The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol (23 page)

To this day I cannot forget an old couple from times past, who, alas, are no more, yet my soul is still filled with pity and my feelings are strangely wrung when I imagine myself coming again some day to their former, now-deserted dwelling and seeing a cluster of tumbledown cottages, an untended pond, an overgrown ditch in the place where the little low house used to stand—and nothing more.
Sad!
I feel sad beforehand!
But let us turn to the story.

Afanasy Ivanovich Tovstogub and Pulkheria Ivanovna, the Tovstogub wife, as the neighboring peasants called her, were the old folk I was beginning to tell about.
If I were a painter and wanted to portray Philemon and Baucis
¹
on canvas, I would never choose any other original than them.
Afanasy Ivanovich was sixty years
old, Pulkheria Ivanovna fifty-five.
Afanasy Ivanovich was tall, always went about in a sheepskin coat covered with camlet, sat hunched over, and almost always smiled, whether talking or merely listening.
Pulkheria Ivanovna was rather serious, she hardly ever laughed, but there was so much kindness written in her face and eyes, so much readiness to treat you to the best of everything they had, that you would surely have found a smile much too sugary on her kind face.
The pattern of light wrinkles on their faces was so pleasant that an artist would surely have stolen it.
By it one seemed able to read their whole life, the serene, calm life led by old, native-born, simple-hearted and yet wealthy families, who are always such a contrast to those low Little Russians who push their way up from tar-makers and dealers, fill the courts and government offices like locusts, rip the last kopeck out of their own compatriots, flood Petersburg with pettifoggers, finally make some fortune, and to their last name, which ends in
o
, solemnly add the letter
v
.
²
No, like all the ancient and native-born families of Little Russia, they bore no resemblance to these despicable and pathetic creatures.

It was impossible to look at their mutual love without sympathy.
They never spoke to each other informally but always with respect, as Afanasy Ivanovich and Pulkheria Ivanovna.
“Was it you who went through the seat of the chair, Afanasy Ivanovich?” “No matter, don’t be angry, Pulkheria Ivanovna, it was me.” They never had children, and therefore all their affection was focused on themselves.
Once, when he was young, Afanasy Ivanovich had served in the volunteer cavalry, later he became a staff major, but that was very long ago, a bygone thing, Afanasy Ivanovich himself hardly ever recalled it.
Afanasy Ivanovich had married at the age of thirty, when he was a fine fellow and wore an embroidered uniform; he had even abducted Pulkheria Ivanovna rather adroitly when her relations refused to give her to him; but of that, too, he remembered very little, or at least never spoke.

All these long-past, extraordinary events were replaced by a quiet and solitary life, by those drowsy and at the same time harmonious reveries which you experience sitting on a village balcony
overlooking the garden, when a wonderful rain makes a luxuriant splashing on the leaves, pouring down in bubbling streams and casting a drowsy spell over your limbs, and meanwhile a rainbow steals from behind the trees and like a half-ruined arch shines with its seven muted colors in the sky.
Or when you are rocked by a carriage bobbing between green shrubs, and a steppe quail throbs, and fragrant grass together with wildflowers and ears of wheat poke through the doors of the carriage, striking you pleasantly on the hands and face.

He always listened with a pleasant smile to the guests who came to see him, and sometimes spoke himself, but mainly to ask questions.
He was not one of those old people who make a nuisance of themselves, eternally praising the old days or denouncing the new.
On the contrary, in questioning you, he showed great curiosity and concern for the circumstances of your own life, its successes and failures, which always interest all kindly old men, though it somewhat resembled the curiosity of a child who, while talking to you, studies your watch fob.
In those moments his face, one might say, breathed kindness.

The rooms of the house in which our old folk lived were small, low, such as one meets among old world people.
In each room there was an enormous stove that took up almost a third of it.
These rooms were terribly warm, because Afanasy Ivanovich and Pulkheria Ivanovna were both very fond of warmth.
The fire-boxes were all in the front hall, which was always filled nearly to the ceiling with the straw customarily used instead of wood in Little Russia.
The crackling of this burning straw and its light made the front hall very pleasant on a winter evening, when ardent youths, chilled in the pursuit of some swarthy beauty, came running in clapping their hands.
The walls of the rooms were adorned with several paintings, big and small, in old-fashioned narrow frames.
I’m certain that the hosts themselves had long forgotten their content, and if some had been taken away, they surely would not have noticed it.
There were two large oil portraits.
One of them represented some bishop, the other Peter III.
³
The Duchess of La Vallière,
⁴
stained by flies, looked out from a narrow frame.
Around the windows and over the door there were many small pictures, such as one somehow gets used to regarding as spots on the wall and therefore simply does not look at.
The floors in almost all the rooms were of clay, but it was beaten down so neatly and kept so clean, as surely no parquet is kept in any rich house where a drowsy gentleman in livery lazily does the sweeping.

Pulkheria Ivanovna’s room was all filled with chests, boxes, little boxes, and little chests.
A multitude of little bundles and bags with flower, vegetable, and watermelon seeds hung on the walls.
A multitude of balls of yarn of various colors, of scraps from old dresses made in the course of half a century, was tucked into the corners of the chests and between them.
Pulkheria Ivanovna was a great manager and collected everything, sometimes without knowing of what use it would be later.

But the most remarkable thing in the house was the singing doors.
As soon as morning came, the singing of the doors sounded throughout the house.
I’m unable to say why they sang—whether it was the fault of rusty hinges, or the workman who made them concealed some secret in them—but the remarkable thing was that each door had its own special voice: the door to the bedroom sang in the highest treble, the dining room door in a hoarse bass, while the one in the front hall produced some strange cracked and at the same time moaning sound, so that, listening attentively, one could finally hear quite clearly: “My, oh, my, how cold I am!” I know that many people dislike this sound very much; but I have a great love for it, and if I happen now to hear the occasional creaking of a door, it immediately smells of the village to me, of the low little room lit by a candle in an old-fashioned candlestick, of supper already set on the table, of the dark May night gazing at the laid table through the open window from the garden, of the nightingale showering the garden, the house, and the distant river with his trills, of the fright and rustling of the branches … and, God, what a long string of memories comes to me then!

The chairs in the room were wooden, massive, as is usual with old-time things; they all had high, carved backs, natural, with no varnish or paint; they were not even upholstered, and somewhat
resembled the chairs on which bishops sit to this day.
Triangular tables in the corners, a rectangular one in front of the sofa, and a mirror in a narrow gilt frame with carved leaves, which flies had covered with black specks, a rug in front of the sofa with birds looking like flowers and flowers looking like birds—these were about all the furnishings in the unpretentious house where my old couple lived.

The female serfs’ quarters were crowded with young and not-so-young girls in striped shirts, whom Pulkheria Ivanovna sometimes gave some trifles to sew or set to sorting out berries, but who mostly slept and raided the kitchen.
Pulkheria Ivanovna considered it necessary to keep them in the house and strictly supervised their morals.
But, to her great astonishment, before a few months went by, one of her girls would grow much plumper at the waist, and this would seem the more astonishing since there were almost no bachelors in the place, except perhaps for the houseboy, who went around barefoot in a gray short-tailed coat and whenever he wasn’t eating was sure to be asleep.
Pulkheria Ivanovna usually reprimanded the guilty girl and gave strict orders that no such thing should happen again.
On the windowpanes a terrible number of flies pinged, overwhelmed completely by the heavy basso of a bumblebee, occasionally accompanied by the piercing shrieks of wasps; but as soon as the candles were brought in, the whole throng would go to sleep and cover the ceiling like a black cloud.

Afanasy Ivanovich took very little care of the management, though all the same he did sometimes go out to the mowers and reapers and watched their work quite closely; the whole burden of government lay on Pulkheria Ivanovna.
Pulkheria Ivanovna’s management consisted in a ceaseless locking and unlocking of the storehouse, in pickling, drying, and stewing a numberless multitude of fruits and plants.
Her house was the perfect likeness of a chemical laboratory.
Under the apple tree a fire was forever burning, and the iron tripod was never without a cauldron or copper pot on it, for preserves, jellies, fruit pastes made with honey, sugar, and I don’t remember what else.
Under another tree the coachman was forever distilling vodka in a copper still, with peach leaves,
bird-cherry flowers, centaury, cherry pits, and by the end of the process was quite unable to move his tongue, pouring out such nonsense that Pulkheria Ivanovna could not understand a thing and would send him to the kitchen to sleep.
So much of this stuff was cooked, pickled, and dried that Pulkheria Ivanovna would finally have drowned the yard in it—because she liked to prepare things for laying away beyond what she counted on using—if a good half of it hadn’t been eaten by the household serf girls, who would get into the storehouse and gorge themselves so terribly that they would spend whole days afterwards groaning and complaining about their stomachs.

As for the tillage and other aspects of management that lay outside the household, Pulkheria Ivanovna had little opportunity of entering into them.
The steward, together with the village headman, stole unmercifully.
They made a custom of entering their master’s forests as if they were their own; they built a lot of sleds and sold them at the local fair; besides that, they sold all the big oak trees to the neighboring Cossacks to be cut down for their mills.
Only once did Pulkheria Ivanovna have a wish to inspect her forests.
For that purpose a droshky was harnessed with enormous leather aprons which, as soon as the coachman snapped the reins and the horses, veterans of the old militia,
⁵
started from their place, filled the air with strange noises, so that one could suddenly hear a flute, a tambourine, and a drum; every little nail and iron staple set up such a clangor that even out at the mills one could hear the mistress leaving her yard, though it was nearly a mile and a half away.
Pulkheria Ivanovna could not fail to notice the terrible devastation in the forest and the loss of the oaks, which she knew to have been hundreds of years old when she was a child.

“Why is it, Nichipor,” she said, addressing her steward, who was right there, “that with you the oaks have grown so sparse?
Look out that the hair on your head doesn’t grow sparse, too.”

“Why sparse?” the steward replied.
“They perished!
Perished just like that—thunder beat them down, worms gnawed at them—they perished, ma’am, perished.”

Pulkheria Ivanovna, thoroughly satisfied with that answer, went home and gave instructions to double the watch in the garden on her Spanish cherries and the big winter bergamots.

Those worthy rulers, the steward and the headman, thought it quite unnecessary to bring all the flour into the master’s own barn and that half was enough; in the end, even the half that was delivered was either moldy or damp and had been rejected at the fair.
But however much the steward and the headman stole, however much everyone in the household stuffed his face, from the housekeeper to the pigs, who consumed a terrible quantity of plums and apples, and often shoved the trees with their snouts to shake down a whole rain of fruit; however much the sparrows and crows pecked up; however much all the household people took as presents to their kin in other villages, even stealing old linen and yarn from the storerooms, all of which returned to the universal source, that is, the tavern; however much visitors, their phlegmatic coachmen and lackeys stole—the blessed earth produced everything in such abundance, and Afanasy Ivanovich and Pulkheria Ivanovna needed so little, that all this terrible plundering seemed to go entirely unnoticed in their management.

The two old folk, as was the ancient custom of old world landowners, liked very much to eat.
As soon as day broke (they always rose early) and the doors started their discordant concert, they would be at the table having coffee.
After having his coffee, Afanasy Ivanovich would go out to the front door and, shaking his handkerchief, say, “Shoo, shoo!
Off the porch, geese!” In the yard he would usually run into the steward.
He would enter into his usual conversation with him, ask in great detail about the work, and come out with such observations and instructions as would astonish anyone with his extraordinary knowledge of management; and a newcomer would not even dare think it possible to steal from such a keen-sighted master.
But his steward was not gun-shy, he knew how to answer and, even more so, how to handle his job.

After that, Afanasy Ivanovich would go back in and, approaching Pulkheria Ivanovna, would say:

“Well, now, Pulkheria Ivanovna, isn’t it time we had a little bite of something?”