The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol (13 page)

“The sorcerer has appeared again!” cried the mothers, snatching up their children.

Majestically and dignifiedly the captain stepped forward and said in a loud voice, setting the icons against him:

“Vanish, image of Satan, there is no place for you here!” And, hissing and snapping his teeth like a wolf, the strange old man vanished.

There arose, arose noisily, like the sea in bad weather, a murmuring and talking among the folk.

“What is this sorcerer?” asked the young and unseasoned people.

“There’ll be trouble!” said the old ones, wagging their heads.
And everywhere, all over the captain’s wide yard, they began gathering in clusters and listening to stories about the strange sorcerer.
But they almost all said different things, and no one could tell anything for certain about him.

A barrel of mead was rolled out into the yard, and not a few buckets of Greek wine were brought.
All became merry again.
The musicians struck up; the girls, the young women, the dashing Cossacks in bright jackets broke into a dance.
Ninety- and hundred-year-olds got tipsy and also started to dance, recalling the years that had not vanished in vain.
They feasted till late into the night, and they feasted as no one feasts any longer.
The guests began to disperse, but few went home: many stayed the night in the captain’s wide yard; still more Cossacks fell asleep, uninvited, under the benches, on the floor, by their horses, near the barn; wherever a drunken Cossack head staggered to, there he lay and snored for all Kiev to hear.

II

It shone quietly over all the world: the moon rose from behind the hill.
It covered the hilly bank of the Dnieper as with precious, snow-white damask muslin, and the shade sank still deeper into the pine thicket.

In the middle of the Dnieper floated a boat.
Two lads sat in the bow, their black Cossack hats cocked, and the spray from under their oars flew in all directions like sparks from a tinderbox.

Why are the Cossacks not singing?
They do not talk of ksiȩdzy
²
going all over the Ukraine rebaptising people as Catholics; nor of the two-day battle with the Horde at the Salt Lake.
³
How can they sing, how can they talk of daring deeds: their master Danilo has fallen into thought, and the sleeve of his red flannel jacket, hanging out of the boat, trails in the water; their mistress Katerina quietly rocks the baby without taking her eyes off him, and a gray dust of water sprays over the linen covering her fancy dress.

Fair is the sight from the midst of the Dnieper of the high hills, the broad meadows, and the green forest!
Those hills are not hills: they have no foot; they are sharp-peaked at both bottom and top;
under them and over them is the tall sky.
Those woods standing on the slopes are not woods; they are hair growing on the shaggy head of the old man of the forest.
Under it his beard washes in the water, and under his beard and over his hair—the tall sky.
Those meadows are not meadows: they are a green belt tied in the middle of the round sky, and the moon strolls about in both the upper and the lower half.

Master Danilo looks to neither side, he looks at his young wife.

“What is it, my young wife, my golden Katerina, have you fallen into sadness?”

“I have not fallen into sadness, my master Danilo!
I am frightened by the strange stories about the sorcerer.
They say he was born so frightful … and from an early age no child wanted to play with him.
Listen, Master Danilo, to what frightening things they say: as if he always imagined that everyone was laughing at him.
He would meet some man on a dark evening, and at once it would seem to him that he had opened his mouth and bared his teeth.
And the next day the man would be found dead.
I felt strange, I felt frightened when I heard these stories,” said Katerina, taking out a handkerchief and wiping the face of the baby asleep in her arms.
She had embroidered the handkerchief with red silk leaves and berries.

Master Danilo said not a word and began looking to the dark side, where far beyond the forest an earthen rampart blackened and an old castle rose from behind the rampart.
Three wrinkles all at once creased his brow; his left hand stroked his gallant mustache.

“It is not so frightening that he is a sorcerer,” he said, “as that he is an evil guest.
Why this whim of dragging himself here?
I’ve heard that the Polacks want to build some sort of fortress to cut off our way to the Zaporozhye.
Only let it be true … I’ll scatter the devil’s nest if I hear so much as a rumor that he has any sort of den there.
I’ll burn the old sorcerer so that the crows have nothing to peck at.
Besides, I think he has no lack of gold and other goods.
Here is where the devil lives.
If he has gold … Now we’re going to pass the crosses—it’s the cemetery!
here his unclean forebears rot.
They say they were all ready to sell themselves to Satan, souls and tattered jackets, for money.
If indeed he has gold, there’s no point in delaying now: war can’t always bring …”

“I know what you are plotting.
No good does the encounter with him promise me.
But you are breathing so hard, you look so stern, your eyes are so grim under their scowling brows!…”

“Silence, woman!” Danilo said angrily.
“Whoever deals with you becomes a woman himself.
Lad, give me a light for my pipe!” Here he turned to one of the oarsmen, who knocked hot ashes from his pipe and transferred them to his master’s pipe.
“Frightening me with a sorcerer!” Master Danilo went on.
“A Cossack, thank God, fears neither devils nor ksiȩdzy.
Much good there’d be if we started listening to our wives.
Right, lads?
Our wife is a pipe and a sharp saber!”

Katerina fell silent, looking down into the slumbering water; and the wind sent ripples over the water, and the whole Dnieper silvered like a wolf’s fur in the night.

The boat swung and began to hug the wooded bank.
On the bank a cemetery could be seen: decrepit crosses crowded together.
Guelder rose does not grow among them, there is no green grass, only the moon warms them from its heavenly height.

“Do you hear cries, my lads?
Someone’s calling us for help!” said Master Danilo, turning to his oarsmen.

“We hear the cries, and they seem to come from that direction,” the lads said together, pointing to the cemetery.

But all grew still.
The boat swung and began to round the jutting bank.
Suddenly the oarsmen lowered their oars and stared fixedly.
Master Danilo also stopped: fear and chill cut into their Cossack fibers.

The cross on one tomb swayed and out of it quietly rose a withered dead man.
Beard down to his waist; claws on his fingers, long, longer than the fingers themselves.
Quietly he raised his arms.
His whole face twisted and trembled.
He obviously suffered terrible torment.
“I can’t breathe!
I can’t breathe!” he moaned in a wild, inhuman voice.
Like a knife blade his voice scraped at the heart, and the dead man suddenly sank under the ground.
Another cross swayed, and again a dead man came out, still taller, still more terrible than the first; all overgrown, beard down to his knees, and still longer, bony nails.
Still more wildly he cried: “I can’t breathe!” and sank under the ground.
A third cross swayed, a third dead man
rose.
It seemed as if nothing but bones rose high over the ground.
Beard down to his very heels; fingers with long claws stuck into the ground.
Terribly he stretched his arms upwards, as if trying to reach the moon, and cried out as if someone were sawing at his yellow bones …

The baby asleep in Katerina’s arms gave a cry and woke up.
The mistress herself gave a cry.
The oarsmen dropped their hats into the Dnieper.
The master himself shook.

Suddenly it all disappeared as if it had never been; nevertheless, the lads did not take up their oars for a long time.

Anxiously did Burulbash look at his young wife, who fearfully rocked the crying baby in her arms; he pressed her to his heart and kissed her on the brow.

“Don’t be afraid, Katerina!
Look, there’s nothing!” he said, pointing all around.
“It’s the sorcerer trying to frighten people, so that no one gets into his unclean nest.
He’ll only frighten women with that!
Give my son here!” With these words, Master Danilo raised his son to his lips.
“What, Ivan, you’re not afraid of sorcerers?
No, papa, he says, I’m a Cossack.
Enough, then, stop crying!
We’ll go home!
we’ll go home—mother will feed you porridge, put you to bed in your cradle, and sing:

Lullay, lullay, lullay
,
Lullay, little son, lullay
,
Grow up, grow up wise
,
Win glory in the Cossacks’ eyes
And punish their enemies.

Listen, Katerina, it seems to me your father doesn’t want to live in accord with us.
He arrived sullen, stern, as if he’s angry … Well, if you’re displeased, then why come?
He didn’t want to drink to Cossack freedom, he didn’t rock the baby in his arms!
First I wanted to confide everything in my heart to him, but it didn’t come out, and my speech stumbled.
No, his is not a Cossack’s heart!
Cossack hearts, when they meet, never fail to go out to each other!
What, my sweet lads, it’s soon the shore?
Well, I’ll give you new hats.
To you, Stetsko, I’ll give a velvet one with gold.
I took it from a Tartar,
along with his head.
I got all his gear; only his soul I let go free.
Well, tie up!
Here, Ivan, we’ve come home and you keep on crying!
Take him, Katerina!”

They all got out.
A thatched roof showed from behind the hill: the ancestral mansion of Master Danilo.
Beyond it another hill, then a field, and then you could walk for a hundred miles and not find even one Cossack.

III

Master Danilo’s farmstead lies between two hills, in a narrow valley that runs down to the Dnieper.
His mansion is not tall: a cottage by the looks, like those of simple Cossacks, and only one room in it; but there is enough space inside for him, and his wife, and the old serving woman, and ten choice youths.
There are oak shelves up on the walls all around.
They are laden with bowls and pots for eating.
There are silver goblets among them and glasses trimmed with gold—gifts or the plunder of war.
Below them hang costly muskets, sabers, harquebuses, lances.
Willingly or unwillingly they were passed on from Tartars, Turks, and Polacks; and so they are not a little nicked.
Looking at them, Master Danilo recalled his battles as if by banners.
Along the wall, smoothly hewn oak benches.
Next to them, before the stove seat,
⁴
a cradle hangs on ropes put through a ring screwed into the ceiling.
The floor of the room is beaten smooth and covered with clay.
On the benches Master Danilo sleeps with his wife.
On the stove seat sleeps the old serving woman.
In the cradle the little baby sports and is lulled to sleep.
On the floor the youths lie side by side.
But it is better for a Cossack to sleep on the level ground under the open sky; he needs no down or feather beds; he puts fresh hay under his head and sprawls freely on the grass.
It delights him to wake up in the middle of the night, to gaze at the tall, star-strewn sky and shiver from the cool of the night that refreshes his Cossack bones.
Stretching and murmuring in his sleep, he lights his pipe and wraps himself tighter in his warm sheepskin.

It was not early that Burulbash woke up after the previous day’s merrymaking, and when he did wake up, he sat in the corner on
the bench and began to sharpen a new Turkish saber he had taken in trade; and Mistress Katerina started to embroider a silken towel with gold.
Suddenly Katerina’s father came in, angry, scowling, with an outlandish pipe in his teeth, approached his daughter, and began to question her sternly: What was the reason for her coming home so late?

“About such things, father-in-law, you should ask me, not her!
The husband is answerable, not the wife.
That’s how it is with us, meaning no offense to you!” said Danilo, without quitting his occupation.
“Maybe there, in infidel lands, it’s different—I wouldn’t know.”

Color came to the father-in-law’s stern face, and his eyes glinted savagely.

“Who, if not a father, is to look after his daughter!” he muttered to himself.
“I ask you, then: Where were you dragging about till late in the night?”

“Now you’re talking, dear father-in-law!
To that I will tell you that I’m long past the age of being swaddled by women.
I can seat a horse.
I can wield a sharp saber with my hand.
I can do a thing or two besides … I can answer to no one for what I do.”

“I see, Danilo, I know, you want a quarrel!
Whoever hides himself must have evil things on his mind.”

“Think what you like,” said Danilo, “and I’ll think, too.
Thank God, I’ve never yet been part of any dishonorable thing; I’ve always stood for the Orthodox faith and the fatherland—not like some vagabonds who drag about God knows where while Orthodox people are fighting to the death, and then come down to reap where they haven’t sown.
They’re not even like the Uniates
⁵
: they never peek inside a church of God.
It’s they who should be questioned properly about where they drag about.”

“Eh, Cossack!
you know … I’m a bad shot: from a mere two hundred yards my bullet pierces the heart.
I’m an unenviable swordsman: what I leave of a man is smaller than the grains they cook for porridge.”

“I’m ready,” said Master Danilo, briskly passing his saber through the air, as though he knew what he had been sharpening it for.

“Danilo!” Katerina cried loudly, seizing his arm and clinging to it.
“Bethink yourself, madman!
Look who you are raising your hand against!
Father, your hair is white as snow, yet you flare up like a senseless boy!”

“Wife!” Master Danilo cried menacingly, “you know I don’t like that.
Mind your woman’s business!”