The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories

A Robbery

I

The conversation got onto the embezzlement in the Orel bank, the case of which was tried in the fall of 1887. It was said that this one was a good man, and that one seemed like a good man, but, nevertheless, they all turned out to be thieves.

An old Orel merchant, who happened to be in the company, said:

“Ah, gentlemen, when the thieves’ time comes, even honest people turn robber.”

“Well, there you’re joking.”

“Not in the least. Otherwise why is it said: ‘With the pure thou wilt show thyself pure; and with the froward thou wilt show thyself froward’?¹ I know of an occasion when an honest man robbed another man in the street.”

“That can’t be.”

“On my word of honor—he robbed him, and if you like, I can tell you about it.”

“Please be so kind.”

Then the merchant told us the following story, which had taken place some fifty years ago in that same Orel, not long before the famous fires that devastated the town. It happened under the late governor of Orel, Prince Pyotr Ivanovich Trubetskoy.²

Here is how he told it.

II

I’m an Orel old-timer. Our whole family—we weren’t among the least of people. We had our own house on Nizhnaya Street, by the Plautin Well, and our own granaries, and our own barges; we kept a fulling works, traded in hemp, and handled the grain collection. Our fortune wasn’t desperately big, but we never pinched pennies, and we passed for being honest people.

My father died when I was going on sixteen. The business was managed by my mother, Arina Leontyevna, and an old clerk, and at the time I only looked on. In everything, by paternal will, I was totally obedient to my mother. I never got up to any mischief or naughtiness, and I was zealous and fearful towards the Church of the Lord. Mama’s sister, my aunt, the venerable widow Katerina Leontyevna, also lived with us. She was a most pious, saintly woman. We were of churchly faith, as father had been, and belonged to the parish of the Protection, served by the reverend Father Efim, but Aunt Katerina Leontyevna adhered to the old ways: she drank from her own special glass and went to the Old Believers in the fish market to pray.³ My mama and aunt were from Elets, and there, in Elets and in Livny, they had very good kin, but they rarely saw them, because the Elets merchants like to boast before the Orel merchants and often get belligerent in company.

Our house by the Plautin Well wasn’t big, but it was very well appointed, merchant-style, and our way of life was the strictest. Having lived in the world for nineteen years, I knew my way only to the granaries or the barges on the riverbank, when they were being loaded, and on Sundays to the early service in the Protection—and from the service straight back home, so as to give proof to my mama by telling her what the Gospel reading was about and whether Father Efim gave any sermon; and Father Efim had a degree in divinity, and when he applied himself to a sermon, there was no understanding it. After Kamensky, our theater was kept by Turchaninov and then by Molotkovsky,⁴ but not for anything would mama allow me to go to the theater, or even to the Vienna tavern to drink tea. “You’ll hear nothing good there in the Vienna,” she’d say. “You’d better sit at home and eat pickled apples.” Only once or twice a winter was a full pleasure allowed me: to go out and see how Constable Bogdanov and the archdeacon turned their fighting geese loose or how the townsfolk and seminarians got into fistfights.

At that time many people in our town kept fighting geese and turned them loose on Kromskaya Square; but the foremost goose was Constable Bogdanov’s: he’d tear the wing off another fighter alive; and so that nobody would feed his goose soaked peas or harm him in some other way, the constable used to carry him on his back in a basket—he loved him so much. The archdeacon’s goose was clay-colored and gabbled and hissed terribly when he fought. A numerous public would gather. And for fistfights the townsfolk and the seminarians gathered on the ice, on the Oka, near the monastery, or at the Navugorskaya Gate; they got together there and went, wall against wall, across the whole street. It was often quite desperate. There was only this one rule, to hit in the belly and not in the face, and not to put big copper coins in your mittens. But, anyhow, this rule wasn’t obeyed. It often happened that they’d drag a man home in their arms and he’d pass away before he had time to confess. A lot of them were left alive, but then wasted away. Mama gave me permission only to watch, but not to stand in the wall myself. I sinned, though, by disobeying my late parent in that: my strength and daring urged me on, and if the townsfolk’s wall wavered, and the seminary wall really piled onto it and drove it back—then I sometimes couldn’t help myself and joined in. From early on my strength was such that, as soon as I jumped onto the driven-back wall and cried: “God bless us, boys! Beat the clericals!” and lit into the seminarians facing me, they’d all just scatter. But I wasn’t seeking glory for myself, and I used to ask for just one thing: “Please, brothers, be so kind, don’t mention my name!”—because I was afraid my mama would find out.

I lived like that until I was nineteen, and was so terribly healthy that I began to have fainting fits and nosebleeds. Then mama began thinking of getting me married, so that I wouldn’t start visiting the Sekerens’ brewery or playing around with rebaptized girls.⁵

III

On account of that, matchmakers in sack coats started coming to us from Nizhnaya, Kromskaya, and Karachevskaya Streets, offering my mother various brides for me. All this was carried out in secret from me, so that everybody knew more than I did. Even our fullers in the shed used to say:

“Your mama’s going to get you married, Mikhailo Mikhailych. How agreeable are you to that? Watch out—you know, your wife’s going to tickle you after the wedding, but don’t be timid—tickle her sides all you can, or else she’ll out-tickle you.”

I’d only blush. I figured out, naturally, that it somehow had to do with me, but I never heard what brides mama and the matchmakers were talking about. One matchmaker or another would come—mama would shut herself up with her in the icon room, they’d sit under the crosses, have the samovar served, and talk all by themselves, and then the matchmaker would come out, pat me on the head, and encourage me:

“Don’t worry, Mishenka, my boy: soon now you won’t sit bored and alone, soon we’ll gladden you up.”

And mama even used to get angry at that and say:

“He needn’t know anything about it; whatever I decide over his head, that’s how it must be for him. It’s like in the scriptures.”

I didn’t worry about it. It was all the same to me: if I’m to marry, I’ll marry, and when it comes to tickling, we’ll see who out-tickles who.

But Aunt Katerina Leontyevna went against mama’s wish and instructed me against her.

“Don’t marry an Orel girl, Misha,” she said, “not for anything. Just you look: the local Orel girls are all haywire—not merchants, not gentry. They marry officers. Ask your mother to take you a wife from Elets, where she and I come from. Among the merchants there, the men are carousers, but the marriageable girls are real maidens: pious, modest—don’t look at officers, but wear kerchiefs when they go to pray and cross themselves in the old Russian way. If you marry one like that, you’ll bring blessings on your house, and start praying with your wife in the old way, and then I’ll leave you all my property, and to her I’ll give my God’s blessing, and my round pearls, and silver, and beads, and brocade jerkins, and warm jackets, and all my Bolkhovo lace.”

And there was quiet displeasure between my mother and my aunt on that score, because by then mama had quit the old faith entirely and read the akathist to the great martyr Barbara by the new Church calendar.⁶ She wanted to take a wife for me from the Orel girls, so as to renew the family.

“At least,” she said, “on the days of forgiveness before Lent, we’ll have somebody to go to with bread for forgiveness, and they’ll also have someone to bring braided loaves to.”

Mama liked to cut these loaves up afterwards for rusks and dunk them in tea with honey during Lent, but for my aunt their ancient faith had to be placed above everything.

They argued and argued, but the whole thing came out differently.

IV

A most unexpected incident suddenly occurred.

Once, during Christmastime, my aunt and I were sitting by the window after dinner, talking about something religious and eating pickled apples, and suddenly we notice a troika of hired horses standing outside in the snow by our gate. We look—a tall man gets out from under the felt flap of the kibitka, dressed in a Kalmyk coat of dark broadcloth lined with fleece, tied with a red belt, a green worsted scarf wrapped around the raised collar, its long ends twisted on his chest and tucked into his bosom, a felt hat on his head, and on his feet calfskin boots with the fur side out.

The man stood up and shook the snow off himself like a poodle, and then, together with the driver, pulled from under the flap of the kibitka another man, in a beaver hat and a wolfskin coat, and held him under the arms so that he could keep his feet, because it was slippery for him in his leather-soled felt boots.

Aunt Katerina Leontyevna was very worried, not knowing who these people were or why they had gotten out by our gate, but when she saw the wolfskin coat, she crossed herself:

“Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on us, amen!” she said. “It’s my brother Ivan Leontych, your uncle, come from Elets. What’s happened to him? He hasn’t been here for three years, not since your father’s funeral, and suddenly he turns up at Christmastime. Quick, fetch the key for the gate, run to meet him.”

I rushed to look for mama, and mama started looking for the key and finally found it in the icon chest, but by the time I ran to the gate, unlocked the lock, and drew the bolt, the troika had already gone, and the man in the Kalmyk coat had gone with the kibitka, and my uncle was standing there alone, holding on to the gate pull, and angry.

“What’s this?” he says. “You lock yourselves up in the daytime like scaredy-cats?”

Mama greeted him and replied:

“Don’t you know, brother, what a situation we have in Orel? There’s constant thievery, and we lock ourselves in day and night from the police.”

My uncle replied that the situation was the same everywhere: Orel and Kromy are thieving cronies, Karachev’s another, and Elets is their father. “We also lock ourselves in from the police,” he says, “but only at night—why in the daytime? I’m displeased that you left me outside the gate in the daytime: my felt boots have leather soles, it’s slippery to walk—and I’ve come on a church necessity, not empty-handed. God forbid some Orelian should snatch it from me and run off, and me unable to catch up with him.”

V

We all apologized to my uncle and brought him to a room where he could change his traveling clothes. Ivan Leontych changed his felt boots for leather ones, put on a frock coat, and sat down by the samovar, and mother began asking him what sort of church business he had come on, that he should go to the trouble even during the feast days, and where his companion by our gate had disappeared to.

Ivan Leontych replied:

“It’s big business. You must understand that I’m now the church warden, and our deacon tore something on the very first day of the feast.”

Mama says:

“We hadn’t heard.”

“As if you ever hear anything interesting! Your town’s such a backwater.”

“But how was it that your deacon tore something?”

“Ah, my dear, he suffered it on account of his zeal. He began serving nicely on the occasion of our deliverance from the Gauls,⁷ and kept singing louder, and louder, and still louder, and suddenly, as he exclaimed ‘for the salvation’—a vein burst on him. They went to take him from the ambo, and he already had a boot full of blood.”

“He died?”

“No. The merchants didn’t let that happen: they called in a doctor. Would our merchants just abandon him? The doctor says he may yet recover, but he won’t have any voice. So I came here with our foremost parishioner to make sure our deacon gets sent to the nuns in some convent or other, and here we must choose ourselves the best one from all you’ve got.”

“And who is this foremost parisher of yours and where did he go off to?”

“Our foremost parishioner is named Pavel Mironych Mukomol. He’s married to a rich Moscow woman. The wedding celebration went on for a whole week. He’s very devoted to the church and knows all the church services better than any archdeacon. So everybody begged him: go, and look, and choose; the one you like will be to our liking, too. Everybody, old and young, honors him. And he, with his enormous capital, owner of three houses, and a candle factory, and a flour mill, obeyed at once and dropped it all for the church necessity and came flying. He’ll take a room in the Repinskaya Inn now. Are they tricksters there, or honest?”

Mama replied:

“I don’t know.”

“There you have it, you live here and don’t know anything.”

“We’re afraid of inns.”

“Well, never mind. Pavel Mironych is also not easily offended: there’s no stronger fistfighter in Elets or in Livny. Whenever there’s a fight, two or three men fall by his hand. Last year, during Lent, he went on purpose to Tula, and though he’s a miller, he up and left two of the foremost samovarniks there with ruptures.”⁸

Mama and my aunt crossed themselves.

“Lord!” they said. “Why have you brought such a man to us at Christmastime?”

But my uncle laughs:

“What are you women afraid of?” he says. “Our parishioner’s a good man, and for this church business I can’t do without him. He and I came on the spur of the moment to snatch what suits us and leave.”

Mama and my aunt gasp again.

“What are you doing, brother, making such frightful jokes!”

My uncle laughs even more merrily.

“Eh,” he says, “you lady-crows, you Orel merchant-wives! Your town’s maybe a town, maybe a burnt-down place—it doesn’t resemble anything, and you yourselves sit in it like smoked sardines stuffed in a box! No, your town’s a far cry from our Elets, never mind that it’s a provincial capital. Our Elets is a little district town, but in a Moscow gown, and you can’t even appreciate what you’ve got that’s good here. And that’s just what we’ll take away from you.”

“What is it?”

“We need a good deacon for our parish, and they say you’ve got two deacons with voices: one at the Theophany in the marketplace, the other in the clerks’ quarter, at St. Nicetas. We’ll give them a listen in all styles, and we’ll choose whichever one Pavel Mironych decides is more suited to our Elets taste, and we’ll lure him away and make a deal with him; and the one who doesn’t suit us we’ll call number two: he’ll get money for a new cassock for his trouble. Pavel Mironych has already gone now to gather them for a tryout, and I must go at once to the Boris and Gleb cathedral; they say you’ve got an innkeeper there whose inn is always empty. So we’ll take three connecting rooms in this empty inn and hold the audition. You, Mishutka my lad, will have to come now and take me there.”

I ask:

“Are you speaking to me, uncle?”

He replies:

“Obviously. Who else but you, Mishutka? Well, if you’re offended, then allow me to call you Mikhailo Mikhailovich. Do us a family service—kindly lead your uncle through this strange land.”

I cleared my throat and answered politely:

“Uncle, dear, it’s not on account of that: I’m not offended at anything, and I’m ready and glad to do it, but I’m not my own man and do as mama tells me.”

Mama didn’t like it at all:

“Why, dear brother, should you take Misha with you to such company?! You can have someone else lead you.”

“I find it more proper to go with my nephew.”

“But what does he know?!”

“He most likely knows everything. Mishutka, do you know everything?”

I got embarrassed.

“No,” I say, “I can’t know everything.”

“Why’s that?”

“Mama won’t allow it.”

“Just look at that! And what do you think: can an uncle always guide his nephew in everything, or not? Of course he can. Get dressed at once and let’s be gone before trouble comes on.”

I started to go, then stood there like a post: I listened to him, but saw that mama didn’t want to let me go for anything.

“Our Misha,” she said, “is still young, he’s not used to going out anywhere at night. Why do you insist on having him? It will be dark before you notice, and the thieves’ time will come.”

But here my uncle even yelled at them:

“Enough playing the fool, really! What are you stewing him in your women’s skirts for! The boy’s grown so big he can kill an ox, and you still coddle him like a baby. It’s all nothing but your female foolishness, and he’ll be the worse off for it because of you. He has to have his life forces developed and his character firmed up, and I need him because, God forbid, in the darkness or in some back street your Orel thieves may actually fall upon me or I may run into a police patrol—you see, I have all our money for the business with me … There’s enough to dump our torn deacon on the nuns and lure your mighty one to us … Can it be that you, my own sisters, are so unfamilial that you want me, your brother, to be bashed on the head or picked up by the police, and end up there with nothing?”

My mother says:

“God save us from that—families aren’t only respected in Elets! But take our clerk with you, or even two sturdy fullers. Our fullers are from Kromy, they’re terribly strong, they eat some eight pounds a day of bread alone, besides other things.”

My uncle didn’t want to.

“What good are your hired people to me?” he says. “You sisters even ought to be ashamed to say it, and I’d be ashamed and afraid to go with them. Kromy men! And you call them good people! They’d go with me and be the first to kill me, but Misha’s my nephew—with him at least it will be brave and proper.”

He stood his ground and wouldn’t give way:

“You can’t possibly refuse me this,” he says. “Otherwise I renounce you as my family.”

My mother and aunt became frightened at that and exchanged glances, meaning “What on earth should we do?”

Ivan Leontych persisted:

“And understand that it’s not just a family matter! Remember, I’m not taking him for my own amusement or pleasure, but on a Church necessity. Can you refuse me that? Consider well. To refuse that is the same as refusing God. The boy’s a servant of God; God’s will is upon him: you want him to stay with you, but God just won’t let him stay.”

He was an awfully persuasive one with words.

Mama became frightened.

“Enough talk, please, of such horrors.”

But my uncle again burst into merry laughter.

“Ah, you lady-crows! You don’t understand the power of words! Who isn’t a servant of God? But now I can see that you won’t decide on anything yourselves, so I’m just going to knock him from under your wing …”

And with that he seized me by the shoulder and said:

“Up you get now, Misha, and put on your visiting clothes—I’m your uncle, and a man who has lived into gray-haired old age. I have grandchildren, and I’m taking charge of you and order you to follow me.”

I looked at mama and my aunt, and I myself felt all merry inside, and this Elets free-and-easiness of my uncle’s pleased me greatly.

“Who should I listen to?” I ask.

My uncle answers:

“You must listen to the eldest one—that’s me. I’m not taking you forever, but only for an hour.”

“Mama!” I cry. “What do you tell me to do?”

Mama replies:

“Why … if it’s only for an hour, it’s all right—put on your visiting clothes and go with your uncle; but don’t stay one minute beyond an hour. If you’re a minute late—I’ll die of fear!”

“Well,” I say, “that’s a good one! How can I know so precisely that an hour has already gone by and a new minute’s beginning—and meanwhile you’ll have started worrying …”

My uncle burst out laughing.

“You can look at your watch,” he says, “and see what time it is.”

“I don’t have a watch,” I reply.

“Ah, you still don’t even have your own watch! Things are bad with you!”

But mama answers back:

“What does he need a watch for?”

“To know what time it is.”

“Well … he’s still young … he wouldn’t know how to wind it … Outside you can hear it strike the hours in the Theophany and in the Devichy Convent.”

I reply:

“Maybe you don’t know it, but a weight fell off the Theophany clock yesterday and it stopped striking.”

“Well, there’s the Devichy clock.”

“We never hear the Devichy clock.”

My uncle intervenes and says:

“Never mind, never mind: get dressed quickly and don’t worry about being late. We’ll stop at the watchmaker’s, and I’ll buy you a watch as a present for going with me. That will give you something to remember your uncle by.”

When I heard about the watch, I got all excited: I smacked a kiss on my uncle’s hand, put on my visiting clothes, and was ready.

Mama gave me her blessing and said several more times:

“Only for an hour!”

VI

My uncle was a gentleman of his word. The moment we stepped out, he said:

“Quickly whistle for a cabby, we’ll go to the watchmaker’s.”

But back then, in Orel, decent people didn’t ride around town in cabs. Only some sort of carousers did that, but most cabbies waited for the hirelings who were sent off as soldiers in place of local recruits.

I said:

“I know how to whistle, dear uncle, but I can’t, because here only hirelings ride in cabs.”

He said: “Fool!”—and whistled himself. And when a cab drove up, he said again:

“Get in without talking! On foot, we won’t make it back to your women within an hour, but I gave them my word, and my word is adamant.”

But I was beside myself with shame and kept leaning out of the cab.

“What are you fidgeting for?” he says.

“For pity’s sake,” I say, “they’re going to think I’m a hireling.”

“With your uncle?”

“They don’t know you here. They’ll say: look, he’s driving him around now, he’ll take him to all the bad places, and then whisk him away. It will bring shame on mama.”

My uncle started swearing.

No matter how I protested, I had to sit beside him to avoid a scandal. I ride along and don’t know where to turn—I’m not looking, but it’s as if I see and hear everybody around saying: “Look at that! Arina Leontyevna’s Misha is riding in a cab—must be a fine place he’s going to!” I couldn’t stand it!

“Do as you like, uncle,” I say, “but I’m jumping off.”

He held me back and laughed.

“Can it be,” he says, “that they’re a whole string of fools here in Orel, to go thinking your old uncle would take you to any bad places? Where’s your best watchmaker here?”

“Our best watchmaker is considered to be the German Kern; in his window a Moor with a clock on his head winks his eyes in all directions. Only the way to him is across the Orlitsky Bridge to Bolkhovskaya Street, and merchants we know there will be looking out their windows. I won’t drive past them in a cab for anything.”

But my uncle wasn’t listening.

“Cabby,” he says, “drive to Kern’s on Bolkhovskaya Street.”

We arrived. I persuaded him to dismiss the cabby here at least—I said I wouldn’t drive back down those same streets again for anything. That he agreed to. He called me a fool one more time, gave the cabby fifteen kopecks, and bought me a silver watch with a gold rim and a chain.

“Such watches,” he says, “are now all the fashion among us in Elets; once you get accustomed to winding it, and I come again, I’ll buy you a gold watch with a gold chain.”

I thanked him and was very glad of the watch, only I begged him all the same not to ride in cabs with me anymore.

“Very well, very well,” he says. “Now take me quickly to the Boris and Gleb Inn; we have to have three connecting rooms there.”

I say:

“It’s a stone’s throw from here.”

“Let’s go, then. We have no time to idle away with you here in Orel. What have we come for? To choose a full-throated deacon for ourselves; and that we must do now. There’s no time to lose. Take me to the inn and go home to your mother.”

I took him there and hurried home.

I ran so quickly that an hour hadn’t passed since I left, and at home I showed them my uncle’s gift—the watch.

Mama looked and said:

“Why … it’s very nice—hang it on the wall over your bed, otherwise you’ll lose it.”

But my aunt regarded it critically:

“Why is it,” she says, “that the watch is silver, but the rim is yellow?”

“That,” I reply, “is all the fashion in Elets.”

“What silly things they think up in Elets,” she says. “The old men of Elets used to be smarter—they wore everything of the same kind: if it’s a silver watch, it’s silver; if gold, it’s gold. What’s the point of forcing together what God put separately on earth?”

But mama said peaceably that you don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, and told me again:

“Go to your room and hang it over your bed. On Sunday I’ll tell the nuns to make you a little cushion for it embroidered with beads and fish scales, so that you won’t somehow crush the glass in your pocket.”

I said cheerfully:

“That can be repaired.”

“When it needs repairing, the watchmaker will replace the magnetized needle with a stone one inside, and the watch will be ruined. Better go quickly and hang it up.”

So as not to argue, I hammered in a nail over my bed and hung up the watch, and I lay back on the pillow and looked at it admiringly. I was very pleased to have such a noble thing. And how nicely and softly it ticked: tick, tick, tick, tick … I listened and listened, and fell asleep. I was awakened by loud talk in the drawing room.

VII

I hear my uncle’s voice and some other unknown voice behind the wall; and I also hear that mama and my aunt are there.

The unknown man tells them that he has already been to the Theophany and heard the deacon there, and he has also been to St. Nicetas, but, he says, “they must be placed on an equal level and listened to under our own tuning fork.”

My uncle replies:

“Do it, then. I’ve prepared everything at the Boris and Gleb Inn. All the doors between the rooms will be open. There are no other guests—shout as much as you like, there’s nobody to get annoyed. An excellent inn: only government clerks come there with petitioners during office hours; but in the evening there’s nobody at all, and there are shafts and bast sleighs standing like a forest blocking the windows on Poleshskaya Square.”

The unknown man replies:

“That’s what we need, because they’ve also got some brazen amateurs, and they’ll undoubtedly gather to hear my voice and make fun of it.”

“You don’t mean you’re afraid?”

“I’m not afraid, but their insolence will make me angry, and I’ll beat them.”

He himself has a voice like a trumpet.

“I’ll freely explain to them,” he says, “all the examples of what’s liked in our town. We’ll listen to what they can do and how they perform in all tones: a low growl when vesting a bishop, middle and upper notes when singing ‘Many Years,’ how to let out a cry for ‘In the blessed falling asleep …’ and a howl for ‘Memory Eternal.’⁹ That’s the long and short of it.”

My uncle agreed.

“Yes,” he says, “we must compare them and then quite inoffensively make a decision. Whichever of them suits our Elets fashion better we’ll work on and lure over to us, and to the one who comes out weaker we’ll give a cassock for his trouble.”

“Keep your money on you—they’ve got thieves here.”

“And you keep yours on you.”

“All right.”

“Well, and now you go and set out some refreshments, and I’ll fetch the deacons. They asked to do it in the evening—‘because,’ they say, ‘our people are rascals, they may get wind of it.’ ”

My uncle answers in the affirmative, only he says:

“It’s these evenings here in Orel that I’m afraid of, and soon now it will be quite dark.”

“Well,” the unknown man says, “I’m not afraid of anything.”

“And what if one of these Orelian priggers strips your fur coat off you?”^*

“Oh, yes! As if he’ll strip it off me! He’d better not cross paths with me, or I may just strip everything off him!”

“It’s a good thing you’re so strong.”

“And you go with your nephew. Such a fine lad, he could fell an ox with his fist.”

Mama says:

“Misha’s weak—how can he protect him!”

“Well, have him put some copper coins in his gloves, that’ll make him strong.”

My aunt says:

“What an idea!”

“Why, did I say something bad?”

“Well, it’s clear you have your own rules for everything in Elets.”

“And what else? You’ve got a governor for setting up rules, but we haven’t got one—so we make our own rules.”

“On how to beat people?”

“Yes, we also have rules on how to beat people.”

“Well, you’d better come back before the thieves’ time, that way nothing will happen to you.”

“And when is the thieves’ time in your Orel?”

My aunt answered from some book:

“ ‘Once folk have their dinner and, after praying, go to sleep, that is the time when thieves arise and set about to rob.’ ”

My uncle and the unknown man burst out laughing. Everything mama and my aunt said seemed unbelievable or unreasonable to them.

“In that case,” they say, “where are your police looking?”

My aunt again answers from the scriptures:

“ ‘Except the Lord guard the house—the watchman waketh but in vain.’¹⁰ We have a police chief by the name of Tsyganok. He looks after his own business, he wants to buy property. And when somebody gets robbed, he says: ‘Why weren’t you asleep at home? You wouldn’t have been robbed.’ ”

“He’d do better to send out patrols more often.”

“He already did.”

“And what happened?”

“The robberies got worse.”

“Why is that?”

“Nobody knows. The patrol goes by, the priggers follow after it and rob.”

“Maybe it’s not the priggers, but the patrolmen themselves who rob?”

“Maybe it is.”

“Call in the constable.”

“With the constable it’s even worse—if you complain about him, you have to pay him for the dishonor.”

“What a preposterous town!” cried Pavel Mironych (I figured it was him), and he said good-bye and left, but my uncle went on pacing and reasoning:

“No, truly,” he says, “it’s better with us in Elets. I’ll take a cab.”

“Don’t go in a cab! The cabby will bilk you and dump you out of the sleigh.”

“Well, like it or not, I’ll take my nephew Misha with me again. Nobody will harm the two of us.”

At first mama wouldn’t even hear of letting me go, but my uncle began to take offense and said:

“What is this: I give him a watch with a rim, and he won’t show gratitude by rendering me a trifling family service? I can’t upset the whole business now. Pavel Mironych left with my full promise that I’d join him and prepare everything, and now, what, instead of that I should listen to your fears and stay home, or else go alone to a certain death?”

My aunt and mama quieted down and said nothing.

And my uncle persists:

“If I had my former youth,” he says, “when I was, say, forty years old, I wouldn’t fear the priggers, but I’m an elderly man, going on sixty-five, and if they strip my fur coat off me when I’m far from home, then, while I’m walking back without my fur coat, I’m bound to catch an inflammation in my shoulders, and then I’ll need a young leech to draw the blood off, or else I’ll croak here with you. Bury me here, then, in your church of John the Baptist, and people can remember over my coffin that in your town your Mishka let his own uncle go without a family service and didn’t accompany him this one time in his life …”

Here I felt such pity for him and such shame that I jumped out at once and said:

“No, mama, say what you like, but I won’t leave my uncle without this family service. Am I to be ungrateful like Alfred, whom the soldier mummers perform in people’s houses?¹¹ I bow down to your feet and beg your permission, don’t force me to be ungrateful, allow me to accompany my uncle, because he’s my relation and he gave me the watch and I will be shamed before all people if I leave him without my service.”

Mama, however put out, had to let me go, but even so she ordered me very, very strictly not to drink, and not to look to the sides, and not to stop anywhere, and not to come home late.

I reassured her in all possible ways.

“Really, mama,” I say, “why look to the sides when there’s a straight path? I’ll be with my uncle.”

“All the same,” she says, “though you’re with your uncle, come back before the thieves’ time. I won’t sleep until you’re back home.”

Outside the door she started making crosses over me and whispered:

“Don’t look too much to your uncle Ivan Leontyevich: they’re all madcaps in Elets. It’s even frightening to visit them at home: they invite officials for a party, and then force them to drink, or pour it behind their collars; they hide their overcoats, lock the gate, and start singing: ‘He who won’t drink—stays in the clink.’ I know my brother on that score.”

“All right, mama,” I reply, “all right, all right. Rest easy about me in everything.”

But mama goes on with her refrain:

“I feel in my heart,” she says, “that you’ll both come to no good.”

VIII

At last my uncle and I went out the gate and set off. What could the priggers do to the two of us? Mama and my aunt were notorious homebodies and didn’t know that I alone used to beat ten men with one fist in a fistfight. And my uncle, too, though an elderly man, could also stand up for himself.

We ran here and there, to the fish stores and wine cellars, bought everything, and sent it to the Boris and Gleb Inn in big bags. We ordered the samovars heated at once, laid out the snacks, set up the wine and rum, and invited the innkeeper of the Boris and Gleb to join our company:

“We won’t do anything bad, our only desire and request is that no outsiders hear or see us.”

“That I grant you,” he said. “A bedbug on the wall may hear you, but nobody else.”

And he was so sleepy himself, he kept yawning and making crosses over his mouth.

Soon Pavel Mironych arrived and brought both deacons with him: the one from the Theophany and the one from Nicetas. We had a little snack to begin with, a bit of sturgeon and caviar, then crossed ourselves and straightaway got down to the business of the tryout.

In three upstairs rooms, all the connecting doors stood open. We put our coats on the bed in one, in another, the far one, the snacks were set up, and in the middle one we tried out the voices.

First, Pavel Mironych stood in the middle of the room and showed what the merchants in Elets liked most from a deacon. His voice, as I said to you, was quite terrifying, as if it beat us on the face and shattered the glass in the windows.

Even the innkeeper woke up and said:

“You yourself should be the first deacon.”

“Tell me another!” Pavel Mironych replied. “With my capital, I can get along as I am. It’s just that I like to hear loudness in holy services.”

“Who doesn’t!”

And right after Pavel Mironych did his shouting, the deacons began to display themselves, first one and then the other, intoning the same things. The deacon from the Theophany was dark and soft, as if all quilted with cotton, while the one from Nicetas was redheaded, dry as a horseradish root, and his beard was small, upturned; but once they got to shouting, it was impossible to pick the better one. One kind came out better with one, but the other did another more pleasingly. Pavel Mironych began by presenting the way they liked it in Elets, so that the growling comes as if from far off. He growled out “It is meet and right,” and then “Pierce, Master” and “Sacrifice, Master,” and then both deacons did the same. The redhead’s growl came out better. For the Gospel reading, Pavel Mironych took such a low note that it was lower than the lowest, as if carried on the wind from far away: “In those da-a-ays.” Then he began rising higher and higher, and in the end gave such an exclamation that the window-panes jingled. And the deacons didn’t lag behind him.

Well, then the rest all went the same way, how to conduct the litany and how it must be kept in tune with the choir, then the joyful “and for the salvation” in “Many Years,” then the mournful “Rest Eternal.”¹² The dry deacon from St. Nicetas pleased everyone so much with his howling that my uncle and Pavel Mironych started weeping and kissing him and asking him whether it might not lie within his natural powers to make it still more terrible.

The deacon says:

“Why not? It’s allowed me by religion, but I’ll have to fortify myself with pure Jamaican rum—it expands the resounding in the chest.”

“Help yourself—that’s what the rum is there for: you can drink it from a shot glass, swill it from a tumbler, or, better still, upend the bottle and down it all at once.”

The deacon says:

“No, more than a tumbler at a time is not to my liking.”

They fortified themselves—and the deacon began “Rest eternal in blessed repose” from low down and went on climbing ever higher and with an ever denser howling all the way to “the deceased bishops of Orel and Sevsk, Apollos and Dosiphey, Iona and Gavriil, Nikodim and Innokenty,” and when he reached “make their memory e-ter-r-r-nal,” his whole Adam’s apple stuck out of his throat and he produced such a howl that we were horrorstruck, and my uncle began crossing himself and shoving his feet under the bed, and I did the same. And under the bed, suddenly, something whacked us on the anklebones—we both cried out and all at once leaped into the middle of the room and stood trembling …

My uncle said in fright:

“To blazes with it all! Stop them … don’t name them anymore … they’re here already, shoving us from under the bed.”

Pavel Mironych asked:

“Who could be shoving you from under the bed?”

My uncle replied:

“Those dead ones.”

Pavel Mironych, however, did not turn coward: he seized a burning candle, thrust it under the bed, but something blew out the candle, and knocked the candlestick from his hand, and emerged looking like one of our merchants from the Meat Market near St. Nicholas.

All of us, except the innkeeper, rushed in various directions and repeated the same word:

“Begone! Begone!”

And after that another merchant crawled out from under the other bed. And it seemed to us that this one, too, was from the Meat Market.

“What’s the meaning of this?”

And the merchants both say:

“Please, it doesn’t mean anything … We simply like to hear bass voices.”

And the first merchant, who had struck my uncle and me on the legs and knocked the candle out of Pavel Mironych’s hand, apologized, saying that we ourselves had kicked him with our boots, and Pavel Mironych had nearly burned his face with the candle.

But Pavel Mironych got angry at the innkeeper and started accusing him, saying that since money had been paid for the rooms, he should not have put strangers under the beds without permission.

The innkeeper, who seemed to have been sleeping, turned out to be quite drunk.

“These gentlemen,” he says, “are both my relations: I wanted to do them a family service. I can do whatever I like in my own house.”

“No, you can’t.”

“Yes, I can.”

“And what if you’ve been paid?”

“So what if I’ve been paid? It’s my house, and my relations are dearer to me than any payment. You stay here and you’ll leave, but they’re permanent: you’ve got no call to go poking your heels at them or burning their eyes with candles.”

“We didn’t poke our heels at them on purpose, we just tucked our feet under,” says my uncle.

“You shouldn’t have tucked your feet under, you should have sat upright.”

“We did it from fear.”

“Well, there’s no harm done. But they’re devoted to lerigion and wanted to listen …”

Pavel Mironych boiled over.

“What kind of lerigion is that?” he says. “It’s only a sample for education: lerigion’s in the Church.”

“That makes no difference,” says the innkeeper. “It all comes to the same thing.”

“Ah, you incendiaries!”

“And you’re rioters.”

“How come?”

“You dealt in dead meat. You locked up the assessor!”

And endless stupidities of the same sort followed. And suddenly everything was in an uproar, and the innkeeper was shouting:

“Away with all you millers, get out of my establishment, me and my butchers will carry on by ourselves.”

Pavel Mironych shook his fist at him.

But the innkeeper replies:

“If you threaten me, I’ll shout up such Orelian stalwarts right now that you won’t bring a single unbroken rib home to Elets.”

Pavel Mironych, being the foremost strongman in Elets, got offended.

“Well, no help for it,” he says, “call for them, if you can still stand up, but I’m not leaving this room; we laid out money for the drink.”

The butchers wanted to leave—they had obviously decided to call people.

Pavel Mironych herded them back and shouted:

“Where’s the key? I’ll lock them all up.”

I said to my uncle:

“Uncle! For God’s sake! See what we’re coming to! There may be a murder here! And mama and auntie are waiting at home … What must they be thinking! … How they’ll worry!”

My uncle was frightened himself.

“Grab your coat,” he says, “while the door’s still open, and let’s get away.”

We leaped into the next room, grabbed our coats, and gladly came barreling out into the open air; only the darkness around us was so thick you couldn’t see an inch, and a wet snow was slapping big flakes in our faces, so that our eyes were blinded.

“Lead me,” says my uncle. “I’ve somehow suddenly forgotten all about where we are, and I can’t make anything out.”

“Just run for it,” I say.

“It’s not nice that we left Pavel Mironych.”

“But what could we do with him?”

“That’s so … but he’s our foremost parishioner.”

“He’s a strong man; they won’t hurt him.”

The snow blinded us, and once we leaped out of that stuffiness, we fancied God knows what, as if somebody were coming at us from all sides.

IX

Naturally, I knew the way very well, because our town isn’t big and I was born and grew up in it, but it was as if this darkness and wet snow right after the heat and light of the room dimmed my memory.

“Wait, uncle,” I said, “let me figure out where we are.”

“You mean you don’t know the landmarks of your own town?”

“No, I know them. The first landmarks for us are the two cathedrals, the one new and big, the other old and small, and we have to go between them and turn right, but in this snow I don’t see either the big one or the small one.”

“How about that! They may really take our fur coats or even strip us naked, and we won’t know where to run. We could catch our death of cold.”

“Maybe, God willing, they won’t strip us naked.”

“Do you know those merchants who came out from under the beds?”

“Yes.”

“Both of them?”

“Both of them. One is named Efrosin Ivanovich, and the other Agafon Petrovich.”

“And what—are they real true merchants?”

“They are.”

“I didn’t like the mug on one of them at all.”

“What about it?”

“Some sort of Jesovitic expression.”

“That’s Efrosin: he frightened me once, too.”

“How?”

“In my imagination. Once I was walking past their shops in the evening after the vigil, and I stopped across from St. Nicholas to pray that God would let me pass, because they have vicious dogs in the market; and this merchant Efrosin Ivanych had a nightingale whistling in his shop, and the light of an icon lamp was coming through a crack in the fence … I put my eye to the crack and saw him standing knife in hand over a bullock. The bullock at his feet has its throat cut and is kicking its bound feet and tossing its head; the head is dangling from the cut throat and blood is gushing out; and there’s another calf in the dark corner awaiting the knife, maybe mooing, maybe trembling, and over the fresh blood the nightingale in its cage is whistling furiously, and far across the Oka a thunderstorm is rumbling. Fear came over me. I was frightened and cried out: ‘Efrosin Ivanych!’ I wanted to ask him to accompany me to the pontoon bridge, but he suddenly gave such a start … I ran away. And I’ve only just remembered it.”

“Why are you telling me such a frightening thing now?”

“And what of it? Are you afraid?”

“No, I’m not, but better not talk about frightening things.”

“But it ended well. The next day I told him: thus and so—I got scared of you. And he says: ‘And you scared me, because I was standing there listening to the nightingale, and you suddenly cried out.’ I say: ‘How is it you listen so feelingly?’ ‘I can’t help it,’ he says, ‘my heart often swoons in me.’ ”

“Are you strong, or not?” my uncle suddenly interrupted.

“I wouldn’t boast of any special strength,” I said, “but if I put three or four old coppers in my fist, I can send any prigger you like to an early grave.”

“That’s fine,” he says, “if he’s alone.”

“Who?”

“The prigger, that’s who! But if there’s two of them, or a whole company? …”

“Never mind: if there’s two, we’ll manage—you can help. And priggers don’t go around in big companies.”

“Well, don’t rely much on me: I’ve grown old, my lad. Formerly, it’s true, I gave such beatings for the glory of God that they were known all over Elets and Livny …”

Before he finished saying it, we suddenly thought we heard somebody coming behind us and even hastening his steps.

“Excuse me,” I said, “but it seems to me somebody’s coming.”

“Ah, yes! I also hear somebody coming,” my uncle replied.

X

I kept silent. My uncle whispered to me:

“Let’s stop and let him go past us.”

And this was just on the slope of the hill where you go down to the Balashevsky Bridge in summer, and across the ice between the barges in winter.

It was a godforsaken place from old times. There were few houses on the hill, and those were closed up, and below, to the right, on the Orlik, there were seedy bathhouses and an empty mill, and up from there a sheer cliff like a wall, and to the right a garden where thieves always hid. The police chief Tsyganok had built a sentry box there, and folk started saying that the sentry helped the thieves … I thought to myself, whoever’s coming—prigger or not—in fact it’s better to let him go past.

My uncle and I stopped … And what do you think: the man who was walking behind us must also have stopped—his footsteps were no longer heard.

“Maybe we were mistaken,” said my uncle. “Maybe there wasn’t anybody.”

“No,” I replied, “I clearly heard footsteps, and very close.”

We stood there a little longer—nothing to be heard; but as soon as we went on—we heard him hurrying after us again … We could even hear him hustling and breathing hard.

We slackened our pace and went more quietly—and he also went more quietly; we speeded up again—and he again came on more quickly and was nearly stepping in our tracks.

There was nothing more to talk about: we clearly understood that this was a prigger following us, and he’d been following us like that all the way from the inn; which meant that he was lying in wait for us, and when I lost my way in the snow between the big cathedral and the small—he caught sight of us. Which meant that now there was no avoiding some run-in. He couldn’t be alone.

And the snow, as if on purpose, poured down still more heavily; you walk as if you’re stirring a pot of curds: it’s white, and wet, and sticks to you all over.

And now the Oka is ahead of us, we have to go down on the ice; but on the ice there are empty barges, and in order to reach home on the other side, we have to make our way through the narrow passages between these barges. And the prigger who is following us surely has some fellow thieves hidden there somewhere. It would be handiest for them to rob us on the ice between the barges—and kill us and shove us underwater. Their den was there, and in the daytime you could always see them around it. They fixed up their lairs with mats of hemp stalks and straw, on which they lay smoking and waiting. And special pot-house wives hung out with them there. Rascally wenches. They’d show themselves, lure a man and lead him away, and he’d get robbed, and they’d be there on the lookout again.

Most of all they attacked those returning from the vigil in the men’s monastery, because people liked the singing, and back then there was the astounding bass, Strukov, of terrifying appearance: all swarthy, three tufts of hair on his head, and a lower lip that opened like the folding front flap of a phaeton. While he bellowed, it stayed open, and then it slammed shut. Anybody who wanted to return home safely from the vigil invited the clerks Ryabykin or Korsunsky to go with him. They were both very strong, and the priggers were afraid of them. Especially of Ryabykin, who was wall-eyed and was put on trial when the clerk Solomka was killed in the Shchekatikhino grove during the May fête …

I’m telling all this to my uncle so that he won’t think about himself, but he interrupts:

“Stop it, you’ll really be the death of me. It’s all about killing. Let’s rest at least, before we go down on the ice. Here, I’ve still got three coppers on me. Take them and put them in your glove.”

“Do please give them to me—I’ve got room in my mitten, I can take three more coppers.”

And I was just going to take these three coppers from him, when somebody emerged from the darkness right next to us and said:

“So, my good fellows, who have you robbed?”

I thought: that’s it—a prigger, but I could tell by the voice that it was that butcher I told you about.

“Is that you, Efrosin Ivanych?” I say. “Come along with us, brother.”

But he hurries by, as if blending with the snow, and answers on his way:

“No, brothers, we’re no birds of a feather: divide up your own booty, but don’t touch Efrosin. Efrosin’s just been listening to voices, his heart’s swooning in his breast … One flick—and there’ll be no life left in you.”

“Impossible to stop him,” I say. “You see, he’s mistaken on our score: he takes us for thieves.”

My uncle replies:

“God keep him and his bird feathers. With him, too, you don’t know if you’ll be left alive. We’d better take what God grants and go with God’s help alone. If God doesn’t desert you, pigs won’t hurt you. Now that he’s gone, I feel brave.… Lord have mercy! Nicholas, protector of Mtsensk, Mitrophany of Voronezh, Tikhon and Josaf … Scat! What is it?”

“What?”

“Didn’t you see?”

“What can anybody see here?”

“Something like a cat under our feet.”

“You imagined it.”

“Just like a watermelon rolling.”

“Maybe somebody’s hat got torn off.”

“Aie!”

“What’s wrong?”

“It’s the hat.”

“What about it?”

“Why, you yourself said ‘torn off’ … They must be trouncing somebody up there on the hill.”

“No, it must be the wind tore it off.”

And with those words we both started going down towards the barges on the ice.

The barges, I repeat, were simply standing there then, without any order, one beside the other, just as they had put in. They were piled terribly close together, with only the narrowest little passageways between them, where you could barely get through and had to keep twisting and turning this way and that.

“Well, uncle,” I say, “I don’t want to conceal it from you: here lies the greatest danger.”

My uncle froze—he even stopped praying to the saints.

“Now, uncle,” I say, “you go on ahead.”

“Why ahead?” he whispers.

“It’s safer ahead.”

“Why safer?”

“Because, if a prigger attacks you, you can immediately fall back towards me, and then I’ll support you, and give him one. But behind I won’t see you: the prigger may cover your mouth with his hand or some slippery bast—and I won’t hear … I’ll keep walking.”

“No, don’t keep walking … And what sort of bast is it?”

“Slippery. Their women pick it up around the bathhouses and bring it to them for stopping people’s mouths so they can’t shout.”

I could see that my uncle kept talking like this because he was afraid to go ahead.

“I’m apprehensive about going ahead,” he says, “because he may hit me on the forehead with a weight, and then you won’t have time to defend me.”

“Well, but behind is still more frightening, because he may swat you on the head with a svaika.”

“What svaika?”

“Why do you ask? Don’t you know what a svaika is?”

“No, I do know: a svaika’s used in a game—made of iron, sharp.”

“Yes, sharp.”

“With a round head?”

“Yes, a three- or four-pound ball-shaped head.”

“Back home in Elets they carry bludgeons for that; but this is the first I hear about a svaika.”

“Here in Orel it’s the most favorite fashion—on the head with a svaika. The skull splits right open.”

“Better, though, if we walk arm in arm beside each other.”

“It’s too narrow for two between the barges.”

“Still … this svaika, really! … Better if we squeeze together somehow.”

XI

But as soon as we locked elbows and started squeezing through those passageways between the barges—we hear that one from behind us, again not hanging back, again pressing close on our heels.

“Tell me, please,” says my uncle, “maybe the other one wasn’t the butcher?”

I just shrugged my shoulders and listened.

A scraping could be heard as he squeezed through sideways, and he was just about to seize me from behind with his hand … And another one could be heard running down the hill … Well, it was obvious these were priggers—we had to get away. We tore ahead, but it was impossible to go quickly, because it was dark, and narrow, and ice stuck up everywhere, and this nearest prigger was already right on my back … breathing.

I say to my uncle:

“Anyhow there’s no avoiding it—let’s turn around.”

I thought, either let him go on past us, or better if I meet him in the face with my fist full of coppers than have him strike from behind. But as soon as we turned to face him, the good-for-nothing bent down and shot between us like a cat! …

My uncle and I both went sprawling.

My uncle shouts to me:

“Catch him, catch him, Mishutka! He snatched my beaver hat!”

And I can’t see a thing, but I remember about my watch and clutch myself where it should be. And just imagine, my watch is gone … The beast snatched it!

“Same for me,” I answer. “He took my watch!”

And, forgetting myself, I went hurtling after the prigger as fast as I could, and was lucky enough to catch him in the dark just behind a barge, hit him on the head as hard as I could with my coppers, knocked him down, and sat on him:

“Give me back the watch!”

He didn’t say a word in reply, the scoundrel, but he nipped my hand with his teeth.

“Ah, you dog!” I say. “See how he bites!” And I gave him a good belt in the jaw, then stopped his mouth with the cuff of my sleeve, and with the other hand went straight for his breast pocket, found the watch at once, and yanked it out.

Just then my uncle ran up:

“Hold him, hold him,” he says, “I’ll give him a drubbing …”

And we started drubbing him Elets-fashion and Orel-fashion. We pummeled him cruelly, so much so that when he tore away from us, he didn’t even cry out, but dashed off like a hare; and only when he had fled as far as the Plautin Well did he shout “Help”; and at once somebody on the other side, on the hill, also shouted “Help.”

“What brigands!” says my uncle. “They rob people, and then shout ‘Help’ themselves on both sides! … Did you take your watch back from him?”

“Yes.”

“Why didn’t you take back my hat as well?”

“Your hat,” I reply, “went clean out of my head.”

“And I’m cold now. I’ve got a bald spot.”

“Put on my hat.”

“I don’t want yours. My hat cost fifty roubles at Faleev’s.”

“Never mind,” I say, “nobody can see it now.”

“What about you?”

“I’ll simply go bareheaded like this. We’re already close—we’ll turn that corner in a moment, and it’ll be our house.”

My hat, however, was too small for my uncle. He took a handkerchief from his pocket and tied it over his head.

And so we came running home.

XII

Mama and my aunt had not gone to bed yet: they were both knitting stockings and waiting for us. When they saw my uncle come in all covered with snow and his head tied with a handkerchief like a woman’s, they both gasped at once and began talking.

“Lord! What’s the matter! … Where’s the winter hat you were wearing?”

“Farewell, good old winter hat! … It’s no more,” my uncle replied.

“Our Lady, most holy Mother of God! Where did it go?”

“Your Orelian priggers took it on the ice.”

“So that’s why we heard you cry ‘Help.’ I said to my sister, ‘Let’s send our fullers—I think I hear Misha’s innocent voice.’ ”

“Oh, yes! By the time your fullers woke up and came out, there wouldn’t even have been a name left to us … No, it wasn’t us crying ‘Help,’ it was the thieves; and we defended ourselves.”

Mama and my aunt boiled up.

“What? Can Misha have shown his strength?”

“Yes, our Misha played the main part—he may have let my hat slip, but he did take back his watch.”

I can see mama is glad that I’ve done so well, but she says:

“Ah, Misha, Misha! And I begged you so not to drink anything and not to stay out late, till the thieves’ time. Why didn’t you listen to me?”

“Forgive me, mama,” I say, “but I didn’t drink anything, and I didn’t dare leave uncle there alone. You can see for yourself, if he’d come home alone, he might have gotten into some big trouble.”

“He’s had his hat taken as it is.”

“Well, so what! … You can always get yourself a hat.”

“Of course—thank God you took back your watch.”

“Yes, mama, I took it. And, oh, how I took it! I knocked him down in a trice, stopped his mouth with my sleeve so that he wouldn’t cry out, put my other hand into his breast pocket and pulled out my watch, and then uncle and I started pummeling him.”

“Well, that was pointless.”

“Not at all! Let the rascal remember it.”

“The watch wasn’t damaged?”

“No, I don’t think so—only the chain seems to be broken …”

And with those words I took the watch from my pocket and examined the chain, but my aunt looks closely and asks:

“Whose watch might that be?”

“What do you mean, whose? It’s mine, of course.”

“But yours had a rim.”

“Well, so?”

And I look myself and suddenly see: in fact, this watch doesn’t have a gold rim, but instead of that it has a silver face with a shepherd and shepherdess on it, and little sheep at their feet …

I started shaking all over.

“What is this??! It’s not my watch!”

And they all just stood there, not comprehending.

My aunt says:

“How about that!”

My uncle reassures us:

“Wait,” he says, “don’t be frightened. The thief must have made off with Mishutka’s watch, and this one he took earlier from somebody else.”

But I flung the filched watch on the table and, so as not to see it, rushed to my room. And there I hear my watch on the wall above my bed ticking away: tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock.

I jump up to it with a candle and see—that’s it, my watch with the rim … Hanging there quite nicely, where it belongs!

Here I slapped myself on the forehead as hard as I could and started, not crying, but howling …

“Lord God! Who have I robbed?”

XIII

Mama, my aunt, my uncle—everybody got frightened, came running, shook me.

“What’s the matter? What’s the matter? Calm down!”

“Please,” I say, “leave me alone! How can I calm down if I’ve robbed a man?”

Mama started crying.

“He’s gone mad,” she says. “He must have seen something horrible!”

“I certainly did, mama! … What do I do now!!”

“What was it that you saw?”

“That there. Look for yourself.”

“What? Where?”

“That, that there! Look! Don’t you see what it is?”

They looked at the wall where I was pointing and saw the silver watch with the gold rim that my uncle had given me, hanging on the wall and ticking away quite calmly …

My uncle was the first to recover his reason.

“Holy God,” he says, “isn’t that your watch?”

“Yes, of course it is!”

“So it must be you didn’t take it with you, but left it here?”

“You can see I did.”

“And that one … that one … Whose is that one you took?”

“How should I know?”

“What is this! My little sisters, my dear ones! Misha and I have robbed somebody!”

Mama’s legs gave way under her: she cried out as she stood there and sat down on the floor right where she was.

I rushed to pick her up, but she said wrathfully:

“Away, robber!”

My aunt just made crosses in all directions and muttered:

“Holy God, holy God, holy God!”

But mama clutched her head and whispered:

“They beat somebody, they robbed somebody, and they don’t know who!”

My uncle picked her up and tried to calm her:

“Calm yourself now, it wasn’t a good man we beat.”

“How do you know? Maybe he was; maybe it was somebody going to fetch a doctor for a sick man.”

My uncle says:

“And what about my hat? Why did he snatch my hat?”

“God knows about your hat and where you left it.”

My uncle was offended, but mama paid no attention to him and turned to me again.

“I’ve kept my boy in the fear of God for so many years, and this is what he prepared himself for: thief or none, but he looks like one … After this no sensible girl in Orel will marry you, because now everybody, everybody, will know you’re a prigger.”

I couldn’t help myself and said loudly:

“For pity’s sake, mama, what kind of a prigger am I? It’s all a mistake!”

But she didn’t want to listen, and kept rapping me on the head with her knuckles and wailing woefully:¹³

“I taught you: my child, live far from wickedness, do not go gambling and merrymaking, do not drink two cups in a single gulp, do not fall asleep in a secluded place, lest your costly trousers be taken off you, lest great shame and disgrace overtake you, and through you your family suffer idle reproach and revilement. I taught you: my child, do not go to dicers and taverners, do not think how to steal and rob, but you did not want to heed your mother. Now take off your fine clothes and put on pot-house rags, and wait till the watchmen knock at our gates and Tsyganok himself comes barging into our honest house.”

She kept wailing like that and rapping me on the head with her knuckles.

But when my aunt heard about Tsyganok, she cried out:

“Lord, save us from bloody men and from Arid!”¹⁴

My God! In other words, our house turned into a veritable hell.

My aunt and mama embraced each other and, in that embrace, withdrew weeping. Only my uncle and I remained.

I sat down, leaned on the table, and I don’t remember how many hours I went on sitting there. I kept thinking: who was it that I robbed? Maybe it was the Frenchman Saint-Vincent coming from a lesson, or the secretary from the office who lives in the house of Strakhov, the marshal of the nobility¹⁵ … I was sorry for each of them. And what if it was my godfather Kulabukhov coming from the other side after visiting the treasury secretary! … He wanted to pass by quietly, so as not to be seen with a little sack, and I up and worked him over … A godson! … his own godfather!

“I’ll go to the attic and hang myself. There’s nothing else left for me.”

And my uncle was just fiercely drinking tea, and then he comes up to me somehow—I didn’t even see how—and says:

“Enough sitting and moping, we must act.”

“Why, yes,” I reply, “of course, if we can find out whose watch I took …”

“Never mind. Get up quickly, and we’ll go together and declare everything ourselves.”

“Who are we going to declare it to?”

“To your Tsyganok himself, naturally.”

“How shameful to confess it!”

“What can we do? Do you think I’m eager to go to Tsyganok? … But all the same, it’s better to own up to it ourselves than to have him come looking for us: take both watches and let’s go.”

I agreed.

I took both my own watch, which my uncle had given me, and the one I had brought home that night, and, without saying good-bye to mama, we left.

XIV

We went to the police station, and Tsyganok was already sitting in his office before the zertsalo,¹⁶ and at his door stood a young constable, Prince Solntsev-Zasekin. The family was notable, the talent unremarkable.

My uncle saw that I bowed to this prince, and said:

“Is he really a prince?”

“By God, it’s true.”

“Flash something at him in your fingers, so that he’ll pop out to the stairs for a minute.”

And that’s just how it went: I held up a twenty-five-kopeck piece—the prince popped out to the stairs.

My uncle put the coin in his hand and asked that we be let in to the office as soon as possible.

The constable started telling us that a great many incidents had taken place here in town last night.

“And with us an incident also occurred.”

“Well, but what sort? You both look yourselves, but down on the river there’s a man sunk under the ice; two merchants on Poleshskaya Square scattered all the shafts, frames, and sleigh bodies about; a man was found unconscious under a tub, and two had their watches stolen. I’m the only one left on duty, all the rest are running around looking for the priggers …”

“All right, all right, you go and report that we’ve come to explain a certain matter.”

“Have you had a fight or some family trouble?”

“No, just report that we’re here on a secret matter; we’re ashamed to explain it in front of people. Here’s another.”

The prince pocketed the fifty-kopeck piece and five minutes later called us:

“Come in, please.”

XV

Tsyganok was a thickset Ukrainian—exactly like a black cockroach; bristling mustaches, and the crudest Ukrainian-style conversation.

My uncle, in his own way, his Elets way, wanted to go up to him, but he shouted:

“Speak from a distance.”

We stopped.

“What’s your business?”

My uncle says:

“First of all—this.”

And he placed a sweetener on the table, wrapped in paper. Tsyganok covered it up.

Then my uncle began his story:

“I’m a merchant and a church warden from Elets, I came here yesterday on a church necessity; I’m staying with my relations beyond the Plautin Well …”

“So it was you who got robbed last night, was it?”

“Exactly. My nephew and I were on our way home at eleven o’clock, and an unknown man was following us, and as we started to cross the ice between the barges, he …”

“Wait a minute … And who was the third one with you?”

“There was no third one with us, besides this thief, who rushed …”

“But who got drowned there last night?”

“Drowned?”

“Yes!”

“We know nothing about that.”

The police chief rang and said to the constable:

“Take them to the clink!”

My uncle pleaded:

“For pity’s sake, Your Honor! Why? … We ourselves came to tell …”

“Wasn’t it you who drowned the man?”

“We never even heard anything about any drowning. Who got drowned?”

“Nobody knows. A mucked-up beaver hat was found by a hole in the ice, but who was wearing it—nobody knows.”

“A beaver hat!?”

“Yes. Show him the hat, let’s see what he says.”

The constable took my uncle’s hat from the closet.

My uncle says:

“That’s my hat. A thief snatched it off me yesterday on the ice.”

Tsyganok batted his eyes.

“What thief? Stop blathering! The thief didn’t take a hat, the thief stole a watch.”

“A watch? Whose watch, Your Honor?”

“The Nicetas deacon’s.”

“The Nicetas deacon’s!”

“Yes, and he was beaten badly, this Nicetas deacon.”

We were simply astounded.

So that’s who we worked over!

Tsyganok says:

“Must be you know these crooks.”

“Yes,” my uncle replies, “it’s us.”

And he told how it all happened.

“Where is this watch now?”

“If you please—here’s the one watch, and here’s the other.”

“And that’s all?”

My uncle slips him another sweetener and says:

“Here’s more for you.”

He covers it up and says:

“Bring the deacon here!”

XVI

The lean deacon comes in, all beaten up and his head bandaged.

Tsyganok looks at me and says:

“See?!”

I bow and say:

“Your Honor, I’m ready to endure anything, only please don’t send me to some far-off place. I’m my mother’s only son.”

“No, tell me, are you a Christian or not? Is there any feeling in you?”

I see the conversation isn’t going right and say:

“Uncle, give him a sweetener for me, they’ll pay you back at home.”

My uncle gives it.

“How did this happen to you?”

The deacon began telling how “the whole company of us were in the Boris and Gleb Inn, and everything was very good and noble, but then, for a bribe, the innkeeper put strangers under the bed so they could listen, and one of the Elets merchants got offended, and a fight came of it. I quietly put my coat on and left, but when I went around the office building, I see two men on the lookout ahead of me. I stop to let them go further, and they stop; I go on—so do they. And suddenly I hear somebody else from far away overtaking me from behind … I got completely frightened, rushed ahead, and the first two turned towards me in the narrow passage between the barges and blocked my way … And the one from the hill behind had almost caught up with me. I prayed in my mind: ‘Lord bless me!’ and bent down to slip between these two, and so I did, but they ran after me, knocked me down, beat me, and snatched my watch … Here’s what’s left of the chain.”

“Show me the chain.”

He put the piece of chain together with the one attached to the watch and said:

“There you are. Look, is this your watch?”

The deacon says:

“It’s mine all right, and I’d like to have it back.”

“That’s impossible, it has to stay here till the investigation.”

“And what did I get beaten for?” he says.

“That you can ask them.”

Here my uncle intervened.

“Your Honor! There’s no point in asking us. We are indeed to blame, it was we who beat the father deacon, and we’ll make up for it. We’re taking him to Elets with us.”

But the deacon was so offended that he didn’t see things that way at all.

“No,” he says, “God forbid I ever agree to go to Elets. Forget it! I was just about to accept, and right off you give me this treatment.”

My uncle says:

“Father deacon, this is all a matter of a mistake.”

“A fine mistake, when I can’t turn my head anymore.”

“We’ll get you cured.”

“No,” he says, “I don’t want your cures, I always go to the attendant at Finogeich’s bathhouse to get cured, but you can pay me a thousand roubles to build a house.”

“That we’ll do.”

“It’s no joke. I’m not to be beaten … I have my clerical dignity.”

“We’ll satisfy your dignity, too.”

And Tsyganok also started helping my uncle:

“The Elets merchants will satisfy you …,” he says. “Is there anybody else there in the clink?”

XVII

They brought in the Boris and Gleb innkeeper and Pavel Mironych. Pavel Mironych’s frock coat was in shreds, and so was the innkeeper’s.

“What was the fight about?” asks Tsyganok.

They both lay sweeteners on the desk for him and reply:

“It was nothing, Your Honor. We’re on perfectly good terms again.”

“Well, splendid, if you’re not angry about the beating, that’s your business; but how dared you cause disorder in town? Why did you scatter all the troughs and sleighs and shafts on Poleshskaya Square?”

The innkeeper said it was accidental.

“I wanted to take him to the police last night, and he me; we pulled each other by the arm, but the butcher Agafon supported me; we got lost in the snow, wound up on the square—no way to get through … everything got scattered … We started shouting from fear … The patrol picked us up … a watch got lost …”

“Whose?”

“Mine.”

Pavel Mironych says:

“And mine, too.”

“What proofs have you got?”

“Why proofs? We’re not looking for them.”

“And who put the butcher Agafon under the washtub?”

“That we can’t say,” says the innkeeper. “The tub must have fallen on him and knocked him down, and he, being drunk, fell asleep under it. Let us go, Your Honor, we’re not looking for anything.”

“Very well,” says Tsyganok, “only we’ve got to finish with the others. Bring in the other deacon.”

The swarthy deacon comes in.

Tsyganok says to him:

“Why did you smash up the sentry box last night?”

The deacon replies:

“I was very frightened, Your Honor.”

“What were you frightened of?”

“Some people on the ice started shouting ‘Help’ very loud. I rushed back and asked the sentry to hide me from the priggers, and he chased me away: ‘I can’t stand up, I sent my boot soles to be mended.’ Then I pressed myself against the door in fright, and it broke. It’s my fault—I forced my way into the box and fell asleep there, and in the morning I got up, looked: no watch, no money.”

Tsyganok says:

“So you see, Eletsians? This deacon also suffered through you, and his watch disappeared.”

Pavel Mironych and my uncle replied:

“Well, Your Honor, we’ll have to go home and borrow from acquaintances, we’ve got nothing more on us.”

So we all went out, but the watch stayed there, and soon we were all consoled for that, and there was a lot of joking and laughing, and I drank with them then in the Boris and Gleb Inn till I got drunk for the first time in my life, and I rode down the street in a cab, waving my handkerchief. After that they borrowed money in Orel and left, but they didn’t take the deacon along with them, because he was too afraid of them. Insist as they might—he wouldn’t go.

“I’m very glad,” he says, “that the Lord granted that I get a thousand roubles from you for my offense. I’ll build myself a little house now, and talk the secretary into giving me a good post here. You Eletsians, I can see, are just too brassy.”

For me, however, a terrible trial began. Mama got so ill from her anger at me that she had one foot in the grave. There was dejection all through the house. Doctor Dépiche was not called in: they were afraid he would ask all kinds of questions about her health. They turned to religion. Mother Evnikeya was living in the convent then, and she had a Jordanian sheet, which she had wiped herself with after bathing in the Jordan River. They wrapped mama in this sheet. It didn’t help. They blessed the water with seven crosses in seven churches every day. That didn’t help. There was a layabout peasant, Esafeika—he lay about all the time and never worked. They sent him a hatful of cut-up apples and asked him to pray. That didn’t help either. Only when she and her sister finally went to Finogeich’s bathhouse and had her blood let with leeches, only then did she pull herself together somewhat. She ordered the Jordanian sheet sent back to Evnikeya and started looking for an orphan to raise at home.

This was the matchmaker’s teaching. The matchmaker had many children of her own, but she was also very fond of orphans—she kept taking them in, and so she started saying to my mother:

“Take some poor people’s child into your home. Everything at home will change for you at once: the air will become different. Gentlefolk set out flowers for the air—of course, there’s nothing wrong with that; but the main thing for the air is children. There’s a spirit that breathes from children, and the angels rejoice at it, but Satan gnashes his teeth … There’s a girl now in the Pushkarny quarter: she’s had such a hard time with her baby, she even took her to the Orlik mill to drown her.”

Mama said:

“Tell her not to drown her, but to leave her with me.”

That same day the little girl Mavrutka started squealing in our house and sucking her little fist. Mama busied herself with the girl, and a change came over her. She became caustic with me.

“You don’t need any new clothes for the feast day: now that you’re a drunkard, pot-house rags are enough for you.”

At home I endured it all, but I also couldn’t show my face outside, because as soon as they saw me, the market folk started teasing me:

“He’s the one who took the deacon’s watch.”

No living at home, no going out.

Only the orphan girl Mavrutka smiled at me.

But the matchmaker Matryona Terentyevna saved me and helped me out. She was a simple woman, but a kindly one.

“My fine lad,” she says, “would you like to have your head put back on your shoulders? I’ll do it so that, if anybody laughs at you, you won’t feel it.”

I say:

“Please do, I’m disgusted with life.”

“Well, then,” she says, “listen to me alone. You and I will go to Mtsensk, pray zealously to St. Nicholas, and offer him a candle big as a post; and I’ll marry you to a picture of beauty, whom you’ll live with all your life, thanking God and remembering me, and protecting poor orphans, because I have a soft spot for orphans.”

I replied that I myself felt pity for orphans, but that no decent sort of girl would marry me now.

“Why not? That’s all nonsense. This girl’s intelligent. You didn’t take from your own household, you brought to it. That makes a difference. I’ll tell her how to understand it, and she’ll see it clearly, and she’ll marry you all right. And we’ll travel so nicely to St. Nicholas with full satisfaction: the horse will pull a little cart with our load, with a samovar, with provisions, and we three will go by foot along the roadside, we’ll take that trouble for the saint’s sake: you, and me, and her, and I’ll take an orphan girl to keep me company. And she, my swan, Alyonushka, also pities orphans. They’ll let her go to Mtsensk with me. And you and she will walk and walk, then sit down, and sit and sit, and then take to the road again and get to talking, and the talking will lead to loving, and once you’ve tasted love, you’ll see that in it is all our life and joy, and our desire is to live in family quietude. And then you’ll just spit on all people’s talk, and not even look their way. So all will be well, and your former pranks will be forgotten.”

I obtained mama’s leave to go to St. Nicholas and heal my soul, and the rest all went as the matchmaker Matryona Terentyevna had said. I became friends with the girl Alyonushka, and I forgot about all those happenings; and once I married her and a children’s spirit came to our house, mama also calmed down, and to this day I live and keep saying: Blessed art thou, O Lord!

* Podlyot, in old Orel speech, was the same as the Moscow word zhulik or the Petersburg word mazurik (“rogue, swindler, cheat”). Author. (We translate it by the old thieves’ word “prigger.” Trans.)