“Indeed it is,” the merchant retorted to that, “only even in a habit they can still call you up as a soldier.”
The black-cassocked mighty man was not offended in the least by this observation, but only reflected a little and replied:
“Yes, they can, and they say there have been such cases; but I’m too old now, I’m in my fifty-third year, and then military service is nothing unusual for me.”
“You mean you’ve already been in military service?”
“That I have, sir.”
“What, as a corporal, was it?” the merchant asked again.
“No, not as a corporal.”
“Then what: a soldier, an orderly, a noodle—the whole caboodle?”
“No, you haven’t guessed it; but I’m a real military man, involved in regimental doings almost since childhood.”
“So you’re a cantonist?”10 the merchant persisted, getting angry.
“No again.”
“Then what the deuce are you?”
“I’m a conosoor.”
“A wha-a-at?”
“A conosoor, sir, a conosoor, or, as plain folk put it, a good judge of horseflesh, and I served as an adviser to the remount officers.”
“So that’s it!”
“Yes, sir, I’ve selected and trained a good few thousand steeds. I’ve broken such wild beasts as, for example, the ones that rear up and then throw themselves backwards with all their might, and the rider can have his chest crushed right then against the pommel, but with me not one of them could do that.”
“How did you tame that kind?”
“I—it was very simple, because I received a special gift for it from nature. When I jump into the saddle, straightaway, without giving the horse time to collect its wits, I pull its ear to the side as hard as I can with my left hand, and with my right fist I bash it between the ears, and I grind my teeth at it something terrible, so that sometimes you even see brains come out its nostrils along with blood—and it quiets down.”
“And then?”
“Then you dismount, stroke it, let it look you in the eye and admire you, so that a good picture stays in its memory, and then you mount up again and ride.”
“And the horse goes quietly after that?”
“It goes quietly, because a horse is smart, it feels what sort of man is handling it and what he’s thinking about it. Me, for instance, by that same reasoning, every horse loved me and felt me. In Moscow, in the manège, there was one horse that got completely out of hand, and he learned this heathenish trick of biting off a rider’s knee. The devil simply caught the kneecap in his big teeth and tore it off whole. Many men were done in by him. At that time the Englishman Rarey visited Moscow11—the ‘furious breaker,’ as he was called—and the lowdown horse nearly ate him, too, and put him to shame in any case; they say the only thing that saved him was that he wore a steel knee guard, so, though the horse did bite his leg, he couldn’t bite through, and so he bucked him off; otherwise it would have been the death of him; but I straightened him out good and proper.”
“Tell us, please, how did you do that?”
“With God’s help, sir, because, I repeat, I have a gift for it. This Mister Rarey, known as the ‘furious tamer,’ and the others who took on this steed, used all their art against his wickedness to keep him bridled, so that he couldn’t swing his head to this side or that. But I invented a completely opposite means to theirs. As soon as this Englishman Rarey renounced the horse, I said: ‘Never mind, it’s all futile, because this steed is nothing if not possessed by a devil. The Englishman can’t fathom that, but I can, and I’ll help you.’ The superiors agreed. Then I say: ‘Take him out the Drogomilovsky Gate!’ They took him out. Right, sir. We led him by the bridle down to a hollow near Fili, where rich people live in their summer houses. I saw the place was spacious and suitable, and went into action. I got up on him, on that cannibal, without a shirt, barefoot, in nothing but balloon trousers and a visored cap, and I had a braided belt around my naked body, brought from the brave prince St. Vsevolod-Gavriil of Novgorod,12 whom I believed in and greatly respected for his daring; and embroidered on the belt was ‘My honor I yield to none.’ I had no special instruments in my hands, except that in one I had a stout Tartar whip topped with a lead head of no more than two pounds, and in the other a simple glazed pot of liquid batter. Well, sir, I sat him, and there were four men pulling the horse’s bridle in different directions so that he wouldn’t hurl himself at anybody with his teeth. And he, the demon, seeing that we’re all up in arms against him, whinnies, and shrieks, and sweats, and trembles all over with wickedness, wanting to devour me. I see that and tell the stablemen: ‘Quick, tear the bridle off the scoundrel.’ They don’t believe their ears, that I’m giving them such an order, and they gape at me. I say: ‘What are you standing there for! Don’t you hear? What I order you to do, you should do at once!’ And they answer: ‘But, Ivan Severyanych’ (my name in the world was Ivan Severyanych, Mr. Flyagin), ‘how can you tell us to take the bridle off?’ I began to get angry at them, because I could see and feel in my legs that the horse was raging with fury, and I pressed him hard with my knees, and shouted to them: ‘Take it off!’ They were about to say something, but by then I was in a complete frenzy and gnashed my teeth so hard that they pulled the bridle off at once, in an instant, and made a dash for it wherever their feet would take them, while in that same moment I first off did something he wasn’t expecting and smashed the pot on his head; the pot broke and the batter ran down over his eyes and nose. And he got frightened, thinking: ‘What’s that?’ And I quickly snatched the cap from my head and with my left hand began to rub the batter into the horse’s eyes still more, and I gave him a whack on the side with my whip … He surged forward, and I kept rubbing him on the eyes with my cap, to blear his eyesight completely, and gave him a whack on the other side … And I keep laying it on hotter and hotter. I don’t let him catch his breath or open his eyes, and keep smearing the batter over his muzzle with my cap, blinding him, gnashing my teeth to make him tremble, scaring him, and flogging him on both sides with the whip, so he’ll understand this is no joke … He understood it and didn’t stay stubbornly in one place, but raced off with me. He carried me, the dear heart, carried me, and I thrashed and thrashed him, and the more zealously he carried me, the more ardently I plied the whip, and at last we both began to get tired of this work. My shoulder ached and I couldn’t raise my arm, and he, I could see, also stopped looking sideways and stuck his tongue out of his mouth. Well, here I saw he was begging for mercy. I quickly dismounted, wiped his eyes, took him by the forelock, and said: ‘Don’t move, dog meat, bitch’s grub!’ and pulled him down—he fell to his knees before me, and after that he became so meek, you couldn’t ask for anything better: he let people mount him and ride around, only he dropped dead soon after.”
“So he dropped dead?”
“Dropped dead, sir. He was a very proud creature, behaved humbly, but clearly couldn’t subdue his character. But Mr. Rarey, when he heard about it, invited me to work for him.”
“So, then, did you work for him?”
“No, sir.”
“Why not?”
“How can I put it to you! First, because I was a conosoor and was more used to that line—to selecting, and not to breaking, and he only needed furious taming—and second, because on his side, as I suppose, it was just a crafty ploy.”
“Of what sort?”
“He wanted to get my secret.”
“Would you have sold it to him?”
“Yes, I would have.”
“So what was the matter?”
“Must be he just got frightened of me.”
“Will you be so kind as to tell us that story as well?”
“There was no special story, only he said: ‘Reveal your secret to me, brother—I’ll pay you a lot and take you to be my conosoor.’ But since I was never able to deceive anybody, I answered: ‘What secret? It’s just foolishness.’ But he looke
d at everything from his English, learned point of view, and didn’t believe me. He says: ‘Well, if you don’t want to reveal it, have it your way, let’s go and drink rum together.’ After that we drank a lot of rum together, so much that he turned all red and said, as well as he was able: ‘Well, go on and tell me now, what did you do to the horse?’ And I answered: ‘Here’s what …’—and I threw him as scary a look as I could and gnashed my teeth, and since I had no pot of batter around just then, I took a glass, as an example, and swung it, but seeing that, he suddenly ducked his head, got under the table, and then made a dash for the door, and that was it, and there was no going looking for him. We haven’t set eyes on each other since.”
“That’s why you didn’t go to work for him?”
“That’s why, sir. How could I work for him, when from then on he was even afraid to meet me? And I was quite willing to go to him then, because, while we were competing over that rum, I got to like him very much, but, right enough, there’s no sidestepping your path, and I had to follow a different calling.”
“And what do you consider your calling?”
“I really don’t know how to tell you … I’ve done all kinds of things, had occasion to be on horses, and under horses, and was taken prisoner, and made war, and beat people myself, and was made a cripple, such that maybe not everybody could have stood it.”
“And when did you go to the monastery?”
“That wasn’t long ago, sir, just a few years after all my past life.”
“And you also felt a calling for that?”
“Mm … I … I don’t know how to explain it, sir … though it must be assumed I did.”
“How is it that you speak of it as … as if you’re not certain?”
“Because how can I say for certain, when I can’t even embrace all my extensive past living?”
“Why is that?”
“Because much that I did wasn’t even by my own will.”
“And by whose, then?”
“By a parental promise.”
“And what happened to you by this parental promise?”
“I kept dying all my life, and could never die.”
“Really?”
“Precisely so, sir.”
“Then please tell us your life.”
“What I remember, I can tell you if you like, only I can’t do it otherwise than from the very beginning.”
“Do us the favor. That will be all the more interesting.”
“Well, I don’t know if it will be of any interest at all, but listen if you like.”
II
The former connoisseur Ivan Severyanych, Mr. Flyagin, began his story thus:
I was born a serf and come from the household staff of Count K——of Orel province.13 Now, under the young masters, these estates have been broken up, but under the old count they were very sizeable. In the village of G——, where the count himself lived, there was a great, huge mansion, with wings for guests, a theater, a special skittles gallery, a kennel, live bears sitting chained to posts, gardens; his singers gave concerts, his actors performed various scenes; there were his own weavers, and he kept workshops for various crafts; but most attention was paid to the stud farm. Special people were appointed for each thing, but the horse department received still more special attention, and as in military service in the old days cantonists descended from soldiers in order to fight themselves, so with us little coachmen came from coachmen in order to drive themselves, from stablemen came little stablemen to tend the horses, and from the fodder peasant—the fodder boy, to carry fodder from the threshing floor to the cattle yard. My father was the coachman Severyan, and though he wasn’t among the foremost coachmen, because we had a great many, still he drove a coach-and-six, and once, during the tsar’s visit, he came in seventh and was awarded an old-style blue banknote.14 I was left an orphan of my mother at a very young age and I don’t remember her, because I was her prayed-for son, meaning that, having no children for a long time, she kept asking God for me, and when she got what she asked for, having given birth to me, she died at once, because I came into the world with an unusually big head, for which reason I was called not Ivan Flyagin, but simply Golovan.* Living with my father in the coachmen’s yard, I spent my whole life in the stables, and there I comprehended the mystery of animal knowing and, you might say, came to love horses, because as a little boy I crawled on all fours between horses’ legs, and they didn’t hurt me, and once I got a little older, I became quite intimate with them. Our stud farm was one thing, the stables were another, and we stable folk had nothing to do with the farm, but we received horses ready to be taught and trained them. Every coachman and postillion drove a coach-and-six, and of all different breeds: Vyatka, Kazan, Kalmyk, Bitiug, Don—these were all horses bought at fairs and brought to us. There were more of our own from the stud farm, naturally, but they’re not worth talking about, because stud-farm horses are placid and have neither strong character nor lively fantasy, but these wild ones were terrible beasts. The count used to buy up whole shoals of them, entire herds outright, cheap, at eight or ten roubles a head, and once we drove them home, we immediately set about schooling them. They were terribly headstrong. Half of them would even drop dead rather than submit to training: they stand there in the yard—they’re bewildered and even shy away from the walls, and only keep their eyes turned to the sky, like birds. You’d even feel pity looking at them, because you see how the dear heart would like to fly away, save that he has no wings … And from the very start he won’t eat or drink for anything, neither oats nor water from the trough, and so he pines away, until he wears himself out completely and drops dead. Sometimes we lost half of what we spent, especially on Kirghiz horses. They love steppe freedom terribly. And of those who get habituated and stay alive, no small number get crippled during training, because against their wildness there’s only one means—strictness; but then those that survive all this training and learning come out as such choice horses, no stud-farm horse can compare to them in driving quality.
My father, Severyan Ivanych, drove a Kirghiz six, and when I grew up, they set me on that same six as a postillion. They were cruel horses, not like some of the cavalry horses taken for officers nowadays. We called these officer’s horses Kaffeeschenks,15 because there was no pleasure in riding them, since even officers could sit them, but ours were simply beasts, asps and basilisks at once: their muzzles alone were worth something, or their bared teeth, or else their legs, or their manes … that is, to put it simply, sheer terror! They never knew fatigue; to do not only fifty, but even seventy or eighty miles from the village to Orel and back again without a rest was nothing to them. Once they got going, you had to watch out that they didn’t fly right by. At the time when they sat me in the postillion’s saddle, I was all of eleven years old, and my voice was just the kind that, by the custom of that time, was required of a nobleman’s postillion: most piercing, resounding, and so long-drawn-out that I could keep that “hhhi-i-i-ya-a-ahhh” ringing for half an hour; but my strength of body wasn’t great enough yet for me to keep myself freely sitting up for long journeys, and they would tie me to the saddle and harness with straps, so that I was all twined around and couldn’t fall. I was jolted to death, and even passed out and lost consciousness more than once, but still rode in my upright position, and, sick of dangling, would come to my senses again. It was no easy duty; on the way, these changes would occur several times, I’d grow faint, then straighten up, and at home they’d untie me from the saddle like a dead man, lay me out, and make me sniff horseradish. Well, but later I got used to it, and it all became like nothing to me. I even kept aiming to give some passing peasant a hot one over the shirt as we drove—that’s a well-known postillion’s prank. So, once we were taking the count visiting. The weather was beautiful, summery, and the count and his dog were sitting in the open carriage, father was driving a four-in-hand, and I was blowing about in front, and here we turned off the main road and went along a special byway for some
ten miles to a monastery called the P—— hermitage. This little road was tended by the monks, to make it more enticing to go to them: naturally, on the state road there were weeds and broom and twisted branches sticking out everywhere; but the monks kept the road to the hermitage clean, all swept and cleared, with young birches planted along both sides, and these birches were so green and fragrant, and the wide view of the fields in the distance … In short—it was so good, I was about to cry out to it all, but, of course, I couldn’t cry out for no reason, so I controlled myself and galloped on. Then suddenly, two or three miles before the monastery, the road began to slope downwards a bit, and I suddenly saw a little speck ahead of me … something was creeping along the road like a little hedgehog. I was glad of the chance and struck up with all my might: “Hhhhi-i-i-i-ya-a-a-ahh!” and kept it going for almost a mile, and got so fired up that when we began to overtake the hay wagon I was shouting at, I rose in the stirrups and saw a man lying on the hay in the wagon, and it was probably so pleasant for him, warmed by the sun in the fresh breeze, that he lay there fast asleep, fearing nothing, sweetly sprawled facedown, and even with his arms spread wide, as if embracing the wagon. I could see he wasn’t going to pull over, so I went alongside, and, drawing even with him, stood up in the stirrups, gnashed my teeth for the first time in my life, and hit him across the back as hard as I could with my whip. His horses lunged forward down the hill, and he gave a start—he was a little old man in a novice’s cap, like the one I’m wearing now, and his face was pitiful, like an old woman’s, all frightened, with tears running down, and he thrashed on the hay like a gudgeon in a frying pan, and suddenly, probably half-asleep, not knowing where the edge was, he tumbled off the wagon under the wheels, and went sprawling in the dust … his legs tangled in the reins … At first my father and I, and even the count himself, found it funny the way he tumbled off, but then I saw that, down there by the bridge, the horses had caught one of the wheels on a post and stopped, but he didn’t get up and didn’t move … We came closer, I looked, he was all gray, covered with dust, and on his face there was no nose to be seen, only a crack, and blood coming from it … The count ordered us to stop, got out, looked, and said: “Dead.” He threatened to give me a good thrashing for that at home and ordered us to drive quickly to the monastery. From there people were sent down to the bridge, and the count talked things over with the father superior, and in the fall a whole train of gifts went there from us, with oats, and flour, and dried carp, and father gave me a whipping behind a shed in the monastery, not a real thrashing, but over the trousers, because it was my duty to mount up again right away. The matter ended there, but that same night the monk I had whipped to death comes to me in a vision and again weeps like a woman. I say:
The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories Page 17
