Fifty-Two Stories

CHAPTER ONE / MISBEHAVIOR

A young, rusty-red dog, half dachshund and half mutt, her muzzle very much resembling a fox’s, was running up and down the sidewalk, looking anxiously in all directions. Every once in a while she stopped and whined, shifting from one frozen paw to the other, trying to figure out how she could have gotten lost.

She remembered perfectly well the events of the day that had brought her to this unfamiliar sidewalk.

The day had begun when her master, the cabinetmaker Luka Alexandrych, put on his hat, took some wooden thing wrapped in a red handkerchief under his arm, and hollered:

“Kashtanka, let’s go!”

Hearing her name, the half dachshund half mutt came out from under the workbench where she slept on the wood shavings, stretched sweetly, and ran after her master.

Luka Alexandrych’s customers lived terribly far apart, so on his way from one to the other he had to stop several times at a tavern to fortify himself. Kashtanka remembered that on the way she had behaved very improperly. She was so overjoyed to be going for a walk that she jumped about, barked at trolley cars, dashed into backyards, and chased other dogs. The cabinetmaker kept losing sight of her and would stop and shout angrily at her. Once, with an avid expression on his face, he even grabbed her foxlike ear in his fist, tugged at it, and said slowly, “Drop…dead…you…pest!”

Having seen his customers, Luka Alexandrych had stopped at his sister’s, where he had a bite to eat and a few more drinks. From his sister’s, he went to see a bookbinder he knew; from the bookbinder’s, he went to a tavern; from the tavern to a friend’s house, and so on. In short, by the time Kashtanka found herself on the unfamiliar sidewalk, it was getting dark and the cabinetmaker was as drunk as a fish. He waved his arms and, sighing deeply, moaned:

“In sin did my mother conceive me in my womb! Oh, my sins, my sins! So now we’re going down the street and looking at the streetlights, but when we die, we’ll burn in the fiery hyena…”¹

Or else he fell into a good-natured tone, called Kashtanka to him, and said:

“You, Kashtanka, are an insect creature and nothing more. Compared to a man, you’re like a carpenter compared to a cabinetmaker…”

While he was talking to her in that fashion, suddenly there had come a burst of music. Kashtanka looked around and saw a regiment of soldiers marching down the street straight at her. She couldn’t stand music, which upset her nerves, and she rushed around and howled. But to her great surprise, the cabinetmaker, instead of being frightened, yelping and barking, grinned broadly, stood at attention, and gave a salute. Seeing that her master did not protest, Kashtanka howled even louder, then lost her head and rushed to the other side of the street.

When she came to her senses, the music had already stopped and the regiment was gone. She rushed back across the street to where she had left her master, but alas, the cabinetmaker was also gone. She rushed ahead, then back, ran across the street once more, but it was as if the cabinetmaker had vanished into thin air…Kashtanka began sniffing the sidewalk, hoping to find her master by the smell of his tracks, but some scoundrel had just walked past in new galoshes, and now all the delicate scents were mixed with the strong smell of rubber, so that it was impossible to tell one from the other.

Kashtanka ran here and there but could not find her master, and meanwhile night was falling. The lamps were lit on both sides of the street, and lights appeared in the windows. Big, fluffy snowflakes were falling, painting the sidewalks, the horses’ backs, and the coachmen’s hats white, and the darker it grew, the whiter everything became. Unknown customers ceaselessly walked back and forth past Kashtanka, obstructing her field of vision and shoving her with their feet. (Kashtanka divided the whole of mankind into two very unequal parts: the masters and the customers; there was an essential difference between them: the first had the right to beat her, the second she herself had the right to nip on the calves.) The customers were hurrying somewhere and did not pay the slightest attention to her.

When it was quite dark, Kashtanka was overcome by fear and despair. She huddled in some doorway and began to weep bitterly. She was tired from her long day’s travels with Luka Alexandrych, her ears and paws were cold, and besides she was terribly hungry. Only twice in the whole day had she had anything to eat: at the bookbinder’s she had lapped up some paste, and in one of the taverns she had found a sausage skin near the counter—that was all. If she had been a human being, she would probably have thought:

“No, it’s impossible to live this way! I’ll shoot myself!”