The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol (20 page)

“Allow me, my dear sir, to introduce myself!” the fat man went on.
“I am a landowner in the same Gadyach district and your neighbor.
I live in the village of Khortyshche, no more than four miles from your farmstead of Vytrebenki.
My name is Grigory Grigorievich Storchenko.
Without fail, without fail, my dear sir, I don’t even want to know you unless you come to visit the village of Khortyshche.
I’m hurrying off on an errand now … And what is this?” he said in a mild voice to the entering lackey, a boy in a long Cossack blouse with patches on the elbows, who with a perplexed mien was placing bundles and boxes on the table.
“What is this?
What?” and Grigory Grigorievich’s voice was imperceptibly becoming more and more menacing.
“Did I tell you to put it here, my gentle?
did I tell you to put it here, scoundrel?
Didn’t I tell you to heat the chicken up first, you cheat?
Get out!” he cried, stamping
his foot.
“Wait, you mug!
where’s the hamper with the bottles?
Ivan Fyodorovich!” he said, pouring some liquor into a glass, “a little cordial if you please?”

“By God, sir, I can’t … I’ve already had occasion …” Ivan Fyodorovich said, faltering.

“I won’t hear of it, my dear sir!” the landowner raised his voice, “I won’t hear of it!
I’m not moving from this spot until you try …”

Ivan Fyodorovich, seeing it was impossible to refuse, drank it off, not without pleasure.

“This is a chicken, my dear sir,” the fat Grigory Grigorievich went on, cutting it up in the wooden box with a knife.
“I must tell you that my cook, Yavdokha, is fond of a nip now and then, and so it often comes out too dry.
Hey, boy!” here he turned to the boy in the Cossack blouse, who was bringing in a featherbed and pillows, “make my bed up on the floor in the middle of the room!
See that you pile the hay a bit higher under the pillow!
And pull a tuft of hemp from the woman’s spinning to stop my ears for the night!
You should know, my dear sir, that I’ve been in the habit of stopping my ears for the night ever since that cursed time when a cockroach got into my left ear in a Russian tavern.
The cursed Russians, as I found out later, even eat cabbage soup with cockroaches in it.
It’s impossible to describe what happened to me: such a tickling in my ear, such a tickling … you could just climb the wall!
A simple old woman helped me when I got back to our parts.
And how, do you think?
Merely by whispering some spell on it.
What do you say about these medical men, my dear sir?
I think they simply fool and befuddle us.
Some old woman knows twenty times better than all these medical men.”

“Indeed, sir, what you say is perfectly true.
In fact, some old …” Here he stopped, as if unable to find the appropriate word.

It will do no harm if I say that generally he was not lavish with words.
Maybe the reason was his timidity, or maybe it was the wish to express himself more beautifully.

“Give that hay a real good shaking!” Grigory Grigorievich said to his lackey.
“The hay here is so vile you have to keep watching for twigs.
Allow me, my dear sir, to wish you a good night!
We
won’t see each other tomorrow: I’ll be setting out before dawn.
Your Jew will keep his sabbath, because tomorrow’s Saturday, and so there’s no need for you to get up early.
And don’t forget my request.
I don’t even want to know you unless you come to the village of Khortyshche.”

Here Grigory Grigorievich’s valet pulled his frock coat and boots off him, replacing them with a dressing gown, and Grigory Grigorievich tumbled into bed, and it looked as if one huge featherbed were lying on another.

“Hey, boy!
where are you off to, scoundrel!
Come here, straighten my blanket!
Hey, boy, pile up some hay under my head!
and, say, have the horses been watered yet?
More hay!
here, under this side!
and straighten the blanket nicely, scoundrel!
Like that!
more!
ah!…”

Here Grigory Grigorievich sighed another time or two and sent a terrible nose-whistling all over the room, occasionally letting out such snores that the old woman snoozing on the stove bench
⁵
would wake up and suddenly look all around her, but, seeing nothing, would calm down and go back to sleep.

When Ivan Fyodorovich woke up the next day, the fat landowner was no longer there.
This was the only remarkable event that befell him on the road.
Three days later he was nearing his farmstead.

He felt his heart pound hard when the windmill peeked out, its sails turning, and when, as the Jew drove his nags up the hill, a row of pussy willows appeared down below.
A pond gleamed vividly and brightly through them, breathing freshness.
Here he once used to swim, in this very pond he used to wade with other boys, up to his neck in the water, hunting for crayfish.
The kibitka rode up the dam, and Ivan Fyodorovich saw the same little thatch-roofed old house; the same apple and cherry trees he used to climb on the sly.
As soon as he drove into the yard, dogs of all sorts came running from every side: brown, black, gray, spotted.
Some threw themselves, barking, under the horses’ hooves, others ran behind, noticing that the axle was greased with lard; one stood by the kitchen, covering a bone with his paw and howling at the top of his voice; another barked from a distance as he ran back and forth wagging
his tail, as if to say: “Look, good Christian folk, what a wonderful young fellow I am!” Boys in dirty shirts came running to see.
A sow, strolling in the yard with sixteen piglets, raised her snout with an inquisitive air and grunted louder than usual.
In the yard there were many canvases with wheat, millet, and oats drying in the sun.
On the roof there were also many varieties of herbs drying: chicory, hawkweed, and others.

Ivan Fyodorovich was so busy gazing at it all that he came to his senses only when the spotted dog bit the Jew on the calf as he was getting down from the box.
The people of the household came running, including the cook, one woman, and two girls in woolen shirts, and after the first exclamations—“Why, it’s our young master!”—announced that the aunt was in the kitchen garden planting sweet corn together with the girl Palashka and the coachman Omelko, who often carried out the duties of gardener and watchman.
But the aunt, who had seen the bast-covered kibitka from far off, was already there.
And Ivan Fyodorovich was amazed when she all but picked him up, as if he couldn’t believe this was the aunt who had written to him about her illness and decrepitude.

III
T
HE
A
UNT

Aunt Vasilisa Kashporovna was then about fifty years old.
She had never been married, and she used to say that her maidenly life was dearer to her than anything.
However, as far as I can recall, no one had ever offered to marry her.
The reason for that was that all men felt some sort of timidity in her presence and simply could not get up the courage to propose to her.
“Vasilisa Kashporovna has quite a character!” her wooers used to say, and they were perfectly right, because Vasilisa Kashporovna could make anyone feel lower than grass.
The drunken miller, who had been good for absolutely nothing at all, she managed, through her own manly pulling of his topknot every day, without any extraneous remedies, to turn not into a man but into pure gold.
She was of almost
gigantic height and of corresponding build and strength.
It seemed that nature had committed an unpardonable error in having arranged for her to wear a dark brown housecoat with little ruffles on weekdays and with a red cashmere shawl on Easter Sunday and her name day, whereas the most becoming things would have been a dragoon’s mustache and jackboots.
On the other hand, her occupations corresponded perfectly to her appearance: she rowed the boat herself, handling the oars more skillfully than any fisherman; she hunted game; she stood over the mowers all the while they worked; she knew the exact number of melons and watermelons in her patch; she took a toll of five kopecks per cart from those passing over her dam; she climbed the trees to shake down the pears; she gave beatings to her vassals with her terrible hand, and with the same awesome hand offered a glass of vodka to the deserving.
Almost simultaneously she cursed, dyed yarn, ran the kitchen, made kvass, cooked jam with honey; she bustled all day and had time for everything.
The result was that Ivan Fyodorovich’s little estate, which, according to the latest census, consisted of eighteen souls,
⁶
flourished in the full sense of the word.
Besides, she loved her nephew all too ardently and carefully saved every kopeck for him.

On his homecoming, Ivan Fyodorovich’s life decidedly changed and took a totally different path.
It seemed as if nature had created him precisely for managing an eighteen-soul estate.
The aunt herself noticed that he was going to make a good proprietor, though, all the same, she did not yet allow him to enter into all branches of management.
“He’s still a young lad,” she used to say, despite the fact that Ivan Fyodorovich was just shy of forty, “he can’t know everything!”

However, he was constantly present in the fields beside the reapers and mowers, and this brought inexplicable delight to his meek soul.
The swinging in unison of a dozen or more shining scythes; the swish of grass falling in orderly rows; the occasional pealing song of the women reapers, now merry as the welcoming of guests, now melancholy as parting; the calm, clear evenings—and what evenings!
how free and fresh the air!
how everything
comes alive then: the steppe turns red and blue and glows with flowers; quails, bustards, gulls, grasshoppers, thousands of insects, and from them comes whistling, buzzing, chirring, crying, and suddenly a harmonious chorus; and it’s all never silent for a moment!
And the sun is going down and disappearing.
Oh!
how fresh and good!
In the fields, now here, now there, cookfires are started, with cauldrons over them, and around the cauldrons mustached mowers sit; steam rises from the dumplings.
The dusk turns gray … It’s hard to say what went on inside Ivan Fyodorovich then.
When he joined the mowers, he would forget to sample their dumplings, which he liked very much, and stand motionless in one spot, his eyes following a gull vanishing in the sky, or counting the shocks of harvested grain that studded the field.

Before too long there was talk everywhere of Ivan Fyodorovich being a great manager.
The aunt was utterly overjoyed with her nephew and never missed an opportunity to boast about him.
One day—this was after the harvest was over and, namely, at the end of July—Vasilisa Kashporovna, taking Ivan Fyodorovich by the hand, said with a mysterious air that she now wished to talk with him about a matter that had long occupied her.

“You know, gentle Ivan Fyodorovich,” so she began, “that there are eighteen souls on your farmstead; that is according to the census, however, while without it one might count as many as twenty-four.
But that’s not the point.
You know the woods behind our pasture, and you must know the wide meadow beyond that same woods: it measures a little less than fifty acres, and there’s so much grass that you could sell more than a hundred roubles’ worth a year, especially if, as people say, a cavalry regiment is to be stationed here.”

“Of course I know it, Auntie—the grass is very good.”

“I know myself that it’s very good, but do you know that in reality all that land is yours?
Why do you pop your eyes so?
Listen, Ivan Fyodorovich!
Do you remember Stepan Kuzmich?
What am I saying—remember!
How could you!
You were so little then, you couldn’t even say his name!
I remember, when I came, just before St.
Philip’s,
⁷
I picked you up, and you almost ruined my whole
dress.
Fortunately, I handed you over to the nanny Matryona just in time.
Such a nasty boy you were then!… But that’s not the point.
All the land beyond our farmstead, and the village of Khortyshche itself, belonged to Stepan Kuzmich.
Even before you came into the world, I must tell you, he started visiting your mother—true, at times when your father wasn’t home.
Not that I say it in reproach of her!
God rest her soul!—though the dear departed was always unfair to me.
But that’s not the point.
Be that as it may, only Stepan Kuzmich left you a deed of gift for that very estate I’ve been talking about.
But, just between us, your late mother was of a most whimsical character.
The devil himself, Lord forgive me the vile word, wouldn’t have been able to understand her.
What she did with that deed, God alone knows.
I simply think it’s in the hands of that old bachelor Grigory Grigorievich Storchenko.
That fat-bellied rogue got the whole estate.
I’m ready to stake God knows what that he concealed the deed.”

“Allow me to say, Auntie—isn’t that the Storchenko I became acquainted with at the posting station?”

Here Ivan Fyodorovich told of his encounter.

“Who knows about him!” the aunt replied, after pondering a little.
“Maybe he’s not a scoundrel.
True, it’s only six months since he moved here to live, not long enough to get to know the man.
The old woman, his mother, is a very sensible woman, I’ve heard, and a great expert at pickling cucumbers, they say.
Her serf girls make excellent rugs.
But since you say he was nice to you, go and see him!
Maybe the old sinner will listen to his conscience and give back what doesn’t belong to him.
You’re welcome to take the britzka, only those cursed children pulled all the nails out in the rear.
The coachman Omelko must be told to tack the leather down all over.”

“What for, Auntie?
I’ll take the dogcart you sometimes go hunting in.”

At that the conversation ended.

IV
T
HE
D
INNER

At dinnertime Ivan Fyodorovich drove into the village of Khortyshche and turned a bit timid as he began to approach the master’s house.
This house was long and covered not with a thatched roof, such as many neighboring landowners had, but with wood.
The two barns in the yard also had wooden roofs; the gates were of oak.
Ivan Fyodorovich was like that dandy who, having come to a ball, looks around and sees that everyone is dressed more smartly than he is.
Out of deference, he stopped his cart by the barn and went on foot to the porch.