“Why ‘have to’?”
“Because of the ‘knock’7—you see, He ordered it Himself, so that’s never going to change, sir.”
“And tell us, please, does anybody else pray for suicides besides this Moscow priest?”
“I don’t rightly know how to fill you in on that. They say you supposedly shouldn’t petition God for them, because they followed their own will, though maybe there are some who don’t understand that and do pray for them. On the Trinity, or on the day of the Holy Spirit,8 though, it seems everybody’s allowed to pray for them. Some special prayers are even read then. Wonderful, moving prayers; I think I could listen to them forever.”
“And they can’t be read on other days?”
“I don’t know, sir. For that you’d have to ask somebody who’s studied up on it; I suppose they should know; since it’s nothing to do with me, I’ve never had occasion to talk about it.”
“And you’ve never noticed these prayers being repeated sometimes during services?”
“No, sir, I haven’t; though you shouldn’t take my word for it, because I rarely attend services.”
“Why is that?”
“My occupation doesn’t allow me to.”
“Are you a hieromonk or a hierodeacon?”9
“No, I just wear a habit.”
“But still, doesn’t that mean you’re a monk?”
“Hm … yes, sir; generally that’s how it’s considered.”
“Indeed it is,” the merchant retorted to that, “only even in a habit they can still call you up as a soldier.”
The black-cassocked mighty man was not offended in the least by this observation, but only reflected a little and replied:
“Yes, they can, and they say there have been such cases; but I’m too old now, I’m in my fifty-third year, and then military service is nothing unusual for me.”
“You mean you’ve already been in military service?”
“That I have, sir.”
“What, as a corporal, was it?” the merchant asked again.
“No, not as a corporal.”
“Then what: a soldier, an orderly, a noodle—the whole caboodle?”
“No, you haven’t guessed it; but I’m a real military man, involved in regimental doings almost since childhood.”
“So you’re a cantonist?”10 the merchant persisted, getting angry.
“No again.”
“Then what the deuce are you?”
“I’m a conosoor.”
“A wha-a-at?”
“A conosoor, sir, a conosoor, or, as plain folk put it, a good judge of horseflesh, and I served as an adviser to the remount officers.”
“So that’s it!”
“Yes, sir, I’ve selected and trained a good few thousand steeds. I’ve broken such wild beasts as, for example, the ones that rear up and then throw themselves backwards with all their might, and the rider can have his chest crushed right then against the pommel, but with me not one of them could do that.”
“How did you tame that kind?”
“I—it was very simple, because I received a special gift for it from nature. When I jump into the saddle, straightaway, without giving the horse time to collect its wits, I pull its ear to the side as hard as I can with my left hand, and with my right fist I bash it between the ears, and I grind my teeth at it something terrible, so that sometimes you even see brains come out its nostrils along with blood—and it quiets down.”
“And then?”
“Then you dismount, stroke it, let it look you in the eye and admire you, so that a good picture stays in its memory, and then you mount up again and ride.”
“And the horse goes quietly after that?”
“It goes quietly, because a horse is smart, it feels what sort of man is handling it and what he’s thinking about it. Me, for instance, by that same reasoning, every horse loved me and felt me. In Moscow, in the manège, there was one horse that got completely out of hand, and he learned this heathenish trick of biting off a rider’s knee. The devil simply caught the kneecap in his big teeth and tore it off whole. Many men were done in by him. At that time the Englishman Rarey visited Moscow11—the ‘furious breaker,’ as he was called—and the lowdown horse nearly ate him, too, and put him to shame in any case; they say the only thing that saved him was that he wore a steel knee guard, so, though the horse did bite his leg, he couldn’t bite through, and so he bucked him off; otherwise it would have been the death of him; but I straightened him out good and proper.”
“Tell us, please, how did you do that?”
“With God’s help, sir, because, I repeat, I have a gift for it. This Mister Rarey, known as the ‘furious tamer,’ and the others who took on this steed, used all their art against his wickedness to keep him bridled, so that he couldn’t swing his head to this side or that. But I invented a completely opposite means to theirs. As soon as this Englishman Rarey renounced the horse, I said: ‘Never mind, it’s all futile, because this steed is nothing if not possessed by a devil. The Englishman can’t fathom that, but I can, and I’ll help you.’ The superiors agreed. Then I say: ‘Take him out the Drogomilovsky Gate!’ They took him out. Right, sir. We led him by the bridle down to a hollow near Fili, where rich people live in their summer houses. I saw the place was spacious and suitable, and went into action. I got up on him, on that cannibal, without a shirt, barefoot, in nothing but balloon trousers and a visored cap, and I had a braided belt around my naked body, brought from the brave prince St. Vsevolod-Gavriil of Novgorod,12 whom I believed in and greatly respected for his daring; and embroidered on the belt was ‘My honor I yield to none.’ I had no special instruments in my hands, except that in one I had a stout Tartar whip topped with a lead head of no more than two pounds, and in the other a simple glazed pot of liquid batter. Well, sir, I sat him, and there were four men pulling the horse’s bridle in different directions so that he wouldn’t hurl himself at anybody with his teeth. And he, the demon, seeing that we’re all up in arms against him, whinnies, and shrieks, and sweats, and trembles all over with wickedness, wanting to devour me. I see that and tell the stablemen: ‘Quick, tear the bridle off the scoundrel.’ They don’t believe their ears, that I’m giving them such an order, and they gape at me. I say: ‘What are you standing there for! Don’t you hear? What I order you to do, you should do at once!’ And they answer: ‘But, Ivan Severyanych’ (my name in the world was Ivan Severyanych, Mr. Flyagin), ‘how can you tell us to take the bridle off?’ I began to get angry at them, because I could see and feel in my legs that the horse was raging with fury, and I pressed him hard with my knees, and shouted to them: ‘Take it off!’ They were about to say something, but by then I was in a complete frenzy and gnashed my teeth so hard that they pulled the bridle off at once, in an instant, and made a dash for it wherever their feet would take them, while in that same moment I first off did something he wasn’t expecting and smashed the pot on his head; the pot broke and the batter ran down over his eyes and nose. And he got frightened, thinking: ‘What’s that?’ And I quickly snatched the cap from my head and with my left hand began to rub the batter into the horse’s eyes still more, and I gave him a whack on the side with my whip … He surged forward, and I kept rubbing him on the eyes with my cap, to blear his eyesight completely, and gave him a whack on the other side … And I keep laying it on hotter and hotter. I don’t let him catch his breath or open his eyes, and keep smearing the batter over his muzzle with my cap, blinding him, gnashing my teeth to make him tremble, scaring him, and flogging him on both sides with the whip, so he’ll understand this is no joke … He understood it and didn’t stay stubbornly in one place, but raced off with me. He carried me, the dear heart, carried me, and I thrashed and thrashed him, and the more zealously he carried me, the more ardently I plied the whip, and at last we both began to get tired of this work. My shoulder ached and I couldn’t raise my arm, and he, I could see, also stopped looking sideways and stuck his tongue out of his mouth. Well, here I saw he was begging for mercy. I quickly dismounted, wiped his eyes, took him by the forelock, and said: ‘Don’t move, dog meat, bitch’s grub!’ and pulled him down—he fell to his knees before me, and after that he became so meek, you couldn’t ask for anything better: he let people mount him and ride around, only he dropped dead soon after.”