Short Fiction - Fyodor Sologub (best romance ebooks .txt) 📗

or pages either. No one wore his lady’s scarf, and he had never heard of anyone fighting giants in order to protect the weak. The gentlemen here were unpleasant and remote, and either rude or contemptuously familiar; the peasants were also rude, and they were also remote from Grishka, and their simplicity was as dreadful to him and as artful as the incomprehensible complexity of the gentlefolk.

Nothing that Grishka saw in real life pleased him; it all afflicted his tender soul. He even hated his own name. Even when his mother in a rare interval of unexpected tenderness would suddenly begin to call him Grishenka, even this pet name did not please him. But this stupid diminutive Grishka, the name everybody called him by⁠—his mother, her mistress, the young ladies, and everyone in the yard⁠—seemed altogether foreign, altogether unsuitable to what he thought himself. It seemed to him sometimes that it would drop from him, as a badly stuck-on label comes off a wine-bottle.

II

Anushka wanted to put a dish on the window-seat. She seized Grishka’s thin ankles in her large rough hand and dragged him down, saying in a needlessly rough way:

“You sprawl about everywhere. And even without you there’s not enough room, no place to stand anything.”

Grishka sprang away. He looked with frightened eyes at the stern, lean face of his mother, red from the heat of the kitchen stove, and at her red arms, bare to the elbow. It was stifling in the kitchen; something was smoking and spluttering on the stove; there was a bitter smell and a smell of burning. The door on to the outer stairway was open. Grishka stood at the door, then, seeing his mother busy at the stove and taking no notice of him, he went out on to the staircase. It was only then, when he felt the hard dirty pavement of the landing under his feet, that he noticed that his head was aching and giddy; he felt faint, his body was overcome by a feverish lassitude.

“How stuffy it was in the kitchen,” he thought.

He looked about him in a kind of perplexity, at the grey stone steps of the staircase, worn and dirty, running upwards and downwards from the narrow landing on which he stood. Opposite their door on the other side of the landing was another door, and from behind it came the sounds of two women’s shrill voices; someone was scolding another. The words rained out like drops of lead from a carelessly unscrewn hanging lamp, and it seemed to Grishka that they must be running about on the dry kitchen floor and making a noise, knocking themselves against the iron and the stove. There were many words, but they all ran into one another in a shrieking hubbub of scolding words. Grishka laughed mirthlessly. He knew the people in that flat were always quarrelling, and that they often beat their naughty, dirty little children.

There was a window on the landing like the one in the kitchen, and from it one could look out on to the same crowded, uninteresting world⁠—the red roofs, the yellow walls, the dusty yard. Everything was strange, foreign, unnecessary⁠—quite unlike the sweet intimate figures of his dreams.

Grishka climbed up on to the worn slab of the window-seat, and leaned his back up against one of the wide-open frames, but he did not look out into the yard. A brightly decorated palace showed itself to his gaze; he saw in front of him a door leading to the apartment of the auburn-haired Princess Turandina. The door was opened wide, and the princess herself, seated before a high narrow window, weaving fine linen, looked round at the sound of the opening door, and stopping with her shapely white hand the noisily humming spinning-wheel, looked at him with a tender smile, saying:

“Come nearer to me, dear boy. I have waited a long time for you. Don’t be afraid, come along.”

Grishka went up to her and knelt at her feet, and she asked him:

“Do you know who I am?”

Grishka was charmed by the golden tones of her voice, and he answered:

“Yes, I know who you are. You are the most beautiful Princess Turandina, daughter of the mighty king of this land, Turandon.”

The princess smiled gaily and said to him:

“Yes, you know that, but you don’t know all. I learnt from my father, the wise King Turandon, how to weave spells and enchantments, and I am able to do with you as I will. I wanted to have a little game with you, and so I cast a spell over you and you went away from your princely home and from your father, and now, you see, you have forgotten your real name, and you have become the child of a cook, and you are called by the name of Grishka. You have forgotten who you are, and you can’t remember until I choose that you should.”

“Who am I?” asked Grishka.

Turandina laughed. An evil light gleamed in her cornflower-blue eyes like the light in the eyes of a young witch not yet accustomed to the art of sorcery. Her long fingers pressed hard against the boy’s thin shoulder. She teased him, speaking like a little street-girl:

“Shan’t tell you. Shan’t tell you for anything. Guess yourself. Shan’t tell you, shan’t. If you don’t guess yourself you’ll always be called Grishka. Listen, there’s your mother the cook calling you. Go along and be obedient to her. Go quickly or she’ll beat you.”

III

Grishka listened; he heard his mother’s harsh voice calling from the kitchen:

“Grishka, Grishka, where are you? you bad boy, where have you hidden yourself?”

Grishka jumped quickly down from the window-seat and ran into the kitchen. He knew when his mother called like that he mustn’t dawdle, he must go at once. And all the more just now when his mother was busy preparing dinner. She was always angry then, and especially when the kitchen was hot and stuffy. The bright