Katerina Lvovna said nothing to that, and for a week she walked without exchanging a word or a glance with Sergei. As the offended party, she stood firm and did not want to make the first step towards reconciliation in this first quarrel with him.
In the meantime, while Katerina Lvovna was angry, Sergei began making eyes at and flirting with the blond Sonetka. Now he greets her “with our particular honor,” now he smiles, now, meeting her, he tries to embrace and squeeze her. Katerina Lvovna sees it all and her heart seethes all the more.
“Shouldn’t I maybe make peace with him?” Katerina Lvovna thinks, stumbling and not seeing the ground under her feet.
But her pride now forbids her more than ever to go to him first and make peace. And meanwhile Sergei attaches himself to Sonetka ever more persistently, and it seems to everyone that the inaccessible Sonetka, who slipped away like an eel, is suddenly growing more tame.
“Here you wept over me,” Fiona once said to Katerina Lvovna, “but what did I do to you? With me it came and went, but you’d better watch out for Sonetka.”
“Perish my pride: I absolutely must make peace today,” Katerina Lvovna decided, now only pondering how to set about the reconciliation most adroitly.
Sergei himself helped her out of this difficulty.
“Lvovna!” he called to her as they made a halt. “Come and see me tonight for a moment: it’s business.”
Katerina Lvovna said nothing.
“What, maybe you’re still angry and won’t come?”
Katerina Lvovna again said nothing.
But Sergei and all who observed Katerina Lvovna saw that, as they approached the transit prison, she started moving closer to the chief guard and gave him seventeen kopecks she had saved up from alms.
“I’ll give you another ten once I save more,” Katerina Lvovna begged him.
The soldier put the money behind his cuff and said:
“All right.”
Once these negotiations were concluded, Sergei grunted and winked at Sonetka.
“Ah, Katerina Lvovna!” he said, embracing her as they went up the steps of the transit prison. “Compared to this woman, lads, there’s not another such in the whole world.”
Katerina Lvovna blushed and choked with happiness.
That night, as soon as the door quietly opened a crack, she ran out at once: she was trembling and felt for Sergei with her hands in the dark corridor.
“My Katya!” said Sergei, embracing her.
“Ah, my villain!” Katerina Lvovna answered through her tears and clung to him with her lips.
The guard paced the corridor and, stopping, spat on his boots, and paced again; behind the door the tired inmates snored, a mouse gnawed at a feather, under the stove crickets chirped away one louder than the other, and Katerina Lvovna was still in bliss.
But the raptures wore off, and the inevitable prose began.
“I’m in mortal pain: my bones ache from the ankles right up to the knees,” Sergei complained, sitting with Katerina Lvovna on the floor in a corner of the corridor.
“What can we do, Seryozhechka?” she asked, huddling under the skirt of his coat.
“Maybe I can ask to be put in the infirmary in Kazan?”
“Oh, is it as bad as that, Seryozha?”
“Like I said, it’s the death of me, the way it hurts.”
“So you’ll stay, and I’ll be driven on?”
“What can I do? It chafes, I’m telling you, it chafes, the chain’s cut almost to the bone. If only I had woolen stockings or something to put under,” Sergei said a moment later.
“Stockings? I still have a pair of new stockings, Seryozha.”
“Well, never mind!” Sergei replied.
Without another word, Katerina Lvovna darted to the cell, shook her sack out on the cot, and hastily ran to Sergei again with a pair of thick, dark blue woolen stockings with bright clocks on the sides.
“Now it should be all right,” said Sergei, parting from Katerina Lvovna and accepting her last stockings.
The happy Katerina Lvovna returned to her cot and fell fast asleep.
She did not hear how, after she came back, Sonetka went out to the corridor and quietly returned just before morning.
This happened only a two days’ march from Kazan.
XV
A cold, gray day with gusty wind and rain mixed with snow drearily met the party as they stepped through the gates of the stuffy transit prison. Katerina Lvovna started out quite briskly, but she had only just taken her place in line when she turned green and began to shake. Everything became dark in her eyes; all her joints ached and went limp. Before Katerina Lvovna stood Sonetka in those all too familiar dark blue stockings with bright clocks.
Katerina Lvovna moved on more dead than alive; only her eyes looked terribly at Sergei and did not blink.
At the first halt, she calmly went up to Sergei, whispered “Scoundrel,” and unexpectedly spat right in his eyes.
Sergei was about to fall upon her; but he was held back.
“Just you wait!” he said and wiped his face.
“Nice, though, how bravely she treats you,” the prisoners mocked Sergei, and Sonetka dissolved in especially merry laughter.
This little intrigue Sonetka had yielded to was perfectly suited to her taste.
“Well, you won’t get away with that,” Sergei threatened Katerina Lvovna.
Worn out by the bad weather and the march, her heart broken, Katerina Lvovna slept uneasily that night on her cot in the next transit prison, and did not hear how two men entered the women’s barrack.
When they came in, Sonetka got up from her cot, silently pointed to Katerina Lvovna, lay down again, and wrapped herself in her coat.
At the same moment, Katerina Lvovna’s coat flew up over her head, and the thick end of a double-twisted rope let loose with all a man’s strength on her back, covered only by a coarse shirt.
Katerina Lvovna screamed, but her voice could not be heard under the coat that covered her head. She thrashed, but also without success: a stalwart convict sat on her shoulders and held her arms fast.
“Fifty,” a voice, which it was not hard for anyone to recognize as Sergei’s, finally counted off, and the night visitors disappeared through the door.
Katerina Lvovna uncovered her head and jumped up: there was no one there; only not far away someone giggled gleefully under a coat. Katerina Lvovna recognized Sonetka’s laughter.
This offense was beyond all measure; also beyond all measure was the feeling of spite that boiled up at that moment in Katerina Lvovna’s soul. Oblivious, she rushed forward and fell oblivious onto the breast of Fiona, who took her in her arms.
On that full breast, where so recently Katerina Lvovna’s unfaithful lover had enjoyed the sweetness of debauchery, she was now weeping out her unbearable grief, and she clung to her soft and stupid rival like a child to its mother. They were equal now: both were equal in value and both were abandoned.
They were equal—Fiona, subject to the first opportunity, and Katerina Lvovna, acting out the drama of love!
Katerina Lvovna, however, was by now offended by nothing. Having wept out her tears, she turned to stone, and with a wooden calm prepared to go to the roll call.
The drum beats: ratta-tat-tat; chained and unchained prisoners pour out into the yard—Sergei, Fiona, Sonetka, Katerina Lvovna, an Old Believer6 fettered with a Jew, a Pole on the same chain with a Tartar.
They all bunched together, then pulled themselves into some sort of order and set off.
A most cheerless picture: a handful of people, torn away from the world and deprived of any shadow of hope for a better future, sinking into the cold black mud of the dirt road. Everything around them is horribly ugly: the endless mud, the gray sky, the leafless, wet broom, and in its splayed branches a ruffled crow. The wind now moans, now rages, now howls and roars.
In these hellish, soul-rending sounds, which complete the whole horror of the picture, one hears the advice o
f the biblical Job’s wife: “Curse the day you were born and die.”7
Whoever does not want to listen to these words, whoever is not attracted but frightened by the thought of death even in this dismal situation, must try to stifle these howling voices with something still more hideous. The simple man understands this perfectly well: he then unleashes all his animal simplicity, begins to be stupid, to jeer at himself, at people, at feeling. Not very tender to begin with, he becomes doubly malicious.
“What, then, merchant’s wife? Is your honor in good health?” Sergei impudently asked Katerina Lvovna, as soon as the party went over a wet hillock and lost sight of the village where they had spent the night.
With these words, he turned at once to Sonetka, covered her with the skirts of his coat, and sang in a high falsetto:
A blond head flashes in the dark outside the window.
So you’re not asleep, my tormentress, you’re not asleep, sweet cheat.
I’ll cover you with my coat skirts, so that none can see.8
With these words, Sergei embraced Sonetka and kissed her loudly in front of the whole party …
Katerina Lvovna saw and did not see it all: she walked on like an utterly lifeless person. They started nudging her and pointing to Sergei’s outrageous behavior with Sonetka. She became an object of mockery.
“Let her be,” Fiona defended her, when somebody in the party tried to laugh at the stumbling Katerina Lvovna. “Don’t you devils see that the woman’s quite ill?”
“Must have got her feet wet,” a young prisoner cracked.
“She’s of merchant stock, you know: a pampered upbringing,” Sergei responded.
“Of course, if she at least had warm stockings, it would be better,” he went on.
It was as if Katerina Lvovna woke up.
“Vile serpent!” she said, unable to restrain herself. “Keep jeering, scoundrel, keep jeering!”
“No, merchant’s wife, I’m not jeering at you at all, but Sonetka here has some very nice stockings for sale, so I thought our merchant’s wife might buy them.”
Many laughed. Katerina Lvovna strode on like a wound-up automaton.
The weather was turning stormy. From the gray clouds that covered the sky, snow began to fall in wet flakes, which melted after barely touching the ground and made the mud still deeper. Finally a dark, leaden strip appears; its other side cannot be seen. This strip is the Volga. Over the Volga a rather stiff wind is blowing, driving the slowly rising, dark, gape-jawed waves back and forth.
The party of drenched and chilled prisoners slowly came to the crossing and stopped, waiting for the ferry.
The wet, dark ferry came; the crew began loading the prisoners.
“They say somebody has vodka on this ferry,” one prisoner observed, when the ferry, under the downpour of wet snowflakes, cast off and rocked on the big waves of the storm-tossed river.
“Yes, right now a little nip wouldn’t do any harm,” Sergei responded, and, persecuting Katerina Lvovna for Sonetka’s amusement, he said: “Merchant’s wife, for old friendship’s sake, treat me to a little vodka. Don’t be stingy. Remember, my sweet, our former love, and what a good time you and I had, my joy, sitting together of a long autumn evening, sending your relations off to their eternal rest without priests or deacons.”
Katerina Lvovna was trembling all over with cold. But, besides the cold that pierced her to the bone under her soaked dress, something else was going on in Katerina Lvovna’s whole being. Her head burned as if on fire; the pupils of her eyes were dilated, alive with a sharp, roving glitter, and peered fixedly into the rolling waves.
“And I’d like a little vodka, too: the cold’s unbearable,” Sonetka’s voice rang out.
“Come on, merchant’s wife, treat us!” Sergei kept rubbing it in.
“Ah, you’ve got no conscience!” said Fiona, shaking her head reproachfully.
“That does you no credit at all,” the prisoner Gordyushka seconded the soldier’s wife.
“If you’re not ashamed before her, you should be before others.”
“You common snuffbox!” Sergei yelled at Fiona. “Ashamed, is it! What should I be ashamed of! Maybe I never loved her, and now … Sonetka’s worn-out shoe is dearer to me than her mangy cat’s mug; what do you say to that? Let her love skew-mouthed Gordyushka; or—” he glanced at a runty fellow on horseback in a felt cape and military cap with a cockade and added, “or, better still, let her cuddle up to this transport officer: at least his cape will keep her from the rain.”
“And she’ll be called an officer’s wife,” Sonetka chimed in.
“Right you are! … and she’ll easily get enough to buy stockings,” Sergei seconded.
Katerina Lvovna did not defend herself: she looked more and more intently into the waves and moved her lips. Through Sergei’s vile talk she heard the rumble and moan from the opening and slamming waves. And suddenly the blue head of Boris Timofeich appears to her out of one breaking wave; her husband, rocking, peers out of another, holding Fedya with a drooping head. Katerina Lvovna wants to remember a prayer, and she moves her lips, but her lips whisper: “What a good time you and I had, sitting together of a long autumn evening, sending people out of this world by a cruel death.”
Katerina Lvovna was trembling. Her roving gaze became fixed and wild. Her arms reached out somewhere into space once or twice and dropped again. Another moment—and she suddenly began to sway all over, not taking her eyes from the dark waves, bent down, seized Sonetka by the legs, and in one sweep threw the girl and herself overboard.
Everyone was petrified with amazement.
Katerina Lvovna appeared at the top of a wave and sank again; another wave tossed up Sonetka.
“A hook! Throw them a hook!” they shouted on the ferry.
A heavy hook on a long rope soared up and fell into the water. Sonetka could no longer be seen. Two seconds later, borne away from the ferry by the swift current, she again flailed her arms; but at the same moment, out of another wave, Katerina Lvovna rose up almost to the waist, threw herself on Sonetka like a strong pike on a soft-finned little roach, and neither of them appeared again.
The Sealed Angel
I
It happened during Christmastime, on the eve of St. Basil’s.1 The weather was raging most unmercifully. A severe, ground-sweeping blizzard, of the kind for which the winters of the Transvolga steppe are famous, drove a multitude of people into a solitary inn that stood like an old bachelor in the midst of the flat and boundless steppe. Here gentlefolk, merchants, and peasants, Russians, and Mordovians, and Chuvashes, all ended up in one heap. To observe grades and ranks in such night lodgings was impossible: wherever you turned, it was crowded, some drying off, others warming themselves, still others looking for a bit of space to huddle up in; the dark, low cottage, crammed with people, was stuffy and filled with dense steam from the wet clothes. There was no free space to be seen: on the bunks, on the stove,2 on the benches, and even on the dirty earth floor—people were lying everywhere. The innkeeper, a stern muzhik, was glad neither of the guests nor of the gains. Angrily slamming the gate after the last sleigh, carrying two merchants, forced its way in, he locked it with a padlock and, hanging the key in the icon corner, said firmly:
“Well, now whoever wants to can beat his head on the gate—I won’t open.”
But he had barely managed to say that and, having taken off his vast sheepskin coat, to cross himself with a big, old-style cross and prepare to get onto the hot stove, when someone’s timid hand knocked on the windowpane.
“Who’s there?” the innkeeper called in a loud and displeased voice.
“It’s us,” a muffled reply came from outside the window.
“Well, what do you want?”
“Let us in, for Christ’s sake, we’re lost … frozen.”
“Are there many of you?”
“Not many, not many, eighteen in all, just eighteen,” a man, obviously completely frozen, said outside the window, stammering
and his teeth chattering.
“There’s no room for you, the whole cottage is packed with people as it is.”
“At least let us warm up a little!”
“What are you?”
“Carters.”
“Empty or loaded?”
“Loaded, dear brother, we’re carrying hides.”
“Hides! You’re carrying hides, and you ask to spend the night in the cottage? What’s become of the Russian people! Get out of here!”
“But what are they to do?” asked a traveler lying under a bearskin coat on an upper bunk.
“Pile up the hides and sleep under them, that’s what,” the innkeeper replied, and, giving the carters another good cursing out, he lay motionless on the stove.
From under his bearskin, the traveler reprimanded the innkeeper for his cruelty in tones of highly energetic protest, but the man did not honor his remarks with the slightest response. Instead of him, a small, red-haired man with a sharp, wedge-shaped little beard called out from a far corner.
“Don’t condemn our host, my dear sir,” he began. “He takes it from experience, and what he says is true—with the hides it’s safe.”
“Oh?” a questioning response came from under the bearskin.
“Perfectly safe, sir, and it’s better for them that he doesn’t let them in.”
“Why is that?”
“Because now they’ll get themselves useful experience from it, and meanwhile if some helpless person or other comes knocking here, there’ll be room for him.”
“Who else would the devil bring here now?” said the fur coat.
“Listen, you,” the innkeeper put in. “Don’t spout empty words. Can the foul fiend bring anybody to where there’s such holy things? Don’t you see the icon of the Savior and the face of the Mother of God here?”
“That’s right,” the red-haired little man seconded. “Every saved person is guided by an angel, not by the dark one.”
The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories Page 8
