The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories

Whoever does not want to listen to these words, whoever is not attracted but frightened by the thought of death even in this dismal situation, must try to stifle these howling voices with something still more hideous. The simple man understands this perfectly well: he then unleashes all his animal simplicity, begins to be stupid, to jeer at himself, at people, at feeling. Not very tender to begin with, he becomes doubly malicious.

“What, then, merchant’s wife? Is your honor in good health?” Sergei impudently asked Katerina Lvovna, as soon as the party went over a wet hillock and lost sight of the village where they had spent the night.

With these words, he turned at once to Sonetka, covered her with the skirts of his coat, and sang in a high falsetto:

A blond head flashes in the dark outside the window.

So you’re not asleep, my tormentress, you’re not asleep, sweet cheat.

I’ll cover you with my coat skirts, so that none can see.⁸

With these words, Sergei embraced Sonetka and kissed her loudly in front of the whole party …

Katerina Lvovna saw and did not see it all: she walked on like an utterly lifeless person. They started nudging her and pointing to Sergei’s outrageous behavior with Sonetka. She became an object of mockery.

“Let her be,” Fiona defended her, when somebody in the party tried to laugh at the stumbling Katerina Lvovna. “Don’t you devils see that the woman’s quite ill?”

“Must have got her feet wet,” a young prisoner cracked.

“She’s of merchant stock, you know: a pampered upbringing,” Sergei responded.

“Of course, if she at least had warm stockings, it would be better,” he went on.

It was as if Katerina Lvovna woke up.

“Vile serpent!” she said, unable to restrain herself. “Keep jeering, scoundrel, keep jeering!”

“No, merchant’s wife, I’m not jeering at you at all, but Sonetka here has some very nice stockings for sale, so I thought our merchant’s wife might buy them.”

Many laughed. Katerina Lvovna strode on like a wound-up automaton.

The weather was turning stormy. From the gray clouds that covered the sky, snow began to fall in wet flakes, which melted after barely touching the ground and made the mud still deeper. Finally a dark, leaden strip appears; its other side cannot be seen. This strip is the Volga. Over the Volga a rather stiff wind is blowing, driving the slowly rising, dark, gape-jawed waves back and forth.

The party of drenched and chilled prisoners slowly came to the crossing and stopped, waiting for the ferry.

The wet, dark ferry came; the crew began loading the prisoners.

“They say somebody has vodka on this ferry,” one prisoner observed, when the ferry, under the downpour of wet snowflakes, cast off and rocked on the big waves of the storm-tossed river.

“Yes, right now a little nip wouldn’t do any harm,” Sergei responded, and, persecuting Katerina Lvovna for Sonetka’s amusement, he said: “Merchant’s wife, for old friendship’s sake, treat me to a little vodka. Don’t be stingy. Remember, my sweet, our former love, and what a good time you and I had, my joy, sitting together of a long autumn evening, sending your relations off to their eternal rest without priests or deacons.”

Katerina Lvovna was trembling all over with cold. But, besides the cold that pierced her to the bone under her soaked dress, something else was going on in Katerina Lvovna’s whole being. Her head burned as if on fire; the pupils of her eyes were dilated, alive with a sharp, roving glitter, and peered fixedly into the rolling waves.

“And I’d like a little vodka, too: the cold’s unbearable,” Sonetka’s voice rang out.

“Come on, merchant’s wife, treat us!” Sergei kept rubbing it in.

“Ah, you’ve got no conscience!” said Fiona, shaking her head reproachfully.

“That does you no credit at all,” the prisoner Gordyushka seconded the soldier’s wife.

“If you’re not ashamed before her, you should be before others.”

“You common snuffbox!” Sergei yelled at Fiona. “Ashamed, is it! What should I be ashamed of! Maybe I never loved her, and now … Sonetka’s worn-out shoe is dearer to me than her mangy cat’s mug; what do you say to that? Let her love skew-mouthed Gordyushka; or—” he glanced at a runty fellow on horseback in a felt cape and military cap with a cockade and added, “or, better still, let her cuddle up to this transport officer: at least his cape will keep her from the rain.”

“And she’ll be called an officer’s wife,” Sonetka chimed in.

“Right you are! … and she’ll easily get enough to buy stockings,” Sergei seconded.