The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories

“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 strokes, 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