The Witch Page #2

"The Witch" by Aleksandr Kuprin is a haunting novella that explores the themes of love, obsession, and the supernatural. Set in a small Russian village, the story follows the enigmatic figure of a beautiful woman rumored to be a witch. As the protagonist becomes entranced by her mysterious allure, he navigates the boundaries between desire and despair, grappling with the darker aspects of human emotion and the consequences of his actions. Kuprin's lyrical prose and psychological depth create a compelling narrative that delves into the complexities of passion and the fear of the unknown.

• Novel

								


‘Come, Yarmola, say ma. Just say ma simply,’ I urged him. ‘Don’t
look at the paper. Look at me, so. Now say ma.’

Yarmola would then heave a deep sigh, put the horn-book on the table,
and announce with sad determination:

‘No, I can’t....’

‘Why can’t you? It’s so easy. Just say ma simply, just as I say it.’

‘No, sir, I cannot ... I’ve forgotten.’

All my methods, my devices and comparisons were being shattered by this
monstrous lack of understanding. But Yarmola’s longing for knowledge
did not weaken at all.

‘If I could only write my name!’ Yarmola begged me bashfully. ‘I don’t
want anything else. Only my name: Yarmola Popruzhuk--that’s all.’

When I finally abandoned the idea of teaching him to read and write
properly, I began to show him how to sign his name mechanically. To
my amazement this method seemed to be the easiest for Yarmola, and at
the end of two months he had very nearly mastered his name. As for his
Christian name we had decided to make the task easier by leaving it
out altogether.

Every evening, after he had finished filling the stoves, Yarmola waited
on patiently until I called him.

‘Well, Yarmola, let’s have a go at it,’ I would say. He would sidle up
to the table, lean on it with his elbows, thrust his pen through his
black, shrivelled, stiff fingers, and ask me, raising his eyebrows:

‘Shall I write?’

‘Yes, write.’

Yarmola drew the first letter quite confidently--P[2]. (This letter was
called ‘a couple of posts and a crossbeam on top.’) Then he looked at
me questioningly.

    [2] The Russian P is shaped П, as in Greek.

‘Why don’t you go on writing? Have you forgotten?’

‘I’ve forgotten.’ Yarmola shook his head angrily.

‘Heavens, what a fellow you are! Well, make a wheel.’

‘Ah, a wheel, a wheel!... I know....’ Yarmola cheered up, and
diligently drew an elongated figure on the paper, in outline very like
the Caspian Sea. After this labour he admired the result in silence for
some time, bending his head now to the left, then to the right, and
screwing up his eyes.

‘Why have you stopped there? Go on.’

‘Wait a little, sir ... presently.’

He thought for a couple of minutes and then asked timidly:

‘Same as the first?’

‘Right. Just the same.’

So little by little we came to the last letter ‘k,’ which we knew as ‘a
stick with a crooked twig tilted sideways in the middle of it.’

‘What do you think, sir?’ Yarmola would say sometimes after finishing
his work and looking at it with great pride; ‘if I go on learning like
this for another five or six months I shall be quite a learned chap.
What’s your idea?’

II

Yarmola was squatting on his heels in front of the stove door, poking
the coals in the stove, while I walked from corner to corner of the
room. Of all the twelve rooms of the huge country house I occupied only
one--the lounge that used to be. The other rooms were locked up, and
there, grave and motionless, mouldered the old brocaded furniture, the
rare bronzes, and the eighteenth-century portraits.

The wind was raging round the walls of the house like an old naked,
frozen devil. Towards evening the snowstorm became more violent. Some
one outside was furiously throwing handfuls of fine dry snow at the
window-panes. The forest near by moaned and roared with a dull, hidden,
incessant menace....

The wind stole into the empty rooms and the howling chimneys. The
old house, weak throughout, full of holes and half decayed, suddenly
became alive with strange sounds to which I listened with involuntary
anxiety. Into the white drawing-room there broke a deep-drawn sigh,
in a sad worn-out voice. In the distance somewhere the dry and rotten
floorboards began to creak under some one’s heavy, silent tread. I
think that some one in the corridor beside my room is pressing with
cautious persistence on the door-handle, and then, suddenly grown
furious, rushes all over the house madly shaking all the shutters and
doors. Or he gets into the chimney and whines so mournfully, wearily,
incessantly--now raising his voice higher and higher, thinner and
thinner, all the while, till it becomes a wailing shriek, then lowering
it again to a wild beast’s growling. Sometimes this terrible guest
would rush into my room too, run with a sudden coldness over my back
and flicker the lamp flame, which gave a dim light from under a green
paper shade, scorched at the top.

There came upon me a strange, vague uneasiness. I thought: Here am
I sitting, this bad, stormy night, in a rickety house, in a village
lost in woods and snowdrifts, hundreds of miles from town life, from
society, from woman’s laughter and human conversation.... And I began
to feel that this stormy evening would drag on for years and tens of
years. The wind will whine outside the windows, as it is whining now;
the lamp will burn dimly under the paltry green shade, as it burns now;
I will walk just as breathlessly up and down my room, and the silent,
intent Yarmola will sit so by the stove, a strange creature, alien to
me, indifferent to everything in the world, indifferent that his family
has nothing to eat, to the raging wind, and my own vague consuming
anxiety.

Suddenly I felt an intolerable desire to break this anxious silence
with some semblance of a human voice, and I asked:

‘Why is there such a wind to-day? What do you think, Yarmola?’

‘The wind?’ Yarmola muttered, lazily lifting his head. ‘Don’t you
really know?’

‘Of course I don’t. How could I?’

‘Truly, you don’t know?’ Yarmola livened suddenly. ‘I’ll tell you,’ he
continued with a mysterious note in his voice. ‘I’ll tell you this.
Either a witch is being born, or a wizard is having a wedding-party.’

‘A witch?... Does that mean a sorceress in your place?’

‘Exactly ... a sorceress.’

I caught up Yarmola eagerly. ‘Who knows,’ I thought, ‘perhaps I’ll
manage to get an interesting story out of him presently, all about
magic, and buried treasure, and devils.’

‘Have you got witches here, in Polyessie?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know ... may be,’ Yarmola answered with his usual
indifference, bending down to the stove again. ‘Old folks say there
were once.... May be it’s not true....’

I was disappointed. Yarmola’s characteristic trait was a stubborn
silence, and I had already given up hope of getting anything more out
of him on this interesting subject. But to my surprise he suddenly
began to talk with a lazy indifference as though he was addressing the
roaring stove instead of me.

‘There was a witch here, five years back.... But the boys drove her out
of the village.’

‘Where did they drive her to?’

‘Where to? Into the forest, of course ... where else? And they pulled
her cottage down as well, so that there shouldn’t be a splinter of the
cursed den left.... And they took her to the cross roads....’

‘Why did they treat her like that?’

‘She did a great deal of harm. She quarrelled with everybody, poured
poison beneath the cottages, tied knots in the corn.... Once she asked
a village woman for fifteen kopeks. “I haven’t got a sixpence,” says
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