“He’s got away! He’s got away!” Pyotr Demyanich shouted, assuming a ferocious expression. “Where is the kitten, the little horror? Under the table, eh? Just you wait!”
My uncle dragged the kitten from under the table and gave him a good shaking.
“What a rascal you are, eh?” he muttered, smacking the kitten across the ear. “Take that! Take that! Will you just stand there gawking the next time? You r-r-r-rascal, you!”
The following day Praskovya heard him shouting for the second time: “Praskovya, we’ve caught a mouse! Bring the kitten here!”
After the abuse he had received the previous day the kitten had taken to hiding under the stove, where he remained throughout the night. When Praskovya pulled him out and carried him by the scruff of the neck to the study, he was trembling all over and mewing pathetically. He was put in front of the mousetrap.
“You see, he has to feel at home,” Pyotr Demyanich said. “Let him look and sniff a bit. Look and learn!” And when he saw the kitten backing away from the trap, he shouted: “Stop, dammit! I’ll tear you to pieces! Hold him by the ear!… That’s right, and now set him down opposite the door.”
My uncle slowly lifted the door. The mouse dived under the kitten’s nose, threw itself against Praskovya’s hand, and then dived under a cupboard, while the kitten, feeling relieved, decided upon a sudden desperate leap in the air and scuttled under the divan.
“That’s the second mouse he has let go!” Pyotr Demyanich roared at the top of his voice. “Do you call that a cat? It’s a silly idiot, that’s what it is, and deserves a thrashing. That’s right—give him a thrashing in front of the mousetrap.”
When the third mouse was caught, the kitten shivered uncontrollably in full view of the mousetrap and its occupant, and dug his claws into Praskovya’s hand.… After the fourth mouse my uncle was beside himself with rage, kicked out at the kitten, and shouted: “Take the filthy thing away! Get it out of the house! Throw it out! The hell with it!”
A year passed. The lean and frail kitten became a wise and sedate tomcat. One day he was making his way through the back yard in search of amatory adventure and was very close to finding what he wanted to find when he suddenly heard a rustling sound and saw a mouse running between the water trough and the stables. My hero’s fur bristled, he arched his back, he hissed, he trembled all over, and ignominiously ran away.
Alas, I sometimes feel I am in the same ludicrous position as this cowardly cat. Long ago, like the kitten, I had the honor of receiving lessons in Latin from my uncle. Now, whenever someone mentions an ancient classic, instead of being moved with eager enthusiasm, I remember my uncle’s gray and sallow face, irregular verbs,
T
YOUNG Lieutenant Klimov sat in a smoking compartment on the mail train from Petersburg to Moscow. Opposite him was an elderly man with the clean-shaven face of a ship’s skipper, to all appearances a well-to-do Finn or Swede; he kept sucking at his pipe and spoke in broken Russian. He had only one subject of conversation throughout the entire journey.
“Ha! So you are an officer, eh? Well, my brother is also an officer, but he is in the Navy. He’s a sailor serving at Kronstadt. Why are you going to Moscow?”
“I’m stationed there.”
“Ha! Are you married?”
“No, I am living with my aunt and sister.”
“My brother is also an officer, but he’s in the Navy, and he’s married and has a wife and three children. Ha!”
The Finn seemed puzzled by something, but smiled broadly and idiotically whenever he said “Ha!” Every now and then he blew through his evil-smelling pipe. Klimov was feeling unwell, had no desire to answer questions, and hated the skipper with all his heart. He was thinking how good it would be to snatch that noisy, grumbling pipe out of the man’s hands and hurl it under the seat, and then to order him into another car.
“Those Finns … and Greeks,” he thought. “They’re all loathsome. They’re completely useless, good-for-nothing, rotten people. They only fill up the earth’s space. What good do they do?”
The thought of Finns and Greeks overwhelmed him with a kind of nausea. He tried to compare them with the French and Italians, but for some reason he could only conjure up images of organ-grinders, naked women, and the foreign oleographs which hung over the chest of drawers in his aunt’s house.
The officer was beginning to feel some abnormal symptoms. There seemed to be no room at all for his arms and legs on the seat, although he had the whole seat for himself. His mouth was dry and sticky; a heavy fog weighed down his brain; his thoughts seemed to be straying not only within but also outside his skull, among the seats and the people muffled up in the misty darkness of the night. Through the turmoil of his brain, as through a dream, he heard the murmur of voices, the clattering of wheels, the slamming of doors. The clanging of bells, the guards’ whistles, people running up and down the platform—these sounds seemed more frequent than usual. Time flew by quickly, imperceptibly, and it seemed that never a minute passed but the train stopped at a station, and at each stop there could be heard metallic voices saying:
“Is the mail ready?”
“Ready!”
It seemed to him that the man in charge of the heating was continually coming in to look at the thermometer, and the roar of approaching trains and the rumbling of the wheels over bridges never ended. The noise, the whistles, the Finn, tobacco smoke … all these things, mingled with the menacing and trembling shapes of mist in his brain, those shapes which healthy men can never afterwards remember, weighed down on Klimov like an unendurable nightmare. In awful agony he lifted his heavy head and gazed at the lamp, whose light was encircled with shadows and misty blurs. He wanted to ask for water but his tongue was excessively dry and could hardly move, and he had scarcely enough strength to answer the Finn’s questions. He tried to lie down more comfortably and go to sleep, but he could not. Several times the Finn fell asleep, then woke up, lit his pipe, turned and said “Ha!” and went to sleep again; but the lieutenant could not find room for his legs on the seat, and still the menacing shapes came hovering over his eyes.
