"Thank you, mother! The victuals are good, though the lamb hereabouts is not at all like in our Zaporozhye-but why not take what comes?…"
Potemkin winced, seeing that the Cossacks were saying something completely different from what he had taught them…
One of the Cossacks, assuming an air of dignity, stepped forward:
"Have mercy, mother! Why would you ruin loyal people? How have we angered you? Have we joined hands with the foul Tartar? Have we made any agreements with the Turk? Have we betrayed you in deed or in thought? Why, then, the disgrace? First we heard that you had ordered fortresses built everywhere for protection against us; then we heard that you wanted to turn us into carabinieri 10; now we hear of new calamities. In what is the Zaporozhye army at fault? that it brought your troops across the Perekop and helped your generals to cut down the Crimeans?…" 11
Potemkin kept silent and with a small brush casually cleaned the diamonds that studded his hands.
"What, then, do you want?" Catherine asked solicitously.
The Cossacks looked meaningly at one another.
"Now's the time! The tsaritsa is asking what we want!" the blacksmith said to himself and suddenly fell to the ground.
"Your Imperial Majesty, punish me not, but grant me mercy! Meaning no offense to Your Imperial Grace, but what are the booties you're wearing made of? I bet not one cobbler in any country of the world can make them like that. My God, if only my wife could wear such booties!"
The empress laughed. The courtiers also laughed. Potemkin frowned and smiled at the same time. The Cossacks began nudging the blacksmith's arm, thinking he had lost his mind.
"Get up!" the empress said benignly. "If you want so much to have such shoes, it's not hard to do. Bring him my most expensive shoes at once, the ones with gold! Truly, this simple-heartedness pleases me very much! Here," the empress went on, directing her eyes at a middle-aged man with a plump but somewhat pale face, who was standing further off than the others and whose modest caftan with big mother-of-pearl buttons showed that he did not belong to the number of the courtiers, "you have a subject worthy of your witty pen!" 12
"You are too gracious, Your Imperial Majesty. Here at least a La Fontaine 13 is called for," the man with the mother-of-pearl buttons replied, bowing.
"I tell you in all honesty, I still love your Brigadier to distraction. You read remarkably well! However," the empress went on, turning to the Cossacks, "I've heard that in the Setch you never marry."
"How so, mother! You know yourself a man can't live without a wife," replied the same Cossack who had spoken with the blacksmith, and the blacksmith was surprised to hear this Cossack, who had such a good knowledge of literate language, talk with the tsar-itsa as if on purpose in the coarsest way, usually called muzhik speech. "Clever folk!" he thought to himself. "He's surely doing it for a reason."
"We're not monks," the Cossack went on, "but sinful people. We fall for non-lenten things, as all honest Christendom does. Not a few among us have wives, though they don't live with them in the Setch. There are some who have wives in Poland; there are some who have wives in the Ukraine; there are even some who have wives in Turkey."
Just then the shoes were brought to the blacksmith.
"My God, what an adornment!" he cried joyfully, seizing the shoes. "Your Imperial Majesty! If the shoes on your feet are like this, and Your Honor probably even wears them to go ice skating, then how must the feet themselves be! I bet of pure sugar, at least!"
The empress, who did in fact have very shapely and lovely feet, could not help smiling at hearing such a compliment from the lips of a simple-hearted blacksmith, who, in his Zaporozhye outfit, could be considered a handsome fellow despite his swarthy complexion.
Gladdened by such favorable attention, the blacksmith was just going to question the tsaritsa properly about everything-was it true that tsars eat only honey and lard, and so on-but feeling the Cossacks nudging him in the ribs, he decided to keep quiet. And when the empress, turning to the elders, began asking how they lived in the Setch and what their customs were, he stepped back, bent to his pocket, and said softly, "Get me out of here, quick!" and suddenly found himself beyond the toll gate.
"He drowned! by God, he drowned! May I never leave this spot if he didn't drown!" the weaver's fat wife babbled, standing in the middle of the street amidst a crowd of Dikanka women.
"What, am I some kind of liar? did I steal anybody's cow? did I put a spell on anybody, that you don't believe me?" shouted a woman in a Cossack blouse, with a violet nose, waving her arms. "May I never want to drink water again if old Pereperchikha didn't see the blacksmith hang himself with her own eyes!"
"The blacksmith hanged himself? just look at that!" said the headman, coming out of Choub's house, and he stopped and pushed closer to the talking women.
"Why not tell us you'll never drink vodka again, you old drunkard!" replied the weaver's wife. "A man would have to be as crazy as you are to hang himself! He drowned! drowned in a hole in the ice! I know it as well as I know you just left the tavern."
"The hussy! see what she reproaches me with!" the woman with the violet nose retorted angrily. "You'd better shut up, you jade! Don't I know that the deacon comes calling on you every evening?"
The weaver's wife flared up.
"The deacon what? Calls on whom? How you lie!"
"The deacon?" sang out the deacon's wife, in a rabbitskin coat covered with blue nankeen, pushing her way toward the quarreling women. "I'll show you a deacon! who said deacon?"
"It's her the deacon comes calling on!" said the woman with the violet nose, pointing at the weaver's wife.
"So it's you, you bitch!" said the deacon's wife, accosting the weaver's wife. "So it's you, you hellcat, who blow fog in his eyes and give him unclean potions to drink so as to make him come to you?
"Leave me alone, you she-devil!" the weaver's wife said, backing away.
"You cursed hellcat, may you never live to see your children! Pfui!…" and the deacon's wife spat straight into the weaver's wife's eyes.
The weaver's wife wanted to respond in kind, but instead spat into the unshaven chin of the headman, who, in order to hear better, had edged right up to the quarreling women.
"Agh, nasty woman!" cried the headman, wiping his face with the skirt of his coat and raising his whip. That gesture caused everyone to disband, cursing, in all directions. "What vileness!" he repeated, still wiping himself. "So the blacksmith is drowned! My God, and what a good painter he was! What strong knives, sickles, and plows he could forge! Such strength he had! Yes," he went on, pondering, "there are few such people in our village. That's why I noticed while I was still sitting in that cursed sack that the poor fellow was really in bad spirits. That's it for your blacksmith-he was, and now he's not! And I was just going to have my piebald mare shod!…"
And, filled with such Christian thoughts, the headman slowly trudged home.
Oksana was confused when the news reached her. She trusted little in Pereperchikha's eyes, or in women's talk; she knew that the blacksmith was too pious to dare destroy his soul. But what if he had left with the intention of never coming back to the village? There was hardly such a fine fellow as the blacksmith anywhere else! And he loved her so! He had put up with her caprices longest! All night under her blanket the beauty tossed from right to left, from left to right-and couldn't fall asleep. Now, sprawled in an enchanting nakedness which the dark of night concealed even from herself, she scolded herself almost aloud; then, calming down, she resolved not to think about anything-and went on thinking. And she was burning all over; and by morning she was head over heels in love with the blacksmith.
Choub expressed neither joy nor grief at Vakula's lot. His thoughts were occupied with one thing: he was simply unable to forget Solokha's perfidy and, even in his sleep, never stopped abusing her.