Oh, Lord! My God! What is this? What are you doing, you barbarians!?” cried Zinovy Borisych, turning all purple and getting up from his chair.
“What? You don’t like it? Look, look, my bright falcon, how beautiful!”
Katerina Lvovna laughed and passionately kissed Sergei in front of her husband.
At the same moment, a deafening slap burned on her cheek, and Zinovy Borisych rushed for the open window.
VIII
“Ah … Ah, so that’s it! … Well, my dear friend, thank you very much. That’s just what I was waiting for!” Katerina Lvovna cried. “Now it’s clear … it’s going to be my way, not yours …”
In a single movement she pushed Sergei away from her, quickly threw herself at her husband, and before Zinovy Borisych had time to reach the window, she seized him by the throat from behind with her slender fingers and threw him down on the floor like a damp sheaf of hemp.
Having fallen heavily and struck the back of his head with full force against the floor, Zinovy Borisych lost his mind completely. He had never expected such a quick denouement. The first violence his wife used on him showed him that she was ready for anything, if only to be rid of him, and that his present position was extremely dangerous. Zinovy Borisych realized it all instantly in the moment of his fall and did not cry out, knowing that his voice would not reach anyone’s ear, but would only speed things up still more. He silently shifted his eyes and rested them with an expression of anger, reproach, and suffering on his wife, whose slender fingers were tightly squeezing his throat.
Zinovy Borisych did not defend himself; his arms, with tightly clenched fists, lay stretched out and twitched convulsively. One of them was quite free; the other Katerina Lvovna pinned to the floor with her knee.
“Hold him,” she whispered indifferently to Sergei, turning to her husband herself.
Sergei sat on his master, pinning down both his arms with his knees, and was about to put his hands around his throat under Katerina Lvovna’s, but just then he cried out desperately himself. Seeing his offender, blood vengeance aroused all the last strength in Zinovy Borisych: with a terrible effort, he tore his pinned-down arms from under Sergei’s knees and, seizing Sergei by his black curls, sank his teeth into his throat like a beast. But that did not last long: Zinovy Borisych at once uttered a heavy moan and dropped his head.
Katerina Lvovna, pale, almost breathless, stood over her husband and her lover; in her right hand was a cast-iron candlestick, which she held by the upper end, the heavy part down. A thin trickle of crimson blood ran down Zinovy Borisych’s temple and cheek.
“A priest,” Zinovy Borisych moaned dully, throwing his head back with loathing as far as he could from Sergei, who was sitting on him. “To confess,” he uttered still more indistinctly, trembling and looking from the corner of his eye at the warm blood thickening under his hair.
“You’ll be all right like this,” Katerina Lvovna whispered.
“Well, no more dawdling with him,” she said to Sergei. “Squeeze his throat well and good.”
Zinovy Borisych wheezed.
Katerina Lvovna bent down, pressed her own hands to Sergei’s hands, which lay on her husband’s throat, and put her ear to his chest. After five quiet minutes, she stood up and said: “Enough, he’s had it.”
Sergei also stood up and let out a long breath. Zinovy Borisych lay dead, with a crushed throat and a gashed temple. Under his head on the left side was a small spot of blood, which, however, was no longer pouring from the clotted wound stopped up with hair.
Sergei carried Zinovy Borisych to the cellar under the floor of the same stone larder where he himself had been locked up so recently by the late Boris Timofeich and returned to the room upstairs. Meanwhile, Katerina Lvovna, having rolled up the sleeves of her bed jacket and tucked her skirt up high, was carefully washing off with a soapy sponge the bloodstain left by Zinovy Borisych on the floor of his bedroom. The water was not yet cold in the samovar from which Zinovy Borisych had steamed his little merchant’s soul in poisoned tea, and the stain was washed away without a trace.
Katerina Lvovna took the copper basin and soapy sponge.
“Light, here,” she said to Sergei, going to the door. “Lower, hold it lower,” she said, carefully studying all the floorboards over which Sergei had dragged Zinovy Borisych to the cellar.
In only two places on the painted floor were there two tiny spots the size of a cherry. Katerina Lvovna rubbed them with the sponge and they disappeared.
“That’ll teach you to sneak up on your wife like a thief and spy on her,” said Katerina Lvovna, straightening up and glancing in the direction of the larder.
“Finished off,” said Sergei, and he jumped at the sound of his own voice.
When they returned to the bedroom, a thin red strip of dawn was cutting across the east and, lightly gilding the blossom-covered apple trees, peeked through the green slats of the garden fence into Katerina Lvovna’s room.
The old clerk, a short coat thrown over his shoulders, crossing himself and yawning, came trudging through the yard from the shed to the kitchen.
Katerina Lvovna carefully drew the shutter closed and looked Sergei over attentively, as if she wished to see into his soul.
“So now you’re a merchant,” she said, laying her white hands on Sergei’s shoulders.
Sergei made no reply.
His lips were trembling, he was shaking feverishly. Katerina Lvovna’s lips were merely cold.
After two days, Sergei had big calluses on his hands from the pick and heavy spade; but Zinovy Borisych was laid away so nicely in his cellar that, without the help of his widow or her lover, no one would have been able to find him before the general resurrection.
IX
Sergei went around with his neck wrapped in a crimson scarf and complained of a swelling in his throat. Meanwhile, before the traces left on Sergei by Zinovy Borisych’s teeth had healed, Katerina Lvovna’s husband was missed. Sergei himself began speaking of him even more often than others. He would sit by the gate in the evening with other young fellows and say: “Really, lads, how is it the master hasn’t turned up yet?”
The young fellows were also wondering.
And then news came from the mill that the master had hired horses and gone home long ago. The driver who had taken him said that Zinovy Borisych had seemed to be in distress, and had dismissed him somehow strangely: about two miles from town, near the monastery, he got off the cart, took his bag, and walked away. Hearing this story, everybody wondered still more.
Zinovy Borisych had vanished, and that was that.
A search was made, but nothing was discovered: the merchant had vanished into thin air. From the testimony of the arrested driver, it was learned only that the merchant had gotten out by the monastery on the river and walked away. The matter was never clarified, but meanwhile Katerina Lvovna, in her position as a widow, lived freely with Sergei. There were random surmises that Zinovy Borisych was here or there, but Zinovy Borisych still did not return, and Katerina Lvovna knew better than anyone that it was quite impossible for him to return.
A month went by like that, and another, and a third, and Katerina Lvovna felt herself heavy.
“The capital will be ours, Seryozhechka; I have an heir,” she said to Sergei, and she went to complain to the town council that, thus and so, she felt she was pregnant, and the business was stagnating: let her take charge of it all.
A commercial venture should not go to waste. Katerina Lvovna was her husband’s lawful wife: there were no apparent debts, which meant they ought to let her. And so they did.
Katerina Lvovna lived like a queen; and at her side Sergei was now called Sergei Filipych; and then smack, out of nowhere, came a new calamity. Somebody wrote to the town headman from Livny saying that Boris Timofeich had not traded all on his own capital, that more money than his own had been invested in the business, the money of his young nephew Fyodor Zakharovich Lyamin, and that the matter had to be looked into and not left in the hands of Katerina Lvovna alone. The news came, the headman talked about it with Katerina Lvovna, and then a week later, bang, an old lady arrives from Livny with a little boy.
“I am the late Boris Timofeich’s cousin,” she says, “and this is my nephew, Fyodor Lyamin.”
Katerina Lvovna received them.
Sergei, watching this arrival from the courtyard, and the reception Katerina Lvovna gave the new arrivals, turned white as a sheet.
“What’s wrong?” asked his mistress, noticing his deathly pallor, when he came in after the arrivals and stopped in the front room, studying them.
“Nothing,” the clerk replied, turning from the front room to the hallway. “I’m just thinking, how lovely is Livny,” he finished with a sigh, closing the door to the hallway behind him.
“Well, what are we to do now?” Sergei Filipych asked Katerina Lvovna, sitting with her at night over the samovar. “Now our whole business together is turned to dust.”
“Why to dust, Seryozha?”
“Because now it will all be divided. Why sit here managing a futile business?”
“Won’t it be enough for you, Seryozha?”
“It’s not about me; I only doubt we’ll be as happy as before.”
“Why is that? Why won’t we be happy, Seryozha?”
“Because, loving you as I do, Katerina Lvovna, I’d like to see you as a real lady, and not as you’ve lived so far,” replied Sergei Filipych. “But now, on the contrary, it turns out that with reduced capital we’ll have to descend to an even lower level than before.”
“What do I care about that, Seryozha?”
“It may be, Katerina Lvovna, that you’re not at all interested, but for me, since I respect you, and again looking at it with other people’s eyes, base and envious as they are, it will be terribly painful. You may think as you like, of course, but I, having my own considerations, will never manage to be happy in these circumstances.”
And Sergei played over and over on that same note for Katerina Lvovna, that because of Fedya Lyamin he had become the unhappiest of men, deprived of the opportunity to exalt and distinguish her before the entire merchant estate. Sergei wound up each time by saying that, if it were not for this Fedya, the child would be born to Katerina Lvovna less than nine months after her husband disappeared, she would get all the capital, and then there would be no end or measure to their happiness.
X
And then Sergei suddenly stopped talking about the heir altogether. As soon as the talk of him ceased on Sergei’s lips, Fedya Lyamin came to lodge in Katerina Lvovna’s mind and heart. She became pensive and even less affectionate towards Sergei. Whether she slept, or tended the business, or prayed to God, in her mind there was one and the same thing: “How can it be? Why should I be deprived of capital because of him? I’ve suffered so much, I’ve taken so much sin upon my soul,” thought Katerina Lvovna, “and he comes and takes it from me without any trouble … Well and good if he was a man, but he’s a child, a little boy …”
There was an early frost outside. Of Zinovy Borisych, naturally, no word came from anywhere. Katerina Lvovna was getting bigger and went about deep in thought; in town there was much beating of drums to do with her, figuring out how and why the young Izmailov woman, who had always been barren, thin as a pin, had suddenly started swelling out in front. And the young co-heir, Fedya Lyamin, walked about the yard in a light squirrel-skin coat, breaking the ice on the potholes.
“Hey, Fyodor Ignatych! Hey, you merchant’s son!” the cook Aksinya would shout at him, running across the yard. “Is it fitting for you, a merchant’s son, to go poking in puddles?”
But the co-heir, who troubled Katerina Lvovna and her beloved object, kicked up his feet serenely like a little goat and slept still more serenely opposite his doting old aunt, never thinking or imagining that he had crossed anyone’s path or diminished anyone’s happiness.
Fedya finally ran himself into the chicken pox, with a cold and chest pains attached, and the boy took to his bed. First they treated him with herbs and balms, and then they sent for the doctor.
The doctor came calling, prescribed medications, the old aunt herself gave them to the boy by the clock, and then sometimes asked Katerina Lvovna.
“Take the trouble, Katerinushka,” she would say, “you’re big with child yourself, you’re awaiting God’s judgment—take the trouble.”
Katerina Lvovna never refused her. When the old woman went to the evening service to pray for “the child Fyodor who is lying in sickbed” or to the early liturgy so as to include him in the communion,2 Katerina Lvovna sat with the sick boy and gave him water and his medications at the proper time.
So the old woman went to the all-night vigil on the eve of the feast of the Entrance3 and asked Katerinushka to look after Fedyushka. By then the boy was already getting better.
Katerina Lvovna went into Fedya’s room, and he was sitting on his bed in his squirrel-skin coat, reading the lives of the saints.
“What are you reading, Fedya?” Katerina Lvovna asked, sitting down in the armchair.
“I’m reading the Lives, auntie.”
“Interesting?”
“Very interesting, auntie.”
Katerina Lvovna propped her head on her hand and began watching Fedya’s moving lips, and suddenly it was as if demons came unleashed, and all her former thoughts descended on her of how much evil this boy had caused her and how good it would be if he were not there.
“But then again,” thought Katerina Lvovna, “he’s sick; he’s being given medications … anything can happen in illness … All you have to say is that the doctor prescribed the wrong medicine.”
“Is it time for your medicine, Fedya?”
“If you please, auntie,” the boy replied and, having swallowed the spoonful, added: “It’s very interesting, auntie, what’s written about the saints.”
“Read, then,” Katerina Lvovna let fall and, passing her cold gaze around the room, rested it on the frost-patterned windows.
“I must tell them to close the shutters,” she said and went out to the drawing room, and from there to the reception room, and from there to her room upstairs, and sat down.
Some five minutes later Sergei silently came to her upstairs, wearing a fleece jacket trimmed with fluffy sealskin.
“Have they closed the shutters?” Katerina Lvovna asked him.
“Yes,” Sergei replied curtly, removed the snuff from the candle with a pair of snuffers, and stood by the stove.
Silence ensued.
“Tonight’s vigil won’t be ending soon?” asked Katerina Lvovna.
“It’s the eve of a great feast; they’ll make a long service of it,” replied Sergei.
Again there was a pause.
“I must go to Fedya: he’s there alone,” Katerina Lvovna said, getting up.
“Alone?” asked Sergei, glancing sidelong at her.
“Alone,” she replied in a whisper. “What of it?”
And between their eyes flashed something like a web of lightning, but they did not say a word more to each other.
Katerina Lvovna went downstairs, walked through the empty rooms: there was total silence everywhere; the
icon lamps burned quietly; her own shadow flitted over the walls; the windows behind their closed shutters began to thaw out and weep. Fedya sits and reads. Seeing Katerina Lvovna, he only says:
“Auntie, please take this book, and give me, please, that one from the icon shelf.”
Katerina Lvovna did as her nephew asked and handed him the book.
“Won’t you go to sleep, Fedya?”
“No, auntie, I’ll wait for my old aunt.”
“Why wait for her?”
“She promised to bring me some blessed bread from the vigil.”
Katerina Lvovna suddenly went pale, her own child turned for the first time under her heart, and she felt a chill in her breast. She stood for a while in the middle of the room and then went out, rubbing her cold hands.
“Well!” she whispered, quietly going into her bedroom and finding Sergei again in the same position by the stove.
“What?” Sergei asked, barely audibly, and choked.
“He’s alone.”
Sergei scowled and started breathing heavily.
“Let’s go,” said Katerina Lvovna, abruptly turning to the door.
Sergei quickly took off his boots and asked:
“What shall I take?”
“Nothing,” Katerina Lvovna replied under her breath and quietly led him after her by the hand.
XI
The sick boy gave a start and lowered the book to his knees when Katerina Lvovna came into his room for the third time.
“What’s wrong, Fedya?”
“Oh, auntie, I got frightened of something,” he said, smiling anxiously and pressing himself to the corner of the bed.
“What are you frightened of?”
“Who is it that came with you, auntie?”
“Where? Nobody came, dearest.”
“Nobody?”
The boy leaned towards the foot of the bed and, narrowing his eyes, looked in the direction of the door through which his aunt had come, and was reassured.
“I probably imagined it,” he said.
Katerina Lvovna stood leaning her elbow on the headboard of her nephew’s bed.
The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories Page 6
