Joseph Olenin’s Coat

by Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé

Translated by Patricia Worth

Table of Contents

Table of Contents
parts: 1, 2, 3, 4

conclusion

During this second stay, Madame ***ska’s manner was testament to a veritable hostility toward me. She almost never spoke to me, and I had to pretend not to see her in order not to suffer from her attitude, which I could only attribute to the disdain provoked by my deranged mind. Only the old Count, a stranger to my follies, welcomed me with the traditional cordiality of our provinces and pressed me to come back, to shorten the long leisurely days of winter in his company.

Indeed, I went back, though I felt my presence odious; I went back for the Christmas festivities, tormented by my passion. This time, again, the polonaise was absent. But I was more than a little surprised to find the Countess shivering and curled up in our pelisse. Her good mood seemed to have returned, and she received me with a smile on her lips.

“Oh, my dear neighbor, I’m very sorry to upset your habits, but my doctor finds me unwell, and with this cold weather we’re having he has ordered me to wear furs in the icy rooms of our old ruins. You wouldn’t want me to die, no doubt. But just to let you know, I am not bequeathing my coat to you. So resign yourself to gazing at it on me. I regret my coarse figure upsets the drape of my perfect double. Try to become accustomed to it.”

“Alas, Madame! You deprive me of such soft, innocent caresses.”

“Oh! I know that on me the magic mantle loses all its virtue! All the better; you will get over it. If not... if not, it’s up to you to find a compromise.”

Magic mantle, indeed. Since my hostess had put it on again, it seemed she was becoming, with each day, a little less of a stranger; it seemed she was a little less herself, a little more the mantle. With the strange power of absorption that I had so often noticed, the pelisse was metamorphosing her mistress and bringing her back to the proportions of my illusion. The Countess ***ska had disappeared; only my polonaise remained, with the unique temptations she had been offering me for three months. Unconsciously and naturally, I had come to the point where I was no longer able to separate one from the other. It was all the easier for me because the shivering young woman never removed what she had once so scornfully called “her old rag”; and I, who could not tear myself away from this darling object, was riveted to the footsteps of she who wore it; I followed her everywhere like a living shadow. The Countess could not have invented a better stratagem if she had wanted to chain me to herself. I am not suggesting this was a calculated scheme; her very correct soul was incapable of it.

Henceforth I was with the lady of the manor on her every walk; I accompanied her in her park, my hand hurrying to gather the frost pearls as they caught in the sable, in moments when it brushed the low birch branches. I followed her onto the ponds where she would take her pleasure at skating. When she stumbled as she raced along, I was behind her, trembling with fear that in some fall or other my treasure would be torn; I was ready to catch it in my arms and save it. If she rode a sleigh for a longer excursion, I would sit by her side, grateful for the jolts of the track when the narrow vehicle would shake, and the soft blue velvet with its warmth and perfume would brush against my shoulder and over my hand.

During these days of a shared life, we would chat. I took a keen interest in this singular nature unveiling itself before me; a double nature, as though made from the poorly joined halves of two souls. I could explain this duality without much trouble; I knew through experience that the wondrous pelisse possessed an influence so penetrating, so irresistible, that she modified even the moral being of those she enveloped.

In a peaceful soul, a little weary and numbed by solitude, a fairy was igniting sparks of mischief and flashes of poetry. There were moments when it seemed my new friend’s words were breathed into her by a passing spirit, one of those vagabonds from the occult world that sometimes come and stay awhile in the most honest dwellings and upset the whole household. I would see she was uneasy, capricious, coolly fickle, now fallen deep into a secret thought, now given to abrupt flashes of wit. The menacing laugh passing over her small teeth was not coming from her; it gave me the impression of a drinking song played by a pagan on a church organ.

On the long, empty December evenings, the three of us would come together in the downstairs room, before the flaming hearth. The Countess would maintain a stubborn silence: snuggling in the fur despite the heat of the fire, leaning on her elbows, her gaze lost between the large firedogs, she seemed to be closely watching the follies of the little yellow and red demons that lodge beneath the large logs and gossip in the flames, telling stories to bored Ladies in old castles.

I didn’t speak much; absorbed in contemplation of the sable, I took an ever new pleasure in following the play of light on her folds. With the slightest movement of she who wore it, the sable would slip into the thick shadow falling from the rafters, or would light up, lengthened and continued by hair curls in the same golden tints. Only the Count animated our late nights with his inexhaustible good humor, delighted to find a listener agreeable to his war memories and his Ukrainian legends.

One evening, the wind from the steppe, blowing its way to the Carpathian Mountains, howled as it passed through the courtyards; the groans of the village windmills drifted to the dark window panes and expired. To our countryside, usually so quiet, these sounds of the elements bring a sense of dread. We were sitting in silence; the old major domo came in bringing the tea; a shutter banged, the barking of a dog or wolf on the road faded away.

As the major domo withdrew, he said sententiously, “Madame the Countess would do well to lock up her jewels this evening; it’s on nights like this that the Lady returns.”

“Which Lady?” I asked my host.

“What? You don’t know you are threatened with a visit? Don’t go smiling, Monsieur Skeptic. Listen to a story that all my servants believe as surely as they believe the miracles of Our Lady of Czestochowa.

“A very long time ago, in the reign of King Stanislaus, this house was the scene of a domestic tragedy. One of my ancestors, betrayed by his young wife, took justice into his own hands in the harsh manner of our forebears, and hurled the guilty woman into the large pond. Since that time the cursed soul has roamed with the rusalki, the fairies of the waters, beneath the water lilies and the bulrushes. Now and again she comes back into her abode and visits the very corner tower where you are staying. We’ve heard her soft sighs in the corridors, we’ve followed her trace of water drips and sprigs of moss and iris. Some have seen her walking: a tall reed clad in green gauze, crowned with seaweed.

“She appeared twice in my grandfather’s lifetime, once in my father’s lifetime: after each of these visits, a costly object was missing from the castle. She always carries off what is most precious to the master of this house. It was she, the minx, who took my old battle steed on the evening when he escaped, coming back from the pasture. But now I’m not sure what else she could take from me.”

The Count’s warning was unnecessary; as I was raised by my Little Russian nurse in the faith of popular traditions, I had no desire at all to joke about this matter. I was even shocked by the burst of laughter that came from the Countess’s armchair at her husband’s last words; it was an indefinable, disturbing laugh, the laugh of a stranger which seemed to enter into her rather than come out of her.

I took leave of them and went up to my room in the tower, a little nervous, my thoughts held captive by the story I’d just heard. I went to bed, my eyes fixed, as always, on the pelisse hanging on the window latch. For I must confess one last bit of childishness after so many others. I had felt so upset each evening at the moment of leaving my polonaise, that I was once bold enough to say to the Countess: “Madame, you’ve allowed me to seek a compromise; since you monopolize my beloved all day long, let me at least take her at night, to have her closer to me and to gaze on her when I wake.”

Without waiting for Madame ***ska’s consent, I had grabbed her coat as she was throwing it over a chair to withdraw from the room. From then on, I carried it lovingly away to my retreat. On moonlit nights the wan velvet and sable would be silhouetted against my windowpane in a halo of moon rays. I have no words sweet enough to tell of their grace, the divine symphony which would keep me from sleeping.

That evening, the full December moon was veiled at intervals by dark clouds maddened by the wind. The tempest raged and penetrated my bedroom through old, badly fitted casements. A thought came to me, leaving me cold: what if the Lady, the rusalka, was coming to visit me and rob me of my treasure, the most precious object in the castle, without a doubt? And besides, wouldn’t it be her property? This fur which I’d been told was a family heirloom, this coat of a style of days past, didn’t it belong to the ill-fated ancestor? And this mysterious soul which clearly resides in the haunted pelisse, isn’t it her soul?

If you have ever trembled for one you loved, you can imagine what terror filled my mind, intensifying, pricking my heart and beating at my temples. With my eyes wide open on the polonaise, I saw her stirring with movements very human, in the play of the wind probably, hiding and reappearing, with the caprices of the moon and the clouds, no doubt. There was a longer eclipse; the light again filled the window space; the polonaise was no longer there. I heard soft sighs and a silken stroking of the draperies, like a barque cleaving through reeds. Beside myself, I rushed to the door, fell to my knees and stretched out my arms, crying: “Leave her, leave me my soul, don’t go.”

When my arms closed again they were embracing the sable. She moved, an uncertain form was palpitating beneath her folds, a moist breath brushed my forehead. A fit of madness took away my sense of reality; I cried out, I lost consciousness... and my memory, too, for I am unable to say what happened afterward. All that was left to me was the confused and troubling sensation of a morning after a heavy night of drinking.

When I saw my hosts the next morning, I wanted at first to announce that the ancestor had appeared to me. A sense of shame made me hesitate, and some kind of fear of displeasing the mysterious being whom I wanted to see again. Would the Lady return?

She returned. It is she who brings me back and ties me to Rogonostzova. Here, my life and my friends’ lives continue, always steady, always peaceful. Count ***sky, most inconvenienced by his sciatica that whole winter long, could no longer suffer his only partner in cards and chess to leave.

Everyone knows that the Russian government, in its paternal solicitude, anticipates its subjects’ smallest desires, and that the most secret wish expressed by the administered is just as soon realized by the administration. I recently had new proof of this. The Podolia line, which serves our two residences, was opened in January; now I am no more than two hours from my neighbors.

It is in vain that my acquaintances in St. Petersburg and my peers from the Academy write me letters upon letters filled with question marks. Impatiently, I have responded to them once and for all that I am in the business of furs. I have not been able to find the time to go and see them again, and I even missed the last convention of Orientalists. But then, how could I show my face there? My great work has not advanced one line. The excellent Count sometimes makes fun of me on this subject, asking why my studies on the Hebrews stopped at the chapter on Joseph. Out of self-respect I had to say I was deciphering a papyrus of texts that were very difficult but destined to revolutionize history, and which to me suggest that the Israelite would have found his coat.

“Bah!” the Count responded with the broad laugh which is the secret of people from a past age, “I hope, dear Egyptologist, that nothing untoward has happened to my ancient and illustrious colleague, Pharaoh’s governor-general?”

“My dear,” the Countess interrupted, with her particular laugh, the laugh of the other woman, “my dear, one must never mock one’s colleagues. Nor one’s peers.”

Proceed to Challenge 832...