Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, page 16
“Why does He have to?”
“Because ‘Knock and it shall be opened to you’: after all, it was God Himself who told us this, so there’ll be no change there, sir.”
“Tell me, please, apart from this Moscow priest, is there really nobody who prays for suicides?”
“I honestly don’t know how to answer you. They say it’s wrong to ask God to help them, since they took the law into their own hands, but, all the same, some people do pray for them, because they don’t understand this. I think, though, anyone can pray for them on Trinity Sunday, or maybe All Saints’ Day: that’s when you have special prayers. Wonderful prayers, full of feeling: I think I’d never tire of hearing them.”
“Can’t these prayers be said on other days?”
“I don’t know, sir. You’d have to ask someone learned: I imagine he would know. But it’s never been a concern of mine, so I’ve never found myself discussing it.”
“But when you’ve attended mass, haven’t you noticed these prayers being repeated at times?”
“No, sir, I haven’t: but don’t take too much notice of what I say, because I don’t often attend services.”
“Why’s that?”
“My work doesn’t allow me to.”
“Are you a priest monk or a priest deacon?”
“Neither: I’m still a senior novice.”
“But doesn’t that mean that you’re a monk?”
“Mmm . . . well, yes; that’s what people think.”
“They may think that,” retorted the trader, “but a novice in a cassock can still get his head shaved and be conscripted.”
The warrior hero in a black cassock was not in the least offended by this remark: he merely thought for a minute and then replied, “Yes, he can, and they say there have been cases of this happening; but I’m too old, I’m fifty-two, and military service is nothing new to me.”
“Have you really served in the army?”
“I have, sir.”
“How’s that, were you one of those warrant officers?” the trader asked him.
“No, I wasn’t.”
“Then who are you: a soldier, a quartermaster, or an axle greaser?”
“No, you’ve guessed wrong: I am a real military man, all the same, and I’ve been with the regiment almost since I was a child.”
“So you’re a conscripted orphan, a cantonist?” the trader persisted angrily.
“Wrong again.”
“God knows who you are; then who are you?”
“I’m a connoisseur.”
“Wha-a-t’s tha-a-at?”
“I’m a connoisseur, sir, a connoisseur, or to use a more popular term, a horse expert, and it was my job to advise the army remount officers.”
“So that’s it.”
“Indeed, sir. I’ve selected and broken in several thousand horses. I’ve trained real beasts, the sort that can rear up on their hind legs and then plunge down with all their strength and smash in a rider’s chest with the saddletree, but no horse could ever do that to me.”
“But how did you tame horses like that?”
“Me? Very simply, because I have a special natural gift. I would leap onto them, not give the horse time to understand what was happening, and grab its ear with my left hand and pull its head to one side with all my might, and punch its head right between the ears with my right fist, and make a terrible rasping noise with my teeth, so that some horses even pass bits of brain and blood through their nostrils: that tames them.”
“And then?”
“Then you get down, stroke it, let it have a thorough look at you, so it has a good image of you, then you get on again and off you ride.”
“Is the horse a good ride after that?”
“It is indeed, and it’s obedient, because horses are clever, they have a sense for whoever is dealing with them and what he thinks of them. As for me, in that respect every horse loved me and responded to me. There was a horse in the manège in Moscow that defied everyone who tried to ride it; the cunning devil had learned a way of biting its rider’s knees. This demon would grab a knee with its great big teeth and crack the kneecap open like a pea pod. A lot of people were killed that way. The Englishman John Rarey came to Moscow around then—he was known as ‘the mad tamer’—and that horrible horse nearly ate his knees, too. In any case, it made him lose face. The only reason he was unharmed was, they say, that he had a steel kneecap, so even though it tried to eat his knee, it couldn’t get its teeth in and just threw him off. Otherwise he’d have been a dead man. But I taught that horse a proper lesson.”
“Please tell us, how did you manage to do that?”
“With God’s help, sir, because as I told you, I have the gift for it. Mr. Rarey, the so-called ‘mad tamer,’ and other people who tried to handle that horse kept it on a tight rein. Their only technique to deal with its viciousness was to not let it twist its head to either side. But I worked out a completely different technique. The moment the Englishman Rarey gave up on the horse, I said, ‘It’s all right, it couldn’t be easier, because all that’s wrong with the horse is that it’s possessed by a devil. The Englishman will never understand that, but I can and I’ll cure it.’ The officers agreed. Then I told them, ‘Take it out to the Dorogomilovo city gate!’ They led it out. Well, sir: we led it by the reins to the gully by Fili, where the gentry have their summer cottages. I could see this was a suitable open space, and made a start. I mounted that cannibal—I was bare-chested and barefoot, wearing just trousers and a cap, and around my bare body a tarpaulin belt with a saying by the brave Saint Prince Vsevolod Gavriil of Novgorod, whose bravery I’ve always revered and believed in: ‘I’ll never surrender my honor to anyone.’ I didn’t have any special tools with me, except for two: in one hand, a strong Tatar whip with a lead weight weighing at most two pounds at the tip, and in the other hand, an ordinary glazed clay pot of thin slurry. Well, sir, I got into the saddle, with four men holding the reins and pulling the horse’s head in different directions to stop it getting its teeth into any of them. That devil saw we’d ganged up on him; he was neighing and shrieking and sweating, shaking all over with fury, doing his best to eat me. I could see all that; I told the stablemen, ‘Quick as you can, pull the bridle off the bastard.’ They couldn’t believe their ears when I gave the order: they just stared with amazement. I said, ‘Don’t just stand there! Didn’t you hear me? You’ve got to do as I say immediately!’ They answered, ‘Ivan Severianych!’ (I was a layperson then and was called Mr. Ivan Severianych Fliagin.) ‘How can you possibly order the bridle to be taken off?’ I was getting angry with them: I could see and feel in my legs that the horse was in a furious rage, so I squeezed it hard with my knees and I yelled at them, ‘Take it off!’ They were about to say something, but now I was out of my mind with anger and I had only to gnash my teeth noisily for them to tug the bridle off and then run off wherever their eyes took them. The very same moment I did to the horse what it least expected: I smashed the clay pot over his head; the pot broke and the slurry poured out into his eyes and nostrils. He took fright; he had no idea what had happened. Then, with my left hand, I quickly snatched my cap off my head, used it to rub even more slurry into his eyes and gave him a crack of the whip over the flank . . . He jerked forward, and I kept rubbing his eyes with my cap so as to blur his vision completely, while I whipped him on the other flank as well . . . I kept on thrashing him and I didn’t stop. I wouldn’t let him draw a breath or take a look at anything, I kept smearing slurry over his head so that it blinded him, I made him shake all over by noisily gnashing my teeth, I frightened him, and I flogged both his flanks, so he realized I wasn’t joking . . . He finally understood and got to the point where he stopped resisting and broke into a gallop. He was a fine horse, he let me ride him and carried me off, while I thrashed and thrashed him, so that the harder he galloped, the harder I went for him with my whip, and finally all this effort began to tire us out; my shoulder was aching and I couldn’t lift my arm any more, while he had stopped veering his head about. His tongue was poking out of his mouth. Well, now I saw he was saying sorry, so I got off as fast as I could, wiped his eyes clean, took him by his forelock, and told him, ‘Kneel, you dog meat, kennel food!’ And I jerked him down, and he fell to his knees in front of me, and after that he became such a docile animal that you couldn’t have asked for better: he let people mount and ride him; only he soon dropped dead.”
“So he dropped dead, did he?”
“He did, sir; he was a very proud creature; he curbed his behavior, but I don’t think he could curb his character. When Mr. Rarey heard about this, he invited me to work for him.”
“Well then, did you work for him?”
“No, sir.”
“Whyever not?”
“How can I put it? Firstly, I was a connoisseur, after all, and that was the type of work I was most used to—selecting, not breaking. But all he wanted me for was for taming mad horses. And secondly, I reckon this was just a cunning ruse on his part.”
“What do you mean?”
“He wanted to get my secret out of me.”
“Would you have sold it to him?”
“Yes, I would have.”
“So what was stopping you?”
“Well . . . I must have frightened him.”
“Tell us, for heaven’s sake, the story behind that.”
“There’s no particular story, sir: he just said, ‘Pal, tell me your secret, and I’ll give you a lot of money and take you on as my connoisseur.’ As I’ve never been able to deceive anyone, my answer was: ‘What secret? It’s just silliness.’ But he always looked at things from his learned English point of view, and he wouldn’t believe me. He said, ‘Well, if you’re not willing, in your normal state, to let me into the secret, let’s have some rum to drink.’ After that the two of us drank an awful lot of rum, until he went all red and put it as best he could: ‘All right, now tell me what you did with the horse.’ I answered, ‘It was this . . .’ and gave him as terrifying a look as I could and gnashed my teeth noisily but, since I didn’t have a pot of slurry at the time, I raised my arm with the glass in it, as though I was about to smash it on his head. When he saw that, he ducked down and dived under the table; then he dashed for the door and got away, nowhere to be found. So we never met again.”
“Is that why you didn’t go to work for him?”
“Yes, sir. How could I work for him when he was afraid of even meeting me after that? I would have very much liked to work for him, because I took a great liking to him when we were seeing who could drink the most rum, but it seems you can’t alter your destiny, and I had to follow my other vocation.”
“So what do you consider your vocation to be?”
“Really, I don’t know how to put it . . . I’ve been through a lot of things, I’ve found myself in the saddle and under the hooves, I’ve been a hostage, I’ve done military service, I’ve knocked people around myself, and I’ve been badly beaten, so hard that anyone else might have gone under.”
“But when did you join the monastery?”
“That was quite recently, sir, just a few years after my previous life.”
“And did you feel you had a vocation for that, too?”
“Mmm . . . I don’t know how to explain it . . . But I suppose that I must have.”
“Why put it like that, as if you’re not sure of what you’re saying?”
“The reason is this: How can I say for certain, when I can’t even get a grip on all the extent of the life I’ve lived?”
“Why is that?”
“It’s because I did a lot of things against my own will.”
“Whose will, then?”
“My parents’: they made a vow.”
“Then what happened to you because of your parents’ vow?”
“I’ve spent my whole life in mortal peril, but I’ve never managed to perish.”
“Can that really be so?”
“That’s how it’s been, sir.”
“Then tell us, please, the story of your life.”
“Why not? I can, if you like, tell you what I remember, but I can only do it if I start at the very beginning.”
“We’d appreciate that. That will make it even more interesting.”
“Well, I wouldn’t know if it’s going to be of any interest, but listen, if you like.”
2
Mr. Ivan Severianych Fliagin, the former connoisseur, began his story:
“I was born a serf; my family were house serfs owned by Count Komarovsky in Oriol Province. The new generation of masters have squandered the estates, but when the old count was alive, those estates were very substantial. In the village of Gorodishche, where the count lived, there was an enormous manor house, an annex for visitors, a theater, a special bowling alley, kennels; live bears sat on a pillar, there were gardens, he had his own choristers to sing and actors to put on all sorts of performances. He had his own weavers and ran all sorts of craft workshops, but his main attention was focused on his horse stud. Particular people were assigned to every job, but the equine side of things was given even more special attention, and just as the military used to turn conscripts’ children into future warriors like their fathers, who were cantonists (conscripted orphans), so we had coachmen to produce coachmen’s boys as drivers, and stablemen to produce stable boys to look after the horses, and peasants growing forage to produce foragers to bring hay from the barns to the paddocks. My father, Severian, was a coachman; he wasn’t one of the top coachmen, because we had a great number of them, but he could drive a team of six horses, and when the Tsar passed our way he was number seven and was rewarded with an old-fashioned blue five-ruble note. My mother died when I was a baby, so I don’t remember her: I was a prayed-for son, which means that she hadn’t had a child for a long time and begged God to give me to her, and when God granted her wish, she died straight after giving birth, because I came into the world with an unusually large head. That’s why they called me Bighead, instead of Ivan Fliagin. I lived with my father in the coachmen’s yard, so I spent all my life in the stables, and that’s where I discovered the secret of how to know an animal and, you can say, learned to love horses, because even when I was a baby, before I learned to walk, I used to crawl between the horses’ legs and they didn’t hurt me. And when I grew a bit older, I became really close to them. Our stud was separate from the stables; we stable boys were kept away from the stud, and we were given already reared colts and fillies to train. Every one of our coachmen and postilions drove six-horse carriages: the horses were of every breed—Vyatka, Kazan, Kalmyk, Bitiuga, Don—all of them horses we bought at horse fairs. Of course, we had more horses from the stud, but they aren’t worth talking about, since studhorses are always biddable and don’t have much character; they don’t have any spirited imagination, whereas those wild horses were terrible beasts. The count used to buy whole herds of them, and I mean a whole herd, cheap, eight or ten rubles a head, and as soon as we’d driven them home we’d start to school them. They put up a terrible fight. Half of them would actually drop dead sometimes, but they refused to be trained: they’d stand in the yard, staring at everything and shy even at a wall; all they did was cast a glance at the sky, as if they were birds. Sometimes, when you watched, you even felt sorry for them, because you could see that the poor animal would fly away if only it had wings . . . At first they wouldn’t touch oats or water from a trough, they wouldn’t eat at all, just shriveling up until they were mere skin and bones and dropped dead. Sometimes we would lose more than half of what we’d bought, especially the Kyrgyz horses. They’re terribly fond of the freedom of the steppes. On the other hand, though, there were some horses that accepted the bridle and decided to live, but you had to cripple quite a few of those when you trained them, because the only way to deal with their wild nature is to be strict. The horses that could stand all this training and teaching would turn out so fine that no studhorse could compare with them for their riding virtues.
