And she took a white glass vial from under her shawl.
I ask:
“What is it?”
And she answers:
“This is the terrible falask, and in it is the poison of oblivion.”
I say:
“Give me this oblivious poison: I want to forget everything.”
She says:
“Don’t drink—it’s vodka. I couldn’t help myself once, I drank it … good people gave me some … Now I can’t do without it, I need it, but don’t you drink for as long as you can, and don’t judge me for sipping a bit—I hurt very much. And there’s still a comfort for you in the world: the Lord has delivered him from tyranny! …”
I cried out: “He’s dead!” and seized my hair, but I see that it’s not my hair—it’s white … What is this!
And she says to me:
“Don’t be frightened, don’t be frightened, your hair was already white when they untangled you from your braid; but he’s alive and safe from all tyranny: the count showed him such mercy as he never did anybody—when night comes, I’ll tell you everything, and now I’ll have another little sip … I have to sip it away … my heart’s on fire.”
And she kept sipping and sipping, and fell asleep.
At night, when everybody was asleep, Auntie Drosida got up again very quietly, went to the window without any light, and I saw her standing there and sipping again from the falask, and putting it away again, and she asked me softly:
“Is grief sleeping or not?”
I answer:
“Grief is not sleeping.”
She came over to my bed and told me that, after the punishment, the count summoned Arkady to him and said:
“You had to go through everything I said you would, but since you were my favorite, I will now show you my mercy: tomorrow I will send you for a soldier without conscription, but because you were not afraid of my brother, a count and a nobleman, with his pistols, I will open a path to honor for you—I don’t want you to be lower than you have placed yourself with your noble spirit. I will send a letter asking that you be sent straight to war at once, and you will serve not as a simple soldier, but as a regimental sergeant, and show your courage. Then it will not be my will over you, but the tsar’s.”
“For him,” the old woman in calico said, “it’s easier now and there’s nothing more to fear: over him there is just one power—to fall in battle—and not the master’s tyranny.”
So I believed, and for three years I dreamed of the same thing every night, of how Arkady Ilyich was fighting.
Three years went by that way, and all that time God’s mercy was upon me, that I was not brought back to the theater, but stayed on in the calves’ shed with Auntie Drosida as her helper. And it was very good for me there, because I pitied the woman, and when she happened not to drink too much at night, I liked to listen to her. And she still remembered how our people, and the head valet himself, had killed the old count—because they could no longer suffer his infernal cruelty. But I still didn’t drink at all, and I did a lot for Auntie Drosida, and with pleasure: those little brutes were like children to me. I got so used to the little calves that, when they took one I had milk fed to be slaughtered for the table, I’d make a cross over him and weep for three days afterwards. I was no good for the theater anymore, because my feet had gone bad on me, they hobbled. Before, I’d had a very light step, but after Arkady Ilyich carried me off unconscious in the cold, I probably chilled my feet and no longer had any strength in the toes for dancing. I put on the same calico as Drosida, and God knows how long I’d have lived in such dreariness, when suddenly one time I was there in the shed before evening: the sun was setting and I was unreeling yarn by the window, and suddenly a small stone falls through my window, and it’s all wrapped in a piece of paper.
XVI
I looked this way and that, I looked out the window—nobody was there.
“Most likely,” I thought, “somebody beyond the fence outside threw it and missed, and it landed here with me and the old woman.” And I thought to myself: “Should I unwrap the paper or not? Seems better to unwrap it, because something’s surely written on it. And maybe somebody or other needs it, and I could figure it out and keep the secret, and throw the note with the stone to the right person in the same way.”
I unwrapped it and began to read, and couldn’t believe my eyes …
XVII
There was written:
“My faithful Lyuba! I fought and served the sovereign and shed my blood more than once, and for that I was raised to officer’s rank and granted nobility. Now I have come as a free man on leave to recover from my wounds. I am staying at an inn in the Pushkarsky quarter, and tomorrow I will put on my medals and crosses and appear before the count and bring all the money given me for treatment, five hundred roubles, and I will ask to buy you out, in hopes that we can be married before the altar of the Most High Creator.”
“And further,” Lyubov Onisimovna continued, always with suppressed emotion, “he wrote that ‘whatever calamity may have befallen you and whatever you have been subjected to, I count it as your suffering, and not as sin or weakness, and leave it to God, feeling nothing but respect for you.’ And it was signed: ‘Arkady Ilyich.’ ”
Lyubov Onisimovna burned the letter at once in the stove and did not tell anyone about it, not even the old woman in calico, but only prayed to God all night, without uttering a word about herself, but all for him, because, she said “though he wrote that he was now an officer, with crosses and wounds, all the same I couldn’t possibly imagine that the count would treat him differently than before.
“To put it simply, I was afraid they’d flog him again.”
XVIII
Early in the morning, Lyubov Onisimovna took the calves out into the sun and began to feed them with milk-soaked crusts at the tubs, when it suddenly came to her hearing that “in the open,” outside the fence, people were hurrying somewhere and talking loudly among themselves as they ran.
“I didn’t hear a word of what they were talking about,” she said, “but it was as if their words cut my heart. And just then the dung collector, Filipp, drove through the gate, and I said to him: ‘Filyushka, dear! Did you hear what these people passing by are talking about so curiously?’
“And he replies: ‘It’s them going to the Pushkarsky quarter, to see how the innkeeper murdered a sleeping officer during the night. Slit his throat right through,’ he says, ‘and took five hundred roubles in cash. They caught him all bloody with the money on him.’
“As soon as he told me that, I fell down bang on the spot …
“Here’s what happened: the innkeeper murdered Arkady Ilyich … and they buried him here, in this same grave where we’re sitting now … Yes, he’s now here under us, lying under this ground … And why do you think I keep going for walks here with you … I don’t want to look there,” she pointed to the gloomy and gray ruins, “but to sit here next to him and … take a little drop to commemorate his soul …”
XIX
Here Lyubov Onisimovna stopped and, considering her story told, took a small vial from her pocket and “commemorated,” or “sipped,” but I asked her:
“And who buried the famous toupee artist here?”
“The governor, dearest, the governor himself was at the funeral. What else! He was an officer. At the liturgy both the deacon and the priest called Arkady ‘bolyarin’9 and once the coffin was lowered down, the soldiers fired blanks into the air with their guns. And later, a year after, the innkeeper was punished by the executioner on the Ilyinka square with a knout. They gave him forty and three knouts for Arkady Ilyich, and he endured it—was left alive and went branded to hard labor. Our men, those who could get away, came to watch, and the old men, who remembered the sentence for murdering the cruel count, said it was as little as forty and three because Arkasha was of simple origin, but for the count the sentence had been a hundred and one knouts. By law you can’t stop at an even number of stro
kes, it always has to be an odd number. That time, they say, an executioner was brought on purpose from Tula, and before the business they gave him three glasses of rum to drink. Then he flogged him, a hundred strokes just for the torture, and the man was still alive, but then, at the hundred and first crack, he shattered his whole backbone. They started to lift him from the board, but he was already going … They covered him with sacking and took him to jail—he died on the way. And this Tula man, the story goes, kept crying out: ‘Give me somebody else to flog—I’ll kill all you Orel boys.’ ”
“Well, but you,” I say, “were you at the funeral, or not?”
“I went. I went with everybody else: the count ordered all the theater people to be brought, to see how one of us could earn distinction.”
“And you said your last farewells?”
“Yes, of course! Everybody went up to him, and I did, too … He was so changed I wouldn’t have recognized him. Thin and very pale—they said he lost all his blood, because he was murdered at midnight … He shed so much of his blood …”
She became silent and fell to thinking.
“And you,” I say, “how did you bear up after that?”
She seemed to come to her senses and passed a hand over her forehead.
“To begin with,” she says, “I don’t remember how I got home … I was with them all—somebody must have brought me … And in the evening Drosida Petrovna says: ‘Well, you can’t do that—you don’t sleep, and meanwhile you lie there like a stone. It’s no good—weep, pour your heart out.’
“I say: ‘I can’t, auntie—my heart’s burning like a coal, and there’s no pouring it out.’
“And she says: ‘Well, that means there’s no avoiding the falask now.’
“She poured for me from her little bottle and says: ‘Before, I myself wouldn’t let you do it and I told you not to, but now there’s no help for it: take a sip—pour it on the coal.’
“I say: ‘I don’t want to.’
“ ‘Little fool,’ she says, ‘nobody wants to at first. Grief is bitter, but this poison is bitterer still. If you pour this poison over the coal—it goes out for a minute. Sip it quickly, sip it!’
“I drank the whole falask at once. It was disgusting, but I couldn’t sleep without it, and the next night also … I drank … and now I can’t fall asleep without it, and I have my own falask, and I buy vodka … You’re a good boy, you’ll never tell that to your mother, you’ll never betray simple folk: because simple folk ought to be spared, simple folk are all sufferers. And when we go home, I’ll knock again at the window of the pot-house around the corner … We won’t go in, but I’ll give them my empty little falask, and they’ll hand me a new one.”
I was touched and promised that I would never tell about her “falask.”
“Thank you, dearest—don’t go talking: I need it.”
And I can see her and hear her as if it was right now: at night, when everyone in the house is asleep, she sits up in bed, quietly, so that even a little bone won’t crack; she listens, gets up, walks stealthily to the window on her long, chilled legs … She stands for a moment, looks around, listens for whether mama is coming from the bedroom; then she softly knocks the neck of the “falask” on her teeth, tips it up, and “sips” … One gulp, two, three … She quenches the coal and commemorates Arkasha, and goes back to bed again—quickly slips under the covers, and soon begins whistling away very, very softly—phwee-phwee, phwee-phwee, phwee-phwee. She’s asleep!
Never in my life have I seen such a terrible and heartrending commemoration.
* This incident was known to many in Orel. I heard about it from my grandmother Alferyeva and from the merchant Ivan Androsov, known for his unfailing truthfulness, who saw himself “the dogs tearing at the clergy,” and who saved himself from the count only by “taking sin upon his soul.” When the count ordered him brought and asked him, “Do you feel sorry for them?” Androsov replied: “No, Your Serenity, it serves them right: why go hanging about?” For that, Kamensky pardoned him. Author.
† “Much too much, much too much!” Trans.
The Voice of Nature
I
The well-known military writer General Rostislav Andreevich Faddeev, long attached to the late Field Marshal Baryatinsky,1 told me of the following amusing incident.
Once, traveling from the Caucasus to Petersburg, the prince felt unwell on the way and sent for a doctor. It happened, if I am not mistaken, in Temir-Khan-Shura.2 The doctor examined the patient and found that there was nothing dangerous in his condition, but that he was simply tired and needed to rest for a day without rocking and jolting along the road in a carriage.
The field marshal obeyed the doctor and agreed to stop in the town; but the station house there was quite vile, and private quarters, given the unforeseen nature of the occasion, had not been prepared. An unexpected predicament presented itself: where to lodge such a renowned visitor for a day.
There was much bustling and rushing about, and for the time being the unwell field marshal settled in the posting station and lay down on a dirty divan, which was covered just for him with a clean sheet. Meanwhile, news of this event, of course, quickly flew around the whole town, and all the military hastened to scrub and dress themselves up, and the civil authorities polished their boots, pomaded their whiskers, and they all crowded together across the street from the station. They stood and looked out for the field marshal, in case he should show himself in the window.
Suddenly, unexpected and unforeseen by anybody, a man pushed them all aside from behind, sprang forward, and ran straight to the station, where the field marshal lay on the dirty divan covered with a sheet, and began to shout:
“I can’t bear it, the voice of nature rises up in me!”
Everyone looked at him and marveled: what an impudent fellow! The local inhabitants all knew this man, and knew he was not of high rank—since he was neither in civil nor in military service, but was simply a minor supervisor in some local supply commissariat and had been chewing on government rusks and boot soles along with the rats, and in that fashion had chewed himself up a pretty little house with a mezzanine right across from the station.
II
This supervisor came running to the station and asked Faddeev to announce him to the field marshal without fail.
Faddeev and all the others started protesting to him.
“Why? There’s no need for that, and there won’t be any formal reception—the field marshal is tired and is here only for a temporary rest, and once he’s rested, he’ll be on his way.”
But the commissary supervisor stood his ground and became even more inflamed—asking that they announce him to the prince without fail.
“Because,” he says, “I’m not looking for glory or for honors, and I stand before you precisely as you’ve said: not out of duty, but in the zeal of my gratitude to him, because I am indebted to him for everything in the world and, in my present prosperity, moved by the voice of nature, I wish to gratefully repay my debt.”
They asked him:
“And what does your debt of nature consist in?”
And he replied:
“This is my grateful debt of nature, that it is wrong for the prince to be resting here in institutional untidiness, when I have my own house with a mezzanine just across the street, and my wife is of German stock, the house is kept clean and tidy, and I have bright, clean rooms in the mezzanine for the prince and for you, with white, lace-trimmed curtains on all the windows and clean beds with fine linen sheets. I wish to receive the prince in my house with the greatest cordiality, like my own father, because I’m indebted to him for everything in my life, and I will not leave here before you tell him that.”
He so insisted on it and refused to leave, that the field marshal heard it from the next room and asked:
“What’s this noise? Will nobody tell me what all this talk is about?”
Then Faddeev told him everything, and the prince shrugged his shoulders
and said:
“I decidedly do not remember who this man is and how he’s indebted to me; but in any case, have a look at the rooms he’s offering, and if they’re better than this hovel, I’ll accept the invitation and pay him for his trouble. Find out how much he wants.”
Faddeev went to look at the commissary’s mezzanine and reported:
“The place is very quiet and of an extraordinary cleanliness, and the owner will not hear of any payment.”
“What? Why not?” asked the field marshal.
“He says he owes you a great deal and the voice of nature prompts him to the happiness of expressing his debt of gratitude to you. ‘Otherwise,’ he says, ‘if you want to pay, then I cannot open my doors.’ ”
Prince Baryatinsky laughed and praised this official.
“Still,” he says, “I see he’s a fine fellow and has character—that has become rare among us, and I like such people: how he’s indebted to me, I can’t recall, but I’ll move to his place. Give me your arm and let’s leave here.”
III
They went across the street and … into the yard; and at the gate the supervisor himself is already greeting the field marshal—pomaded, sleek, all his buttons buttoned, and with the most joyful face.
The prince looked around and saw that everything was clean, shining brightly, in the front garden cheerful green and blossoming roses. The prince himself cheered up.
“What is my host’s name?”
The latter replies something like Filipp Filippovich Filippov.
The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories Page 52
