The Greatest Russian Stories of Crime and Suspense (9 page)

“I’ll keep it in mind,” Aniskin said smiling and shaking his head. “Duska, Duska, funny woman! What does she want all that money for?”

“She is making herself a new coat. Remember they delivered three fur collars to the shop and she bought one of them.”

“I know about that.”

“Then why do you ask what she wants the money for? D’you think she’d let that collar lie another winter?”

“Oh, you always know everything,” Aniskin said with sudden severity and turned away from his wife, who did not react to his change of tone in any way, however, but sat there as happy and relaxed as before. She simply stared more intently down at the floor and bent her scrawny neck lower. Suddenly her sunken cheeks moved in a smile.

“You know, Fedka is already wearing size nine. Can you imagine it?”

“Take ten then,” Aniskin responded after a pause. “I suppose you were going to anyway?”

“Yes.”

And again the room was immersed in silence. Aniskin drank two more glasses of tea, then upturned his empty glass resolutely and rose with a springy motion. The table and the stool creaked, the floorboards groaned under his elephant weight, Glafira started and then relaxed again, reluctant to put an end to the blissful interlude of inactivity.

“It’s a quarter to nine,” said Aniskin.“I’ll go to the farm board.There is some important business to discuss. Make me up a bed in the outhouse, will you.”

He wiped his sweaty face with a towel, dropped the towel on the window-sill and waddled to the door. He walked in his usual unhurried manner. Glafira did not change her posture and still sat with her head bent low, her eyes staring at the floor. But she obviously was aware that her husband was at the door for she suddenly called out:

“Aniskin!”

“What is it?”

“You’d better take your gun along,” she said very quietly.

Aniskin stopped in the doorway, turned to her slowly as though his hinges were too stiff, and said after a considering pause with a wave of his arm:

“No, I won’t. I’m not thinking of killing him.”

4

At a quarter to twelve the moon was suspended high over the village, and its shadows had grown so short that they were no longer dogging Aniskin’s steps. The moon was yellow like a piece of cheap amber inserted into a dark fabric sprinkled with stars. The night was cool and bright.

Aniskin felt fine at night. His heart did not ache, his legs did not hurt, there was no gnawing feeling in the pit of his stomach; he felt healthy, cheerful and strong and so perceived everything with youthful freshness of feeling. He liked the moon, enjoyed the distant sounds of the accordion and looked with pleasure at the silver zigzag of the moonlit Ob.

The accordion sang the moving old song about young Komsomol lovers parted by the Civil War, about him pressing her hand and looking tenderly into the girl’s eyes. Aniskin stopped for a while listening to the accordion singing about himself, his own youth. “I am a cunning fox,” he thought of himself admiringly. “I certainly picked the right time for Genka’s arrest—at midnight.” The accordion made the inspector feel young and even handsome.

Genka’s house was the last in the row. An empty bird box was nailed to an old willow tree. The young bull uttered short restless moos in the shed. The windows were gilded all over with moonlight. The yard was crowded with shadows thrown by the well pole, the numerous sheds, barns and outhouses. These shadows, dark-grey and shapeless, lived a life of their own, unconnected, as it were, with the moon. Aniskin walked up to the house and gazed at it for a while.

“Here we meet again, Dmitri,” he thought.

Nobody in the village knew why starlings never made nests in the little boxes put up by Dmitri Paltsev or his son Genka. The excited birds, reaching home after their long flight from the south, fought among themselves for the possession of every little box available, but, for some reason, gave a wide berth to the Paltsevs’ yard.

“Eh, Dmitri,” Aniskin thought ruefully, “millions of people have been won over by Soviet power, but you remained what you have always been, a miserable, tight-fisted kulak.”

Aniskin opened the gate soundlessly and entered the yard, dragging his dark-grey legless shadow along. The shadow went across the yard, winded its way among the outhouses and barns and stopped in front of the big shed. Moonlight made its way gladly and confidently into the opened door of the shed lighting its interior with pale mat reflection. In this paleness Aniskin could see two green dots and a strip of white.

Entering the shed, Aniskin made out what they were, the two green dots and the strip of white. Genka was sitting on an upturned tub, staring glassily, his teeth bared in a snarl. He was holding a gleaming revolver in his hand, his arm bent at an awkward angle so that it was hard to say where the revolver was pointing. When Aniskin crunched his way across the sandy floor and stopped, the barrel of the revolver turned on the inspector. Turned and remained in that position.

“I’ll kill you!” said Genka.

“No, you won’t,” replied Aniskin with a grim smile. “If you aren’t gone, that means you won’t kill me. You are a coward, same as your father. That is why I gave you a chance, to see if there is anything of a man in you. There isn’t. I never really believed you would go, that’s why I gave you the chance. Now I see that you deserve the firing squad. Murderers never escape us.”

Aniskin waddled his way unhurriedly towards Genka, scraping on the ground with his worn sandals. He went straight to meet the ominous hole of the revolver, a big, stout man who looked like an enigmatic Oriental deity.

NIKOLAI GOGOL

THE PORTRAIT

One of Russia’s most important writers, Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol-Yanovsky (1809–1852) may be credited for helping to lay the foundations of the development of the Russian realistic novel, though he was not himself a realist. Powerfully influenced by Alexander Pushkin, many of his early works were based on Russian folk tales, combining mythology and fantasy, and his later works were perceived as satires, though he saw them more as reflections of society. Profoundly, even fanatically, religious and nationalistic during much of his life, he dropped the Polish-sounding second part of his last name due to its Catholic, non-Russian, overtones.

His earliest work was so disastrously received that he fled St. Petersburg but, after a short stay in Germany, he returned to write
Evenings on the Farm Near Dikanka
(1831), a romantic picture of Ukrainian life that was widely praised. His most famous and lasting works followed, notably
Arabesques
(1835), which included such stories as “The Diary of a Madman” and “The Portrait”;
Mirgorod
(1836), containing “Taras Bulba,” a historical romance about Ukrainian Cossacks which was filmed in 1962 with Yul Brynner and Tony Curtis; the 1836 satiric comedy
The Inspector General
(made into an unlikely musical comedy vehicle for Danny Kaye in 1949); and his masterpiece,
Dead Souls
(1842), often seen as a satire but in actuality a reflection of Gogol’s dismal view of humanity. There were supposed to be additional tales about his hero, showing his gradual reformation, but none were published and, as the author descended into madness, he burned virtually all of his late writings.

“The Portrait” is about the possibility of evil and the mysterious effect a painting has on two artists, one of whom it corrupts while the other is lifted by it, though both suffer consequences. It was first published in a collection titled
Arabesques
in 1835; a somewhat different version was published in 1842. It was translated by Constance Garnett in 1922.

PART I

N
owhere did so many people pause as before the little picture-shop in the Shtchukinui Dvor. This little shop contained, indeed, the most varied collection of curiosities. The pictures were chiefly oil-paintings covered with dark varnish, in frames of dingy yellow. Winter scenes with white trees; very red sunsets, like raging conflagrations, a Flemish boor, more like a turkey-cock in cuffs than a human being, were the prevailing subjects. To these must be added a few engravings, such as a portrait of Khozreff-Mirza in a sheepskin cap, and some generals with three-cornered hats and hooked noses. Moreover, the doors of such shops are usually festooned with bundles of those publications, printed on large sheets of bark, and then coloured by hand, which bear witness to the native talent of the Russian.

On one was the Tzarevna Miliktrisa Kirbitievna; on another the city of Jerusalem. There are usually but few purchasers of these productions, but gazers are many. Some truant lackey probably yawns in front of them, holding in his hand the dishes containing dinner from the cook-shop for his master, who will not get his soup very hot. Before them, too, will most likely be standing a soldier wrapped in his cloak, a dealer from the old-clothes mart, with a couple of penknives for sale, and a huckstress, with a basketful of shoes. Each expresses admiration in his own way. The muzhiks generally touch them with their fingers; the dealers gaze seriously at them; serving boys and apprentices laugh, and tease each other with the coloured caricatures; old lackeys in frieze cloaks look at them merely for the sake of yawning away their time somewhere; and the hucksters, young Russian women, halt by instinct to hear what people are gossiping about, and to see what they are looking at.

At the time our story opens, the young painter, Tchartkoff, paused involuntarily as he passed the shop. His old cloak and plain attire showed him to be a man who was devoted to his art with self-denying zeal, and who had no time to trouble himself about his clothes. He halted in front of the little shop, and at first enjoyed an inward laugh over the monstrosities in the shape of pictures.

At length he sank unconsciously into a reverie, and began to ponder as to what sort of people wanted these productions? It did not seem remarkable to him that the Russian populace should gaze with rapture upon “Eruslanoff Lazarevitch,” on “The Glutton” and “The Carouser,” on “Thoma and Erema.” The delineations of these subjects were easily intelligible to the masses. But where were there purchases for those streaky, dirty oil-paintings? Who needed those Flemish boors, those red and blue landscapes, which put forth some claims to a higher stage of art, but which really expressed the depths of its degradation? They did not appear the works of a self-taught child. In that case, in spite of the caricature of drawing, a sharp distinction would have manifested itself. But here were visible only simple dullness, steady-going incapacity, which stood, through self-will, in the ranks of art, while its true place was among the lowest trades. The same colours, the same manner, the same practised hand, belonging rather to a manufacturing automaton than to a man!

He stood before the dirty pictures for some time, his thoughts at length wandering to other matters. Meanwhile the proprietor of the shop, a little grey man, in a frieze cloak, with a beard which had not been shaved since Sunday, had been urging him to buy for some time, naming prices, without even knowing what pleased him or what he wanted. “Here, I’ll take a silver piece for these peasants and this little landscape. What painting! It fairly dazzles one; only just received from the factory; the varnish isn’t dry yet. Or here is a winter scene—take the winter scene; fifteen rubles; the frame alone is worth it. What a winter scene!” Here the merchant gave a slight fillip to the canvas, as if to demonstrate all the merits of the winter scene. “Pray have them put up and sent to your house. Where do you live? Here, boy, give me some string!”

“Hold, not so fast!” said the painter, coming to himself, and perceiving that the brisk dealer was beginning in earnest to pack some pictures up. He was rather ashamed not to take anything after standing so long in front of the shop; so saying, “Here, stop! I will see if there is anything I want here!” he stooped and began to pick up from the floor, where they were thrown in a heap, some worn, dusty old paintings. There were old family portraits, whose descendants, probably could not be found on earth; with torn canvas and frames minus their gilding; in short, trash. But the painter began his search, thinking to himself, “Perhaps I may come across something.” He had heard stories about pictures of the great masters having been found among the rubbish in cheap print-sellers’ shops.