The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories

The Devil-Chase

I

It is a rite that can be seen only in Moscow, and then not otherwise than with special luck and patronage.

I saw a devil-chase from beginning to end thanks to a lucky concurrence of circumstances, and want to record it for true connoisseurs and lovers of what is serious and majestic in our national taste.

Though I’m a nobleman on one side, on the other I’m close to “the people”: my mother is from the merchant estate. She left a very wealthy house to marry, but left it by eloping, out of love for my father. My late father had a way with the ladies, and what he intended, he achieved. Thus he also succeeded with my mother, but for that adroitness my mother’s parents gave her nothing except, of course, her wardrobe, linens, and God’s mercy, which were obtained along with forgiveness and the parental blessing, forever inviolable. My old folks lived in Orel, lived in want, but proudly, asked nothing of my mother’s rich relations, and had no contacts with them. However, when it came to my going to university, my mother began to say:

“Please, go to Uncle Ilya Fedoseevich and pay him my respects. It’s not humiliating, one should honor one’s older relations—and he’s my brother, and a pious man at that, and carries great weight in Moscow. At all the official greetings, he always brings the bread and salt … always stands in front of the others with the dish or the icon … is received at the governor general’s and the metropolitan’s …¹ He may give you good advice.”

I did not believe in God at that time, having studied Filaret’s catechism,² but I did love my mother, and one day I thought: “Here I’ve been in Moscow for about a year and still haven’t carried out my mother’s will. Why don’t I go right now to Uncle Ilya Fedoseich, convey my mother’s respects to him, and see what he really has to teach me?”

By childhood habit I was respectful of my elders—especially those who were known to both the metropolitan and the governor general.

I rose, brushed myself off, and went to Uncle Ilya Fedoseich.

II

It was somewhere around six in the evening. The weather was warm, mild, and grayish—in short, very nice. My uncle’s house was well-known—one of the foremost houses in Moscow—everybody knew it. Only I had never gone there, and had never seen my uncle, even from afar.

I boldly went, however, reasoning: if he receives me, good, and if he doesn’t, he doesn’t.

I come to the courtyard; by the porch stand horses, fierce, raven black, their manes flying loose, their hide shining like costly satin, and they are hitched to a carriage.

I go up to the porch and say: thus and so, I’m his nephew, a student, I ask to be announced to Ilya Fedoseich. And the servants reply:

“He’ll be coming down presently—to go for a ride.”

A very simple figure appears, a Russian one, but quite majestic—there is a resemblance to my mother in his eyes, but the expression is different—what’s known as a solid man.

I introduced myself; he heard me out silently, quietly gave me his hand, and said:

“Get in, we’ll go for a ride.”

I was about to decline, but somehow faltered and got in.

“To the park,” he ordered.

The fierce horses galloped off at once, with only the rear of the carriage bouncing, and when we left town, they raced even more swiftly.

We sat there not saying a word, only I could see that the edge of my uncle’s top hat was cutting into his forehead, and on his face there was that sort of wry scowl that comes from boredom.

He looked this way and that, and once cast a glance at me and, out of the blue, said:

“No life at all.”

I didn’t know what to reply, and said nothing.

We rode on and on. I think, “Where’s he taking me?” and I begin to suspect that I’ve landed in some sort of adventure.

And my uncle suddenly seems to have made up his mind about something and starts giving orders to the coachman one after another:

“Turn right, turn left. Here at the Yar—stop!”³

I see many waiters pouring out of the restaurant to meet us, and they all bend almost double before my uncle, but he does not stir from the carriage and summons the owner. They run off. A Frenchman appears—also very respectful, but my uncle does not stir: he taps the ivory knob of his cane against his teeth and says:

“How many superfluous ones are there?”

“Up to thirty in the main rooms,” replies the Frenchman, “and three private rooms are occupied.”

“Out with them all!”

“Very good.”

“It’s now seven,” my uncle says, looking at his watch. “I’ll come back at eight. Will you be ready?”

“No,” he replies, “by eight is difficult … there are many reservations … but by nine, if you please, there won’t be a single stranger in the restaurant.”

“Very well.”

“And what shall we prepare?”

“Gypsies, naturally.”

“What else?”

“An orchestra.”

“One?”

“No, better two.”

“Send for Ryabyka?”

“Naturally.”

“French ladies?”

“No need for them!”

“The cellar?”

“All of it.”

“From the kitchen?”

“The carte!”

They brought the menu for the day.

My uncle glanced and, it seems, did not really see anything, and perhaps did not wish to. He tapped the paper with his stick and said:

“All of it, for a hundred persons.”

And with that he rolled up the menu and put it in his kaftan.

The Frenchman was both glad and hesitant:

“I can’t serve it all to a hundred persons,” he said. “There are very expensive things here, of which there are only five or six portions in the whole restaurant.”

“And how am I to sort out my guests? Whoever wants something should get it. Understand?”

“Yes.”

“Otherwise, brother, even Ryabyka won’t help. Drive!”

We left the restaurateur with his lackeys at the entrance and went rolling off.

By then I was fully convinced that this was not for me, and I tried to take my leave, but my uncle didn’t hear me. He was very preoccupied. We drove along, on the way stopping now one person, now another.

“Nine o’clock at the Yar!” my uncle said briefly to each of them. And the people to whom he said this were all such venerable old men, and they all took their hats off and just as briefly answered my uncle:

“Your honored guest, Fedoseich.”

I don’t remember how many people we stopped in that fashion, but I think it was some twenty, and just then it turned nine o’clock, and we rolled up to the Yar again. A whole crowd of waiters poured out to meet us and took my uncle under the arms, and on the porch the Frenchman himself brushed the dust off his trousers with a napkin.

“All clear?” asked my uncle.

“One general,” he said, “is lingering in a private room, he begged to be allowed to finish …”

“Out with him at once!”

“He’ll be finished very soon.”

“I don’t care—I’ve given him enough time—let him go and finish eating on the grass.”

I don’t know how it would have ended, but at that moment the general came out with two ladies, got into his carriage, and left, and the guests my uncle had invited to the park began driving up to the entrance one by one.

III

The restaurant was tidied up, clean, and free of customers. Only in one of the rooms sat a giant, who met my uncle silently and, without saying a word to him, took his stick and hid it away somewhere.

My uncle surrendered the stick without the least protest, and also gave the giant his wallet and change purse.

This massive, gray-haired giant was the same Ryabyka of whom I had heard the incomprehensible order given to the restaurateur. He was some sort of “children’s teacher,” but here he obviously also had some special duties. He was as necessary here as the Gypsies, the orchestra, and the whole get-up, which instantly appeared in full muster. Only I didn’t understand what the teacher’s role was, but that was still early on in my inexperience.

The brightly lit restaurant was in operation: music thundered, Gypsies strolled about and snacked from the buffet, my uncle inspected the rooms, the garden, the grotto, and the galleries. He looked everywhere to see if there were any “non-belongers,” and beside him walked the inseparable teacher; but when they came back to the main dining room, where everyone was gathered, a great difference between them could be noticed. The campaign had not affected them in the same way: the teacher was as sober as when he set out, but my uncle was completely drunk.

How it could have happened so quickly, I don’t know, but he was in excellent spirits; he sat in the chairman’s place, and the show began.

The door was locked, and, as was said of the whole world, “neither could they pass from them to us, nor from us to them.”⁴ We were separated by a gulf, a gulf of everything—wine, viands, and, above all, a gulf of carousing—I don’t want to say outrageous, but wild, furious, such as I’m unable to describe. And that shouldn’t be asked of me, because, seeing myself squeezed in there and cut off from the world, I grew timid and hastened to get drunk the sooner myself. And therefore I will not give an account of how the night went on, because it is not given to my pen to describe all of it; I remember only two outstanding battle episodes and the finale, but in them was also contained what was most dreadful.

IV

Some Ivan Stepanovich was announced, who, as it turned out later, was a prominent Moscow factory owner and businessman.

That produced a pause.

“But you were told: let nobody in,” my uncle replied.

“He begs very much.”

“Let him take himself off where he came from.”

The man went out, but timidly came back.

“Ivan Stepanovich asked me to tell you,” he says, “that he very humbly begs.”

“Never mind, I don’t want to.”

Others said: “Let him pay a fine.”

“No! Drive him away. No need for a fine.”

But the man reappears and says still more timidly:

“He agrees to pay any fine, because at his age, he says, it’s very sad for him to be excluded from your company.”

My uncle rose and flashed his eyes, but at the same moment Ryabyka rose to his full height between him and the lackey: with his left hand he flung the servant away, somehow with one tweak, like a chicken, and with his right hand he seated my uncle in his place.

From among the guests voices were heard in favor of Ivan Stepanovich, asking to let him in—take a hundred-rouble fine from him for the musicians and let him in.

“He’s one of us, a pious old man, where is he to go now? If he’s driven away, he may make a scandal in front of the small fry. We should take pity on him.”

My uncle heeded them and said:

“If it won’t be my way, it won’t be yours either, it will be God’s way: I grant Ivan Stepanovich admittance, only he must beat the kettledrum.”

The messenger came back:

“He begs to pay a fine instead.”

“Devil take him! If he doesn’t want to drum, he doesn’t have to—let him go wherever he likes.”

A little while later Ivan Stepanovich yielded and sent to tell them he agreed to beat the kettledrum.

“Let him come here.”

A man of great height and respectable appearance enters: stern aspect, extinct eyes, bent spine, and tufty, greenish beard. He tries to joke and greet them all, but is put in his place.

“Later, later, all of that later,” my uncle shouts at him. “Now beat the drum.”

“Beat the drum!” others join in.

“Music! For the kettledrum!”

The orchestra strikes up a loud piece—the staid old man takes the wooden drumsticks and starts banging on the kettledrum in time and out of time.

Infernal noise and shouting; everybody’s pleased and cries out:

“Louder!”

Ivan Stepanovich puts more into it.

“Louder, louder, still louder!”

The old man bangs with all his might, like the Black King in Freiligrath,⁵ and finally the goal is achieved: the kettledrum gives out a desperate crack, the skin splits, everybody laughs, the noise is unimaginable, and for breaking through the kettledrum Ivan Stepanovich is relieved of a five-hundred-rouble fine to benefit the musicians.

He pays, wipes his sweat, sits down, and while everybody drinks his health, he, to his own no small horror, notices his son-in-law among the guests.

Again laughter, again noise, and so it goes until I lose my senses. In rare moments of lucidity I see Gypsy women dancing, see my uncle pumping his legs while sitting in place; then he gets up in front of someone, but Ryabyka at once appears between them, and somebody goes flying to one side, and my uncle sits down, and before him stand two forks stuck into the table. Now I understand Ryabyka’s role.

But here the freshness of a Moscow morning breathed through the window. Once more I was conscious of something, but as if only so as to doubt my own reason. There was combat and the chopping of wood: I heard crashing, thunder, trees were swaying, virgin, exotic trees, behind them some swarthy faces huddled in a corner, and here, at the roots, terrible axes flashed and my uncle chopped, and old Ivan Stepanovich chopped … Right out of a medieval picture.

This was the “taking captive” of the Gypsy women hiding in the grotto beyond the trees. The Gypsy men did not defend them and left them to their own devices. There was no sorting out joke from seriousness here: plates, chairs, stones from the grotto flew through the air, yet the cutting of trees went on, and Ivan Stepanovich and my uncle performed most valiantly of all.

At last the fortress was taken: the Gypsy women were seized, embraced, kissed, and each of them had a hundred-rouble note stuck behind her corsage,^* and that was the end of it …

Yes, all at once everything quieted down … everything ended. No one had interfered, but enough was enough. The feeling was that, as there had been “no life” without it, so now there was enough of it.

There had been enough for everyone, and everyone had had enough. Maybe it was also of importance that the teacher had said it was “time for classes,” but anyhow it was all the same: Walpurgisnacht⁶ was over, and “life” was beginning again.

The public did not go driving off, did not say good-bye, but simply vanished; there was no longer any orchestra or Gypsies. The restaurant was a picture of total devastation: not a single drape, not a single intact mirror, even the overhead chandelier lay all in pieces on the floor, and its crystal prisms crunched under the feet of the barely stirring, exhausted waiters. My uncle sat alone on the sofa and drank kvass; now and then he recalled something and pumped his legs. Beside him stood the hurrying-to-class Ryabyka.

They were brought the bill—a short one: “rounded off.”

Ryabyka read the bill attentively and demanded a reduction of fifteen hundred roubles. They didn’t argue much with him and totted it up: it came to seventeen thousand, and Ryabyka, after a second look, declared it fair. My uncle said monosyllabically: “Pay,” and then put his hat on and motioned for me to follow him.

To my horror, I saw that he had not forgotten anything and that it was impossible for me to escape from him. I found him extremely frightening and couldn’t imagine remaining alone with him in this state. He had taken me along without saying even two reasonable words, and now he was dragging me with him and I couldn’t get away. What would become of me? All my drunkenness disappeared. I was simply afraid of this dreadful wild beast, with his incredible fantasy and terrifying scope. And meanwhile we were already leaving: in the front hall we were surrounded by a throng of lackeys. My uncle dictated, “Five to each”—and Ryabyka paid it out; less was paid to the porters, watchmen, policemen, gendarmes, who had all been of some service to us. That was all satisfied. But it all made up quite a sum, and there were also cabbies standing over the whole visible expanse of the park. There was no end of them, and they were also all waiting for us—waiting for dear old Ilya Fedoseich, “in case His Honor needs to send for something.”

We found out how many they were, handed them each three roubles, and my uncle and I got into the carriage, where Ryabyka gave him his wallet.

Ilya Fedoseich took a hundred-rouble bill from the wallet and gave it to Ryabyka.

Ryabyka turned the bill over in his hands and said rudely:

“Too little.”

My uncle added two more twenty-fives.

“That’s still not enough: there wasn’t a single scandal.”

My uncle added a third twenty-five, after which the teacher handed him his stick and bowed out.

V

The two of us were left alone and racing back to Moscow, while all that cabby riffraff came whooping and rattling at full speed behind us. I didn’t understand what they wanted, but my uncle did. It was outrageous: they wanted to grab some smart money as well, and so, in the guise of paying special honor to Ilya Fedoseich, they exposed his highly esteemed self to shame before the whole world.

Moscow was on our noses and all in view—all in the beautiful morning brightness, in the light smoke of hearths and the peaceful ringing of church bells summoning to prayer.

To right and left of the city gate there were grocery stores. My uncle stopped at the first of them, went to a linden barrel that stood by the door, and asked:

“Honey?”

“Honey.”

“How much for the barrel?”

“We sell it by the pound for small change.”

“Sell me the whole thing: come up with a price.”

I don’t remember, I think he came up with seventy or eighty roubles.

My uncle threw him the money.

And our cortège closed in.

“Do you love me, my fine city cabbies?”

“Sure enough, we’re always at Your Honor’s …”

“You feel an attachment?”

“A strong attachment.”

“Take the wheels off.”

They were puzzled.

“Quickly, quickly!” my uncle commanded.

The most light-footed of them, some twenty men, climbed under the boxes, took out wrenches, and began unscrewing the nuts.

“Good,” said my uncle. “Now spread honey on them.”

“But sir!”

“Spread it.”

“Such a good thing … more interesting in the mouth.”

“Spread it.”

And, without further insistence, my uncle got back into the carriage, and we raced on, and they, many as they were, were all left standing with their wheels off over the honey, which they probably did not spread on the wheels, but just appropriated or sold back to the grocer. In any case they abandoned us, and we found ourselves in a bathhouse. Here I expected my end had come, and I sat neither dead nor alive in the marble bath, while my uncle stretched out on the floor, but not simply, not in an ordinary pose, but somehow apocalyptically. The whole enormous mass of his stout body rested on the floor only by the very tips of his toes and fingers, and on these fine points of support his red body trembled under the spray of the cold water showered on him, and he roared with the restrained roar of a bear tearing the ring from its nose. This lasted for half an hour, during which he went on trembling like jelly on a shaky table, until he finally jumped up all at once, asked for kvass, and we got dressed and went “to the Frenchman” on Kuznetsky.⁷

Here we both had a slight trim, a slight curling and brushing up, and then we crossed the city on foot—to his shop.

With me there was still no talk, no release. Only once he said:

“Wait, not all at once. What you don’t understand—you’ll understand with the years.”

In the shop he prayed, looked everybody over with a proprietary eye, and stood at the counter. The outside of the vessel was clean, but inside there still lurked a deep foulness seeking its own cleansing.

I saw it and now stopped being afraid. It interested me. I wanted to see how he was going to deal with himself: by abstinence or some sort of grace?

At around ten o’clock he became terribly restless, kept waiting and looking for a neighbor, so that the three of us could go for tea—with three it’s a whole five kopecks cheaper. The neighbor didn’t come: he had died a galloping death.

My uncle crossed himself and said:

“We’ll all die.”

This did not disconcert him, despite the fact that for forty years they had gone to have tea together at the Novotroitsky Tavern.

We invited a neighbor from across the street and went more than once to sample this or that, but all in a sober way. For the whole day I sat and went about with him, and towards evening my uncle sent for the carriage to go to the All-Glorious.⁸

There they also knew him and met him with the same respect as at the Yar.

“I want to fall down before the All-Glorious and weep for my sins. And this—allow me to introduce him—is my nephew, my sister’s son.”

“Welcome,” said the nuns, “welcome. From whom else if not you should the All-Glorious accept repentance—ever our cloister’s benefactor. Now is a very good moment … the vigil.”

“Let it finish—I like it without people, and so you can make a blessed darkness for me.”

They made darkness for him; put out all the icon lamps except one or two and the big green lamp in front of the All-Glorious herself.

My uncle did not fall, but crashed to his knees, then prostrated himself, beat his brow against the floor, sobbed, and lay stock still.

I sat with two nuns in a dark corner by the door. There was a long pause. My uncle went on lying there, unspeaking, unheeding. It seemed to me that he was asleep, and I even said so to the nuns. The more experienced sister thought a little, shook her head, and, lighting a thin candle, clutched it in her fist and went very, very quietly to the penitent. She quietly tiptoed around him, shook her head negatively, and whispered:

“It’s working … and with a twist.”

“What makes you say so?”

She bent down, gesturing for me to do the same, and said:

“Look straight through the light, where his feet are.”

“I see.”

“Look, what a struggle!”

I peer closely and indeed notice some sort of movement: my uncle is lying reverently in a prayerful position, but in his feet it’s as if there are two cats fighting—now one, now the other attacking, and so rapidly, with such leaps.

“Mother,” I say, “where did these cats come from?”

“It only seems to you that they are cats,” she replies, “but they are not cats, they are temptation: see, in spirit he burns towards heaven, but his feet are still moving towards hell.”

I see that with his feet my uncle is indeed still dancing last night’s trepak,⁹ but in spirit is he now really burning towards heaven?

As if in reply to that, he suddenly sighs and cries out loudly:

“I will not rise until thou forgivest me! Thou only art holy, and we are all accursed devils!”—and bursts into sobs.

He sobbed so that the three of us began to weep and sob with him: Lord, do unto him according to his prayer.

And we don’t notice that he is already standing next to us and saying to me in a soft, pious voice:

“Let’s go—we’ll manage.”

The nuns ask:

“Were you granted, dear man, to see the gleam?”

“No,” he says, “I was not granted the gleam, but here … here’s how it was.”

He clenched his fist and raised it, as one raises a boy by his hair.

“You were raised?”

“Yes.”

The nuns started crossing themselves, and so did I, and my uncle explained:

“Now,” he says, “I’m forgiven! Right from above, from under the coopola, the open right hand gathered all my hair together and lifted me straight to my feet …”

And now he’s not outcast and is happy. He gave a generous gift to the convent where he had prayed and had been granted this miracle, and he felt “life” again, and he sent my mother her full share of the dowry, and me he introduced to the good faith of the people.

Since then I have become acquainted with the people’s taste for falling and rising … And this is what’s known as the devil-chase, “which drives out the demon of wrong-mindedness.” One can be granted this, I repeat, only in Moscow, and then only through special luck or the great patronage of the most venerable old men.

* Bodice. Trans.