The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories

The mechanic propped himself on the shoulders of two of his comrades and had just put his eye to the narrow gap when he screamed at the top of his voice:

“Brothers, friends, they’re smothering somebody, they’re smothering somebody in there!”

And the mechanic desperately banged on the shutters with his hands. Some dozen men followed his example and, running to the windows, began applying their fists to them.

The crowd grew every moment, and the result was the siege of the Izmailov house already known to us.

“I saw it, with my own eyes I saw it,” the mechanic testified over the dead Fedya. “The child was lying on the bed, and the two of them were smothering him.”

Sergei was taken to the police that same evening, and Katerina Lvovna was led to her upstairs room and two guards were placed over her.

It was freezing cold in the Izmailovs’ house: the stoves were not lit; the door was never shut; one dense crowd of curious people replaced another. They all came to look at Fedya lying in his coffin and at the other big coffin, its lid tightly covered with a wide shroud. There was a white satin crown on Fedya’s forehead, covering the red scar left by the opening of the skull. The forensic autopsy had discovered that Fedya died of suffocation, and Sergei, when brought to his corpse, at the priest’s first words about the Last Judgment and the punishment of the unrepentant, burst into tears and not only confessed openly to the murder of Fedya, but also asked them to dig up Zinovy Borisych, whom he had buried without a funeral. The corpse of Katerina Lvovna’s husband, buried in dry sand, was not yet completely decomposed: it was taken out and laid in a big coffin. As his accomplice in both these crimes, to the general horror, Sergei named his young mistress. Katerina Lvovna, to all questions, answered only: “I know nothing about it.” Sergei was forced to expose her at a confrontation. Having heard his confession, Katerina Lvovna looked at him in mute amazement, but without anger, and then said indifferently:

“If he’s willing to tell about it, there’s no point in my denying it: I killed them.”

“What for?” she was asked.

“For him,” she answered, pointing to Sergei, who hung his head.

The criminals were put in jail, and the terrible case, which attracted general attention and indignation, was decided very quickly. At the end of February, the court announced to Sergei and the widow of the merchant of the third guild, Katerina Lvovna, that it had been decided to punish them by flogging in the marketplace of their town and then to send them both to hard labor. At the beginning of March, on a cold, frosty morning, the executioner counted off the appointed number of blue-purple weals on Katerina Lvovna’s bare white back, and then beat out his portion on Sergei’s shoulders and branded his handsome face with three convict’s marks.

During all this time, Sergei for some reason aroused much more general sympathy than Katerina Lvovna. Smeared and bloody, he stumbled as he came down from the black scaffold, but Katerina Lvovna came down slowly, only trying to keep the thick shirt and coarse prisoner’s coat from touching her torn back.

Even in the prison hospital, when they gave her her baby, all she said was: “Oh, away with him!” and turning to the wall, without a moan, without complaint, she laid her breast on the hard cot.

XIII

The party in which Sergei and Katerina Lvovna found themselves set out when spring had begun only by the calendar, while, as the popular proverb says, “there was lots of sun, but heat there was none.”

Katerina Lvovna’s child was given to Boris Timofeich’s old sister to be brought up, because, being counted as the legitimate son of the criminal woman’s murdered husband, the infant was now left the sole heir to the entire Izmailov fortune. Katerina Lvovna was very pleased with that and surrendered the baby quite indifferently. Her love for the father, like the love of many all too passionate women, did not extend in the least to the child.

Anyhow, nothing in the world existed for her: neither light, nor darkness, nor good, nor bad, nor boredom, nor joy; she did not understand anything, did not love anyone, did not love herself. She waited impatiently for the party to set out on its way, when she hoped to be able to see her darling Sergei again, and she even forgot to think about the baby.

Katerina Lvovna’s hopes were not deceived: heavily bound in chains, branded, Sergei came out of the prison gates in the same group with her.

Man accustoms himself as far as possible to any abominable situation, and in every situation preserves as far as possible his capacity to pursue his meager joys; but for Katerina Lvovna there is nothing to adjust to: she sees her Sergei again, and with him even the convict’s path blossoms with happiness.