The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories

The sovereign did not want to listen to that for long, and Platov, seeing as much, did not insist. So they drove on in silence, only Platov got out at every posting station and in vexation drank a glass of vodka, ate a salty pretzel, smoked his tree-root pipe, which held a whole pound of Zhukov tobacco at once,⁷ then got back into the carriage and sat silently beside the tsar. The sovereign looked out one side, and Platov stuck his pipe out the other window and smoked into the wind. In this way they reached Petersburg, and the sovereign did not take Platov to the priest Fedot at all.

“You,” he says, “are intemperate before spiritual conversation and smoke so much that I’ve got soot in my head because of it.”

Platov was left offended and lay at home on a vexatious couchment, and went on lying like that, smoking Zhukov tobacco without quittance.

IV

The astonishing flea of burnished English steel stayed in Alexander Pavlovich’s chest inlaid with fish bone until he died in Taganrog, having given it to the priest Fedot, to be given later to the empress when she calmed down. The empress Elisaveta Alexeevna looked at the flea’s veritations and smiled, but did not become interested in it.

“My business now,” she says, “is to be a widow, and no amusement holds any seduction for me”—and, on returning to Petersburg, she handed over this wonder, with all the other valuables, to the new sovereign as an heirloom.

The emperor Nikolai Pavlovich also paid no attention to the flea at first, because there were disturbances at his ascension,⁸ but later one day he began to go through the chest left him by his brother and took out the snuffbox, and from the snuffbox the diamond nut, and in it he found the steel flea, which had not been wound up for a long time and therefore did not work, but lay quietly, as if gone stiff.

The sovereign looked and wondered.

“What’s this gewgaw, and why did my brother keep it here so carefully?”

The courtiers wanted to throw it out, but the sovereign says:

“No, it means something.”

They invited a chemist from the opposing pharmacy by the Anichkov Bridge, who weighed out poisons in very small scales, and showed it to him, and he took it, put it on his tongue, and said: “I feel a chill, as from hard metal.” Then he nipped it slightly with his teeth and announced:

“Think what you like, but this is not a real flea, it’s a nymphosoria, and it’s made of metal, and it’s not our Russian workmanship.”

The sovereign gave orders at once to find out where it came from and what it meant.

They rushed and looked at the files and lists, but there was nothing written down in the files. Then they began asking around—nobody knew anything. But, fortunately, the Don Cossack Platov was still alive and was even still lying on his vexatious couchment smoking his pipe. When he heard that there was such a stir in the palace, he got up from his couchment at once, abandoned his pipe, and appeared before the sovereign in all his medals. The sovereign says:

“What do you need of me, courageous old fellow?”

And Platov replies:

“Myself, Your Majesty, I need nothing from you, because I eat and drink what I like and am well pleased with it all, but,” he says, “I’ve come to report about this nymphosoria that’s been found: it happened thus and so, and it took place before my eyes in England—and there’s a little key here, and I’ve got a meagroscope you can see it through, and you can wind up the nymphosoria’s belly with the key, and it will leap through any space you like and do veritations to the sides.”

They wound it up, and it started leaping, but Platov said:

“This,” he says, “is indeed a very fine and interesting piece of work, Your Majesty, only we shouldn’t get astonished at it with rapturous feeling only, but should subject it to Russian inspection in Tula or Sesterbeck”—Sestroretsk was still called Sesterbeck then—“to see whether our masters can surpass it, so that the Englishmen won’t go putting themselves above the Russians.”

The sovereign Nikolai Pavlovich was very confident in his Russian people and did not like yielding to any foreigners, and so he answered Platov:

“You’ve put it well, courageous old fellow, and I charge you with seeing to this matter. With my present troubles, I don’t need this little box anyway, so take it with you, and don’t lie on your vexatious couchment anymore, but go to the quiet Don and start up an internecine conversation with my Cossacks there concerning their life and loyalty and likings. And when you pass through Tula, show this nymphosoria to my Tula masters and let them think about it. Tell them from me that my brother marveled at this thing and praised the foreign people who made this nymphosoria more than all, but that I’m relying on our people, that they’re no worse than any others. They won’t let my word drop and will do something.”

V

Platov took the steel flea and, on his way through Tula to the Don, showed it to the Tula gunsmiths, passed on the sovereign’s word to them, and then asked: