The Russian Century: A Hundred Years of Russian Lives

This explanation appeared to Nanny implausible in the highest degree.

“Well, my dear, anybody can see you don’t even know how to tell a lie,” she said with contempt.

“A likely story . . . when did Maria Vasilievna take it into her head to start treating you to jam?”

“Nanny dear, I’m not lying! It’s the God’s honest truth. You can ask her yourself. I was heating up her irons for her yesterday, and that’s why she treated me to the jam. But she ordered me, ‘Don’t show it to Nanny, or else she’ll scold me for pampering you.’ ”

“All right then, we’ll get to the bottom of this thing tomorrow morning,” Nanny decided. And in anticipation of morning she locked Feklusha up in a dark closet, from which her sobbing could be heard for a long while afterward. The next morning, the investigation began.

Maria Vasilievna was a seamstress who had been living in our house for many years. She was not a serf but a freewoman and enjoyed greater respect than the rest of the servants. She had her own room, in which she dined on food from the master’s table. She held herself very proudly in general and kept apart from all the other servants. She was highly regarded in our house because she was such a complete mistress of her craft. People said of her that she had “golden hands.” She was, I imagine, getting on toward forty by then. Her face was thin and sickly-looking, with huge dark eyes. She was homely, but I recall that the grownups always said of her the she looked distingue, that “you’d never take her for an ordinary seamstress.” She dressed immaculately and kept her room in perfect order, even with certain pretensions to elegance. There were always pots of geraniums on her windowsill, her walls were hung with cheap pictures and, on the shelf in the corner, various porcelain articles were set out which I highly admired as a child—a swan with a gilt beak, a lady’s slipper painted all over with pink flowers.

We children found Maria Vasilievna especially interesting because there was a story connected with her. In her youth she had been a beautiful, strapping young woman, a serf in the household of a certain landowner’s widow who had a grown son, an Army officer. This son came home on leave and presented Maria Vasilievna with a few silver coins. By ill luck the mistress entered the serf-girls’ room at that very moment, and she saw the money in Maria Vasilievna’s hands.

Sofiia Kovalevskaia, A Thief in the House

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“Where did you get it?” she asked, and Maria Vasilievna took such a fright that instead of answering, she swallowed the coins. She became ill at once. Her face turned black, and she fell choking on the floor. They barely managed to save her life. She was ill for a very long time, and her beauty and freshness vanished forever. Shortly after this episode the old mistress died, and the young master gave Maria Vasilievna her freedom.

We children were entranced by this story of the swallowed coins, and we often hung around Maria Vasilievna begging her to tell us how it had all happened. She used to visit the nursery rather often, even though she and Nanny were not on the best of terms. And we too loved to run to her room, especially at twilight, when she willy-nilly had to put her sewing aside. She would sit down by the window then and, leaning her head on her hand, would begin singing various sentimental, old-fashioned romances in a plaintive voice: “Among the Even Plains” or “Black Flower, Sad Flower.”

Her singing was terribly dismal but I loved listening to it, even though it always made me feel sad afterwards. Sometimes it would be interrupted by terrible attacks of coughing, which had been tormenting her for many years and which threatened to tear her dry, flat chest apart.

When, on the morning after the incident with Feklusha, Nanny asked Maria Vasilievna, “Is it true that you gave the girl some jam?” the seamstress, as might have been expected, responded with an expression of astonishment.

“Whatever have you got into your head, Naniushka?” she answered in an offended tone. “Would I pamper the brat like that? Why, I don’t even have any jam for myself!”

So now it was all clear. And yet Feklusha’s insolence was so great that she went on insisting she was innocent in spite of the seamstress’s categorical assertion.

“Maria Vasilievna! As God is watching—did you forget? You called me last night yourself, yes, you did, you praised me for heating up the irons, and you gave me the jam,” she kept on repeating in a desperate voice breaking with sobs, and shaking all over as if in a fever.

“You must be sick and raving, Feklusha,” Maria Vasilievna answered calmly, her pale, bloodless face betraying no trace of emotion. And now neither Nanny nor anyone else in the household had any further doubt of Fek-lusha’s guilt. The culprit was taken away and locked into a closet far from all the other rooms.