The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol (18 page)

“Father, pray!
pray!” he cried desperately, “pray for a lost soul!” and he collapsed on the ground.

The holy hermit crossed himself, took out the book, opened it—and recoiled in horror, letting the book fall.

“No, unheard-of sinner, there is no mercy for you!
Flee from here!
I cannot pray for you!”

“No?” the sinner shouted like a madman.

“Look: the holy letters of the book are filled with blood.
Never has there been such a sinner in the world!”

“You mock me, Father!”

“Go, cursed sinner!
I do not mock you!
Fear is coming over me.
It is not good for a man to be with you!”

“No, no!
you mock me, do not say … I see your mouth stretch: the two rows of your old teeth are showing white!…”

And, like one crazed, he rushed at the holy hermit and killed him.

Something groaned deeply, the groaning went across the field into the forest.
From beyond the forest rose dry, bony arms with long claws; they shook and vanished.

And now he felt no fear, he felt nothing.
Everything seemed somehow vague to him.
There was a ringing in his ears and in his head, as from drunkenness; and everything before his eyes appeared covered with cobwebs.
Leaping on his horse, he headed straight for Kanev, thinking to go from there through Cherkassy to the Tartars, right to the Crimea, himself not knowing why.
He rode for one day, for another, but there was no Kanev.
It was the right road; it should have been here long ago, but Kanev was nowhere to be seen.
Church tops gleamed in the distance.
But that was not Kanev, it was Shumsk.
The sorcerer was astonished to see that he had gone in a completely different direction.
He urged his horse back to Kiev, and a day later a city appeared—not Kiev but Galich,
a city still further from Kiev than Shumsk, and not far now from the Hungarians.
Not knowing what to do, he turned his horse back again, but again felt he was going ever further in the contrary direction.
No man in the world could tell what was in the sorcerer’s soul; and if anyone had looked into it and seen what went on there, he would not have slept the whole night long and would never have laughed again.
It was not anger, or fear, or wicked vexation.
There is no word in the world that could name it.
He was burnt, scorched, he would have trampled the whole world under his horse’s hooves, or taken the whole country from Kiev to Galich, its people and all, and drowned it in the Black Sea.
But it was not from anger that he would have done so; no, he did not know why himself.
He shuddered all over when just ahead of him the Carpathian Mountains appeared, and tall Krivan, its crown covered with a gray cloud as with a cap; and his horse raced on and was already roaming in the mountains.
All at once the clouds cleared, and before him in terrible majesty appeared the rider … The sorcerer tries to stop, he pulls hard at the reins; the horse whinnies wildly, tossing its mane and racing toward the knight.
Now the sorcerer fancies that everything in him is frozen, that the motionless rider stirs and all at once opens his eyes; he sees the sorcerer racing toward him and laughs.
Like thunder the wild laughter spilled over the mountains and rang in the sorcerer’s heart, shaking everything within it.
He fancied someone strong got into him and went about inside him, hammering on his heart and nerves … so terribly did this laughter resound in him!

The rider seized the sorcerer with a terrible hand and lifted him up in the air.
Instantly the sorcerer died and opened his eyes after death.
But he was now a dead man and had the gaze of a dead man.
Neither the living nor the resurrected have such a terrible gaze.
He rolled his dead eyes in all directions and saw dead men rising from Kiev, from the land of Galicia, and from the Carpathians, their faces as like his as two drops of water.

P
ALE
,
PALE
,
ONE
taller than another, one bonier than another, they stood around the rider, who held this terrible plunder in his hand.
The knight laughed once more and threw him down into
the abyss.
And all the dead men leaped down into the abyss, picked the dead man up, and sank their teeth into him.
Yet another, taller than all of them, more terrible than all of them, wanted to rise out of the earth; but he could not, he had not the strength to do it, so great had he grown in the ground; and if he had done it, he would have overturned the Carpathians, the Seven Cities, and the land of the Turks; he stirred just slightly, and the quaking from it went all over the world.
And many houses fell.
And many people were crushed.

A swishing is often heard in the Carpathians, the sound as of a thousand mill wheels turning in the water.
It is the dead men gnawing the dead man, in the abyss without issue, which no man has ever seen, fearing to pass near it.
It happens not seldom in the world that the earth shakes from one end to the other: learned people say it is because somewhere by the sea there is a mountain out of which flames burst and burning rivers flow.
But the old men who live in Hungary and the land of Galicia know better and say that the earth shakes because there is a dead man grown great and huge in it who wants to rise.

XVI

In the town of Glukhov people gathered around the old bandore player and listened for an hour as the blind man played his bandore.
No bandore player had ever sung such wonderful songs or sung them so well.
First he sang about the old hetmans, about Sagaidachny and Khmelnitsky.
¹³
Times were different then: the Cossacks were in their glory; their steeds trampled down their enemies, and no one dared to mock them.
The old man sang merry songs, too, and kept glancing around at the people as if he could see; and his fingers, with little bone picks attached to them, flew like flies over the strings, and it seemed the strings played of themselves; and the people around him, the old ones with their heads hanging, and the young ones looking up at the old man, dared not even whisper to one another.

“Wait,” said the old man, “I’ll sing to you about a deed of yore.”

The people moved closer still, and the blind man sang:

Under Master Stepan,
¹⁴
prince of the Seven Cities—and the prince of the Seven Cities was also king of the Polacks—there lived two Cossacks, Ivan and Petro.
They lived as brother lives with brother.
“Look, Ivan, whatever you gain, it’s all half and half: when one of us is merry, the other is merry; when one of us grieves, we both grieve; if one of us gets some plunder, the plunder’s divided in two; if one falls into captivity, the other sells everything and pays the ransom, or else he, too, goes into captivity.” And truly, whatever the Cossacks got, they divided everything in two; and if they stole cattle or horses, they divided everything in two.

  King Stepan made war on the Turks.
For three weeks he fought the Turks and was still unable to drive them off.
And the Turks had a pasha, one who with a dozen janissaries could cut down a whole regiment.
So King Stepan announced that if some brave man could be found who would bring him this pasha dead or alive, he would pay him alone as much as he paid his whole army.
“Let’s go after the pasha, brother!” said brother Ivan to Petro.
And the Cossacks went, one in one direction, the other in another.

  Petro might still have caught him or he might not have, but Ivan already came back leading the pasha to the king himself with a noose around his neck.
“Brave fellow!” said King Stepan and ordered that he be paid as much as the whole army; and he ordered that he be given lands wherever he himself chose and as much cattle as he wanted.
As soon as Ivan got his payment from the king, that same day he divided everything equally between himself and Petro.
Petro took half of the king’s pay, but he could not bear that Ivan should be so honored by the king, and he kept revenge hidden deep in his heart.

  The two knights went to the lands granted by the king, beyond the Carpathians.
The Cossack Ivan seated his son on his horse and tied him to himself.
It was dark—they were still
riding.
The child fell asleep, and Ivan himself began to doze.
Do not doze, Cossack, the mountain roads are dangerous!… But a Cossack’s horse is such that it knows its way everywhere, never stumbles and never trips.
Between the mountains is a chasm; no one has ever seen the bottom of this chasm; as far as the earth is from the sky, so far is it to the bottom of this chasm.
On the very edge of this chasm runs the road—two men can ride abreast on it, but three never.
The horse with the dozing Cossack began to step carefully.
Petro rode beside him all atremble and holding his breath for joy.
He looked around and pushed his sworn brother into the chasm.
And into the chasm fell the horse with the Cossack and the child.

  But the Cossack seized hold of a branch and only the horse fell to the bottom.
He began to climb out, his son on his back; there was still a short way to go, he raised his eyes and saw that Petro was aiming his lance at him so as to push him back.
“Righteous God, better not to have raised my eyes than to see my own brother aiming a lance to push me back … My dear brother!
pierce me with the lance, if such is my lot, but take my son!
How is the innocent child to blame, that he should die such an evil death?” Petro laughed and pushed him with the lance, and Cossack and child both fell to the bottom.
Petro took all the property for himself and began to live like a pasha.
No one had such herds of horses as Petro.
Nowhere had so many sheep and rams been seen.
And Petro died.

  When Petro died, God summoned the souls of the two brothers, Petro and Ivan, for judgment.
“This man is a great sinner!” God said.
“Ivan!
I will not easily find a punishment for him; you choose how he shall be punished!” Ivan thought for a long time, devising the punishment, and said at last: “This man did me a great offense: he betrayed his brother like Judas and deprived me of my honorable name and my descendants
on earth.
And a man without an honorable name and descendants is like a grain of wheat cast into the ground and lost there for nothing.
No sprouts—no one will even know that the seed was sown.

  “Make it so, God, that his descendants have no happiness on earth!
that the last one of the family be such an evildoer as the world has never seen!
that after each of his evil deeds his grandparents and great-grandparents, finding no peace in the coffin, and suffering torments unknown to the world, rise out of their graves!
And that the Judas Petro be unable to rise, and suffer still greater torments from that, and eat dirt in a frenzy and writhe under the ground!

  “And when the hour comes that fulfills the measure of this man’s evildoings, raise me, God, on my horse, from that chasm up to the highest mountain, and let him come to me, and I will hurl him from that mountain into the deepest chasm, and let all the dead men, his grandfathers and great-grandfathers, wherever they lived when alive, be drawn from all ends of the earth to gnaw on him for the torments he caused them, and gnaw on him eternally, and I will rejoice looking at his torment!
And let the Judas Petro be unable to rise from the ground, and let him strain to gnaw, but gnaw only on himself, and let his bones keep growing bigger, that through this his pain may become greater.
This torment will be the most terrible for him: for there is no greater torment for a man than to desire revenge and be unable to get it.”

  “Terrible is the punishment you have devised, man!” said God.
“Let it all be as you have said, but you, too, will sit there eternally on your horse, and as long as you sit there on your horse, there will be no Kingdom of Heaven for you!” And it all happened as was said: to this day a wondrous knight stands on horseback in the Carpathians, gazing on the dead men gnawing the dead man in the bottomless chasm, and he feels
the dead man lying under the ground growing and gnawing his own bones in terrible torment and shaking all the earth terribly …

The blind man finished his song; he began to strum on the strings again; he began to sing funny little verses about Khoma and Yerema, about Stklyar Stokoza … but old and young still could not come to their senses and stood for a long time, their heads bowed, pondering the terrible deed that had happened in olden times.

IVAN FYODOROVICH SHPONKA
AND HIS AUNT

T
HERE WAS A
story to do with this story: it was told us by Stepan Ivanovich Kurochka, who used to come over from Gadyach.
You should know that my memory’s rotten beyond words: tell me something or not, it’s all the same.
Just like pouring water through a sieve.
Knowing this fault of mine, I asked him purposely to write it down in a notebook.
Well, God grant him good health, he was always kind to me, he did write it down.
I put it into a little desk; I think you know it well: it’s the one in the corner as you come in … Ah, I forgot, you’ve never been to my place.
My old woman, whom I’ve lived with for some thirty years now, never learned to read in all her born days—may as well admit it.
So I noticed she was baking pirozhki
¹
on some paper.
Her pirozhki, my gentle readers, are amazingly good; you won’t eat better pirozhki anywhere.
I looked at the underside of one and saw some writing.
My heart as if knew it.
I went to the desk—not even half a notebook left!
The rest of the pages she’d torn out for her pies!
What could I do?
you can’t start fighting in old age!