"Make it so, God, that his descendants have no happiness on earth! that the last one of the family be such an evildoer as the world has never seen! that after each of his evil deeds his grandparents and great-grandparents, finding no peace in the coffin, and suffering torments unknown to the world, rise out of their graves! And that the Judas Petro be unable to rise, and suffer still greater torments from that, and eat dirt in a frenzy and writhe under the ground!
"And when the hour comes that fulfills the measure of this man's evildoings, raise me, God, on my horse, from that chasm up to the highest mountain, and let him come to me, and I will hurl him from that mountain into the deepest chasm, and let all the dead men, his grandfathers and great-grandfathers, wherever they lived when alive, be drawn from all ends of the earth to gnaw on him for the torments he caused them, and gnaw on him eternally, and I will rejoice looking at his torment! And let the Judas Petro be unable to rise from the ground, and let him strain to gnaw, but gnaw only on himself, and let his bones keep growing bigger, that through this his pain may become greater. This torment will be the most terrible for him: for there is no greater torment for a man than to desire revenge and be unable to get it."
"Terrible is the punishment you have devised, man!" said God. "Let it all be as you have said, but you, too, will sit there eternally on your horse, and as long as you sit there on your horse, there will be no Kingdom of Heaven for you!" And it all happened as was said: to this day a wondrous knight stands on horseback in the Carpathians, gazing on the dead men gnawing the dead man in the bottomless chasm, and he feels the dead man lying under the ground growing and gnawing his own bones in terrible torment and shaking all the earth terribly…
The blind man finished his song; he began to strum on the strings again; he began to sing funny little verses about Khoma and Yerema, about Stklyar Stokoza… but old and young still could not come to their senses and stood for a long time, their heads bowed, pondering the terrible deed that had happened in olden times.
Ivan Fyodorovich Shponka and His Aunt
There was a story to do with this story: it was told us by Stepan Ivanovich Kurochka, who used to come over from Gadyach. You should know that my memory's rotten beyond words: tell me something or not, it's all the same. Just like pouring water through a sieve. Knowing this fault of mine, I asked him purposely to write it down in a notebook. Well, God grant him good health, he was always kind to me, he did write it down. I put it into a little desk; I think you know it welclass="underline" it's the one in the corner as you come in… Ah, I forgot, you've never been to my place. My old woman, whom I've lived with for some thirty years now, never learned to read in all her born days-may as well admit it. So I noticed she was baking pirozhki 1 on some paper. Her pirozhki, my gentle readers, are amazingly good; you won't eat better pirozhki anywhere. I looked at the underside of one and saw some writing. My heart as if knew it. I went to the desk-not even half a notebook left! The rest of the pages she'd torn out for her pies! What could I do? you can't start fighting in old age!
Last year I happened to pass through Gadyach. Before we reached the town, I purposely tied a knot so that I wouldn't forget to ask Stepan Ivanovich about it. Not only that, but I made myself a promise-as soon as I sneezed in town, I'd remember him. All in vain. I passed through the town, and I sneezed, and I blew my nose in my handkerchief, yet I forgot everything; and I remembered only when I was some six miles beyond the town gates. Nothing to be done, I had to publish it without the end. However, if anyone really wishes to know what happened further on in the story, he need only go on purpose to Gadyach and ask Stepan Ivanovich. He'll tell it again with great pleasure, maybe even from beginning to end. He lives not far from the stone church. There's a little lane right there: you just turn down the lane and it's the second or third gate. Or better stilclass="underline" when you see a tall striped pole in the yard, and a fat woman in a green skirt comes out to meet you (he leads a bachelor's life, there's no harm in saying), then it's his yard. Or else you may meet him in the market, where he spends every morning till nine o'clock choosing fish and vegetables for his table and talking with Father Antip or the Jew tax farmer. 2 You'll recognize him at once, because nobody but he has printed duck trousers and a yellow nankeen frock coat. Here's another token for you: he always waves his arms as he walks. The local assessor, the late Denis Petro-vich, always used to say when he saw him in the distance: "Look, look, there goes the windmill."
I
Ivan Fyodorovich Shponka
It's four years now that Ivan Fyodorovich Shponka has been retired and living on his farmstead in Vytrebenki. When he was still Vaniusha, he studied at the Gadyach regional high school, and, it must be said, he was a most well-behaved and diligent boy. The teacher of Russian grammar, Nikifor Timofeevich Participle, used to say that if everyone in the class was as diligent as Shponka, he wouldn't have to bring in the maple ruler, with which, as he con-lessed himself, he was weary of rapping lazybones and pranksters on the knuckles. His notebook was always clean, neatly ruled, never a blot anywhere. He always sat placidly, his arms folded and his eyes fixed on the teacher, and he never hung scraps of paper on the back of the comrade in front of him, never carved on the bench or played squash your granny before the teacher came. Whenever anyone needed a penknife to sharpen his pen, he immediately turned to Ivan Fyodorovich, knowing that he always had a penknife with him; and Ivan Fyodorovich, then simply Vaniusha, would take it from the little leather case tied to the buttonhole of his gray frock coat, and asked only that they not scrape the pen with the sharp edge, assuring them that the dull edge was meant for that. Such good behavior soon attracted the attention of the Latin teacher himself, whose mere cough in the front hall, which preceded the thrusting of his frieze overcoat and pockmark-adorned face through the doorway, inspired fear in the whole class. This terrible teacher, who always had two bundles of birch switches on the lectern and half his auditors on their knees, made Ivan Fyodorovich his monitor, though there were many in the class of much greater ability.
Here we cannot omit one occasion which influenced his entire life. One of the students he had charge of as monitor, in order to incline him to put down a scit 3 on his record, though he didn't know a scrap of the lesson, brought a buttered pancake to class wrapped in paper. Ivan Fyodorovich, though he had a bent for justice, was hungry just then and unable to resist temptation: he took the pancake, stood a book in front of him, and began to eat. And he was so occupied with it that he didn't even notice the deathly silence that suddenly fell over the class. He came to his senses with horror only when the dreaded hand, reaching out from the frieze overcoat, seized him by the ear and dragged him into the middle of the classroom. "Give the pancake here! Give it here, I tell you, scoundrel!" said the terrible teacher. Then he seized the buttery pancake with his fingers and flung it out the window, strictly forbidding the boys running around in the yard to pick it up. After which he beat Ivan Fyodorovich most painfully on the hands. And rightly so: it was the fault of the hands, they and not any other part of the body had done the taking. Be that as it may, the timidity inseparable from him to begin with increased still more. Perhaps this very event was the reason why he never had any wish to enter the civil service, seeing from experience that it was not always possible to keep the lid on things.
He was approaching fifteen when he passed into the second class, where, instead of the short catechism and the four rules of arithmetic, he started on the full-length one, the book on the duties of man, and fractions. But seeing that the further into the forest, the thicker grow the trees, and receiving news that his papa had bid the world farewell, he stayed on for another two years and then, with his mother's consent, joined the P- infantry regiment.