Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, page 21
“Well then, was she actually more fun for you?” Ivan Severianych’s listeners asked.
“Yes,” he answered, “she turned out a bit more fun, only there were times when she cheered me up, and times when she annoyed me by fooling around.”
“What did she do when she was fooling around?”
“Various things . . . The first thing that came into her head: she’d leap onto my knees, or when I was asleep she’d knock off my skullcap and throw it away somewhere and laugh. If you threatened her, she would burst out laughing and she’d start running around like a water nymph; well, walking on my ankles, I could never catch her, I’d just trip and end up laughing myself.”
“When you were in the steppes, did you shave your head and wear a skullcap?”
“I did, sir.”
“Why did you? Was it to please your wives, then?”
“No, sir, it was more for hygiene, because they don’t have bathhouses there.”
“So you had two wives at the same time, then?”
“Yes, in those steppes I had two, and then when I was with another khan, Agashimola, who kidnapped me from Otuchev, I was given two others.”
“Tell me, if you don’t mind,” inquired one of the listeners, “how you could have been kidnapped.”
“By trickery, sir. I’d run away with Chepkun Yemgurchei’s Tatars and spent all those five years living in the Yemgurchei horde, but one day he had a celebration and all the princes and uhlans and princelings, big and small, came to see him, along with Khan Jangar and Bakshei Otuchev.”
“The man whom Chepkun had thrashed?”
“Yes, sir, the same man.”
“How can that be? Didn’t Bakshei have a grudge against Chepkun?”
“Why should he?”
“For flogging him and getting the horse from him.”
“No, sir, they don’t hold grudges: if someone wins in a friendly contest, then he gets the prize and that’s all there is to it. But Khan Jangar did once have a word with me and said, ‘Oh, Ivan, you’re a stupid fool: why did you sit down to a thrashing contest with Savakirei for the sake of a Russian prince: I would have had a good laugh if the Russian prince had taken off his own shirt.’
“ ‘You’d never live to see the day,’ I answered.
“ ‘Why not?’
“ ‘Because our princes are cowards; they’re not brave, and they have no strength to speak of.’
“He understood and said, ‘I could see that there were no real horse lovers among them, and if they wanted to get something, then it would only be with money.’
“ ‘That’s true,’ I said. ‘They can’t do anything unless there’s money in it.’ As for Agashimola, he came from a distant horde; his horses grazed somewhere right by the Caspian Sea, and he liked to take medicine, so he wanted to summon me to treat his lady wife and promised Yemgurchei a lot of cattle in exchange. So Yemgurchei let me go to see him: I gathered a supply of aloe and galangal root and went. But as soon as Agashimola had taken me, he rushed off with all his nomads and we galloped away for eight days.”
“So you were able to ride?”
“I rode, sir.”
“How, with your feet?”
“What do you mean?”
“But what about the chopped horsehair in your heels, didn’t it bother you?”
“Not at all: they’d thought that out cleverly. When they bristle you like that with hair, you can’t walk properly, but a bristled man rides a horse even better than anyone else, because he’s used to walking on his ankles and his legs form a wheel shape, so that he clings to the horse like a hoop, so tight that nothing can knock him off.”
“Well, what happened to you next when you were in different steppes, in Agashimola’s?”
“I was in even worse mortal peril.”
“But you didn’t perish?”
“No, sir, I didn’t.”
“Please go on, tell us what you had to put up with Agashimola.”
“If you like.”
7
“When Agashimola’s Tatars brought me to their camp, they rushed off to a new place and refused to let me go free.
“ ‘Ivan, why would you want to live with the Yemgurchei’s tribe? Yemgurchei is a thief: live with us; we’ll be happy to show you respect and we’ll give you good Natashas. You had only two Natashas with Yemgurchei, but we’ll give you more.’
“I refused. ‘Why would I want more? I don’t need any more.’
“ ‘No,’ they said, ‘you don’t understand: the more Natashas, the better; they’ll bring you more Nicholases and all the Nicholases will call you daddy.’
“ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘do you think it’s an easy task for me to bring up Tatar children? If there was anyone to baptize them and give them Communion, that would be a different matter, otherwise, it doesn’t matter how many I bring forth, they’ll still all be your people, they won’t be Orthodox, and they’ll grow up to cheat Russian peasants.’
“All the same, Agashimola, after kidnapping me from Otuchev, gave me two more wives. In his camp there was much more respect for Russians, and especially for one of our Russian women . . .”
“But how could they take a liking to one of our women? To judge by what you say, their own Natashas aren’t bad, are they?”
“She straightened their faith out for them and found a way of making their family relations much better.”
“How could she manage that, when their own women don’t have much to do with religion?”
“If you listen, I’ll tell you how it was. About five years before I arrived, a young widow from Piriatin ended up with them along with other captives. She was called Oksana, or as they still remember her in steppe fashion, Ksana-Khanum. Her body was very much to Agashimola’s taste, because their Natashas have rather withered figures, but Ksana had something like two good watermelons rolling about under her blouse, and below the waist you could see that there was a lot of pleasing flesh. Because of these generous endowments Agashimola ordered a small yurt to be put up for her next to the main yurt, and after he had said his evening prayers, he went to see her, full of ardent desire; she hadn’t been in the steppe long, but she had learned all the ways of doing things there and she met him, as their wives did, with a pair of scissors. I need to explain that they may have a lot of leeway as far as their womenfolk are concerned, but a man has to let his wife cut his nails before they can try the fruits of joy, so that they don’t indulge unreasonably often in these exercises. Otherwise, a man with no self-restraint would think of nothing but jumping from one woman to another, but not with them: you have to put up with abstinence until your nails grow back a bit. That was the reason Agashimola was so pleased that his nails were beginning to catch on things by the time that Ksana-Khanum arrived. She received him as their rules dictate, by bowing low, and then she took his right hand in hers and cut the nail on the little finger, and then the finger next to it; then she let go of his hand and lay down flirtatiously on the felt rug. She lay there on her side, wiggling her watermelons and looking at her master, furrowing her black eyebrows, while he stuck out a third finger and waited for all his nails to be cut. He wanted to touch her plump flanks, but his faith forbad him until she cut his nails.
“ ‘Finish cutting them, be quick,’ he whispered.
“ ‘No need to,’ murmured Ksana-Khanum.
“ ‘What do you mean “no need”? The Prophet himself commanded that before every act, a man’s nails have to be cut . . .’
“ ‘But I have cut your nails,’ said Ksana-Khanum, laughing.
“ ‘How about the rest?’
“ ‘Why bother about the rest? It wasn’t said, “Cut all the nails,” was it? If that were the law, I wouldn’t have left a single nail uncut, but there’s nothing about “cutting them all” in the command, so there’s no need to. In any case, there’s no need to be holier than the law. Your other nails will come in handy the next time.’
“Agashimola took a great liking to these words. But he was a very religious man and was firm about matters of the faith: he was a little afraid and, just to make sure, he asked the cunning woman, ‘All the same, do you think one can get away with cutting just one nail?’ She seemed to take offense at the idea of altering the Prophet’s holy will: in such a case, it would be one nail, not nails, that was cut, and you could be in a lot of trouble for such dishonorable behavior.
“By now Agashimola realized that his captive was well versed in the rules of the faith; he stopped arguing with her and enjoyed the fruits of joy in peace and calm. This amendment to the rules was just what he wanted. The next morning he summoned first his wives and then his adult sons and relatives, and informed them all how cleverly Ksana-Khanum had interpreted the rules of the faith. Everyone praised the Russian woman’s intelligence and sense, especially those who had young, agreeable wives. They brought her a lot of gifts and offerings and, thanks to her, they stopped being so bestial in their general treatment of Russians: now they admitted that there were Russians who could interpret the law.
“As for those who had older wives and uglier ones, not all of them dared to trust the new interpretation: such a man would dig his heels in if his wife cut only two or three nails, he would say he was afraid of putting his soul in mortal peril with this Russian innovation.
“At first, Agashimola was overjoyed, but later, when he had time to think, he added up all the fruits of joy that he had missed, for he was an elderly man when he met Ksana-Khanum and her correction: he had reduced his pleasures tenfold, and it was impossible to recuperate what he had missed. He even wept with frustration, then summoned the mullahs and teachers and hauled them over the coals for failing, despite their learning, to reveal what a simple woman from Piriatin had grasped.
“The mullahs didn’t argue. They themselves found the correction much improved their own domestic lives. They meekly endured his ranting, reminding him only that by the will of the blessed Prophet is the truth revealed to simple hearts, only over time, never instantly.
“So, once more, I took two wives, but not any more, because if you have a lot of women, even if they’re Tatars, pagan women quarrel and need constant disciplining.”
“Well, then, did you love these new wives of yours?”
“What do you mean?”
“Did you love these new wives of yours?”
“Love? Is that what you mean? They were all right: one I had from Agashimola was a good housewife to me, so I quite . . . liked her.”
“How about the girl, the very young one that you used to have as a wife? I expect you liked her better, didn’t you?”
“So-so: I quite liked her, too.”
“I expect you missed her when you were kidnapped into another horde, didn’t you?”
“No, I didn’t actually miss her.”
“But you must have had children by those first wives.”
“Of course I did: Savakirei’s wife had two Nicholases and a Natasha, and the little girl gave birth to six in five years, because she had a couple of Nicholases at the same time.”
“But do you mind if we ask why you keep calling them Nicholases and Natashas?”
“That’s the Tatar way. Any grown-up Russian is an Ivan to them, and a woman is a Natasha, while the boys are called Nicholases; so my wives, even though they were Tatars, were counted as Russians because of me and called Natashas, and the boy children were Nicholases. Of course, all that’s just superficial, because the children had no churching, so I didn’t consider them to be my children.”
“How could you not consider them your own? Why on earth not?”
“But I couldn’t possibly consider them mine when they weren’t baptized or anointed.”
“What about your parental feelings?”
“What do you mean?”
“But surely you had some feelings for those children. Did you never show them any affection?”
“How could I? Of course, if I was sitting there on my own and one of them ran up, fine, I’d pat him on the head, stroke his hair, and say, ‘Go and see your mother.’ But that didn’t happen often, because I wasn’t interested in them.”
“But why not? Did you have a lot to do?”
“No, sir, I had nothing to do at all, I missed home badly and wanted to get back to Russia.”
“So even after ten years you didn’t get used to the steppes?”
“No, sir, you just want to get home . . . I got miserable. Especially in the evenings, or even when the weather’s good, in the middle of the day, it’s baking hot, the camp is quiet, and the Tatars feel the heat so badly they go to their tents and sleep, then I’d lift the flap in my tent and look at the steppe . . . first one direction, then the other, and it was the same wherever you looked . . . Sultry heat, cruel heat; open spaces with no boundary; grasses, wild winds; the white feather grasses, as thick as a silver sea, are swaying and you can smell them on the wind; there’s a stench of sheep, and everything’s bathed in burning sunlight, and the steppes are as tiresome as life: no end in sight, and the misery is bottomless . . . You look and don’t know where you’re looking, and suddenly you see the shape of a monastery before your eyes, and you remember Christian country and you burst into tears.”
Ivan Severianych stopped: his memories made him heave a deep sigh. Then he went on: “In fact, it was even worse on the salt marshes by the Caspian Sea: the sun turns red, it bakes you, and the salt marsh is shining, so is the sea . . . The shining makes your head spin even worse than the feather grass does, and you don’t know where, in what part of the world, to place yourself, whether you’re alive or dead and being tormented for your sins in a hopeless hell. When there’s some feather grass growing on the steppe, it is a bit less miserable; at least there’s the blue of the sage bushes here and there in the gullies, or there’s some dwarf wormwood and white patches of savory; but in the salt marshes there’s nothing but blinding light . . . Occasionally you get grass fires sweeping along, and that stirs things up: bustards, big and little, steppe sandpipers take to the air, and the Tatars start hunting them. We used to drive the bustards on horseback and kill them by lashing them with long whips; but, if you’re not careful, you find yourself galloping away to escape the fire . . . That’s all the fun you can have. Then wild strawberries start pushing up through the burned ground, various birds fly down, mostly small ones, and the air is filled with chirruping . . . Occasionally you come across a bush: steppe birch, wild peach, or yellow acacia . . . When the sun rose and the mist condensed into dew, you felt a breath of coolness and scents coming from the plants . . . Of course, it was still dreary, but at least it was bearable. But God forbid anyone has to spend time in the salt marshes. Horses might quite like it for a while: they can lick the salt and drink their fill and put on weight, but it’s deadly for a human being. There’s not even a living animal there, there’s just one ridiculous little bird, the pratincole, something like our swallow, nothing notable about it, except a red fringe around its mouth. I don’t know why it comes to those shores; there’s nothing to perch on, so it lands on the salt marsh, lies on its butt for a while, then any moment it will gather its wits and fly off again, and you are deprived even of this, since you have no wings and you’re back on your own, no death, no life, no repentance, and when you die, you’ll be like a piece of mutton, covered in salt, and you’ll lie there, salt meat until the end of the world. But life is even more sickening in winter when the grazing is covered with snow: there isn’t much snow, just enough to cover the grass and make it as hard as wood. That’s when the Tatars stay in their yurts, sitting by the fire, smoking . . . They often get so bored that they thrash each other. Then you go outside and there’s nothing to look at: the horses hunch their backs and move about all huddled, they’re so thin that only their tails and manes move in the wind. The most they can do is move their legs and scrape away the covering of snow with their hooves, to nibble at the frozen grass, which is their only food: that’s what winter grazing is all about . . . It’s unbearable. Your only distraction is when you notice a horse is too weak to graze, it can’t get its hoof through the snow and its teeth around a frozen root. Horses like that have a knife thrust through their throat, then they’re flayed and the meat is eaten. But it’s really vile meat—sweet, rather like a cow’s udder, but tough—you eat it because you have nothing else, but it makes you feel sick. I was lucky: one of my wives knew how to smoke horse ribs: she’d take a horse rib, with meat on either side, put it into a big intestine, and smoke it over the fire. That was all right, more edible, because at least it smelled like ham, but the taste was still foul. And you gnaw at this horrible stuff and you suddenly think: Oh, now, at home in our village, ducks and geese are being plucked, pigs are being slaughtered, really fatty cabbage soup with pork neck is cooking for the holidays, and Father Ilia, our priest, a really nice, kind old man, will soon go to celebrate Christmas, taking the sextons, the priests’ wives and the sextons’ wives, and the student priests, all of them a bit tipsy. But Father Ilia can’t take a lot of drink: the butler in the master’s house will offer him a glass of vodka, and the manager and nanny in the office will send him out something, then Father Ilia will be so weak that he’ll have to crawl to see us in the yard, so drunk he can barely move one leg after the other: in the first peasant hut he comes to, he might be able to swallow a glass of vodka, but not in the next huts. Then he’ll pour whatever he’s offered into a bottle under his cassock. So he always makes himself at home, even when it’s a matter of food, because if he sees something really nice to eat, he’ll ask, ‘Wrap it up in newspaper, then give it to me, and I’ll take it with me.’ Usually, we would tell him, ‘Father, we don’t have any newspaper.’ He wouldn’t be annoyed, he’d just take it unwrapped and give it to his wife, and happily go on to whatever’s next. Oh, gentlemen, when you have memories of such a fine life, ever since childhood, it weighs on your soul, it makes you sick with longing, you realize you’ve lost all that happiness and, no matter how long you live, you’ll never be properly married, and you’ll die with nobody to give you a funeral, and you’re plunged into misery . . . and you wait until it’s night, leave the yurt on the sly, so that your wives and your children can’t see you, and you start praying . . . and praying . . . and praying, so that the snow under your knees thaws and the next morning you see grass where your tears fell.”
