I
“The husband killed his wife! Oh, how stupid you are! Give me some
sugar!”
These cries awoke me. I stretched myself, feeling indisposition and
heaviness in every limb. One can lie upon one's legs or arms until
they are numb, but now it seemed to me that my whole body, from the
crown of my head to the soles of my feet, was benumbed. An afternoon
snooze in a sultry, dry atmosphere amid the buzzing and humming of
flies and mosquitoes does not act in an invigorating manner but has an
enervating effect. Broken and bathed in perspiration, I rose and went
to the window. The sun was still high and baked with the same ardour
it had done three hours before. Many hours still remained until sunset
and the coolness of evening.
“The husband killed his wife!”
“Stop lying, Ivan Dem'yanych!” I said as I gave a slight tap to Ivan
Dem'yanych's nose. “Husbands kill their wives only in novels and in
the tropics, where African passions boil over, my dear. For us such
horrors as thefts and burglaries or people living on false passports
are quite enough.”
“Thefts and burglaries!” Ivan Dem'yanych murmured through his hooked
nose. “Oh, how stupid you are!”
“What's to be done, my dear? In what way are we mortals to blame for
our brain having its limits? Besides, Ivan Dem'yanych, it is no sin to
be a fool in such a temperature. You're my clever darling, but
doubtless your brain, too, gets addled and stupid in such heat.”
My parrot is not called Polly or by any other of the names given to
birds, but he is called Ivan Dem'yanych. He got this name quite by
chance. One day, when my man Polycarp was cleaning the cage, he
suddenly made a discovery without which my noble bird would still have
been called Polly. My lazy servant was suddenly blessed with the idea
that my parrot's beak was very like the nose of our village
shopkeeper, Ivan Dem'yanych, and from that time the name and
patronymic of our long-nosed shopkeeper stuck to my parrot. From that
day Polycarp and the whole village christened my extraordinary bird
“Ivan Dem'yanych.” By Polycarp's will the bird became a personage, and
the shopkeeper lost his own name, and to the end of his days he will
be known among the villagers under the nickname of the “magistrate's
parrot.”
I had bought Ivan Dem'yanych from the mother of my predecessor, the
examining magistrate, Pospelov, who had died shortly before my
appointment. I bought him together with some old oak furniture,
various rubbishy kitchen utensils, and in general the whole of the
household goods that remained after the deceased. My walls are still
decorated with photographs of his relatives, and the portrait of the
former occupant is still hanging above my bed. The departed, a lean,
muscular man with a red moustache and a thick under-lip, sits looking
at me with staring eyes from his faded nutwood frame all the time I am
lying on his bed. . . . I had not taken down a single photograph, I
had left the house just as I found it. I am too lazy to think of my
own comfort, and I don't prevent either corpses or living men from
hanging on my walls if the latter wish to do so.*
* I beg the reader to excuse such expressions. Kamyshev's story is
rich in them, and if I do not omit them it is only because I
thought it necessary in the interest of the characterization of the
author to print his story _in toto_.—A. Ch.
Ivan Dem'yanych found it as sultry as I did. He fluffed out his
feathers, spread his wings, and shrieked out the phrases he had been
taught by my predecessor, Pospelov, and by Polycarp. To occupy in some
way my after-dinner leisure, I sat down in front of the cage and began
to watch the movements of my parrot, who was industriously trying, but
without success, to escape from the torments he suffered from the
suffocating heat and the insects that dwelt among his feathers. . . .
The poor thing seemed very unhappy. . . .
“At what time does he awake?” was borne to me in a bass voice from the
lobby.
“That depends!” Polycarp's voice answered. “Sometimes he wakes at five
o'clock, and sometimes he sleeps like a log till morning. . . .
Everybody knows he has nothing to do.”
“You're his valet, I suppose?”
“His servant. Now don't bother me; hold your tongue. Don't you see I'm
reading?”
I peeped into the lobby. My Polycarp was there, lolling on the large
red trunk, and, as usual, reading a book. With his sleepy, unblinking
eyes fixed attentively on his book, he was moving his lips and
frowning. He was evidently irritated by the presence of the stranger,
a tall, bearded muzhik, who was standing near the trunk persistently
trying to inveigle him into conversation. At my appearance the muzhik
took a step away from the trunk and drew himself up at attention.
Polycarp looked dissatisfied, and without removing his eyes from the
book he rose slightly.
“What do you want?” I asked the muzhik.
“I have come from the Count, your honour. The Count sends you his
greetings, and begs you to come to him at once. . . .”
“Has the Count arrived?” I asked, much astonished.
“Just so, your honour. . . . He arrived last night. . . . Here's a
letter, sir. . . .”
“What the devil has brought him back!” my Polycarp grumbled. “Two
summers we've lived peacefully without him, and this year he'll again
make a pigsty of the district. We'll again not escape without shame.”
“Hold your tongue, your opinion is not asked!”
“I need not be asked. . . . I'll speak unasked. You'll again come home
from him in drunken disorder and bathe in the lake just as you are, in
all your clothes. . . . I've to clean them afterwards! They cannot be
cleaned in three days!”
“What's the Count doing now?” I asked the muzhik.
“He was just sitting down to dinner when he sent me to you. . . .
Before dinner he fished from the bathing house, sir. . . . What answer
is there?”