"Repent, father! Isn't it terrible that after each of your murders the dead rise from their graves?"
"You're at your same old thing again!" the sorcerer interrupted menacingly. "I'll have my way, I'll make you do what I want. Katerina will love me!…"
"Oh, you're a monster and not my father!" she moaned. "No, you will not have your way! It's true you've acquired the power, by your unclean magic, of summoning a soul and tormenting it; but only God alone can make it do what is pleasing to Him. No, never while I am in her body will Katerina venture upon an ungodly deed. Father, the Last Judgment is near! Even if you were not my father, still you would never make me betray my beloved, faithful husband. Even if my husband were not faithful and dear to me, I still would not betray him, because God does not like perjured and faithless souls."
Here she fixed her pale eyes on the window outside which Master Danilo was sitting and stopped motionless…
"Where are you looking? Whom do you see there?" cried the sorcerer.
The airy Katerina trembled. But Master Danilo was long since on the ground and, together with his trusty Stetsko, was making his way toward his hills. "Terrible, terrible!" he repeated to himself, feeling some timorousness in his Cossack heart, and soon he was walking through his courtyard, where the Cossacks were still fast asleep, except for the one who sat on guard and smoked his pipe. The sky was all strewn with stars.
V
"How well you did to awaken me!" said Katerina, wiping her eyes with the embroidered sleeve of her nightdress and looking her husband up and down as he stood before her. "Such a terrible dream I had! How I gasped for breath! Ohh!… I thought I was dying…"
"What dream-did it go like this?" And Burulbash began to tell his wife everything he had seen.
"How did you find it out, my husband?" asked Katerina, amazed. "But no, much of what you tell is unknown to me. No, I did not dream that father had killed my mother, and I saw nothing of the dead men. No, Danilo, you're not telling it right. Ah, how terrible my father is!"
"No wonder there's much you didn't see. You don't know the tenth part of what your soul knows. Do you know that your father is an antichrist? 8 Last year, when I was going together with the Polacks against the Crimeans (I still joined with that faithless people then), the superior of the Bratsky Monastery-he's a holy man, wife-told me that an antichrist has the power to summon the soul out of any person; and the soul goes about freely when the person falls asleep, and it flies with the archangels around God's mansion. From the first your father's face did not appeal to me. If I had known you had such a father, I would not have married you; I would have left you and not taken sin upon my soul by relating myself to the race of an antichrist."
"Danilo!" Katerina said, covering her face with her hands and sobbing, "am I guilty of anything before you? Have I betrayed you, my beloved husband? How have I brought your wrath upon me? Haven't I served you faithfully? Did I ever say anything against it when you came home drunk from your young men's feasting? Didn't I give birth to a dark-browed son for you?…"
"Don't weep, Katerina, I know you now and will not abandon you for anything. All the sins lie upon your father."
"No, don't call him my father! He's no father to me. God is my witness, I renounce him, I renounce my father! He's an antichrist, an apostate! If he were to perish, to drown-I would not reach out to save him. If he were to grow parched from some secret herb, I would not give him water to drink. You are my father!"
VI
In a deep cellar at Master Danilo's, locked with three locks, the sorcerer sits bound in iron chains; away over the Dnieper, his demonic castle is burning, and waves, red as blood, splash and surge around the ancient walls. It is not for sorcery, not for deeds of apostasy, that the sorcerer sits in the deep cellar. God will be the judge of that. He sits there for secret treachery, for conspiring with the enemies of the Russian Orthodox land to sell the Ukrainian people to the Catholics and burn Christian churches. Grim is the sorcerer: a thought dark as night is in his head. He has only one day left to live, and tomorrow he will bid the world farewell. Tomorrow execution awaits him. And what awaits him is no easy execution: it would be more merciful to boil him alive in a cauldron, or flay him of his sinful hide. Grim is the sorcerer, and he hangs his head. Perhaps he is repentant before the hour of his death; only his sins are not such as God will forgive. Above him is a narrow window with iron bars for a sash. Clanking his chains, he gets himself to the window to see whether his daughter is passing by. She is meek as a dove, she does not remember evil, she might take pity on her father… But no one is there. Below runs a road; no one moves along it. Further down, the Dnieper carouses; he has no care for anyone: he storms, and it is gloomy for the prisoner to hear his monotonous noise.
Now someone appears on the road-it is a Cossack! The prisoner sighs deeply. Again all is deserted. Now someone comes down in the distance… A green cloak billows… a golden headdress blazes… It is she! He leans still closer to the window. Now she is drawing near…
"Katerina! daughter! take pity on me, have mercy!…"
She is mute, she does not want to listen, she does not even turn her eyes toward the prison, she has already passed by, already disap- peared. The whole world is deserted. Gloomy is the noise of the Dnieper. Melancholy settles into the heart. But does the sorcerer know this melancholy?
Day draws toward evening. The sun has already set. It is already gone. It is already evening: cool; somewhere an ox is lowing; sounds come wafting from somewhere-it must be people returning from work and being merry; a boat flashes on the Dnieper… who cares about the prisoner! A silver crescent gleams in the sky. Now someone walks down the road from the opposite direction. It is hard to make anything out in the darkness. Katerina is coming back.
"Daughter, for Christ's sake! even fierce wolf cubs will not tear their own mother! Daughter, at least glance at your criminal father!" She does not listen and walks on. "Daughter, for the sake of your unfortunate mother!…" She stops. "Come and receive my last word!"
"Why do you cry out to me, apostate? Do not call me daughter! There is no relation between us. What do you want from me for the sake of my unfortunate mother?"
"Katerina! My end is near: I know your husband wants to tie me to a mare's tale and send me across the fields, or maybe he'll invent a still more terrible execution…"
"Is there any punishment in the world that matches your sins? Wait for it; no one is going to intercede for you."
"Katerina! It is not execution that frightens me but the torments in the other world… You are innocent, Katerina, your soul will fly around God in paradise; but the soul of your apostate father will burn in eternal fire, and that fire will never go out; it will flare up more and more; no drop of dew falls, no wind breathes…"
"It is not in my power to lighten that punishment," said Katerina, turning away.
"Katerina! Stay for one word more: you can save my soul. You don't know yet how good and merciful God is. Have you heard about the Apostle Paul, what a sinful man he was? But then he repented and became a saint."
"What can I do to save your soul?" said Katerina. "Is it for me, a weak woman, to think about it?"
"If I manage to get out of here, I will abandon everything. I will repent: I will go to the caves, put a harsh hair shirt on my body, pray to God day and night. Not just non-lenten fare, but even fish will not pass my lips! I will spread out no clothes when I go to bed! And I will keep praying and praying! And if divine mercy does not lift from me at least a hundredth part of my sins, I will bury myself up to the neck in the ground, or immure myself in a stone wall; I will take neither food nor drink, and I will die; and I will give all my goods to the monks, so that they can serve panikhidas 9 for me for forty days and forty nights."