The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories

The Toupee Artist

A Story Told on a Grave

(To the sacred memory of the blessed day of February 19, 1861)¹

Their souls will abide with the blessed.

FUNERAL CHANT

I

Many among us think that the only “artists” are painters and sculptors, and then only those who have been granted this title by the Academy, and they refuse to consider others artists. Sazikov and Ovchinnikov are for many no more than “silversmiths.” It is not so for other peoples: Heine mentions a tailor who “was an artist” and “had ideas,” and Worth made ladies’ dresses that are now called “works of art.”² Of one of them it was written recently that it “concentrates an abyss of fantasy in a basque waist.”

In America the artistic sphere is understood still more broadly: the famous American writer Bret Harte tells of the extraordinary fame of an “artist” there who “worked on the dead.”³ He endowed the faces of the deceased with various “comforting expressions,” which testified to the more or less happy state of their flown-off souls.

There were several degrees in this art—I remember three: “(1) serenity, (2) lofty contemplation, and (3) the bliss of immediate converse with God.” The artist’s fame corresponded to the high perfection of his work, that is, it was enormous, but, regrettably, the artist fell victim to the coarse crowd, which did not respect the freedom of artistic creativity. He was stoned to death for giving “the expression of blissful converse with God” to the face of a certain fraudulent banker, who had died after robbing the whole town. The swindler’s lucky heirs were moved by the wish to express their gratitude to their departed relation, but the artistic executor paid for it with his life …

We also had a master of this extraordinarily artistic sort here in Russia.

II

My younger brother’s nanny was a tall, dry, but very shapely old woman whose name was Lyubov Onisimovna. She was a former actress from the onetime theater of Count Kamensky in Orel,⁴ and it was in Orel that all I shall tell about further on took place.

My brother is seven years younger than I; consequently, when he was two years old and was being carried in Lyubov Onisimovna’s arms, I was already over nine and could easily understand the stories I was told.

Lyubov Onisimovna was not yet very old then, but her hair was snow white; the features of her face were fine and tender, and her tall figure was perfectly straight and astonishingly shapely, like a young girl’s.

My mother and my aunt, looking at her, said of her more than once that she had undoubtedly been a beauty in her time.

She was infinitely honest, meek, and sentimental; loved the tragic in life and … occasionally got drunk.

She used to take us for walks to the cemetery of the Trinity church, would always sit down on the same simple grave with an old cross, and often told me one thing or another.

It was there that I heard from her the story of the “toupee artist.”

III

He had been our nanny’s fellow in the theater; the difference was that she “performed on stage and danced dances,” while he was a “toupee artist”—that is, a hairdresser and makeup man, who “painted and dressed the hair” of all the count’s serf actresses. But he was not a simple, banal workman with a comb behind his ear and a tin of rouge mixed with grease in his hand; he was a man with ideas—in short, an artist.

In the words of Lyubov Onisimovna, nobody was able “to do impression on a face” so well as he.

I am unable to specify under precisely which of the counts Kamensky these two artistic natures blossomed. There are three known counts Kamensky, and the old-timers of Orel called them all “unheard-of tyrants.” Field Marshal Mikhail Fedotovich was murdered by his serfs in 1809 on account of his cruelty, and he had two sons: Nikolai, who died in 1811; and Sergei, who died in 1835.

A child in the forties, I still remember a huge, gray wooden building, with false windows painted crudely in soot and ochre, and surrounded by a long, half-dilapidated fence. This was the theater at the cursed country seat of Count Kamensky. It stood in a place where it could be very well seen from the cemetery of the Trinity church, and therefore when it happened that Lyubov Onisimovna wanted to tell something, she almost always began with the words:

“Look there, my dear … See how terrible it is?”

“Terrible, nanny.”

“Well, and what I’ll tell you now is still more terrible.”

Here is one of her stories about the toupee master Arkady, a sensitive and brave young man, who was very close to her heart.

IV

Arkady “did the hair and makeup” only for actresses. For men there was another hairdresser, and Arkady, if he occasionally went to “the men’s half,” did so only in cases when the count himself gave orders to “paint somebody up in a very noble way.” The main particularity of this artist’s touch with makeup was that he had certain notions, owing to which he could endow faces with the most subtle and diverse expressions.

“It happened that they would call him,” said Lyubov Onisimovna, “and say: ‘There should be such and such an impression on the face.’ Arkady would step back, tell the actor or actress to stand or sit before him, cross his arms on his chest, and think. And meanwhile he himself was the handsomest of the handsome, because he was of average height, but you couldn’t say how well built, a fine and proud little nose, and his eyes—angelic, kind, and a thick lock hung down beautifully over his eyes, so that he used to look as if from behind a misty cloud.”

In short, the toupee artist was handsome and “pleased everybody.”

“The count himself” also liked him and “distinguished him from everybody else, had him charmingly dressed, but kept him in the greatest strictness.” Not for anything did he want Arkady to cut, shave, and comb anyone but him, and for that he always kept him by his dressing room, and, except for the theater, Arkady could not go anywhere.

He was not even allowed to go to church for confession or communion, because the count himself did not believe in God, and could not bear the clergy, and once at Easter he set his wolfhounds on the priests from the Boris and Gleb cathedral as they carried the cross.^*

The count, in Lyubov Onisimovna’s words, was so terribly ugly from his habitual angrying that he resembled all beasts at once. But Arkady was able to endow even that beastlikeness, at least for a time, with such an impression, that when the count sat in his box in the evening, he even seemed grander than many.

Yet what the count’s nature lacked most, to his great vexation, was precisely grandeur and a “military impression.”

Thus, so that nobody else could make use of the services of such an inimitable artist as Arkady, he sat “all his life without leave and never in his born days saw money in his hands.” And he was then already over twenty-five, and Lyubov Onisimovna was going on nineteen. They were acquainted, of course, and there took place between them what happens at that age, that is, they fell in love with each other. But they could not speak of their love otherwise than in front of other people, in distant hints during makeup sessions.

To see each other alone was completely impossible and even unthinkable …

“We actresses,” Lyubov Onisimovna used to say, “were kept in the same way that wet nurses are kept in noble families; we were looked after by older women who had children, and if, God forbid, anything happened with one of us, those women’s children were all subjected to a terrible tyrannizing.”

The rule of chastity could be violated only by “himself”—the one who had established it.

V

Lyubov Onisimovna was at that time not only in the flower of her virginal beauty, but also in the most interesting moment in the development of her versatile talent: she “sang in potpourri choruses,” danced “the lead part in The Chinese Farm Girl,” and, feeling a calling for the tragic, “knew all the roles from looking.”

Precisely what years these were, I don’t know, but it so happened that the sovereign (whether Alexander Pavlovich or Nikolai Pavlovich, I can’t say),⁵ was passing through Orel and spent the night there, and in the evening was expected to be at Count Kamensky’s theater.

The count invited all the nobility to his theater (there was no paying for seats), and the performance put on was the very best. Lyubov Onisimovna was supposed to sing in a “potpourri” and dance in The Chinese Farm Girl, and then suddenly, during the last rehearsal, a flat fell and hurt the foot of the actress who was to perform “the duchesse de Bourblan” in the play.

I have never come across a role with that name anywhere, but Lyubov Onisimovna pronounced it in precisely that way.

The carpenters who dropped the flat were sent to the stable to be punished, and the injured actress was carried to her closet, but there was no one to play the role of the duchesse de Bourblan.

“Here,” Lyubov Onisimovna told me, “I volunteered, because I liked very much how the duchesse de Bourblan begged forgiveness at her father’s feet and died with her hair let down. And I myself had such wonderfully long, light brown hair, and Arkady used to do it up—a lovely sight.”

The count was very glad that the girl had unexpectedly volunteered and, on receiving assurances from the director that “Lyuba won’t spoil the role,” said:

“If she does, your back will answer for it, and take her these camarine⁶ earrings from me.”

“Camarine earrings” were both a flattering and a repulsive gift. They were a first token of the special honor of being raised for a brief moment to the position of the master’s odalisque. Soon after that, and sometimes straightaway, Arkady would be given the order to make the doomed girl up after the theater “with the innocent look of St. Cecilia,” and this symbolized innocence, all in white, in a coronet and with a lily in her hand, would be delivered to the count’s quarters.

“That,” said my nanny, “you can’t understand at your age, but it was the most terrible thing, especially for me, because I was dreaming of Arkady. I began to weep. I threw the earrings on the table and wept, and of how I was going to perform that evening I couldn’t even think.”

VI

And in those same fatal hours another matter—also fatal and trying—stole up on Arkady as well.

The count’s brother came from his country estate to present himself to the sovereign. He was still worse looking and had long been living in the country and never put on his uniform or shaved himself, because “his whole face was overgrown and bumpy.” Now, on this special occasion, he had to wear a uniform and put himself all in order and “in a military impression,” as form required.

And it required a great deal.

“Now nobody even understands how strict it was then,” my nanny said. “Form was observed in everything then, and there was a standard for important gentlemen as much in their faces as in their hairstyle, and for some it was terribly unbecoming, and it could happen that, if a man’s hair was done according to fashion, with a brushed-up forelock and side-whiskers, the face came out looking exactly like a muzhik’s balalaika without strings. Important gentlemen were terribly afraid of that. In these matters, skill in shaving and doing hair counted for a lot—how to clear a path on the face between the side-whiskers and mustache, and how to dispose the curls, and how to brush up—these same small things resulted in a face having a totally different fantasy. It was easier for civilians,” in my nanny’s words, “because no attentive regard was paid to them—they were only required to have a meek look; but from the military more was required—that they express meekness before their superiors, but before all others flaunt their boundless courage.”

It was this that Arkady was able to impart to the count’s ugly and insignificant face by means of his astonishing art.

VII

The count’s country brother was still uglier than the city one, and on top of that had “got so overgrowned” and “coarse in the face” from country life that he even felt it himself, and there was no one to tend to him, because he was very stingy in all things and had let his barber go to Moscow in exchange for quitrent, and besides, this second count’s face was all in big bumps, so that it was impossible to shave him without cutting it all over.

He arrived in Orel, summoned the town barbers, and said:

“If any of you can make me look like my brother, Count Kamensky, I’ll give him two gold pieces, but if he cuts me, I’m putting two pistols here on the table. If you do a good job—take the gold and go, but if you cut a single pimple or shave the side-whiskers wrong by a hair—I’ll kill you on the spot.”

He was just scaring them, because the pistols were loaded with blanks.

In Orel at that time there were few town barbers, and those mostly went around to the bathhouses with bowls, to apply cupping glasses and leeches, but had neither taste nor fantasy. They realized that themselves, and they all refused to “transfigure” Kamensky. “God be with you,” they thought, “and with your gold.”

“We can’t do what you want,” they say, “because we’re not worthy even to touch a person like you, and we don’t have the right razors, because ours are simple Russian razors, and for your face English razors are needed. Only the count’s Arkady can do it.”

The count ordered the town barbers thrown out on their ears, and they were glad to escape to freedom, while he himself goes to his older brother and says:

“Thus and so, brother, I’ve come to you with a big request: let me have your Arkashka before evening, so that he can get me into shape good and proper. I haven’t shaved for a long time, and the local barbers can’t do it.”

The count answers his brother:

“The local barbers are sure to be vile. I didn’t even know there were any here, because my dogs, too, are clipped by my own people. But as for your request, you’re asking an impossible thing, because I gave an oath that, as long as I live, Arkashka will tend to nobody but me. What do you think—can I change my word given before my own slave?”

The other says:

“Why not? You decreed it, you can also repeal it.”

The count-master replies that for him such an opinion is even strange.

“If I start acting that way myself,” he says, “what can I demand of my people after that? Arkashka has been told that I’ve decided so, and everybody knows it, and for that he’s kept better than any of them, and if he ever dares to touch anyone else but me with his art—I’ll have him flogged to death and sent for a soldier.”

His brother says:

“It’ll be one or the other: either flogged to death or sent for a soldier, you can’t do both.”

“All right,” says the count, “let it be as you say: not to death, but half to death, and then sent.”

“And that,” the other says, “is your last word?”

“Yes, my last.”

“And that’s all there is to it?”

“Yes, that’s all.”

“Well, in that case it’s fine, otherwise I’d have thought you hold your own brother cheaper than a bonded serf. Don’t change your word, then, but send me Arkashka to clip my poodle. And there it’s my business what he does.”

The count felt awkward denying him that.

“All right,” he says, “I’ll send him to clip your poodle.”

“Well, that’s all I need.”

He shook the count’s hand and left.

VIII

It was that time before evening, at dusk, in winter, when the lamps are lit.

The count summons Arkady and says:

“Go to my brother’s house and clip his poodle for him.”

Arkady asks:

“Will that be your only order?”

“Nothing more,” says the count. “But come back quickly to make up the actresses. Lyuba has to be made up for three roles today, and after the theater present her to me as St. Cecilia.”

Arkady staggered.

The count says:

“What’s the matter?”

Arkady replies:

“Sorry, I tripped on the rug.”

The count hints:

“Look out, that doesn’t bode well!”

But Arkady’s soul was in such a state that it was all the same to him whether it boded well or ill.

He had heard himself ordered to bring me as St. Cecilia, and, as if seeing and hearing nothing, he took his instruments in their leather case and left.

IX

He comes to the count’s brother, who already has candles lit by the mirror and again the two pistols next to it, and there are already not two gold pieces, but ten, and the pistols are loaded, not with blanks, but with Circassian bullets.

The count’s brother says:

“I haven’t got any poodle, but here’s what I want: do me up in the bravest fashion and you get ten gold pieces, but if you cut me, I’ll kill you.”

Arkady looked and looked, and suddenly—God knows what got into him—started clipping and shaving the count’s brother. In one minute he did it all in the best way, poured the gold into his pocket, and said:

“Good-bye.”

The other replies:

“Go, only I’d like to know: what made you so reckless that you dared to do it?”

Arkady says:

“Why I dared—only my breast and what’s inside it know.”

“Or maybe you’ve got a spell on you against bullets, so that you’re not afraid of pistols?”

“Pistols are nothing,” Arkady replies. “I wasn’t even thinking about them.”

“How is that? Did you dare think the count’s word is firmer than mine and I wouldn’t shoot you for cutting me? If there’s no spell on you, your life would have been over.”

At the mention of the count, Arkady gave another start, and as if in half sleep, said:

“There’s no spell on me, but there’s understanding from God: while you were raising your hand with a pistol to shoot me, I’d have cut your throat first with a razor.”

And with that he rushed out and came to the theater just on time and began doing my hair, and he was shaking all over. Each time he curled a lock of my hair, he bent down to blow on it, and whispered:

“Don’t be afraid, I’ll carry you off.”

X

The performance went well, because we were all like stone, used to fear and torment: whatever was in our hearts, we did our job so that nothing could be noticed.

From the stage we saw the count and his brother—the one resembling the other. When they came backstage, it was even hard to tell them apart. Only ours was very, very quiet, as if he’d grown kind. That always happened to him before the greatest ferocity.

And we all went numb and crossed ourselves. “Lord, have mercy upon us and save us! Whoever his bestiality falls upon!”

We didn’t know yet about the insanely desperate thing Arkasha had done, but Arkady himself, of course, understood that there would be no merciness for him, and he turned pale when the count’s brother glanced at him and quietly murmured something to our count. But I had very keen hearing, and I made it out.

“I advise you as a brother: beware of him when he shaves you.”

Ours only smiled quietly.

It seems Arkasha himself heard something, because, when he began making me up as the duchess for the last performance, he—something that never happened to him—put on so much powder that the French costumier started shaking me and said:

“Trop beaucoup, trop beaucoup!”^†—and brushed off the excess.

XI

But once the performance was over, they took the dress of the duchesse de Bourblan off of me and dressed me as Cecilia, in a simple white dress with no sleeves and only caught up in knots at the shoulders—we couldn’t stand this costume. And then Arkady comes to do my hair in the innocent way it’s done in pictures of St. Cecilia, and to fix a thin coronet around it, and he sees six men standing by the door of my little closet.

That meant that as soon as he does me up and goes back out the door, he’ll be seized at once and led off somewhere to be tortured. And the tortures with us were such that it would be a hundred times better to be condemned to death. Racking and drawing and squeezing the head with a twisted rope: there was all that. Punishment by the state authorities was nothing compared to it. There were secret cellars under the whole house where people lived chained up like bears. Going past, you could sometimes hear the chains clank and the fettered people moan. They probably wanted news of them to reach us or for the authorities to hear it, but the authorities did not dare even to think of intervening. And people languished there for a long time, sometimes all their lives. One man sat and sat and made up verses:

Snakes—he says—will come slithering and suck out your eyes,

Scorpions will pour poison on your face.⁷

Sometimes you whisper these verses to yourself and get terrified.

And others were even chained with bears, so the bear was only within an inch of getting his paws on them.

Only they didn’t do any of that with Arkady Ilyich, because as soon as he sprang into my little closet, he instantly seized the table and smashed out the whole window, and I don’t remember anything more after that …

I began to come to myself because my feet were very cold. I moved my legs and felt that I was all wrapped up in a wolfskin or bearskin coat, and it was pitcher-dark around, and the troika of horses is dashing along, and I don’t know where. And by me are two men in a heap, sitting in a wide sled—one holding me, that was Arkady Ilyich, and the other urging the horses on with all his might … Snow sprays from under the horses’ hooves, and the sled tilts every second to one side, then to the other. If we hadn’t been sitting right in the middle on the floor and holding each other with our arms, nobody could possibly have stayed whole.

And I hear their worried conversation, in agictation as always—all I can understand is:

“They’re coming, they’re coming! Faster, faster!” and nothing more.

Arkady Ilyich, when he noticed that I was coming to myself, bent over to me and said:

“Lyubushka, my dove! We’re being pursued … Do you agree to die if we can’t get away?”

I replied that I even agreed with joy.

He was hoping to get to Turkish Rushchuk,⁸ where many of our people had escaped from Kamensky.

And suddenly we flew cross the ice of some river, and ahead something like dwellings showed gray and dogs were barking; and the driver whipped up the troika, and the sled all at once heaved to one side, and Arkady and I tumbled out onto the snow, but he, and the sled, and the horses all vanished from sight.

Arkady says:

“Don’t be afraid, it has to be this way, because I don’t know the driver who brought us here, and he doesn’t know us. He hired out for three gold pieces to take you away, and he’s saved his own life. Now we’re in the hands of God: this is the village of Dry Orlitsa—a brave priest lives here who marries desperate couples and has helped many of our people. We’ll give him a gift, he’ll hide us till next evening and marry us, and in the evening the driver will come back, and then we’ll disappear.”

XII

We knocked at the door and went into the front hall. The priest himself opened, old, stocky, one front tooth missing, and his little old wife lit a candle. We both fell down at his feet.

“Save us, let us get warm and hide till next evening.”

The priest asks:

“What is it, my bright lights, have you come with stolen goods or are you just fugitives?”

Arkady says:

“We haven’t stolen anything, we’re running away from Count Kamensky’s ferocity and want to escape to Turkish Rushchuk, where not a few of our folk are living already. And we have our own money with us, and if we’re not found, we’ll give you a gold piece for one night’s lodging and three for marrying us. Marry us if you can, and if you can’t, we’ll get hitched in Rushchuk.”

The priest says:

“No, what do you mean, can’t? I can. Why do it in Rushchuk? Give me five gold pieces in all—I’ll hitch you here.”

Arkady gave him the money, and I took the camarine earrings from my ears and gave them to his wife.

The priest took the money and said:

“Ah, my bright lights, it would all be nothing—I’ve happened to hitch all sorts, what’s bad is that you’re the count’s. Though I’m a priest, his ferocity frightens me. Well, all right, let it be as God grants—just add one more, even if it’s a clipped one, and hide here.”

Arkady gave him a sixth gold piece, a whole one, and the priest then said to his wife:

“Why stand there, old woman? Give the girl a skirt at least, or some coat, it’s shameful to look at her—she’s all but naked.”

And then he wanted to take us to the church and hide us in a trunk of vestments. But the priest’s wife had just started dressing me behind a screen, when we suddenly heard someone ring the bell.

XIII

Our hearts both froze. But the priest whispered to Arkady:

“Well, my bright light, you clearly won’t get as far as the trunk of vestments, but quickly get under the featherbed.”

And to me he says:

“And you, my bright light, go here.”

He took and put me into the case of the clock, and locked it, and put the key in his pocket, and went to open the door. And we can hear there are many folk, and some are standing by the door, and two are already looking in the windows from outside.

Seven of the pursuers came in, all from the count’s hunters, with bludgeons, and hunting crops, and rope leashes in their belts, and with them an eighth one, the count’s majordomo, in a long wolfskin coat and a high peaked cap.

The case I was hiding in was all lattice-like openwork in front, hung with thin old cambric, and I could see through it.

And the old priest was in a fright, seeing how bad things were. He trembled before the majordomo, crossing himself and crying out all in a patter:

“Ah, my bright lights, oh, my shining lights! I know, I know what you’re looking for, only I’m not guilty of anything before the most serene count, truly, not guilty, not guilty!”

And he crosses himself and points his finger over his left shoulder at the clock case where I’m locked up.

“I’m done for,” I thought, seeing him perform this wonder.

The majordomo also saw it and says:

“It’s all known to us. Give me the key to that clock there.”

But the priest waved his hands again:

“Oh, my bright lights, oh, my shining ones! Forgive me, have mercy: I forget where I put the key, I forget, by God, I forget!”

And all the while he’s patting his pocket with the other hand.

The majordomo noticed that wonder as well, took the key from his pocket, and unlocked me.

“Get out, my dove,” he says, “and your mate will soon show himself.”

But Arkasha already showed himself: he threw the priest’s blanket on the floor and stood up.

“Yes,” he says, “there’s clearly nothing to do, the game is yours—take me to be tortured, but she’s not to blame for anything: I abducted her.”

As for the priest, all Arkady did was turn and spit in his face.

The priest says:

“Do you see, my bright lights, what profanation is done to my dignity and my fidelity? Report it to the most serene count.”

The majordomo replies:

“Never mind, don’t worry, it will all be accounted to him,” and he ordered that Arkady and I be led away.

We were put in three sleds, in the first the bound Arkady and some hunters, and me under the same escort in the last, and the rest of them went in the middle one.

Wherever we met folk, they all made way for us, thinking maybe it was a wedding.

XIV

We galloped very quickly, and when we spilled into the count’s courtyard, I couldn’t even see the sled Arkasha was taken in, but me they took to my former place and kept putting question after question to me about how long a time I had found myself alone with Arkady.

To all of them I said:

“Oh, no time at all!”

Then what had been assigned to me by fate—not with my dear, but with my worst fear—I did not avoid, but when I came to my little closet and had just buried my head in the pillow to weep over my misfortune, I suddenly heard terrible moaning from under the floor.

In our wooden building it was arranged that we, the girls, lived on the second floor, and downstairs was a big, high-ceilinged room where we studied singing and dancing, and everything from there could be heard upstairs. And the fiendish king Satan put it into those cruel men’s heads to torture Arkasha right under my room …

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.

Three years went by that way, and all that time God’s mercy was upon me, that I was not brought back to the theater, but stayed on in the calves’ shed with Auntie Drosida as her helper. And it was very good for me there, because I pitied the woman, and when she happened not to drink too much at night, I liked to listen to her. And she still remembered how our people, and the head valet himself, had killed the old count—because they could no longer suffer his infernal cruelty. But I still didn’t drink at all, and I did a lot for Auntie Drosida, and with pleasure: those little brutes were like children to me. I got so used to the little calves that, when they took one I had milk fed to be slaughtered for the table, I’d make a cross over him and weep for three days afterwards. I was no good for the theater anymore, because my feet had gone bad on me, they hobbled. Before, I’d had a very light step, but after Arkady Ilyich carried me off unconscious in the cold, I probably chilled my feet and no longer had any strength in the toes for dancing. I put on the same calico as Drosida, and God knows how long I’d have lived in such dreariness, when suddenly one time I was there in the shed before evening: the sun was setting and I was unreeling yarn by the window, and suddenly a small stone falls through my window, and it’s all wrapped in a piece of paper.

XVI

I looked this way and that, I looked out the window—nobody was there.

“Most likely,” I thought, “somebody beyond the fence outside threw it and missed, and it landed here with me and the old woman.” And I thought to myself: “Should I unwrap the paper or not? Seems better to unwrap it, because something’s surely written on it. And maybe somebody or other needs it, and I could figure it out and keep the secret, and throw the note with the stone to the right person in the same way.”

I unwrapped it and began to read, and couldn’t believe my eyes …

XVII

There was written:

“My faithful Lyuba! I fought and served the sovereign and shed my blood more than once, and for that I was raised to officer’s rank and granted nobility. Now I have come as a free man on leave to recover from my wounds. I am staying at an inn in the Pushkarsky quarter, and tomorrow I will put on my medals and crosses and appear before the count and bring all the money given me for treatment, five hundred roubles, and I will ask to buy you out, in hopes that we can be married before the altar of the Most High Creator.”

“And further,” Lyubov Onisimovna continued, always with suppressed emotion, “he wrote that ‘whatever calamity may have befallen you and whatever you have been subjected to, I count it as your suffering, and not as sin or weakness, and leave it to God, feeling nothing but respect for you.’ And it was signed: ‘Arkady Ilyich.’ ”

Lyubov Onisimovna burned the letter at once in the stove and did not tell anyone about it, not even the old woman in calico, but only prayed to God all night, without uttering a word about herself, but all for him, because, she said “though he wrote that he was now an officer, with crosses and wounds, all the same I couldn’t possibly imagine that the count would treat him differently than before.

“To put it simply, I was afraid they’d flog him again.”

XVIII

Early in the morning, Lyubov Onisimovna took the calves out into the sun and began to feed them with milk-soaked crusts at the tubs, when it suddenly came to her hearing that “in the open,” outside the fence, people were hurrying somewhere and talking loudly among themselves as they ran.

“I didn’t hear a word of what they were talking about,” she said, “but it was as if their words cut my heart. And just then the dung collector, Filipp, drove through the gate, and I said to him: ‘Filyushka, dear! Did you hear what these people passing by are talking about so curiously?’

“And he replies: ‘It’s them going to the Pushkarsky quarter, to see how the innkeeper murdered a sleeping officer during the night. Slit his throat right through,’ he says, ‘and took five hundred roubles in cash. They caught him all bloody with the money on him.’

“As soon as he told me that, I fell down bang on the spot …

“Here’s what happened: the innkeeper murdered Arkady Ilyich … and they buried him here, in this same grave where we’re sitting now … Yes, he’s now here under us, lying under this ground … And why do you think I keep going for walks here with you … I don’t want to look there,” she pointed to the gloomy and gray ruins, “but to sit here next to him and … take a little drop to commemorate his soul …”

XIX

Here Lyubov Onisimovna stopped and, considering her story told, took a small vial from her pocket and “commemorated,” or “sipped,” but I asked her:

“And who buried the famous toupee artist here?”

“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.