Fifty-Two Stories

Once on a Sunday in July, Dmitri Petrovich and I, having nothing to do, went to the big village of Klushino to buy some things for supper. While we made the round of the shops, the sun went down and evening came on, an evening I will probably never forget all my life. We bought cheese that resembled soap and petrified sausage that smelled of tar, then went to the inn to ask if they had beer. Our coachman drove to the smithy to have the horses shod, and we told him we would wait for him by the church. We walked, talked, laughed at our purchases, and behind us, silently and with a mysterious look, like a sleuth, followed a man known to us in the district by the rather strange nickname of Forty Martyrs. This Forty Martyrs was none other than Gavrila Severov, or simply Gavryushka, who had worked for a short time as my valet and had been fired for drunkenness. He had also worked for Dmitri Petrovich and had been fired by him for exactly the same sin. He was a hardened drunkard, and in general his whole life was as drunken and wayward as himself. His father had been a priest and his mother a noblewoman, meaning that by birth he had belonged to the privileged class, but however much I studied his wasted, deferential, eternally sweaty face, his red, already graying beard, his pathetic, ragged suit jacket and loose red shirt, I simply could not find even a trace of what is known in our society as privilege. He called himself educated and told of how he had studied at a seminary, where he did not finish his courses because he was expelled for smoking, then sang in a bishop’s choir and lived for two years in a monastery, from which he had also been expelled, not for smoking this time, but for “the weakness.” He had gone on foot all over two provinces, had made some sort of petitions to the consistory and various offices, had been tried four times. Finally, having landed in our district, he had worked as a servant, a forester, a huntsman, a beadle, had married a wanton widow—a scullery maid—and had sunk definitively into a subservient life. He became so accustomed to its squalor and squabbles that he himself spoke of his privileged origins with a certain mistrust, as of some sort of myth. At the time I am describing, he hung around without work, passing himself off as a farrier and a huntsman, and his wife vanished somewhere without a trace.

From the inn we went to the church and sat down on the porch to wait for the coachman. Forty Martyrs stood at a distance and put his hand to his mouth, so that he could cough into it respectfully when necessary. It was already dark; there was a strong smell of evening dampness and the moon was preparing to rise. In the clear, starry sky there were only two clouds just over our heads: one big, the other smaller; solitary, like a mother and child, they ran one after the other in the direction where the evening glow was fading.

“A fine day today,” said Dmitri Petrovich.

“In the extreme…,” Forty Martyrs agreed and coughed respectfully into his hand. “How is it, Dmitri Petrovich, that you kindly thought of coming here?” he began in an ingratiating voice, evidently trying to strike up a conversation.

Dmitri Petrovich did not reply. Forty Martyrs sighed deeply and said in a low voice, not looking at us:

“I suffer solely because of the matter for which I must answer to almighty God. Of course, I’m a lost man and without ability, but believe my conscience: without a crust of bread and worse off than a dog…Forgive me, Dmitri Petrovich!”

Silin was not listening and, propping his head on his fists, was thinking about something. The church stood at the end of the street, on a high bank, and through the grill of the fence we could see the river, the water-meadows on the other side, and the bright, crimson light of a bonfire, with dark people and horses moving around it. And further on from the bonfire more lights: this was a village…They were singing a song there.

On the river and here and there on the water-meadows mist was rising. High, narrow wisps of mist, thick and white as milk, hovered over the river, covering the reflections of the stars and catching at the willows. They changed their look every moment, and it seemed as if some embraced, others bowed, still others raised their arms to the sky in wide, clerical sleeves, as if praying…They probably suggested to Dmitri Petrovich a thought about ghosts and dead people, because he turned his face to me and asked, smiling sadly:

“Tell me, my dear fellow, why is it that when we want to tell something frightening, mysterious, and fantastic, we draw material not from life but inevitably from the world of ghosts and shades from beyond the grave?”

“What’s frightening is what’s incomprehensible.”

“And is life comprehensible to you? Tell me: do you understand life better than the world beyond the grave?”