“We won’t do anything bad, our only desire and request is that no outsiders hear or see us.”
“That I grant you,” he said. “A bedbug on the wall may hear you, but nobody else.”
And he was so sleepy himself, he kept yawning and making crosses over his mouth.
Soon Pavel Mironych arrived and brought both deacons with him: the one from the Theophany and the one from Nicetas. We had a little snack to begin with, a bit of sturgeon and caviar, then crossed ourselves and straightaway got down to the business of the tryout.
In three upstairs rooms, all the connecting doors stood open. We put our coats on the bed in one, in another, the far one, the snacks were set up, and in the middle one we tried out the voices.
First, Pavel Mironych stood in the middle of the room and showed what the merchants in Elets liked most from a deacon. His voice, as I said to you, was quite terrifying, as if it beat us on the face and shattered the glass in the windows.
Even the innkeeper woke up and said:
“You yourself should be the first deacon.”
“Tell me another!” Pavel Mironych replied. “With my capital, I can get along as I am. It’s just that I like to hear loudness in holy services.”
“Who doesn’t!”
And right after Pavel Mironych did his shouting, the deacons began to display themselves, first one and then the other, intoning the same things. The deacon from the Theophany was dark and soft, as if all quilted with cotton, while the one from Nicetas was redheaded, dry as a horseradish root, and his beard was small, upturned; but once they got to shouting, it was impossible to pick the better one. One kind came out better with one, but the other did another more pleasingly. Pavel Mironych began by presenting the way they liked it in Elets, so that the growling comes as if from far off. He growled out “It is meet and right,” and then “Pierce, Master” and “Sacrifice, Master,” and then both deacons did the same. The redhead’s growl came out better. For the Gospel reading, Pavel Mironych took such a low note that it was lower than the lowest, as if carried on the wind from far away: “In those da-a-ays.” Then he began rising higher and higher, and in the end gave such an exclamation that the window-panes jingled. And the deacons didn’t lag behind him.
Well, then the rest all went the same way, how to conduct the litany and how it must be kept in tune with the choir, then the joyful “and for the salvation” in “Many Years,” then the mournful “Rest Eternal.”12 The dry deacon from St. Nicetas pleased everyone so much with his howling that my uncle and Pavel Mironych started weeping and kissing him and asking him whether it might not lie within his natural powers to make it still more terrible.
The deacon says:
“Why not? It’s allowed me by religion, but I’ll have to fortify myself with pure Jamaican rum—it expands the resounding in the chest.”
“Help yourself—that’s what the rum is there for: you can drink it from a shot glass, swill it from a tumbler, or, better still, upend the bottle and down it all at once.”
The deacon says:
“No, more than a tumbler at a time is not to my liking.”
They fortified themselves—and the deacon began “Rest eternal in blessed repose” from low down and went on climbing ever higher and with an ever denser howling all the way to “the deceased bishops of Orel and Sevsk, Apollos and Dosiphey, Iona and Gavriil, Nikodim and Innokenty,” and when he reached “make their memory e-ter-r-r-nal,” his whole Adam’s apple stuck out of his throat and he produced such a howl that we were horrorstruck, and my uncle began crossing himself and shoving his feet under the bed, and I did the same. And under the bed, suddenly, something whacked us on the anklebones—we both cried out and all at once leaped into the middle of the room and stood trembling …
My uncle said in fright:
“To blazes with it all! Stop them … don’t name them anymore … they’re here already, shoving us from under the bed.”
Pavel Mironych asked:
“Who could be shoving you from under the bed?”
My uncle replied:
“Those dead ones.”
Pavel Mironych, however, did not turn coward: he seized a burning candle, thrust it under the bed, but something blew out the candle, and knocked the candlestick from his hand, and emerged looking like one of our merchants from the Meat Market near St. Nicholas.
All of us, except the innkeeper, rushed in various directions and repeated the same word:
“Begone! Begone!”
And after that another merchant crawled out from under the other bed. And it seemed to us that this one, too, was from the Meat Market.
“What’s the meaning of this?”
And the merchants both say:
“Please, it doesn’t mean anything … We simply like to hear bass voices.”
And the first merchant, who had struck my uncle and me on the legs and knocked the candle out of Pavel Mironych’s hand, apologized, saying that we ourselves had kicked him with our boots, and Pavel Mironych had nearly burned his face with the candle.
But Pavel Mironych got angry at the innkeeper and started accusing him, saying that since money had been paid for the rooms, he should not have put strangers under the beds without permission.
The innkeeper, who seemed to have been sleeping, turned out to be quite drunk.
“These gentlemen,” he says, “are both my relations: I wanted to do them a family service. I can do whatever I like in my own house.”
“No, you can’t.”
“Yes, I can.”
“And what if you’ve been paid?”
“So what if I’ve been paid? It’s my house, and my relations are dearer to me than any payment. You stay here and you’ll leave, but they’re permanent: you’ve got no call to go poking your heels at them or burning their eyes with candles.”
“We didn’t poke our heels at them on purpose, we just tucked our feet under,” says my uncle.
“You shouldn’t have tucked your feet under, you should have sat upright.”
“We did it from fear.”
“Well, there’s no harm done. But they’re devoted to lerigion and wanted to listen …”
Pavel Mironych boiled over.
“What kind of lerigion is that?” he says. “It’s only a sample for education: lerigion’s in the Church.”
“That makes no difference,” says the innkeeper. “It all comes to the same thing.”
“Ah, you incendiaries!”
“And you’re rioters.”
“How come?”
“You dealt in dead meat. You locked up the assessor!”
And endless stupidities of the same sort followed. And suddenly everything was in an uproar, and the innkeeper was shouting:
“Away with all you millers, get out of my establishment, me and my butchers will carry on by ourselves.”
Pavel Mironych shook his fist at him.
But the innkeeper replies:
“If you threaten me, I’ll shout up such Orelian stalwarts right now that you won’t bring a single unbroken rib home to Elets.”
Pavel Mironych, being the foremost strongman in Elets, got offended.
“Well, no help for it,” he says, “call for them, if you can still stand up, but I’m not leaving this room; we laid out money for the drink.”
The butchers wanted to leave—they had obviously decided to call people.
Pavel Mironych herded them back and shouted:
“Where’s the key? I’ll lock them all up.”
I said to my uncle:
“Uncle! For God’s sake! See what we’re coming to! There may be a murder here! And mama and auntie are waiting at home … What must they be thinking! … How they’ll worry!”
My uncle was frightened himself.
“Grab your coat,” he says, “while the door’s still open, and let’s get away.”