“He’s not giving in!” the same voice shouted. “That’s enough! Let it be! I said right away that these are nothing but conjuring tricks!”
Then, just as I heard my friends voice in the crowd and moved to get up, my hand felt a strange object in its palm. My sense of touch responding, I realized that the object was a piece of paper. My father was a doctor, and doctors can sniff out a bank note at a touch. According to Darwin’s theory, I must have inherited this superb faculty, along with many other talents, from my father. The bill, I could tell, was a five- ruble note, so I immediately nodded off.
“Bravo! Bravo!”
The doctors present in the hall rushed up, walked around me, prodded me, and proclaimed: “Hmm, yes... he’s asleep....” The hypnotist, pleased at his success, waved his hands over my head, and I, in a trance, began walking about the room.
“Tetanize his arm!” someone suggested.
“Yes, can you do that? Can you paralyze his arm?”
The hypnotist (not a timid man!) pulled at my right arm and started doing his machinations over it: rubbing it, blowing on it, slapping it. But my arm wouldn’t obey. It just hung there dangling, and refused to become rigid.
“He’s not tetanized! Wake him up! This is dangerous! He’s a sensitive, high-strung boy!”
Suddenly my other palm, the left one, felt a five-ruble note brush against it. A reflex shot from my left hand to my right, and miraculously my arm went rigid.
“Bravo! Look how rigid and cold his hand is! Like a corpse!”
“We have full anesthesia, the lowering of bodily temperature and weakening of the pulse,” the hypnotist announced.
The doctors checked my wrist.
“Yes, his pulse is still weak,” one of them remarked.
“We have complete rigidity. His temperature is much lower...”
“How do you explain it?” one of the ladies asked.
A doctor shrugged his shoulders portentously, sighed, and said, “All we can give you is the facts! Rational explanations? Alas, there are none!”
You have the facts, and I have two fivers in my pocket, and all thanks to hypnotism—I don’t need any rational explanations! Poor hypnotist! It was just your luck to tangle with a viper like me!
P.S.: Damn, what a mess!
It was only afterward that I realized it wasn’t the hypnotist but my boss, Peter Fedorovitch, who slipped me the five-ruble bills.
“I did it to test your honesty,” he told me.
Damn.
“This is terrible,” Peter Fedorovitch said.
“Disgraceful.... I would never have expected this from you!”
“But sir, I have children! A wife... a mother... and things are so expensive nowadays!”
“This is disgusting! And you want to publish your own newspaper... you who cry at sentimental dinner speeches... A disgrace!... I thought you were an honest man, and it turns out that you... you are worse than... haben Sie gewesen!”
So I had to return the two fivers. What else could I do? One’s reputation is, after all, more precious than money.
“It’s not you I’m angry at!” my boss said. “You can go to hell for all I care—that’s what you’re like! But how could she have fallen into the same trap! She, of all people! She who is so gende, so innocent, all rice pudding! She was tempted by money too! She ‘fell asleep’ too!”
By “she,” my boss was referring to his wife, Matryona Nikolayevna...
THE
CROSS
THE POET ENTERS THE drawing room filled with people.
“Well,” the hostess turns to him, “how did your dear little poem do? Did they print it? Was there an honorarium?” “Oh, don’t ask.... I got a cross!”
“You were awarded a cross? You, a poet? I didn’t know poets were awarded crosses.”
The host shakes his hand. “My sincerest congratulations! Is it a Stanislav cross or a St. Anne medal? I am so happy for you... so happy... is it a Stanislav?”
“No, a red cross!”
“Oh, you sacrificed your honorarium in aid of the Red Cross!”
“I didn’t sacrifice anything!”
“The medal will definitely suit you. Do show it to us!” The poet reaches into his side pocket and takes out his manuscript.
“Here it is!”
Everyone looks at the manuscript and sees a large red cross... but it’s not the kind of cross you can pin on your lapel.
THE
CAT
BARBARA PETROVNA WOKE UP and listened. Her face went white, her large black eyes became even larger and burned with terror, when she realized she wasn’t dreaming. She covered her face in horror, raised herself on her elbow, and woke her husband. Her husband curled up and, gently snoring, breathed onto her shoulder.
“Alyosha, darling! Wake up! Sweetheart! Oh, how awful!” Alyosha stopped snoring and stretched his legs. Barbara Petrovna prodded his cheek. He stretched, sighed deeply, and woke up.
“Alyosha, darling! Wake up—someone’s crying!”
“Who’s crying? You’re just imagining things!”
“Listen! Can’t you hear? Someone’s moaning.... Someone must have left: a baby on our doorstep! Oh, I can’t bear the sound!”
Alyosha raised himself up and listened. Outside the wide-open window the night was gray. Along with the fragrance of lilacs and the quiet whispering of the lime trees, a weak breeze wafted a strange sound toward the bed. You couldn’t tell right away what kind of a sound it was: a child’s crying, the song of Lazarus, or just wailing. You couldn’t tell. But one thing was clear: the sound came from right below the window, and not from one throat but from many—there were trebles, altos, tenors.
“Barbara—they’re cats!” Alyosha said. “My silly darling!”
“Cats? It can’t be! What are those bass notes?”
“That’s a sow grunting. Don’t forget we’re at a dacha here. Can’t you hear? Yes, that’s what it is, cats! Come on, calm down. Go back to sleep now.”
Barbara and Alyosha lay down and pulled the blankets over their ears. The morning freshness had begun seeping through the window, and a slight chill hung in the air. Husband and wife curled up and closed their eyes. Five minutes later Alyosha turned round to the other side.
“They don’t let you get any sleep, damn them! With all that screeching!”
In the meantime the feline song was reaching a crescendo. Powerful new voices were joining in, and what had started as a light rustle beneath the window gradually turned into a hubbub, then a rumpus, and finally a hullabaloo. What had begun as a sound tremulous as aspic jelly had finally reached a full fortissimo, and soon the air was full of ghastly notes. Some of the cats let out curt yelps, others rollicking trills—and exactly in rhythm, in octaves and alexandrines! Others sounded long sustained notes. One cat, it must have been the oldest and most passionate, sang in an unnatural voice, not a cat’s voice, but at times in bass, at times in tenor.
“Meouw-meouw—tu tu tu—carrrrriou!”
If it hadn’t been such a donnybrook, you would never think it was cats howling. Barbara turned over and muttered something. Alyosha jumped up, sent a few curses flying through the air, and closed the window. But windows are meager barriers: they let in sound, light, even electricity.
“I have to get up at eight to go to work,” Alyosha shouted, “and these damn cats are howling! They won’t let you sleep! Can’t you at least shut up, woman? Whimpering like this in my ear! Whining at me like that! Is it my fault? They’re not my cats!”
“Please, darling, chase them away!”
Her husband swore, jumped out of bed, and marched over to the window. Night was turning into morning.
Looking up at the sky, Alyosha saw only one little star. It barely flickered in the mist. Sparrows chattered in the lime tree, startled by the sound of the opening window. Alyosha looked down into the garden and saw some ten cats. Their tails in the air, hissing and treading delicately on the grass, they howled, proceeding like a group of dromedaries around a pretty little cat who was sitting on an overturned washtub. It was hard to decide which was stronger: their love for the little cat or their self-importance. Had they come out of love, or just to show off? Their attitude betrayed the most refined scorn for each other. On the other side of the garden gate the sow with her piglets chafed against the grille, trying to get in.