The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories

“Up to thirty in the main rooms,” replies the Frenchman, “and three private rooms are occupied.”

“Out with them all!”

“Very good.”

“It’s now seven,” my uncle says, looking at his watch. “I’ll come back at eight. Will you be ready?”

“No,” he replies, “by eight is difficult … there are many reservations … but by nine, if you please, there won’t be a single stranger in the restaurant.”

“Very well.”

“And what shall we prepare?”

“Gypsies, naturally.”

“What else?”

“An orchestra.”

“One?”

“No, better two.”

“Send for Ryabyka?”

“Naturally.”

“French ladies?”

“No need for them!”

“The cellar?”

“All of it.”

“From the kitchen?”

“The carte!”

They brought the menu for the day.

My uncle glanced and, it seems, did not really see anything, and perhaps did not wish to. He tapped the paper with his stick and said:

“All of it, for a hundred persons.”

And with that he rolled up the menu and put it in his kaftan.

The Frenchman was both glad and hesitant:

“I can’t serve it all to a hundred persons,” he said. “There are very expensive things here, of which there are only five or six portions in the whole restaurant.”

“And how am I to sort out my guests? Whoever wants something should get it. Understand?”

“Yes.”

“Otherwise, brother, even Ryabyka won’t help. Drive!”

We left the restaurateur with his lackeys at the entrance and went rolling off.

By then I was fully convinced that this was not for me, and I tried to take my leave, but my uncle didn’t hear me. He was very preoccupied. We drove along, on the way stopping now one person, now another.

“Nine o’clock at the Yar!” my uncle said briefly to each of them. And the people to whom he said this were all such venerable old men, and they all took their hats off and just as briefly answered my uncle:

“Your honored guest, Fedoseich.”

I don’t remember how many people we stopped in that fashion, but I think it was some twenty, and just then it turned nine o’clock, and we rolled up to the Yar again. A whole crowd of waiters poured out to meet us and took my uncle under the arms, and on the porch the Frenchman himself brushed the dust off his trousers with a napkin.

“All clear?” asked my uncle.

“One general,” he said, “is lingering in a private room, he begged to be allowed to finish …”

“Out with him at once!”

“He’ll be finished very soon.”

“I don’t care—I’ve given him enough time—let him go and finish eating on the grass.”

I don’t know how it would have ended, but at that moment the general came out with two ladies, got into his carriage, and left, and the guests my uncle had invited to the park began driving up to the entrance one by one.

III

The restaurant was tidied up, clean, and free of customers. Only in one of the rooms sat a giant, who met my uncle silently and, without saying a word to him, took his stick and hid it away somewhere.

My uncle surrendered the stick without the least protest, and also gave the giant his wallet and change purse.

This massive, gray-haired giant was the same Ryabyka of whom I had heard the incomprehensible order given to the restaurateur. He was some sort of “children’s teacher,” but here he obviously also had some special duties. He was as necessary here as the Gypsies, the orchestra, and the whole get-up, which instantly appeared in full muster. Only I didn’t understand what the teacher’s role was, but that was still early on in my inexperience.

The brightly lit restaurant was in operation: music thundered, Gypsies strolled about and snacked from the buffet, my uncle inspected the rooms, the garden, the grotto, and the galleries. He looked everywhere to see if there were any “non-belongers,” and beside him walked the inseparable teacher; but when they came back to the main dining room, where everyone was gathered, a great difference between them could be noticed. The campaign had not affected them in the same way: the teacher was as sober as when he set out, but my uncle was completely drunk.

How it could have happened so quickly, I don’t know, but he was in excellent spirits; he sat in the chairman’s place, and the show began.

The door was locked, and, as was said of the whole world, “neither could they pass from them to us, nor from us to them.”⁴ We were separated by a gulf, a gulf of everything—wine, viands, and, above all, a gulf of carousing—I don’t want to say outrageous, but wild, furious, such as I’m unable to describe. And that shouldn’t be asked of me, because, seeing myself squeezed in there and cut off from the world, I grew timid and hastened to get drunk the sooner myself. And therefore I will not give an account of how the night went on, because it is not given to my pen to describe all of it; I remember only two outstanding battle episodes and the finale, but in them was also contained what was most dreadful.

IV

Some Ivan Stepanovich was announced, who, as it turned out later, was a prominent Moscow factory owner and businessman.

That produced a pause.

“But you were told: let nobody in,” my uncle replied.

“He begs very much.”

“Let him take himself off where he came from.”