Through the wood there ran a long, rumbling din, and the leaves began to shake, just as they would from fear. Little blue serpents leaped up from the cross-branches of the firs and something cracked, struck the ancient, horned roots.
The Bear Cub took off as if he’d been scalded, he ran and ran, no matter where to, he was all scratched, he couldn’t catch his breath, and then—voices and a light. The Cub was overjoyed.
“A bird’s nest,” he thought.
But the light went out and voices rang.
The Cub parted the bushes and he sees: a huge lighted room, many hunter-monsters are there, the hunters are eating and gabbling something or other.
“You Alionushka,” Mamma says, “are not to go into the wood alone, bears will eat you up in there. The other day Uncle Fyodor Ivanovich went out hunting, and a little Bear Cub comes to meet him, tiny, just your size!”
“Papa, oh Papa,” Alionushka was overjoyed, “you catch me that Bear Cub, I’m going to play with him!”
And as soo as the Bear Cub heard this he started to roar, and came out of hiding.
“Look, look,” cried Mamma, there’s the Cub!”
Then everyone sprang up from the table, Papa spilled the soup.
“Little Bear Cub, come here, here to us, have supper with us, Bear Cub!” Alionushka was jumping up and down.
So the Bear Cub came up to her and sniffed—he had already taken a great liking to the little fair-haired girl.
And Alionushka had taken a liking to the Bear: she sat him down next to her, stroked his muzzle, poked a morsel of white bread under his nose. And he gazed affectionately into her bright eyes and panted: he was so tired and had had such a fright.
“Well then, you’ve got your Bear Cub, you may play with him. But now get off to bed, you’ve stayed up late as it is!”
“Can he come with me?” Alionushka asked timidly.
“Certainly not, you go on by yourself, Papa will tie him to the thicket!” Mamma had been angry with Papa about the soup, and Alionushka, just holding back her tears, went on to the nursery alone.
For a long time she couldn’t get to sleep, she kept thinking about the Cub, about how they would walk in the wood together, gather berries—there’d be nothing to be afraid of, nobody would eat her up when she was with the Bear Cub.
“Little Bear Cub. my dear little Bear Cub, poor little thing!” whispered Alionushka and fell asleep.
5.
A soon as she awoke Alionushka would run straight to the Bear Cub, untie him from the thicket and play all sorts of games: she would squeeze him and dress him up in Papa’s old hat and ride on his back or lead him about by the paw for a long while and talk to him.
The Cub understood everything, only he couldn’t speak, he growled.
In this way the days passed unnoticed.
With Alionushka the Cub is happy, but tied up he pines, remembers the birds and the other animals.
Autumn arrived, the nights grew colder. They would even sometimes light the stove.
The Bear Cub heard Papa and Mamma speak about leaving for home, and then Alionushka took him by the paw, stroked him, kissed his muzzle.
“You’ll be left all alone soon,” she said to the Cub, “Papa and Mamma don’t want to take you, you’ll bite.”
And today Mamma told Alionushka not to go about with the Bear so much.
“Uncle went to pet him, but your Cub scratched him on the nose!”
“I better make a run for the wood, or they’ll kill me!” reasoned the Bear, and he felt so lonesome and heartsick and sorry for Alionushka.
They were getting ready to go.
In the evening guests arrived and Mamma was playing the piano.
But when Uncle began to sing, the Bear Cub started to howl an accompaniment from the thicket. And suddenly he flared up, broke his collar and ran straight into the room.
Everyone was horribly frightened, as if there were a fire, sprang up to catch the Bear Cub, and when they did catch him he bit Mamma on the finger. Then everyone started to shout.
“It’s my Cub, don’t you touch him!” shrieked Alionushka. But they tied up the Cub and dragged him away.
“Where’d you hide my Cub?”, Alionushka squealed, her little mouth open wide as it would go.
“There there, lambkin,” Nanny Vlasevna consoled her, “They’ll let him free in the wood, it will be better for him there. Shh, Alionushka, shhh: tomorrow we’re going home, and how your toys have missed you!”
I don’t need toys, the Cub is mi-i-ne, you’re all horrid!”
Her little face is all crimson, her tears are falling fast.
6.
Thick as can be, the stars of Autumn—silver ones, gold ones—are quietly flying back and forth, pouring across the sky.
The Moon has disappeared somewhere. Branches crack. Leaves fly off, they buzz.
“The Bear Cub is coming, hide yourselves quick” the birds and the animals call out. Noisily parting the twigs, the Cub emerges—on his neck is the broken rope and his fur hangs in clumps.
He scowled.
So the Cub comes to his den, tears through the thicket, lowers himself into the cave, growls:
“I’m going to sleep, and get a little rested up!”
And snoring resounds throughout the whole wood: it’s the Bear Cub, sucking his paw and sleeping.
Flocks of birds disperse and gather into flocks again, the birds are flying off to warm lands, leaving behind the cold, forsaking their old nests until a new Spring.
The icon candle began to flicker, flared up and went out.
The gray light of morning stealthily crept up to the double windowpane and slyly looked into the nursery, and the darkness of night took its way slowly across the ceiling and walls, while in the corners shadows arose, murky columns that were somehow drowsy.
Kotofey Kotofeyich, the velvety black cat, stood up on his white, cushiony-soft paws, stretched, and, having yawned luxuriously, leapt onto Alionushka’s bed.
Alionushka rubbed her sleepy eyes: was it the Bear Cub coming to eat her?
And Nanny Vlasevna wasn’t there …
There was a dull thumping and footsteps.
The cat tuckeed in his paws, stretched out his whiskery nose and began to purr.
Now she was no longer frightened.
“Lordy,” Alionushka muses, “if only Christmas would hurry up and come, and then there’d be Easter, I’ll go to morning mass, Easter is so nice!”
Her sleep-swollen lips wore a serious expression, but her little face was shining and Alionushka smiles, just as if the Magi were already approaching with the Star, hauling a great big Christmas tree with gingerbread ornaments.
Translated by A.L. and M.K.
The Blaze
CHAPTER ONE
Somehow White Fiokla, a sorceress and a witch, had spawned on a fall morning a black-winged mouse—a newly born scion of the Devil, as everyone could plainly see. Her son Ermil, born mute and without legs, hanged himself after laying the filth to rest in the cesspit.
On the night of St. Catherine’s Day—when, following the old lore, young girls gnaw twigs off the branch and sleep with them in their teeth to bring on a dream of their destined mate—amidst the cruel and raging blizzard, thunder clapped suddenly on high. And little saintly Alionka, the railway foreman’s daughter, was found in the town garden at dawn, deflowered and dead, with a twig clenched in her teeth.
On St. Nicholas’ Day, three rainbow suns showed up in smoky clouds, encircling the ferociously-cold Sun. And those three immanent suns lay like a silent yoke upon the town.
“Hey, a hell of a burning fever, that’s what’s waiting for poor folks like us.”
“Quit croaking up the Devil, we all walk under one God—everybody’s equal in His eyes.”
“Did I come up with it? It’s got nothing to do with me, the priest, no, the deacon brought it up at the ectenia prayers the other day.”
The alarming news was whispered back and forth … People al
ready had vague premonitions of misfortune; it stood at the door, biding its time.
“The Chinaman with an army of a thousand-million’ll come down right on top of Russia, together with the Turk.”
“Great God, what a horde!”
“So you think our boys will just roll over?”
“Everybody knows what they say: Borr is on their side.”
“We’re done for, that’s for damn’ sure!”
With great care the windows were marked for the night with the sign of the cross, and watch was kept staunchly so that the icon lamp would not burn out.
“Did you hear this, Makarikha—the other day Avdotya was saying that at merchant Podkhomutov’s they were calling for the unclean one right from out of the table.”
“Ee-ee! What are you talking about!?”
“By the cross and the Heavenly Queen! Avdotya’s a sly old girl and Podkhomutov’s wife doesn’t say a peep against it: there he was, all blue, and had six paws.”
“Holy Virgin save us! What else is coming!”
“We’re done for, that’s for damn’ sure!”
Bad dreams were common. Some saw The Church of the New Savior as it was at Easter, but with no altar and no icons. And inside the church Ermil, Fiokla’s mute, legless son—the one who hanged himself—was walking about giving people the triple Easter kiss. Others saw some kind of bloated little boy covered with splinters, somersaulting around the floor.
Semion the railway workshop watchman went around mumbling: “This little soldier, an Old Tabeliever, says to me, ‘Gramps,’ he says, ‘woe’s hitting Russia everywhere: in Moscow the Tsar Bell’s shattered into smithereens and every bit turned into a snake and the snakes crawled off under Great Ivan’s bell tower. The bell tower’s rocking and when it comes crashing down peoples’ hearts will fly to pieces and the end of all life will begin.’”
“What don’t they say nowadays, you could die laughing! The primary cause of it all is in the production force, and all the rest is a side-show, an adstruction. Let’s disavow the old world …
“Shut your trap, they won’t treat the likes of you with kid gloves—off to the precinct, you rebels!”
“And in general,” stated the police commissioner’s circular, “if necessary, proper measures will be adopted, holding nothing back, to snuff out the suns that have just appeared, about which ill-intended parties are spreading rumors and disturbing the peaceful population.”
But the rainbow suns did not disappear; now and again they would appear in the sky encircling the ferociously-cold Sun.
Life went on the same old way.
Never before was such an abundant yield seen in the district—no memory of a harvest like this year’s. The mills were loaded to capacity and ground the choice grain unflaggingly. Along criss-crossing railway tracks boxcars overfilled with every kind of grain and flour were driven up and driven off to all four corners. The trading was fast and furious, and buyers were reasonable.
On Christmas Eve White Fiokla was butchered. And it felt like a millstone rolled off everyone’s heart. The oldsters cleansed themselves for Epiphany by cutting holes in the ice and washing themselves with freezing epiphany water. Little crosses were painted in chalk in the corners and on the doors of their homes. And all went on swimmingly, as if cooked on a well-buttered pan.
Spring came in good time, early and warm. The gardens greened at Easter and the winter wheat came in strong and sturdy.
The first week after Easter wedding celebrations were getting into swing.
A few even remembered White Fiokla with a bit of kindness:
“If only the old woman could go on living—they killed the poor soul for nothing!”
New houses sprang up: solemnly blessed with holy water strong foundations were being laid, and ever higher, piling up, day after day, the scaffolding sped upwards against the siding, board crosses overshadowing the future dwellings.
At the Easter observance a fire at the Bishop’s had caused quite a stir: they carried from the Bishop’s flaming bathhouse the charred body of the Mother Superior of the Bogodukhovo Convent, and his worship couldn’t appear at services for a long while due to his burns.
There was winking and smirking.
And dejection too.
“The Devil has stolen the Cross, it’s with the Devil now,” mumbled Semion, the railway workshop watchman.
And the little soldier, the Old Tabeleiver, seconded:
“The heelless one has taken over God’s temple and His throne. The goblin is fouling the paten and spitting in the chalice. And people are receiving not Christ’s blood in the eucharist, but the Devil’s spittle, and are eating not Christ’s body but the Devil’s filth.”
“We’re done for, that’s for damn’ sure!” concluded the listeners.
On the heels of warm and flowery May the summer heat came hard. Drought took over and not a single sprinkle quenched the thirst of desiccating fields, dust-swathed meadows and worm-ridden gardens.
CHAPTER TWO.
On a fine St. John the Baptist’s noon an urgent alarm rang from the Cathedral belfry: a blaze had broken out in town.
Fire took over whole streets of different corners of town, jam-packed with working people and every sort of beggar. Little wooden hovels and awkwardly cumbersome, clumsy flophouses went up like piles of rotten tinder. Flame broke through and disappeared in giant spindles of dust. Dusty spindles swept whirling through the town. And it was as if an unseen hand were spinning stifling, searing, smoke-gray yarn in a sky that was incandescent and unmarred by a single cloud. Taken by surprise, people now tongue-tied in awe rushed about in confusion and howled wildly like beasts.
Then, as the factory whistle began to whistle at its usual time, how alien it sounded amidst the fire’s whistling and the lonely shrill cries, cries that begged for mercy, for children to be saved, for goods to be safeguarded …
Icons were carried out; it was believed that the icons would intercede and protect from disaster.
Yet the flame, creeping on, a-buzz as it went, tried out secret nooks and then took off, engulfing still intact houses in its embrace. Dusty spindles, dark-blue in the evening light, swept whirling through the town. And it was as if a dark-blue fiery bit was boring a hole through the heavy air. A puffed-up rosy glow poured shuddering over the town, above black chimneys jutting from the fire-ruins.
The railway workshops and petroleum were burning.
Burning locomotives, in a kind of scarlet rage, in a kind of terror, as if baited beyond endurance, leapt out of their iron stalls. They whistled all along the tracks with a stuttering, dry whistle. And something sighed and sizzled, uncanny and sinister, under their red-incandescent wheels.
Roasting grain elevators sputtered and overflowed like fountains. Someone, rabid and howling with laughter at the top of his lungs, was pouring the bloodied bits of amber grain from hand to hand.
On St. John the Baptist’s enchanted midnight an urgent alarm began to peal in the Cathedral belfry once again: the jolly haunts in the narrow lanes had started going up in smoke.
Fire entered, a guest that gives no quarter, fire zealously sank its fangs into the walls and licked the ceiling with its delicate tongue.
Naked bodies—any which way, cut by glass and covered in burns, fell from the upper floors onto the pavement.
The kindled pupils of the choking crowd seemed to expand and explode in the heat, and a creaking, crazy laughter mixed with their beseeching wails.
A dark-clothed monk with an immobile stony face stood in the fire’s hell. He alone was unperturbed, as he might have stood at midday, so stood he now, awesome in his calm. The fire boiling in the depths of his eyes penetrated the tongues of flame.
A thousand hands seized his skirts, the black soaring wings of his monastic cap, a thousand hands crawled toward his feet …
“You, our savior, preserve us!”
“You, our savior, save us!”
“You, our savior, pity and forgive us!”
/> And the frightful urgent alarm was struck in the Cathedral belfry a third time, when the lazily ascending sun, panting in blood-gold rays, dawned upon the earth: a horrific thick smoke came rolling from two opposite ends of town.
The prison was in flames. The hospital was in flames.
What a holiday for vengeful fire, willful fire, tearing asunder the living coffins, the cursed prison!
The inmates broke out the iron doors, crushed the warder with a grating, and, beaten up and shot, crawled their way into town.
And in the hospital’s suffocating wards, in yellow-green light amidst dancing orange suns, heart-lacerating groans arose and the Gehenna laughter of lunatics spilled out.
The fire squeals and darts about like a squirrel. And now it has thrown its burning meshes over the hospital walls, onto the abattoir.
The town shuddered all at once under the antediluvian yowling; the animals yowled too, in human anguish.
Next to the prison, the cemetery went up in flames.
Fire with its glowing hot, heavy crow-bar pried open the silent tombs. And the dead, it seemed, rose from their coffins and grew into black pillars of stinking black smoke.
The dark-clad monk, lips tensely compressed, arms crossed, stood among the mobs turned bestial and the sorrowing beasts.
Sparks flew, coiling upwards round his head like flights of golden birds.
The alarm beat unceasingly.
People ran—flayed, seared, despairing.
State liquor stores were burning.
How many hungry souls fell upon the gratis vodka! And the fire-water ate into their hearts. And the miserable creatures writhed in the dark-blue, unbearable flame.
The alarm beat unceasingly.
People went out of their minds from the terror. Mothers could not find their children. Children were dragging about heavy loads. No one dared to stay under any roof that still survived. They fled their homes, finding their way into the street. They searched for the arsonists. It seemed they were picking up the scent … Dark-robed women snooped about the undersides of house gates. Old Semion the watchman, carelessly lighting up his pipe, was torn limb from limb. The little soldier, the Old Tabeliever, had his arm torn off. Someone was tossed into the fire. Someone else had his arm torn off as well. Another was rent apart.
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