The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories

In the darkness, Katerina Lvovna pulled the headcloth from her rival. The woman slipped aside, rushed off, stumbled against someone in the corridor, and fell.

From the men’s quarters came a burst of guffawing.

“Villain!” Katerina Lvovna whispered and hit Sergei across the face with the ends of the kerchief she had torn from the head of his new girlfriend.

Sergei raised his hand; but Katerina Lvovna flitted lightly down the corridor and took hold of her door. The guffawing from the men’s quarters that followed her was repeated so loudly that the guard, who had been standing apathetically next to the lantern and spitting at the toe of his boot, raised his head and barked:

“Quiet!”

Katerina Lvovna lay down silently and went on lying like that until morning. She wanted to say to herself: “I don’t love him,” and felt that her love for him was still greater, still more ardent. And now before her eyes she keeps picturing again and again how his palm trembled under that woman’s head, how his other arm embraced her hot shoulders.

The poor woman wept and unwillingly called upon the same palm to be under her head that minute and his other arm to embrace her hysterically trembling shoulders.

“Well, give me back my kerchief anyhow,” the soldier’s wife Fiona woke her up in the morning.

“Ah, so that was you? …”

“Give it back, please!”

“But why did you come between us?”

“How have I come between you? Is it some sort of love or real interest, that you should be angry?”

Katerina Lvovna thought for a second, then took the kerchief she had torn off at night from under her pillow and, throwing it at Fiona, turned to the wall.

She felt relieved.

“Pah,” she said to herself, “am I going to be jealous of that painted tub? She can drop dead! It’s nasty even comparing myself to her.”

“The thing is this, Katerina Lvovna,” said Sergei, as they walked down the road the next day. “Please understand that, first of all, I’m no Zinovy Borisych to you, and, second, that you’re no great merchant’s wife now: so kindly don’t get so puffed up. There’s no market for butting goats with us.”

Katerina Lvovna said nothing to that, and for a week she walked without exchanging a word or a glance with Sergei. As the offended party, she stood firm and did not want to make the first step towards reconciliation in this first quarrel with him.

In the meantime, while Katerina Lvovna was angry, Sergei began making eyes at and flirting with the blond Sonetka. Now he greets her “with our particular honor,” now he smiles, now, meeting her, he tries to embrace and squeeze her. Katerina Lvovna sees it all and her heart seethes all the more.

“Shouldn’t I maybe make peace with him?” Katerina Lvovna thinks, stumbling and not seeing the ground under her feet.

But her pride now forbids her more than ever to go to him first and make peace. And meanwhile Sergei attaches himself to Sonetka ever more persistently, and it seems to everyone that the inaccessible Sonetka, who slipped away like an eel, is suddenly growing more tame.

“Here you wept over me,” Fiona once said to Katerina Lvovna, “but what did I do to you? With me it came and went, but you’d better watch out for Sonetka.”

“Perish my pride: I absolutely must make peace today,” Katerina Lvovna decided, now only pondering how to set about the reconciliation most adroitly.

Sergei himself helped her out of this difficulty.

“Lvovna!” he called to her as they made a halt. “Come and see me tonight for a moment: it’s business.”

Katerina Lvovna said nothing.

“What, maybe you’re still angry and won’t come?”

Katerina Lvovna again said nothing.

But Sergei and all who observed Katerina Lvovna saw that, as they approached the transit prison, she started moving closer to the chief guard and gave him seventeen kopecks she had saved up from alms.

“I’ll give you another ten once I save more,” Katerina Lvovna begged him.

The soldier put the money behind his cuff and said:

“All right.”

Once these negotiations were concluded, Sergei grunted and winked at Sonetka.

“Ah, Katerina Lvovna!” he said, embracing her as they went up the steps of the transit prison. “Compared to this woman, lads, there’s not another such in the whole world.”

Katerina Lvovna blushed and choked with happiness.

That night, as soon as the door quietly opened a crack, she ran out at once: she was trembling and felt for Sergei with her hands in the dark corridor.

“My Katya!” said Sergei, embracing her.

“Ah, my villain!” Katerina Lvovna answered through her tears and clung to him with her lips.

The guard paced the corridor and, stopping, spat on his boots, and paced again; behind the door the tired inmates snored, a mouse gnawed at a feather, under the stove crickets chirped away one louder than the other, and Katerina Lvovna was still in bliss.

But the raptures wore off, and the inevitable prose began.

“I’m in mortal pain: my bones ache from the ankles right up to the knees,” Sergei complained, sitting with Katerina Lvovna on the floor in a corner of the corridor.