Bluebeard - Kurt Vonnegut [32]
I spoke my first word to him: “Seventeen.”
“My father was only one year older than you are when I was born,” said Dan Gregory. “If you start copulating right now, you, too, can have a squalling baby by the time you’re eighteen, in a big city like this one—and far from home. You think you’re going to set this city on its ear as an artist, do you? Well—my father thought he was going to set Moscow on its ear as a horse trainer, and he found out quickly enough that the horse world there was run by Polacks, and that the highest he was ever going to rise, no matter how good he was, was to the rank of lowest stableboy. He had stolen my mother away from her people and all she knew when she was only sixteen, promising her that they would soon be rich and famous in Moscow.”
He stood and faced me. I had not budged from the top of the stairs. The new rubber heels I had put on my old broken shoes were cantilevered in air past the lip of the top step, so reluctant was I to come any farther into this dumbfoundingly complex and mirrored environment.
Gregory himself was only a head and hands now, since his caftan was black. The head said to me, “I was born in a stable like Jesus Christ, and I cried like this:”
From his throat came a harrowing counterfeit of the cries of an unwanted baby who could do nothing but cry and cry.
My hair stood on end.
12
DAN GREGORY, or Gregorian, as he was known in the Old World, was rescued from his parents when he was about five years old by the wife of an artist named Beskudnikov, who was the engraver of plates for Imperial bonds and paper currency. She did not love him. He was simply a stray, mangy animal in the city she could not stand to see abused. So she did with him what she had done with several stray cats and dogs she had brought home—handed him over to the servants to clean and raise.
“Her servants felt about me the way my servants feel about you,” Gregory said to me. “I was just one more job to do, like shoveling ashes from the stoves or cleaning the lamp chimneys or beating the rugs.”
He said he studied what the dogs and cats did to get along, and then he did that, too. “The animals spent a lot of time in Beskudnikov’s workshop, which was behind his house,” he said. “The apprentices and journeymen would pet them and give them food, so I did that, too. I did some things that other animals couldn’t do. I learned all the languages spoken there. Beskudnikov himself had studied in England and France, and he liked to give his helpers orders in one or the other of those languages, which he expected all of them to understand. Very soon I made myself useful as a translator, telling them exactly what their master had said to them. I already knew Polish and Russian, which the servants had taught me.”
“And Armenian,” I suggested.
“No,” he said. “All I ever learned from my drunken parents was how to bray like a jackass or gibber like a monkey—or snarl like a wolf.”
He said that he also mastered every craft practiced in the shop, and, like me, had a knack for catching in a quick sketch a passable likeness of almost anybody or anything. “At the age often I myself was made an apprentice,” he said.
“By the age of fifteen,” he went on, “it was obvious to everyone that I was a genius. Beskudnikov himself felt threatened, so he assigned me a task which everyone agreed was impossible. He would promote me to journeyman only after I had drawn by hand a one-ruble note, front and back, good enough to fool the sharp-eyed merchants in the marketplace.”
He grinned at me. “The penalty for counterfeiting in those days,” he said, “was a public hanging in that same marketplace.”
Young Dan Gregorian spent six months making what he and all his co-workers agreed was a perfect note. Beskudnikov called the effort childish, and tore it into little pieces.
Gregorian made an even better one, again taking six months to do so. Beskudnikov declared it to be worse than the first, and threw it into the fire.
Gregorian made still a better one, spending a full year on it this time.