LITMIR.BIZ

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and holding her arms crossed at her breast. She was looking straight ahead, not seeing me. Then she raised her eyes to the ceiling and uttered distinctly:

      “And thou, beast of God, the Lord’s wolf, pray for us to the Queen of Heaven.”

      I approached and said softly:

      “Mashenka, don’t be afraid, it’s me.”

      She let her arms drop, stood up, gave a low bow:

      “Hello, sir. No, sir, I’m not afraid. What have I got to be afraid of now? It was in my youth I was silly, afraid of everything. The dark-eyed demon troubled me.”

      “Please sit down,” I said.

      “No, sir,” she replied. “I’ll stand, sir.”

      I put my hand on her bony little shoulder with its big collarbone, made her sit down, and then sat down next to her:

      “Sit still, or else I’ll leave. Tell me, who was it you were praying to? Is there really such a holy one – the Lord’s wolf?”

      Again she tried to get up. Again I restrained her:

      “Ah, just look at you! And there you are, saying you’re not afraid of anything! I’m asking you: is it true that there’s such a holy one?”

      She had a think. Then she replied seriously:

      “There must be, sir. There is the beast Tiger-Euphrates,[26] after all. And if it’s painted in a church, there must be. I saw it myself, sir.”

      “How do you mean, you saw it? Where? When?”

      “Long ago, sir, in a time beyond memory. And where – I can’t even say: I remember one thing – we were travelling there three days. There was a village there, Krutiye Gory. I’m from far away myself – perhaps you’re so good as to have heard of the place: Ryazan – and those parts would be even further down, beyond the Don, and what a rough place it is there, you couldn’t even find the words. It was there our prince had his main village, his grandfather’s favourite – maybe a full thousand clay huts on bare mounds and slopes, and on the very highest hill, on its crown, above the Kamennaya River, the masters’ house, all bare too, three-tiered, and a yellow church with columns, and in that church this here God’s wolf: in the middle, then, there’s a cast-iron slab over the tomb of the prince it slaughtered, and on the right-hand pillar – the creature itself, this wolf, painted at its full height and size: it sits in a grey fur coat on a thick tail, and its whole body’s reaching up, with its front paws resting on the ground – and its eyes just boring into yours: a grey fur collar, long-haired and thick, a large head, sharp-eared, its fangs bared, furious, bloodshot eyes, and around its head a gold aureole, like saints and holy men have. It’s terrible just remembering such a wondrous marvel! It’s so lifelike sitting there, looking as if it’ll rush upon you at any moment!”

      “Wait, Mashenka,” I said, “I don’t understand a thing: who painted this terrible wolf in the church and why? You say it slaughtered a prince – so then why is it holy, and why should it be over the prince’s tomb? And how did you find yourself there, in that dreadful village? Tell me everything clearly.”

      And Mashenka began telling her story:

      “I found myself there, sir, for the reason that I was then a serf girl, serving in our prince’s house. I was an orphan, my father, so they had it, was some sort of man passing through – a runaway, most likely – he seduced my mother unlawfully and disappeared God knows where, and mother, soon after giving birth to me, she passed away. Well, so the master took pity on me, took me from the menials into the house as soon as I hit thirteen, and put me at the beck and call[27] of the young mistress, and for some reason I so took her fancy she wouldn’t let me out of her favour for any time at all. And it was she that took me on the voyage with her when the young prince got the idea of taking a trip with her to his grandfather’s legacy, to that there main village, to Krutiye Gory. That estate had been long neglected, deserted – the house had just stood boarded up, desolate, ever since the grandfather’s death – well, and our young master and mistress thought they’d like to visit it. But what a terrible death the grandfather had died, we all knew about that from legend…”

      In the reception hall something gave a slight crack, then fell with a little thud. Mashenka threw her legs down from the chest and ran into the hall: there was already a smell of burning there from the fallen candle. She put out the still-smoking candlewick, stamped out the smouldering that had started on the nap of a rug and, jumping up onto a chair, relit the candle from the other burning candles stuck into silver sockets beneath the icon, and fitted it into the one from which it had fallen: she turned the bright flame downwards, dripped the wax, which ran like hot honey, into the socket, then inserted it; deftly, with slender figures, she removed the burnt deposit from the other candles, and jumped back down onto the floor.

      “My, how cheerfully it’s started gleaming,” she said, crossing herself and gazing at the revived gold of the candle lights. “And what a smell of the church there is now!”

      There was the smell of sweet fumes, the little lights trembled, from behind them the ancient face of the icon gazed from a blank circle in its silver setting. In the upper, clear panes of the windows, which were frosted over at the bottom with thick, grey rime, the night was black, and white nearby in the front garden were the ends of boughs burdened with layers of snow. Mashenka looked at them too, crossed herself once more and came back into the hallway.

      “It’s time for you to sleep, sir,” she said, sitting down on the chest and stifling her yawns, covering her mouth with her withered little hand. “The night’s grown menacing now.”

      “Why menacing?”

      “Because it’s mysterious, when only the chanticleer, the cockerel, as we call it, and the night crow, the owl, can stay awake. Then the Lord Himself listens to the earth, the most important stars begin to twinkle, the ice holes freeze in seas and rivers.”

      “And why is it you yourself don’t sleep at night?”

      “I sleep as much as is needed as well, sir. Is an old person meant to have a lot of sleep? Like a bird on a branch.”

      “Well, go to bed, only finish telling me about that wolf.”

      “But you know, it’s a dark business, long ago, sir – perhaps a ballad.”

      “What’s that you said?”

      “A ballad, sir. That’s what all our masters used to say, they liked reading those ballads. Sometimes I’d be listening and there’d be a tingling on my head:

      Howls the cold wind o’er the mountain,

      Whirls in white the pasture,

      Comes foul weather and the blizzard,

      Buried deep’s the highway[28]

      “How beautiful, Lord!”

      “What’s beautiful about it, Mashenka?”

      “What’s beautiful about it, sir, is you don’t know what it is that’s beautiful. It’s scary.”

      “In the old days, Mashenka, everything was scary.”

      “How can I put it, sir? Perhaps it’s true that it was scary, but it all seems dear to me now. I mean, when was it? Just so long ago – all the kingdoms have gone, all the oaks have crumbled from old age, all the graves are level with the earth. Now this story too – among the menials it used to be told word for word, but is it the truth? The story was supposed to have happened still in the time of the great Tsarina,[29] and the reason why the prince was sitting in Krutiye Gory was supposed to be that she’d grown angry with him over something, had shut him up a long way away from her, and he’d become really fierce – most of all in the punishment of his serfs and in fornication. He was still very much in his prime, and as for his appearance, wonderfully handsome, and both among his menials and throughout his villages there wasn’t

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