The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories

When I realized that it was him they were torturing … I rushed … threw myself against the door, so as to run to him … but the door was locked … I don’t know myself what I wanted to do … I fell down, but on the floor I could hear still more clearly … And there was no knife, no nail, nothing to finish myself off with somehow … I took my own braid and wound it around my throat … I kept twisting and twisting, and only began to hear a ringing in my ears and to see circles, and then it all stopped … And I came to my senses in an unfamiliar place, in a big, bright shed … There were little calves there … many little calves, as much as ten—they’d come and lick my hand with their cold lips, thinking they were sucking at their mother … I woke up because it tickled … I looked around, wondering “Where am I?” I see a woman come in, an older woman, tall, all in blue calico, with a clean calico kerchief on her head, and her face is gentle.

The woman noticed that I was showing signs of life, and she was gentle with me and told me that I was in the calves’ shed on the count’s estate …

“It was there,” Lyubov Onisimovna explained, pointing towards the farthest corner of the half-dilapidated gray fence.

XV

She wound up in the cattle yard, because there were suspicions that she might have gone a bit crazy. People who became like beasts were tested among beasts, because cattlemen were elderly and sedate, and it was thought they could “look after” psychoses.

The old woman in calico with whom Lyubov Onisimovna had recovered herself was very kind, and her name was Drosida.

When she was ready for bed in the evening (my nanny continued), she herself made my bed from fresh oat chaff. She fluffed it up soft as down and says: “I’ll reveal everything to you, my girl. What will be will be, if you tell on me, but I’m just like you, and I didn’t dress in this calico all my life, but saw other things, only God forbid I should remember it, but I’ll tell you: don’t be distressed that you’re exiled to the cattle yard—it’s better in exile, only beware of this terrible falask.”

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.