Wanka

A Christmas story, published on Christmas Day 1886. In Chekhov's Russia it was common for poor or orphaned children to be sent to the city as apprentices, often to masters who treated them as unpaid servants. The story is very short, so it is given whole, as one episode; the English keeps close to Chekhov's words and follows, with revisions, the public-domain translation by Constance Garnett. The cruelty Vanka describes in his letter is kept, as Chekhov gives it, in a child's plain words, but not dwelt on.

Vanka Zhukov, a boy of nine, who had been apprenticed for three months to Alyakhin the shoemaker, did not go to bed on Christmas Eve. He waited till his master and mistress and the journeymen had gone out to the early service, and then took out of his master's cupboard a little bottle of ink and a pen with a rusty nib, spread out a crumpled sheet of paper in front of him, and began to write. Before he traced the first letter he looked round fearfully several times at the doors and the windows, glanced sideways at the dark icon, on either side of which stretched shelves full of lasts, and heaved a broken sigh. The paper lay on a bench, and he knelt on the floor in front of it.

"Dear Grandfather, Konstantin Makarych," he wrote. "I am writing you a letter. I wish you a happy Christmas and all good things from the Lord God. I have no father and no mother, you are all I have left."

Vanka raised his eyes to the dark window, in which the reflection of his candle flickered, and vividly imagined his grandfather, Konstantin Makarych, who was night watchman on the Zhivarevs' estate. He was a small, thin, but extraordinarily lively and nimble old man of sixty-five, with an everlastingly laughing face and drunken eyes. By day he slept in the servants' kitchen or joked with the cooks; at night, wrapped in an ample sheepskin, he walked round the estate tapping on his clapper. Old Kashtanka and the dog called Eel walked after him with drooping heads. Eel was an extraordinarily respectful and affectionate dog, who looked with equally friendly eyes at friends and strangers, but could not be trusted. Under his deference and humility was hidden the most sly malice. No one knew better how to creep up and snap at your leg, to slip into the storeroom, or steal a hen from a peasant. His hind legs had been nearly broken more than once, twice he had been hanged, every week he was thrashed till he was half dead, but he always revived.

At that moment, no doubt, his grandfather was standing at the gate, screwing up his eyes at the red windows of the village church, stamping in his felt boots and joking with the servants. His clapper was hanging at his belt. He was clasping his hands, shrugging with the cold, and, with an old man's chuckle, pinching first the housemaid, then the cook.

"How about a pinch of snuff?" he was saying, offering the women his snuff-box.