[A tale à la manière de Gogol]
If a nose can become a man, it´s even more likely that a man will fall in love with a nose. So it happened to Sergei Stepanovich, a struggling painter in Petersburg. Like most miracles in life, it happened by chance one day, when, passing a junk shop full of chipped crockery, arm chairs whose stuffing leaked out, rusty samovars and the like, he noticed some picture frames, battered but with traces of its ornate molding and gold leaf.
It was dark inside and so cluttered with stuff, he nearly bumped into the shop assistant, a young peasant girl in a scarf, and absorbed in choosing a frame, he only noticed that she was, if not beautiful, then attractive. Her arms and bust were firm and rounded, her waist trim, her legs slender and her skin had a pleasant golden tone. But she didn´t particularly stand out from the thousands of milkmaids, laundry girls and domestic servants who, barely risen from serfdom, tended to be coarse, ignorant and uncultured.
Sergei was poor, so he started haggling, knowing the longer he did, the less she would be able to resist. At one point, saying he´d seen some barely visible cracks in one frame, he ordered her to bring it to the window, where he could examine it more closely. As he did so, a beam reflected off the gold leaf suddenly lit up her face, which he hadn´t paid any attention to before, and an arrow from cupid lodged in his heart!
Her brow was broad and smooth, her lips full and rosy, and her hair, tied up in a bun, was glossy and raven. But it wasn´t any of that which transfixed him: it was her nose! It was neither Grecian, nor hooked, nor snubbed: ordinary, you might say, but chiseled with the perfection of the (inverted) prow of a ship, with the nostrils pinched, just so, like a scrumptious meat patty.
The girl agreed to shave half a kopek off the price, but as soon as he handed over the coins, Sergei´s satisfaction turned to despair: he had emptied his purse and couldn´t even buy a candle to light up his dismal garret. It was all very well for him to love her, what he could offer in return? Even the humblest working girl expected a husband to provide her with a roof over her head, a pretty frock and a daily loaf of bread.
He fled back to his hole, determined to forget her and fully focus on his art in the hope that someone, somewhere, would recognize his talent. But it was futile. By day, every sketch he made of a bird or a fruit bowl turned into a portrait of her nose. By night, every dream was permeated with those deliciously pinched nostrils.
Starved and half-mad, he went for a walk along the embankment of the Neva, brooding on his fate. He passed the great statue of bronze, a mockery of his failure. Reaching the Nevsky Prospect, he went onto the Anichkov Bridge. The spring thaw had begun: its turbulent waters were filled with tremendous blocks of ice. How easy it would be to end it all, instantly frozen senseless and then crushed, without pain, by one of those enormous boulders. Sergei was about to mount the parapet when he was startled by a boisterous shout.
“Stepanovich, what are you doing at this unearthly hour. Drunk, like me, or just searching for inspiration?”
It was Fedetov, the fur merchant, a wealthy, florid, boastful character known for his sharp business practices and aspirations to rub shoulders with the aristocracy. Towards that end, he was building up a collection of paintings, but, having no taste at all, he only bought those which were cheap and patronized little known artists like Sergei.
“That nude you were doing? Is it finished yet?”
“Nearly, but I´ve run out of pigments and don´t have a kopek to my name”
“I´ll take care of that and pay you a fair price. However, not a word to my wife. Wrap it up well and send it to my store, not my house. It will amuse my friend Count Kushelev-Bezborodko and might get me an invitation to the Jockey Club”.
At his “agreed”, the merchant slipped a silver poltina into Sergei´s vest pocket.
“Only half a ruble, the miser,” he said to himself. But it was enough to buy him the materials and some bowls of borscht to sustain himself while he worked.
Two days later, Fedetov visited his studio, puffing from the exertion of climbing five flights of stairs. Sergei knew that Fedetov knew that he was desperate and would only pay him a few rubles, but his love for the girl´s nose gave the timid painter courage and like most bullies, the merchant yielded when bullied himself.
In middle-class terms, it wasn´t much but for an impoverished painter, it was a small fortune. Nevertheless, Sergei wasn´t going to waste it on luxuries. It was the dowry which would enable him to marry Katia.
Part of it would be spent on sprucing his place up, another on buying her a ring, a bridal trousseau and some decent pots and pans for their kitchen.
Elated, he set off at once to propose marriage to her, along the same embankment of the Neva. It was the first day of mild weather. The strollers he passed by were in a gay mood: bourgeois families, army officers in high boots and tight tunics and engaged couples, trailed by an old witch of chaperone. Fixing on the latter, he suddenly realized that you can´t just go into a shop and ask a girl you´ve only seen once to marry you. Even the humblest peasant lass expected to be wooed first and would be wary of the instant proposals, often made by aristocratic rakes, in order to first bed, then abandon a girl
But, how to convince her that he was honorable? his parents couldn´t vouch for him: they lived in ramshackle cottage on the banks of the distant Volga, where they barely survived by skinning eels. No respectable matron would act as a chaperone for a nobody like himself, nor did he have any friends who were priests or civil servants or employees of a bank. And to top it, a decent courtship required a considerable outlay of time and money on a trinket or a pastry parlor.
But that didn´t deter him. That nose was the outward sign of an angelic soul that would surely see that his love was pure. On a more earthly plane, even an ignorant peasant girl understood that to be an artist is a noble calling, a person destined to illumine mankind, regardless of the crass social standards of wealth, status and title.
To be sure, there were many mediocrities who posed as painters because it was a softer life than being, say, an accountant. Not he, who was a genius, even if the world hadn´t recognized it yet.
So, the secret to her heart would be to show her that he was talented, hard-working and a man of feeling, with a warm and generous heart.
By the time he reached the junk shop, he had devised a plan, knowing that even angels have a little vanity He would say that he was struck by her beauty and longed to immortalize her in a portrait that would astound the world. No, he would add, he didn´t want her to pose in the nude and to ease any doubts, insist that she bring a friend or a sister along to his studio. Plus, he would pay her a fair sum for her time.
The truth is, Katia found him weird. All that transcendental stuff was meaningless to a girl who´d been orphaned at an early age and lived for years on the street scrounging for food in garbage cans before getting a 15-hour a day job that just about kept her from starvation. As for protestations of love, that was a luxury reserved for her betters. And if sex was really what he was after, the former gamine knew how to defend herself.
When they shook hands on the deal, he was repelled by her callouses, but only a little. Like her thick angles and the little mole on her neck, they were like beauty spots which highlighted the glory of her nose.
It was agreed that she would sit for him on her only free half-day, Sunday afternoon. Fortunately, the days were lengthening and there would be enough of the natural light that was essential to his work. After sprucing up his garret, he placed his canvas on the easel, with his charcoal alongside, stood on a stool and nervously looked out of the tiny window in the sloping ceiling. Five minutes which seemed like an eternity passed and just as he cursed himself for being so naïve, there she was, along with her friend, a timid mouse who sat on a stool in a corner and uttered not a word.
Katia didn´t know anything about his craft and to begin with, she was a little frightened when he would pierce her with a brief stare, grab his pencil and attack the canvas in such a frenzy it was if she wasn´t there. And then repeat, over and over again. After a few hours of sitting on a hard chair with her hands in her lap, she was aching all over, asked for a break to stretch her body and, despite his warning never to look at the picture, peeked at it when his back was turned. That first afternoon, the messy pattern of thick black lines and curves, with shading here and there, meant nothing to her. But since art was a mystery to her, she assumed that he knew what he was doing.
Still, she was intrigued and continued to sneak a look when he went to his table for another charcoal or an eraser or rag. By the time several Sundays went by, she was mystified and also indignant, because the only feature of hers which stood out was her nose, at times as though she were an elephant. Was there something wrong with it? Did the rest of her mean nothing to him?
Being observant, she could tell which part of the portrait he was working on by the movement of his eyes, head and arms and there was no doubt about what was happening: virtually of all his attention was focused on her nose and he was always dissatisfied with what he´d done. Once in a while, he would momentarily tinker with the arms or hair, but only in an absent-minded way, meanwhile cursing to himself, as though it were a waste of time.
When night fell, he would dispatch Katia and her friend with the same indifference, and return to the canvas early the next morning and continue to work on it the rest of the week. In effect, he built himself a hermitage and was thus annoyed by an unannounced visit by the merchant Fedetov, who wasn´t his usual brisk, bluff self.
“I need your help. The wifey somehow saw the nude you painted and it´s hell at home just now. So was I thinking of a peace offering, that still life you were working on a while ago”.
“Sorry, it isn´t finished and I am concentrating on something else,” he said, gesturing to his easel and simultaneously covering it with a cloth before Fedetov´s gaze could profane it.
“I won´t beat you down on the price this time: it´s an emergency!”
At the mention of money, Sergei snapped out of his daze. Even when he was in the frenzied grip of creation, Sergei hadn´t entirely lost touch with the reality of his situation. He understood that the portrait was only the first stage of his campaign to woo and win Katia. The next would be to knock off her rough edges, educate her, so she could appreciate what a distinguished fellow he was and become a suitable spouse for a cultured man. A visit to the Hermitage, a night at the opera – that sort of thing – it was going to require cash, a sizeable amount when he´d also have to invite Katia and that drab girlfriend of hers to a good restaurant or tea house afterwards. And what would happen after they wed didn´t bear thinking about –a decent flat, new furniture, fodder for two mouths instead of one, etc.
“Hmm . . .I might have something for you, but it won´t come cheap”.
Sergei opened the lock on a hidden cupboard and took out and opened a small folder.
“No so fast,” he growled when Fedetov started to handle what it contained. “The grease on your palms will ruin them”.
Fedetov lost his breath and his face turned scarlet but it was not because he felt insulted.
They were a series of pornographic engravings. As Sergei knew, he was a collector but as he hadn´t been abroad, let alone to Paris, Fedetov had never seen the like before, so polished, on the one hand, and so explicit, so rousing on the other.
Vainly trying to conceal his excitation, Fedetov said, “Seeing as you´re short of money, I´ll take them off your hands. 50 rubles, far too much, but it´s favor for an old friend.”
“300”
“Are you mad!”
Sergei started to put them away.
“Alright, 80”
“250”
“I25”
“230, take it or leave it”.
“Done”
Fedetov didn´t know whether he was more astonished by his own weakness or the steely determination he´d never seen in the painter before.
The financial side taken care of, Sergei continued to shower little treats on Katia and Maruja, her friend, who despite her meek manner, was actually a cunning shrew and kept warning the innocent Katia that, sooner or later, the brute would demand something in return.
“Something?”
Maruja whispered something in her ear and Katia blushed.
“But he´s so nice, it´s almost as though he´s falling in love with me”.
“That may be, but until you´re wearing the ring, don´t open your legs”.
Katia nearly fainted.
There´s no need to detail what happened in the following months: the posing, the outings, the presents and, eventually, the proposal, the engagement and the wedding.
Like it or not, marriage does make a man out a man, even a dreamer like Sergei and a stroke of luck helped him along. That nude, which caught the fancy of a number of Fedetov´s seedy clients from the nobility. One commission led to the next and if it hadn´t been for his devotion to her nose, whose beauty he struggled to capture over and over again, Sergei might have become one of those promising young artists who sell their souls to mammon and wind up as the fashionable and prosperous mediocrities whose landscapes and battle scenes and portraits of duchesses with their lap dogs line the walls of the annual salon of the Russian Academy of Art. Instead, he would dash off a nude whenever he was short of money –absentmindedly, as an afterthought – and then go back to his obsession.
Was it essentially erotic? Well, yes and no. Whenever the couple made love, during the part which is known as foreplay he would fondle her nose, kiss it, stroke it, even pinch her pinched nostrils at times (delicately, of course) and all the while whisper sweet nothings in her ear– “my temple, my shrine, my diamond, my love has no bounds”.
Katia, barely married and still naïve, was moved, it excited her (in a healthy way) and in quick succession, three children were born.
By then, a little more knowledgeable about the mysteries of Eros, she was no longer afraid to confide these intimacies to Maruja.
“And does he touch the rest of you: your arms, your breasts, your you-know-what?”
“I don´t understand, isn´t that how everyone . . . warms up?”
“Sure, if the guy´s a pervert. Sergei´s sick, he´s got what they call a fixation”.
At first, out of loyalty to her husband, who was treating her well in his absent way, she refused to believe it but after a while doubts crept in. Calling her his treasure, the meaning of his life, pleased her, but why did he babble about his pyramid, his prow, his cup handle? Was her body so ugly? Then there was the weird way, when they were chatting over breakfast, for example, that he would ignore what she was saying and stare and stare at her nose in a rapt silence. It couldn´t have been a pimple or a sore: despite her peasant upbringing, now that she had the means to bathe every day and use the best soap, she was scrupulously clean and her mirror showed that nothing was amiss.
Even so, she was too busy keeping house and looking after her children to give it further thought. It was someone else who did, Fedetov, a sharpster who ran various fiddles when not selling furs and had conned Sergei into letting him act as his dealer for the nudes and charged triple the commission they´d agreed on. It didn´t trouble Fedetov´s conscience because the pictures were selling well and Sergei, who had no head for business and been dirt poor for years, was grateful for the modest sums he was paid.
Now, however, there was a hitch. The clients were complaining that just when they were being aroused by the thighs or bosom or cleft of the model – all luscious, all lubricious – they would momentarily glance at the face and suddenly, to be blunt, droop. There was something askew about it which they couldn´t quite put their fingers on, until one evening when they were getting drunk in a palace on the banks of the Neva, their host, Prince Igor, who´d acquired several large Stepanoviches, peered at one with his monocle, let out a burp and exclaimed, “How dare that scoundrel Fedetov cheat me, a cousin of the Tsar no less. Fellows, it´s the nose!”.
He then collapsed and the others, who were equally pissed, took it as a jest about how none of them could see straight. It was only in the clear light of day that the ghastly truth became known (not the next morning: in that heroic age, the booze-ups of the elite lasted three days at least). The nose of one nude was crooked; another, lumpy; a third, scabrous. The smart set at once summoned Fedetov, and ordered him to clear up the mess or be horse-whipped, naked, on Nevski Prospekt.
When he burst into Sergei´s flat, he was surprised to see that the workaholic, asocial and disheveled painter had a visitor: a man of about the same age, dressed in an ultra-dandified style that was odd in a person Sergei introduced as his best friend.
Purple-faced with rage, the merchant demanded that Sergei fully reimburse both the purchasers of the nudes and himself, with an additional sum to indemnify the damage to his reputation.
“And if he doesn´t?” sneered the friend.
“I´ll have no choice but to go to the police”.
When Sergei laughed out loud, the furious Fedetov went for him with his cane, but the friend, a big burly fellow, grabbed it and kicked him down the stairs.
Humiliated but determined all the more, Fedetov went straight to the commissariat of police.
“I want to report a crime”.
“Specifically?”
He wasn´t sure whether it was assault, fraud, an insult to the Tsar or all three and flustered, could only say that it was a about a nose.
“Not another loony,” the desk sergeant sniggered to a patrolman, circling a finger round his temple.
Enjoyed this story, start to finish!