Fifty-Two Stories

“Yes, yes, indeed. So let’s get back to the main thing,” Vlasich said and stood up. “I’m telling you, Petrusha, our conscience is clear. We weren’t married in church, but our marriage is perfectly legitimate—it’s not for me to prove and not for you to judge. Your thinking is as free as mine, and, thank God, we can’t have any disagreement on that account. As for our future, that shouldn’t alarm you. I’ll work till I sweat blood, I won’t sleep nights—in short, I’ll pour all my strength into making Zina happy. Her life will be beautiful. You ask if I’ll be able to do it? I will, brother! When a man thinks about one and the same thing every moment, it’s not hard for him to achieve what he wants. But let’s go to Zina. She’ll be so glad!”

Pyotr Mikhailych’s heart pounded. He got up and followed Vlasich into the front hall and from there into the reception room. In this enormous, gloomy room there was only a piano and a long row of old chairs with bronze trimming, on which no one ever sat. On the piano one candle was burning. From the reception room they silently passed into the dining room. It was also vast and uninviting. In the middle of the room stood a round extension table on six fat legs, and only one candle. The clock, in a big red case that resembled an icon case, showed half past two.

Vlasich opened the door to the next room and said:

“Zinochka, Petrusha’s here!”

At once there was the sound of hurrying footsteps and Zina came into the dining room, tall, buxom, and very pale, dressed the way Pyotr Mikhailych had last seen her at home—in a black skirt and a red blouse with a big buckle at the waist. She embraced her brother with one arm and kissed him on the temple.

“Such a thunderstorm!” she said. “Grigory went out somewhere, and I was left alone in the whole house.”

She was not embarrassed and looked at her brother candidly and directly, as at home. Looking at her, Pyotr Mikhailych also stopped feeling embarrassed.

“But you’re not afraid of a thunderstorm,” he said, sitting down at the table.

“No, but the rooms here are enormous, the house is old and jingles all over from the thunder, like a cupboard full of dishes. A charming little house, generally,” she went on, sitting down facing her brother. “Here, in any room you like, there’s some sort of pleasant memory. In my room, just imagine, Grigory’s grandfather shot himself.”

“In August there’ll be money, we’ll renovate the cottage in the garden,” said Vlasich.

“For some reason during thunderstorms I remember the grandfather,” Zina went on. “And in this dining room a man was flogged to death.”

“That’s an actual fact,” Vlasich confirmed and looked wide-eyed at Pyotr Mikhailych. “In the ’forties this estate was rented by a certain Olivier, a Frenchman. His daughter’s portrait is still lying here in the attic. A very pretty girl. This Olivier, my father told me, despised Russians for their ignorance and mocked them cruelly. So, for instance, he demanded that the priest take off his hat a half mile before he passed the manor house, and that church bells be rung each time the Olivier family drove through the village. With the serfs and the lowly of the world in general, of course, he showed even less ceremony. Once a man came down the road here, one of the most kindhearted sons of wandering Russia, something like Gogol’s seminarian Khoma Brut.⁵ He asked to spend the night, the clerks liked him, and they kept him on in the office. There are many variations. Some say the seminarian stirred up the peasants, others that Olivier’s daughter supposedly fell in love with him. I don’t know which is right, but one fine evening Olivier summoned him here and interrogated him, then ordered him beaten. You see, he was sitting at this table drinking Bordeaux, and the stablemen were beating the seminarian. It must have been real torture. By morning the man died from it, and they hid the body somewhere. They say it was thrown into Count Koltovich’s pond. A case was opened, but the Frenchman paid several thousand to the proper person and left for Alsace. Incidentally, the term of his lease was also up, so the matter ended there.”

“What scoundrels!” Zina said and shuddered.

“My father remembered Olivier and his daughter very well. He said she was a remarkable beauty and an eccentric besides. I think that that seminarian did all of it at once: stirred up the peasants and enticed the daughter. Maybe he wasn’t a seminarian, but some sort of incognito.”