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The devil made fast friends with a little child1

The devil lived in sister Valeria's2 room—upstairs, straight :ilicad from the staircase, a red, satiny-silky-damasky room with an eternal and strong oblique column of sunshine where incessantly and almost unmovingly dust turned in a circle.

It would start with them calling me up there: "Come on, Musya, someone's waiting for you in there," or: "Hurry, Mu-scnka, hurry! Something's there waiting for you, a (stretching it out) sur-r-r-prise." A purely formal mysteriousness, since I certainly knew perfectly well what kind of "someone" and what kind of surprise it was, and the people who called me up knew, that—I knew. It was either Avgusta Ivanovna, or Asya's nurse Alexandra Mukhina, or maybe once in a while even a guest, but always—a woman, and never—mother, and never—Valeria herself.

And so, half prodded and prompted, half—by the room-pulled and persuaded, making a little show of modesty and refusals in front of the door, like villagers before an invitation to eat and drink, a bit skittishly and a bit wolfishly—I would go in.

The devil sat on Valeria's bed—naked, in gray skin, like a great Dane, with whitish-blue eyes, like a great Dane's or a Baltic German Baron's, the arms extended alongside the knees like a peasant woman from Ryazan3 being photographed or a pharaoh in the Louvre, in the same posture of immutable patience and indifference. The devil sat as quiescently as if they really were taking his picture. There was no fur; there was the opposite of fur: complete smoothness, even clean-shavenness, fresh-cast steeliness. I see now that my devil's body was ideally-athletic: the physique of a female lion, and the color—of a great Dane. When, twenty years later, during the Revolution, they brought a great Dane to me for boarding and feeding, I at once recognized my own Muscleman.

I don't remember horns, maybe there were small ones, but they were more like ears. There, unmistakably, was—a tail, a lioness's tail, large, bare, strong and vital, like a serpent twisted gracefully in many coils around statuesquely-immobile legs arranged so that from within the last coil a tassel looked out. There were no feet, but there were no hooves either; human, even sportsmanlike legs were supported on paws, once again lioncssian great Danian, with large claws, also gray, horn-gray. When he walked—he knocked. However, in my presence he never walked. But the main identifying marks were not the paws, not the tail, not incidentals; the main thing was—the eyes: colorless, passionless and merciless. Before everything else I recognized him by his eyes, and I would have recognized those eyes—without everything else.

There was no movement. He sat, I stood. And I—loved him.

Every summer, whenever we would move to our summer house, the Devil moved with us, or rather, he would already be there waiting in the intact self-sufficiency of a tree transplanted with the roots and the fruit. He would be sitting on Valeria's bed, in her room in Tarusa, a narrow room that flew outside through the stove pipe into the jasmine, a room with a vertical stovepipe from a huge, iron stove that went wild in July. When the Devil was sitting on Valeria's bed, it seemed there was a second iron stove in the room, and when he wasn't sitting there, the iron stove in the corner looked like him. The traits in common were: the color, with the grayish-blue shimmering of summer on the iron, a ferrous shimmer, the solid ice of a stove in summer; the roof-beam height; and the utter motionlessness. The stove stood as quiescently as if they were taking its picture. It substituted for him its whole cold bulk and, with the unique sweetness of secret recognition, I would press against it with the back of my head, shorn of hair, burning hot from summer, while I read aloud to Lera what was forbidden by mother and therefore permitted— put into my hands—by Lera: Dead Souls,4 which—the dead bodies and the souls—I never did find, never read up to, because at the last second when they were supposed to, were just ready to appear—the dead bodies and the souls too—as if on purpose mother's step would be heard (incidentally, she never did come in but only, every single time, at the right moment—as if run on a mechanism—went walking by) and, feeling weak from quite another fear, a real live one, I would stuff the huge book under the bed (that very one!). And the next time, when my eyes had sought out and found the place from which mother's step had chased me, it would turn out that they were not there anymore, that they had already gone on ahead again to a particular place, to the one particular place from which I would again be chased away. So I never read up In the dead souls, cither then or later, (in the moral terror (the physical well-being) of Gogol's heroes never matched the unalloyed fearfulness of the book's name, never satisfied the passion of fear set alight in me by the terror of the name.

... Torn away from the book, I would press up against the stove, press my red cheek against the blue iron, my hot cheek against the icy metal. But I pressed up against him only in the form of the stove, never against him—that him. But then, come to think of it—yes, I did, but because it was in his arms and going across the river.

I am swimming there at night, in the River Oka. Not swimming there but just there—alone, in the middle of the Oka, not black but gray. And I am not even merely there, but simply, instantly—I am drowning. I am already drowned. Let us begin at the beginning: I am drowning in the middle of the Oka. And when I am already completely drowned and, it seems, dead— an ascent (which I know from the first second!)—I am in a pair of arms, I am high above the Oka, head above the sky, and I am carried by "the drowned," or rather by one of them and of course not by someone drowned (the one drowned—is who I am!), because I love him madly and I feel no fear at all and he is not blue but gray, and I press against him with my whole wet face and clothes, holding him around his neck—the right of every person drowning.

We stride along the waters, that is, he strides and I ride along. And the others ("the drowned"? Or who? His subjects) are loudly and joyfully, somewhere down-under, ho-o-owling! And stepping onto the far bank, the one where the Polenov house and Bekhovo village5 are, he sets me on the ground with a flourish, and with thunderous laughter—even thunder doesn't peal the way he does! — he says: "And someday you and I will get married, the devil take it!"

Oh how I, in my little girlhood, liked that, his: "devil take it"—from his mouth! How that boastful manhood set me on fire down deep to my innermost self! He has carried me over the waters and like the most ordinary peasant—or student—"the devil take it!"—as if he could fear that, or want it... as if he himself, or me in his arms, as if the devil could possibly ever take us! And I was never begloomed by the thought that it was said for me, out of condescension to my deficiency in years, the dot over the i of his own identite,6 so that 1 would make no mistake about it, that he—really was—he. No, he was simply playing, playing at being a simple mortal, that "I am not I and the horse isn't mine."

I have to admit that in the face of his bedazzling "The devil take it"—from his own lips—the actual promise, "You and I will get married someday" retreated somewhat to a place in the background. But when I had tasted all the sweets of that exclamation in all its reverberations in me, and I myself had stepped back a little—oh the power beyond endurance of that triumph! He, without any request from me, him himself ... he and me—get married! Marry an utterly soaked, little tiny...

And once, unable to hold and endure the solitary triumph, (my conscience was already gnawing, but I was not strong enough to halt the flood): "Mama! I had a dream today ... drowned people... And I dreamed that they took me by my arms and carried me across the river, and he, the main drowned one, told me: 'You and I will get married some day, the devil take it!' '

"Congratulations!" said mother. "I've always said it! Good children are led across the abyss by angels, but children like you..."

Afraid that she would guess and name him this minute, and by doing that cut it all off forever, I say hurriedly: "But they— honest! they were drowned, as drowned as drowned can be, blue..."

And in the swollen body

Black crayfish sank their claws!7

"And you think that's—better?" said mother ironically. "Nasty thing!"

But apart from the repeated encounters I have related, our typical meetings, he and I had one unique meeting—unrepeated. As always, I am lured into Valeria's room in our house on Three Ponds Lane, but there is not just one being in the room, but many, a whole whispering and finger-poking circle: there is Nurse and Avgusta Ivanovna, and the sewing-boxy Marya Vasilevna who pops up in springtime with the new grass, and the other Marya Vasilevna with a fish face and the strange surname Sumbul, and also that tailor-woman near and from whom it smelled so of castor oil (like red dye)—and all of them are saying in unison: "Hurry Musenka,

hurry, someone's there willing for you..."

As always, I resist a little, I smile a little. I hesitate. Finally, I go in. And oh horror! Empty. On the bed— nobody. He is not on the bed. Nothing but the red room, full of sun and dust. The room is alone the way I am alone. Without him.

Immobilized, I move with my eyes from the empty bed to the fire-bird screen (behind which he most likely is not, for he's not one to play at hide and seek!), from the screen to the book cabinet, such a strange cabinet where instead of books you see yourself, and even to the little cabinet with its— as Nurse says— "good-for-nothings," from the "good-for-nothings" to the obviously-empty red sofa with the buttons pressed into the raspberry, hollyhockian meat of the satin, from the satin to the stove, white with blue squares, crowned with Ural crystal and steppe grass... In the same state of petrification I stride to the window from which those trees are visible: gray willows around the green church, the gray willows of my longing, whose physical location in Moscow and on earth I never did find out and never tried to.

With a draining feeling— he's let me dow— n!— I am standing leaning my forehead on the first low square of window, I am scalding my eyes with dammed-up tears, and when at last I lower my eyes, so as to let out, at last, the tears...— on the cotton-wadding window bottom, between the two window frames, in greenish glass as if in alcohol! there is a whole scattering of minuscule gray jumping terribly-jolly devils from the Holy Week toy fair, with horns-and-feet, turning the whole window into a bottle full of toy devils, the "devils-in-a-bottle "8 you buy at the toy fair before Easter.

After mustering a polite smile as if at some too-babyish toy, and standing as long as was required so as not to offend— not them, senselessly-jumping and not-in-the-least-knowing me, but him— a bit comforted, a bit offended, checking the empty bed for the last time, I walk away.

"Well, what do you say? What do you say?" with false faces and false gestures ask Nurse, Avgusta Ivanovna, the two Marya Vasilevnas, Marya Ignatevnathe tailor, and the three naphthalene nuns who, in certain circumstances of time and place, tickling me wildly, push me down into Valeria's red trunk behind the partition. "All right. Thank you. Very nice," I say purposely-slowly and intensively-carelessly, passing along through their hands that stretched out and didn't dare. (Passing by and not facing them, I see that Avgusta Ivanovna doesn't look much like herself, and for some reason Nurse has her tongue hanging out of the corner of her mouth...).

The little devils in the window and the spooking-devilment at the door were not repeated. What was it? A simple substitution because he couldn't come himself, or a trial, a test of maturity and fidelity: would I, a five-year-old, give him up, him, the real and only one, in exchange for that multitude of Easter toys? That is, turning my back on the empty bed—empty of him— wouldn't I just start—playing?

No, the games were over! The devil of my early childhood left me, along with much else, this inheritance: the invariable word like a great Dane's yawn, to everything that is a game— bo-o-ring!

Why did the Devil live in Valeria's room? At that time I didn't think about it (and Valeria never did find out about it). It was just as simple a thing as the fact that I live in the nursery, Papa lives in the study, grandmother in the portrait, mother on the piano bench, Valeria at the Ekaterininsky Institute,9 and the Devil—in Valeria's room. At that time it was a plain fact.

But now—I know: the Devil lived in Valeria's room because in Valeria's room, changed into the shape of the book cabinet, stood the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, the fruits of which—Lukhmanova's "Girls," Staniukovich's "Around the World on the 'Korshun'," EvgeniaTur's "Catacombs," "The Bor-Ramensky Family," and whole years of the magazine Wellspring10—I so greedily and hastily, guiltily and unrestrainedly, gobbled up, keeping an eye out for the door, the way they did for God, but without ever betraying my serpent. ("Is it Lera who gave you that?"—"No, I took it myself.") The Devil came into Valeria's room to the place prepared for him: of my transgression—of mother's prohibition.

But there was also another thing. In Valeria's room, before the age of seven, on the sly, in fits and starts, with an eye and an ear out for mother, I read through Evgeny Onegin, Mazeppa, Rusalka, "The Lady Turned Peasant," the Gypsies,11 and the first novel of my life, Anais.12 Love was there in her room, love lived there, and not only her love and love for her, for the seventeen-year-old girl; all those albums, notes, pachouly, spiritualistic seances, sympathetic inks, tutors, tutoring, dress-ups as a marquise, oiling of eyelashes - but stop there! Out of the deep well of the dresser, up and out of the rustle of velvets, corals, combed-out hair, paper flowers... they were focused on me—eyes looking my way!—the silver pellets.

Candies, but terrible, pills, but silver, edible silver beads which she for some reason devoured just as secretly (blocking the view with her back and with her forehead on the dresser) as I devour (with my forehead on the book cabinet) the "Pearls of Russian Poetry." Once it dawned upon me that the pills were poisonous and that she wanted to die. From love, of course. Then why don't they let her get married—to Boris Ivanych or Alsant Palcho? Or to Stratonov? Or to Ainalov? Because they want to marry her to Mikhail Ivanych Pokrovsky!

"Lera, can I take a pill like that?"-"No."-"Why?"-"Because you don't need it."—"But if I do eat one—will I die?"-"In any case, you'll get sick." Subsequently (so as to put the reader at ease) it turned out that the pills were the most innocent kind, "contre les troubles,"13 etc., the most usual, young ladylike pills, but no normality of their use eradicated in me the strange image of a yellow-faced girl, secretly eating up the supply of sweet poisonous silver in the dresser.

Not only her seventeen-year-old sex reigned in that room, but all the power of love in her race, the race of her beautiful mother,14 who did not wear out love's force and buried it down among all those satins and moires, eternally-sweetscented and not for nothing so burningly—raspberry red.

But didn't the Devil come to Valeria? After all, she did not know that he came to see me, so I might not know that he came to see her. (A bloodless swarthy face, huge serpentine-jewel-like eyes in a wreath of the blackest lashes, a small, dark, compressed mouth, a sharp nose tilted towards the chin-that face had neither nationality nor age. Neither beauty nor plainness. It was the face— of a witch.) And still—no. No, because after the Ekterininsky Institute she matriculated into Guerier's Women's Courses in Merzliakovsky Lane, and then into the Social-Democratic party, and then into a teachers' program at Kozlovsky gymnasium, and then to a studio of dance—all in all she spent her whole life enrolling and entering. But the first mark of his chosen ones is complete detachment, from the first and from everything—exclusion.
No, the Devil didn't know any Valeria. But he didn't know my mother either, a lonely being like that. He didn't even know that I have a mother. When I was with him, I was his little girl, his devil 's-own-waif. With me as with that room, the devil entered in and found a prepared place. He simply liked the room— the secret red room— and the secret red little girl standing in the petrified stillness of love on the threshold.

1. In Russian the epigraph reads: "Sviazalsia chert s mladentsem." It refers to a very unlikely alliance and also to a feigned naivete which conceals some devious intent. Both meanings provide clues to the interpretation of this most enigmatic of Tsvetaeva's prose works. Another set of clues rests in the order in which the prose works were written, for "The Devil" has close chronological and thematic links with "Mother and Music." "The Devil" is the third chapter of Tsvetaeva's "family chronicle," and Tsvetaeva started it as soon as she had finished the chapter on her mother. "Mother and Music" must have been finished by about October 20,1934, because Tsvetaeva wrote to Bunina on that day asking her to help arrange a public reading of the work. Then, four days later on October 24, Tsvetaeva writes to her friend Ana Teskova telling her that "The Devil" is in progress. "I am writing the next chapter of my childhood, 'The Devil.' I think that after this one the emigration will completely cross me out, if only because of its deep hypocrisy and the most superficial banality. Here everyone has become 'holy,' but what a lack there is of real humanity!" (Letter to Ana Teskova, October 24, 1934, Prague: Academia, 1969, p. 472.) In the move from one piece to the next, Tsvetaeva left the rather tragic mood of her mother's story behind her and she plunged into a more comic (in the many literary senses of that word) frame of mind. She was, after all, writing about her rescue from her mother's musical inundations and her introduction to books, poetry, and Pushkin. The brighter spirit affects the tone of her letters. "I am now writing the devil, my childhood with him," she writes to Bunina, "and I am keeping warm by him, that is, I really do not notice that I have been writing for two hours by an open window-only my fingers notice-and the tip of my nose. . . ." (Letter to V. N. Bunina, November 2, 1934, N. P., p. 472.) Another key set of dates are those assigned to Tsvetaeva's juvenile alter ego as she is depicted in the prose. "Mother and Music" opens when little Marina speaks her first word, but from then on the age most frequently assigned to her is four and five years old. In "The Devil," the age of seven predominates (a "loaded" number in all Tsvetaeva's writings as also, of course, in folklore and mythology), while the final meeting with the chthonic visitor takes place when Marina is nine. We have to do here not only with a child growing up systematically over the span of

the two successive works, bul also with a poet-to-be at a mythically significant chronological threshold-seven years of age. The thematic links between the two prose works are equally important. They grow primarily out of the equation Tsvetaeva makes in "Mother and Music" between her mother's music and water-river water or a lake (the sea has its own function, as will be apparent in "My Pushkin"). The mother's playing is described as a kind of flood; the piano is a black pond or a deep, dangerous river, very much like the River Oka. In "The Devil" the devil finds young Marina drowning in the Oka, rescues her, and pronounces the words of their betrothal. The episode would be entirely mystifying without its connection to the metaphorical system of "Mother and Music." The devil's rescue signals Marina's release from her mother's music. His promise betokens a sacred marriage to the art of poetry, for the mother's Lyricism does belong to the daughter: not the Lyricism of music however, but the Lyricism of verse. The devil then corresponds to the Greek daemon, the godlike moving spirit of an individual talent, an individual fate which the Romans later called "genius." Tsvetaeva explicitly equates "demon" and "genius" in the letter of January 26, 1934, to Ana Teskova, in which'she explains the fate of her female forbears—her zhenskii rod-and it is under the aegis of that equation that both "Mother and Music " and "The Devil" were written.

2. Valeria Ivanovna Tsvetaeva (1883-1966) was Tsvetaeva's half-sister by their father's first marriage. The picture Tsvetaeva paints of her in the prose is curious not only because the negative qualities assigned to her contradict the testimony of other witnesses (for example, Alexandra Zhernakova-Nikolaeva, "Tsvetaevskii dom," Russkaia mysl', Paris, March 23 and 26, 1963), but also because Tsvetaeva herself presents a much more balanced view in her letters (see the Letter to V. N. Bunina, August 19, 1933, N. P., pp. 417-18, cited at length in Note 1 to "The Intended"). In Valeria's case, it would seem, Tsvetaeva's artistic purpose held sway over historical accuracy. Yet history is the main key to Valeria's function in the prose. Valeria stands for the moeurs of her epoch: her albums, paper flowers, and silver pills are the hallmarks of a proper and typical young lady of fin de siecle Russia. But Valeria's destiny is one her sister Marina must avoid if she is to become a poet and realize another, higher, fate. Hence the amusing juxtaposition between the "poison" pills which young ladies "dying from love" must take, and the "pearls of Russian poetry" which little Marina swallows so greedily.

3. The city of Ryazan is in the south central part of Russia, just to the southeast of Moscow.

4. A novel by Nikolai Gogol (1809-1852) published in 1842. The "souls"of the title refer to male serfs. The term was used for statistical purposes much the way Americans refer to counted cattle as "head." Russian landowners had to pay a yearly tax on each registered serf or "soul" whether he was dead or alive, until new births and deaths were recorded in a census. In the novel a shady entrepreneur named Chichikov plans to buy up (on paper) various male serfs who had .died since the last census. Using his ownership of the nonexistent serfs, Chichikov plans to swindle mortgage money out of the government. Little Marina imagines that the "Dead Souls" refer to ghosts. The Russian censorship, in league with the Orthodox Church, was no less puzzled by the novel's title. "How," it inquired, "can there be such a thing as dead souls? The soul is immortal."

5. The village of Bekhovo was visible from the Tsvetaev house. It was situated on the other side of the Oka River to the west. The Polenov house was so named because it was the residence of Vasily Dmitrievich Polenov (1844-1927), a well-known landscape painter who was acquainted with Professor Tsvetaev. (See Anastasia Tsvetaeva, Memoirs, p. 52.)

6. French. "Identity."

7. Lines from "The Drowned Man" ("Utoplennik"), a poem by Pushkin written in 1828. In the poem children find the corpse wned man (described in the quoted lines) and rush home to tell their father.

8. The devil-in-a-bottle is a toy known in English as a Cartesian Diver and more commonly in Russian as amerikanskie zhiteli, that is, "inhabitants of America." At the beginning of Holy Week (known in Russia as Verbnaia nedelia or "Willow Week" for the plant which is carried on Sunday instead of our palms), a fair was held in Moscow on one of the main squares. Tsvetaeva's acquisition of a bottle devil is described later in the piece.

9. Valeria's Institute was a boarding school with a curriculum similar to that of a gymnasium. The "female institutes" (instituty zhenskie), however, had a much older history in Russia than did the gymnasia (see Note 13 to "Voloshin"). There were four institutes for young women in Moscow in the nineties. Valeria's school's full name was "The School of St. Catherine" (Uchilishche Sviatoi Ekateriny).

10. The magazine Wellspring (Rodnik) was an illustrated periodical for children which came out once a month and later once every two weeks from 1882 through 1916. Of the works and authors listed here Evgenia Tur is the best known. The name is the pseudonym of Elizabeta Vasilievna Salhias de Tournemir (1815-1892), a novelist and fiction writer of strong feminist leanings.

11. All the titles named are works by Pushkin. Except for "The Lady Turned Peasant," they are mentioned at greater length in "My Pushkin."

12. This title presents a problem. In the text of "The Devil" published in Contemporary Notes 59 (Paris, 1935), one line is omitted and replaced by the duplicate of a line printed higher up on the page. The line is restored in the version published in Literary Georgia 9 (1967), p. 75. The title Ana'is appears in the restored line, but I was not been able to identify it.

13. French. The description of the pills is left deliberately vague. An English version might be "for various ailments."

14. Valeria's mother was Varvara Drnitrievna Ilovaiskaya, daughter of D. I. Ilo-vaisky by his first marriage. She bore Professor Tsvetaev two children and died while still quite young in 1890. She seems to have left Valeria a set of dowry trunks, the contents of which are described in "The House at Old Pimen." Here similar contents are found in Valeria's dresser.