The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories

Katerina Lvovna took very few valuable things with her in her canvas sack and even less money. But long before they reached Nizhny she had given it all away to the convoy soldiers in exchange for the possibility of walking beside Sergei or standing for a little hour embracing him on a dark night in a cold corner of the narrow transit prison corridor.

Only Katerina Lvovna’s branded young man somehow became very reserved towards her: he did not so much talk as snap at her; his secret meetings with her, for which, not thinking of food or drink, she gave the necessary twenty-five kopecks from her lean purse, he did not value very highly; and more than once he even said:

“You’d do better to give me the money you gave the soldier, instead of us rubbing against corners in the corridor.”

“All I gave him was twenty-five kopecks, Seryozhenka,” Katerina Lvovna justified herself.

“As if twenty-five kopecks isn’t money? Did you pick up a lot of these twenty-five kopecks on the way, that you hand them out so freely?”

“That’s how we could see each other, Seryozha.”

“Well, where’s the joy of seeing each other after such suffering! I could curse my whole life, not just these meetings.”

“And for me it makes no difference, as long as I get to see you.”

“That’s all foolishness,” replied Sergei.

Katerina Lvovna sometimes bit her lips until they bled hearing such replies, and sometimes her eyes, not given to weeping, filled with tears of anger and vexation in the darkness of their nighttime meetings; but she endured it all, kept silent, and wished to deceive herself.

Thus, in these new relations with each other, they reached Nizhny Novgorod. Here their party merged with another party that was going to Siberia from the Moscow highway.

In this big party, among a multitude of people of all sorts in the women’s section, there were two very interesting persons. One was Fiona, a soldier’s wife from Yaroslavl, a splendid, magnificent woman, tall, with a thick black braid and languorous brown eyes, curtained as with a mysterious veil by thick eyelashes; and the other was a sharp-faced seventeen-year-old blonde with tender pink skin, a tiny little mouth, dimples on her fresh cheeks, and golden-brown locks, which stubbornly strayed across her forehead from under her convict’s kerchief. In the party they called this girl Sonetka.

The beautiful Fiona was of a soft and lazy disposition. Everyone in her party knew her, and no one among the men rejoiced especially at achieving success with her, and no one was upset at seeing her grant the same success to another suitor.

“Our Aunt Fiona is a kindly wench, she doesn’t offend anybody,” the convicts all joked unanimously.

But Sonetka was of a completely different sort.

Of her they said:

“An eel: slips through your fingers, and never lingers.”

Sonetka had taste, chose her dishes, and maybe even chose very strictly; she wanted passion to be offered to her, not blandly, but with a piquant, spicy seasoning, with sufferings and sacrifices; while Fiona was Russian simplicity, who is even too lazy to say “Go away,” and who knows only one thing, that she is a woman. Such women are very highly valued in robber bands, convict parties, and the social-democratic communes of Petersburg.⁵

The appearance of these two women in one combined party with Sergei and Katerina Lvovna had tragic consequences for the latter.

XIV

From the first days of the combined party’s movement from Nizhny Novgorod to Kazan, Sergei openly began to seek the favors of the soldier’s wife Fiona, and suffered no lack of success. The languid beauty Fiona did not make Sergei languish, as, in her kindness, she did not make anyone languish. At the third or fourth halting place, in the early dusk, Katerina Lvovna set up a meeting with Seryozhechka by means of bribery, and lay there without sleeping: she kept waiting for the guard on duty to come at any moment, nudge her slightly, and whisper “Run quickly.” The door opened once, and a woman darted out to the corridor; the door opened again, and another woman prisoner quickly jumped up from another cot and also disappeared after the guard; finally there came a tug at the coat with which Katerina Lvovna covered herself. The young woman hurriedly got up from the cot, well polished by the sides of convicts, threw the coat over her shoulders, and gave a push to the guard standing before her.

As Katerina Lvovna went down the corridor, in one place faintly lit by a dim lamp, she came across two or three couples who could not be made out from a distance. As Katerina Lvovna passed the male convicts’ room, she seemed to hear restrained laughter through the little window cut out in the door.

“Having fun,” Katerina Lvovna’s guard growled, and, taking her by the shoulders, he pushed her into the corner and withdrew.

Katerina Lvovna felt a coat and a beard with her hand; her other hand touched the hot face of a woman.

“Who’s that?” Sergei asked in a half whisper.

“And what are you doing here? Who is that with you?”