The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol (24 page)

“What could we have now, Afanasy Ivanovich?—unless it was shortcake with lard, or poppyseed pirozhki,
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or maybe some pickled mushrooms?”

“Why not the mushrooms, or else the pirozhki?” Afanasy Ivanovich would reply, and a tablecloth with pirozhki and mushrooms would suddenly appear.

An hour before dinner, Afanasy Ivanovich would have another snack, drink an old-fashioned silver cup of vodka, followed by mushrooms, various dried fish, and so on.
Dinner was served at twelve noon.
Besides platters and sauce boats, there stood on the table a multitude of pots with sealed lids to keep some savory dishes of old-fashioned cookery from losing their flavor.
At dinner the conversation was about subjects most closely related to dining.

“It seems to me,” Afanasy Ivanovich would say, “that this kasha
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is a wee bit burnt—don’t you think so, Pulkheria Ivanovna?”

“No, Afanasy Ivanovich, put more butter on it, then it won’t seem burnt, or else pour some mushroom sauce on it.”

“Why not?” Afanasy Ivanovich would say, holding out his plate, “let’s try it and see.”

After dinner Afanasy Ivanovich would have a little hour of rest, after which Pulkheria Ivanovna would bring a sliced watermelon and say:

“Here, Afanasy Ivanovich, taste what a good watermelon it is.”

“Never mind that it’s red inside, Pulkheria Ivanovna,” Afanasy Ivanovich would say, accepting a none-too-small slice, “sometimes it’s no good even when it’s red.”

But the watermelon would immediately disappear.
After that Afanasy Ivanovich would also eat a few pears and go for a walk in the garden with Pulkheria Ivanovna.
On returning home, Pulkheria Ivanovna would go about her duties, and he would sit under the gallery roof facing the yard and watch the storehouse ceaselessly revealing and covering its insides, and the serf girls jostling each other, bringing heaps of all sorts of stuff in and out in wooden boxes, sieves, trays, and other containers for fruit.
A little later he would send for Pulkheria Ivanovna or go to her himself and say:

“What is there that I might eat, Pulkheria Ivanovna?”

“What is there?” Pulkheria Ivanovna would say, “unless I go and tell them to bring you some berry dumplings that I asked them to keep specially for you?”

“That’s nice,” Afanasy Ivanovich would answer.

“Or maybe you’d like some custard?”

“That’s good,” Afanasy Ivanovich would answer.
After which it would all be brought at once and duly eaten up.

Before supper Afanasy Ivanovich would again snack on something or other.
At nine-thirty supper was served.
After supper they would all go to bed again, and a general silence would settle over this active yet quiet little corner.
The room in which Afanasy Ivanovich and Pulkheria Ivanovna slept was so hot that it was a rare person who could spend any length of time in it.
But on top of that, for even greater warmth, Afanasy Ivanovich slept on the stove,
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though the intense heat often made him get up several times during the night and pace the room.
Sometimes Afanasy Ivanovich groaned as he walked.
Then Pulkheria Ivanovna would ask:

“Why are you groaning, Afanasy Ivanovich?”

“God knows, Pulkheria Ivanovna, feels like I’ve got a bit of a stomachache,” Afanasy Ivanovich would say.

“Hadn’t you better eat something, Afanasy Ivanovich?”

“I don’t know if that would be good, Pulkheria Ivanovna!
Anyhow, what might I eat?”

“Some buttermilk, or stewed dried pears?”

“Why not, just so as to try it?” Afanasy Ivanovich would say.

A sleepy serf girl would go and rummage in the cupboards, and Afanasy Ivanovich would eat a little plateful, after which he usually said:

“There, that feels better.”

Sometimes, when the weather was clear and the rooms were well heated, Afanasy Ivanovich got merry and liked to poke fun at Pulkheria Ivanovna and talk about something different.

“And if our house suddenly caught fire, Pulkheria Ivanovna,” he would say, “what would we do then?”

“God preserve us from that!” Pulkheria Ivanovna would say, crossing herself.

“Well, but supposing our house caught fire, where would we go then?”

“God knows what you’re saying, Afanasy Ivanovich!
How could our house burn down?
God won’t let it.”

“Well, but what if it did burn down?”

“Well, then we’d move into the kitchen wing.
You could take the housekeeper’s little room for a while.”

“And if the kitchen wing burned down, too?”

“Now, really!
God wouldn’t permit such a thing as both house and kitchen burning down at once!
Well, then we’d have the storehouse till the new house was built.”

“And if the storehouse burns down as well?”

“God knows what you’re saying!
I don’t even want to listen to you!
It’s a sin to say it, and God punishes that sort of talk.”

But Afanasy Ivanovich, pleased at having poked fun at Pulkheria Ivanovna, would smile, sitting on his chair.

But for me the old folk seemed most interesting when they were having guests.
Then everything in their house acquired a different air.
These good people, one might say, lived for their guests.
The very best they had was all brought out.
They vied with each other in trying to treat you to everything their farm had produced.
But the most pleasant thing for me was that they were obliging without being cloying.
This ready cordiality was so meekly expressed on their faces, was so becoming in them, that willy-nilly you would agree to their requests.
It proceeded from the clear, serene simplicity of their kind and artless souls.
This cordiality was a far cry from what you’re treated to by a clerk in a government office who owes his success to you, calls you his benefactor, and cowers at your feet.
A guest was never allowed to leave the same day: he absolutely had to spend the night.

“You can’t set out so late on such a long journey!” Pulkheria Ivanovna always said (the guest usually lived two or three miles away).

“Of course not,” Afanasy Ivanovich would say, “who knows what may happen: robbers may fall upon you, or some other bad men.”

“God preserve us from robbers!” Pulkheria Ivanovna would say.
“Why talk of such things before going to bed at night?
Robbers or no robbers, it’s dark, it’s not good at all to go.
And your coachman, I know your coachman, he’s so weak and small, any nag can beat him; and besides, he’s surely tipsy by now and sleeping somewhere.”

And the guest absolutely had to stay.
However, evening in a low, warm room, cordial, warming, and lulling conversation, steaming hot food served on the table, always nourishing and expertly cooked, would be his reward.
I can see Afanasy Ivanovich as if it were right now, sitting hunched on a chair, smiling his usual smile and listening to the guest with attention and even pleasure!
Often the talk ran to politics.
The guest, who also very rarely left his estate, frequently offered his surmises with an important look and a mysterious expression on his face, saying that the French had secretly agreed with the English to turn Bonaparte loose on Russia again, or else simply talked of war being imminent, and then Afanasy Ivanovich often said, as if not looking at Pulkheria Ivanovna:

“I’m thinking of going to war myself.
Why shouldn’t I go to war?”

“He’s off again!” Pulkheria Ivanovna would interrupt.
“Don’t believe him,” she would say, addressing the guest.
“How can he go to war, old as he is?
The first soldier will shoot him down!
By God, he will!
He’ll just take aim and shoot him down.”

“So what,” Afanasy Ivanovich would say, “I’ll shoot him down, too.”

“Just hear him talk!” Pulkheria Ivanovna would pick up.
“How can he go to war?
His pistols got rusty long ago sitting in the closet.
You should see them: the way they are, the powder will blow them up before they do any shooting.
He’ll hurt his hands, and disfigure his face, and stay crippled forever.”

“So what,” Afanasy Ivanovich would say, “I’ll buy myself a new weapon.
I’ll take a saber or a Cossack lance.”

“He makes it all up.
It just comes into his head and he starts talking,” Pulkheria Ivanovna would pick up vexedly.
“I know he’s joking, but even so, it’s unpleasant to listen.
He always says something like that, sometimes you listen and listen, and then you get scared.”

But Afanasy Ivanovich, pleased to have given Pulkheria Ivanovna a little fright, would be laughing as he sat hunched on his chair.

To me Pulkheria Ivanovna was most entertaining at the moments when she was treating a guest to hors d’œuvres.

“This,” she would say, unstopping a decanter, “is vodka infused with yarrow and sage.
If someone has an ache in the shoulder blades or the lower back, it’s a great help.
This one is with centaury: if you have a ringing in the ears or blotches on your face, it’s a great help.
And this one’s distilled with peach stones; here, take a glass, what a wonderful smell!
If someone bumps the corner of a cupboard or a table as he’s getting out of bed and gets a lump on his forehead, it’s enough just to drink one little glass before dinner and it will go away as if by magic, that same minute, as if he’d never had it.”

This was followed by the same kind of report on other decanters, that almost all of them had some healing properties.
Having loaded the guest with all this pharmacy, she would lead him to a multitude of plates.

“These are mushrooms with thyme!
These are with cloves and walnuts!
A Turkish woman taught me how to pickle them, back when we still had Turkish prisoners.
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She was such a nice woman, it didn’t even show that she confessed the Turkish faith.
She went about just as we do, only she didn’t eat pork, said it was somehow forbidden by their law.
These are mushrooms with black currant leaves and nutmeg!
And these are big gourds done in vinegar: it’s the first time I’ve tried it, I don’t know how they came out, it’s Father Ivan’s secret.
First you spread some oak leaves in a small barrel, then put in some pepper and saltpeter, and some hawkweed flowers, too—you just take the flowers and spread them stems up.
And these are pirozhki!
cheese pirozhki!
with poppyseed juice!
And these are the ones Afanasy Ivanovich likes best, with cabbage and buckwheat.”

“Yes,” added Afanasy Ivanovich, “I like them very much.
They’re tender and slightly tart.”

Generally, Pulkheria Ivanovna was in exceptionally good spirits whenever they had guests.
A kindly old woman!
She belonged entirely to her guests.
I loved visiting them, and though I overate
terribly, as all their visitors did, and though it was very bad for me, nevertheless I was always glad to go there.
However, I think that the very air of Little Russia may possess some special quality that aids digestion, because if anyone here tried to eat like that, he would undoubtedly wind up lying not in his bed but on the table.
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Kindly old folk!
But my narrative is approaching a very sad event which changed the life of this peaceful corner forever.
This event will seem the more striking because it proceeded from a quite unimportant incident.
But, in the strange order of things, it is always insignificant causes that give birth to great events, and, vice versa, great undertakings have ended in insignificant consequences.
Some conqueror gathers all the forces of his state, spends several years making war, his generals cover themselves with glory, and finally it all ends with the acquisition of a scrap of land on which there isn’t even room enough to plant potatoes; while, on the other hand, two sausage makers from two towns start fighting over nothing, other towns get involved in the quarrel, then villages and hamlets, then the whole country.
But let’s drop this reasoning: it’s out of place here.
Besides, I don’t like reasoning that remains mere reasoning.

Pulkheria Ivanovna had a little gray cat that almost always lay curled up at her feet.
Pulkheria Ivanovna sometimes patted her and tickled her neck with her finger, which the pampered cat arched as high as she could.
It cannot be said that Pulkheria Ivanovna loved her all that much, she was simply attached to her, being used to seeing her all the time.
Afanasy Ivanovich, however, often poked fun at this attachment:

“I don’t know what you find in a cat, Pulkheria Ivanovna.
What good is it?
If you had a dog, it would be a different matter: a dog you can take hunting, but what good is a cat?”

“Be quiet, Afanasy Ivanovich,” Pulkheria Ivanovna would say, “you just like to talk, that’s all.
Dogs are untidy, dogs make a mess, dogs break everything, but cats are gentle creatures, they won’t do anyone any harm.”

However, cats and dogs were all the same for Afanasy Ivanovich; he just said it to poke a little fun at Pulkheria Ivanovna.

Behind their garden was a big woods that had been wholly spared by their enterprising steward—perhaps because the sound of the ax would have come to Pulkheria Ivanovna’s ears.
It was dense, overgrown, the old tree trunks were covered with rampant hazel bushes and looked like shaggy pigeon legs.
This woods was inhabited by wild cats.
Wild forest cats should not be confused with those dashing fellows who run over the rooftops of houses.
City dwellers, despite their tough character, are far more civilized than the inhabitants of the forests.
The latter, on the contrary, are grim and savage folk; they always go about thin, scrawny, meowing in coarse, untrained voices.
They sometimes dig subterranean passages under barns and steal lard; they even come right into the kitchen, suddenly jumping through an open window when they notice that the cook has gone out to the bushes.
Lofty feelings are generally unknown to them; they live by plunder and kill young sparrows right in their nests.
These cats spent a long time sniffing at Pulkheria Ivanovna’s meek little cat through a hole under the barn and finally lured her away, as a troop of soldiers lures away a foolish peasant girl.
Pulkheria Ivanovna noticed the cat’s disappearance and sent people to look for her, but the cat was not to be found.
Three days passed; Pulkheria Ivanovna felt sorry, then finally forgot all about it.
One day when, after inspecting her kitchen garden, she was coming back with fresh cucumbers she had picked for Afanasy Ivanovich with her own hand, her hearing was struck by a most pitiful meowing.
She said, as if instinctively: “Kitty, kitty!” and suddenly out of the weeds came her gray cat, thin, scrawny; it was clear that she had had nothing in her mouth for several days.
Pulkheria Ivanovna kept calling her, but the cat stood in front of her, meowing and not daring to come near; it was clear that she had grown quite wild in the meantime.
Pulkheria Ivanovna went on ahead of her, still calling the cat, who timorously followed her as far as the fence.
Finally, seeing old familiar places, she went inside.
Pulkheria Ivanovna at once ordered that she be given milk and meat, and, sitting before her, delighted in the greed with which her poor favorite ate piece after piece and lapped up the milk.
The gray fugitive got fat before her eyes and no longer ate so greedily.
Pulkheria Ivanovna reached out to pat
her, but the ungrateful thing must have grown too used to the predatory cats, or picked up romantic ideas about love in poverty being better than any mansion, since the wild cats were dirt poor; be that as it may, she jumped out the window, and none of the servants could catch her.