The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories

Deathless Golovan

Perfect love casteth out fear.

1 JOHN 4:18

I

He himself is almost a myth, and his story a legend. To tell about him, one should be French, because only the people of that nation manage to explain to others what they don’t understand themselves. I say all this with the aim of begging my reader’s indulgence beforehand for the overall imperfection of my story of a person whose portrayal is worth the efforts of a far better master than I. But Golovan may soon be quite forgotten, and that would be a loss. Golovan is worthy of attention, and though I did not know him well enough to be able to draw his full portrait, I will select and present some features of this mortal man of no high rank who was reputed to be deathless.

The nickname “deathless,” given to Golovan, did not express mockery and was by no means an empty, meaningless sound—he was nicknamed “deathless” as a result of the strong conviction that he was a special man, a man who did not fear death. How could such an opinion of him have been formed among people who walk under God and are always mindful of their mortality? Was there a sufficient reason for it, which subsequently turned into a convention, or was this sobriquet given him by a simplicity akin to foolishness?

It seemed to me that the latter was more probable, but how others considered it I don’t know, because in my childhood I didn’t think about it, and when I grew up and could understand things, “deathless” Golovan was no longer in the world. He had died, and in a none-too-tidy manner at that: he perished during the so-called “big fire” in Orel,¹ drowned in a boiling pit, which he fell into saving someone’s life or someone’s goods. However, “a big part of him, escaping corruption, went on living in grateful memory,”² and I want to try to put down on paper what I knew and heard about him, so that his memory, which is deserving of attention, may be prolonged in the world.

II

Deathless Golovan was a simple man. His face, with its extraordinarily large features, was stamped in my memory early on and remained in it forever. I met him at an age when they say children cannot receive lasting impressions and carry the memory of them all their lives, but it happened otherwise with me. This incident was recorded by my grandmother in the following way:

“Yesterday [May 26, 1835], I came from Gorokhov to see Mashenka [my mother], did not find Semyon Dmitrich [my father] at home, him having been sent on a mission to Elets for an inquest into a frightful murder. In the whole house there were just us women and the serving girls. The coachman went with him [my father], there was only the yard porter Kondrat left, and in the evening a watchman came from the office [the government office, where my father was a councilor] to spend the night in the front hall. Today between eleven and twelve Mashenka went to the garden to look at the flowers and water her costmary, and took Nikolushka [me] along with her, carried by Anna [now an old woman, still living]. And when they came back for lunch, Anna was just opening the garden gate when the dog Ryabka tore free of her chain and flung herself straight onto Anna’s breast, but at the very moment that Ryabka, raising her paws, threw herself on Anna’s breast, Golovan seized her by the scruff of the neck, held her tight, and threw her through the trapdoor into the cellar. There she was shot, but the child was saved.”

The child was me, and however accurate the proofs may be that an infant of one and a half cannot remember what happens to him, I nevertheless remember this occurrence.

Of course, I don’t remember where the rabid Ryabka came from and what Golovan did with her, after he held her high up in his iron grip, wheezing, flailing her legs, her whole body squirming; but I do remember that moment … only that moment. It was like a flash of lightning amidst the dark of night, when for some reason you suddenly see an extraordinary multitude of things at once: the bed canopy, the folding screen, the window, the canary fluttering on its perch, and a glass with a silver spoon in it and spots of magnesium on its handle. It is probably the quality of fear to have big eyes. In that one moment I can see before me, as now, a dog’s enormous muzzle with little speckles, dry fur, completely red eyes, a gaping maw filled with cloudy foam in a bluish, as if pomaded, gullet … bared teeth that already want to snap shut, but suddenly the upper lip is wrenched back over them, the mouth is stretched to the ears, and the thrust-out throat below moves convulsively, like a bared human elbow. Above it all stood an enormous human figure with an enormous head, and he took the rabid dog and carried it off. And the man’s face was smiling all the while.

The figure I’ve described was Golovan. I’m afraid I’m quite unable to paint his portrait, precisely because I see him very well and clearly.

Like Peter the Great, he was nearly seven feet tall; he was broadly built, lean and muscular; he was swarthy, had a round face, blue eyes, a very big nose, and thick lips. The hair on Golovan’s head and trimmed beard was very thick, the color of salt and pepper. His head was always close-cropped, his beard and mustache were also clipped. The calm and happy smile never left Golovan’s face for a minute: it shone in his every feature, but played mostly on his lips and in his eyes, intelligent and kind, but as if slightly mocking. It seemed Golovan had no other expression, at least none that I remember. To supplement this unskillful portrait of Golovan, it is necessary to mention one oddity or peculiarity, which consisted in his gait. Golovan walked very quickly, as if he was always hurrying somewhere, not evenly, though, but with little hops. He didn’t limp, but, in a local expression, “hitched”—that is, he stepped firmly on one leg, the right one, but on the left leg he hopped. It seemed as if the leg didn’t flex, but had a spring in it somewhere, in a muscle or a joint. People walk that way on an artificial leg, but Golovan’s wasn’t artificial; however, this peculiarity also did not come from nature; he brought it about himself, and there was a secret in it, which can’t be explained straight off.

Golovan dressed as a muzhik—summer and winter, in scorching heat and freezing cold, he always wore a long, raw sheepskin coat, all greasy and blackened. I never saw him in any other clothes, and I remember my father often joked about that coat, calling it “everlasting.”

Golovan belted his coat with a strap of white laminated harness, which had turned yellow in many places and in others had flaked off completely, exposing the wax-end and holes. But the coat was kept clean of various little tenants—I knew that better than anyone, because I often sat in Golovan’s bosom listening to his talk and always felt myself very comfortable there.

The wide collar of the coat was never buttoned, but, on the contrary, was left wide open to the waist. Here was the “bosom,” offering a very ample space for bottles of cream, which Golovan provided to the kitchen of the Orel Assembly of the Nobility.³ That had been his trade ever since he “went free” and was given a “Ermolov cow” to start out.

The powerful chest of the “deathless” was covered only with a linen shirt of Ukrainian cut, that is, with a standing collar, always white as milk and unfailingly with long, bright-colored ties. These ties were sometimes a ribbon, sometimes simply a strip of woolen cloth or even cotton, but they lent something fresh and gentlemanly to Golovan’s appearance, which suited him very well, because he was in fact a gentleman.

III

Golovan was our neighbor. Our house in Orel was on Third Dvoryanskaya Street, and it stood third in from the precipitous bank above the river Orlik. It’s a rather beautiful spot. At that time, before the fires, this was the edge of the city proper. To the right, beyond the Orlik, lay the small outlying hovels of the neighborhood adjoining the city center, which ended with the church of St. Basil the Great. To the side was the very steep and uncomfortable descent down the bank, and behind, beyond the gardens, a deep ravine, with open pasture beyond it, on which some sort of storehouse stuck up. In the morning, soldiers’ drills and beatings with rods took place there—the earliest pictures I saw and watched more often than anything else. On that same pasture, or, better to say, on the narrow strip that separated our fenced gardens from the ravine, grazed Golovan’s six or seven cows and the red bull of the Ermolov breed, which also belonged to him. Golovan kept the bull for his small but excellent herd, and also took him around on a halter to “lend” him to those who had need of him for breeding. That brought him some income.

Golovan’s means of livelihood consisted of his milk cows and their healthy spouse. Golovan, as I said above, provided the club of the nobility with cream and milk, which were famous for their high quality, owing, of course, to the good breed of his cattle and his good care of them. The butter supplied by Golovan was fresh, yellow as egg yolk, and fragrant, and the cream “didn’t flow”—that is, if you turned the bottle neck down, the cream did not pour out in a stream, but fell out in a thick, heavy mass. Golovan didn’t deal in products of inferior quality, and therefore he had no rivals, and the nobility of that time not only knew how to eat well, but also had the means to pay for it. Besides that, Golovan also supplied the same club with excellent big eggs from his especially big Dutch hens, of which he kept a great many, and, finally, he “prepared calves,” fattening them expertly and always on time, for instance, for the largest gathering of the nobility or other special occasions in noble circles.

In view of these things, which Golovan depended on as a means of livelihood, it was very handy for him to stick close to the streets of the nobility, where he provided for interesting individuals, whom the Orlovians recognized once upon a time in Panshin, Lavretsky, and other heroes and heroines of A Nest of Gentlefolk.⁴

Golovan lived, however, not on the street itself, but “apart.” The construction that was known as “Golovan’s house” stood not in the row of houses, but on a small terrace of the bank, below the left side of the street. The surface of this terrace was some forty feet in length and about the same in width. It was a ledge of earth that had slid down once, but had stopped on its way, stuck there, and, offering no firm support, hardly constituted anyone’s property. Back then it was still possible.

Golovan’s construction could be called neither a barn nor a house in the proper sense. It was a big, low shed that took up all the space of the fallen ledge. It may be that this formless building was erected there long before the ledge decided to descend, and at that time was part of the nearest household, whose owner did not chase after it, but ceded it to Golovan for the low price that the mighty man could offer him. I even remember it being said that this shed was given to Golovan for some service, at the rendering of which he was a great and willing master.

The shed was divided in two: one half, plastered and whitewashed, with three windows looking out on the Orlik, served as living quarters for Golovan and the five women who were with him; in the other, stalls were made for the cows and bull. In the low garret lived the Dutch hens and a black “Spanish” cock, who lived for a very long time and was considered a “wizard’s bird.” In him Golovan was growing a cock’s stone, which was useful in a great many cases: to bring happiness, to recover a state fallen into enemy hands, to transform old people into young. This stone ripens for seven years and is fully ripe only when the cock stops crowing.

The shed was so big that both parts—for people and for cattle—were very roomy, but, despite all the care taken over it, it held warmth poorly. However, warmth was needed only for the women, while Golovan himself, being insensible to atmospheric changes, slept both summer and winter on an osier mat in a stall, beside his favorite—the red Tyrolean bull Vaska. Cold didn’t get to him, and that constituted one of the peculiarities of this mythical person, which earned him his legendary reputation.

Of the five women living with Golovan, three were his sisters, one was his mother, and the fifth was called Pavla, or sometimes Pavlageyushka. But more often she was called “Golovan’s sin.” I was used to hearing that since childhood, when I still didn’t even understand the meaning of the insinuation. For me this Pavla was simply a very affectionate woman, and I can remember as now her tall stature, pale face with bright red spots on the cheeks, and eyebrows of an extraordinary blackness and regularity.

Such black eyebrows in regular half circles could only be seen in pictures portraying a Persian woman reclining on the knees of an elderly Turk. Our girls knew, however, and explained to me very early on, the secret of those eyebrows: the thing was that Golovan was a potion-maker and, loving Pavla, he anointed her eyes with bear grease while she slept, so that no one would recognize her. After that, naturally, there was nothing remarkable about Pavla’s eyebrows, and she became attached to Golovan by a power other than her own.

Our girls knew all that.

Pavla herself was an extraordinarily meek and “ever silent” woman. She was so silent that I never heard more than one word from her, and that the most necessary: “greetings,” “sit,” “good-bye.” But in each of these brief words could be heard no end of welcome, benevolence, and kindness. The same was expressed in the sound of her quiet voice, in the gaze of her gray eyes, and in her every movement. I also remember that she had remarkably beautiful hands, which constitutes a great rarity in the working class, and she was such a worker that her industriousness distinguished her even in Golovan’s hardworking family.

They all had a great deal to do there: the “deathless” himself had work at the boil from morning till late at night. He was a herdsman, and a deliveryman, and a cheese-maker. At dawn he drove his herd into the dew beyond our fences, and he kept moving his stately cows from ledge to ledge, choosing where the grass was lusher. When people were just getting up in our house, Golovan would already appear with the empty bottles he had taken from the club in place of the new ones he had brought there that day; with his own hands he would hollow out the ice in our ice house for his jugs of freshly drawn milk, while talking something over with my father, and when I went out to the garden after finishing my lessons, he would already be sitting outside our fence again, tending his cows. There was a small gate in the fence, through which I could go out to Golovan and talk with him. He was so good at telling the hundred and four sacred stories that I knew them from him without ever learning them from a book.⁵ Some simple folk also used to come to him there—always seeking advice. One of them would come and begin like this:

“I’ve been looking for you, Golovan. Give me some advice.”

“What is it?”

“This and that: something’s going wrong in the household, or there’s family discord.”

Most often they came with matters of this second category. Golovan would listen, while plaiting osier or shouting to the cows, and smiling all the while, as if paying no attention, and then he would raise his blue eyes to his interlocutor and reply:

“I’m a poor adviser, brother! Ask God’s advice.”

“How can I do that?”

“Oh, very simple, brother: pray and then do as you would if you had to die at once. Tell me: what would you do in that case?”

The man would think and reply.

Golovan would agree, or else say:

“And if I was the one to die, brother, I’d rather do this.”

And he usually said it all quite cheerfully, with his customary smile.

His advice must have been very good, because people always listened to it and thanked him very much.

Could there be a “sin” for such a man in the person of the most meek Pavlageyushka, who at that time, I think, was a little over thirty, a limit she was not to go beyond? I didn’t understand that “sin” and in my innocence did not insult her and Golovan by rather general suspicions. Yet there were grounds for suspicion, and very strong grounds, even irrefutable, judging by appearances. Who was she to Golovan? A stranger. Not only that: he had known her once, they had belonged to the same masters, Golovan had wanted to marry her, but it hadn’t taken place. He had been sent to serve the hero of the Caucasus, Alexei Petrovich Ermolov,⁶ and meanwhile Pavla had been given in marriage to the horse-master Ferapont, or “Khrapon,” as the locals said. Golovan had been a needed and useful servant, because he could do everything—he was not only a good cook and confectioner, but a keen-witted and ready servant on campaign. Alexei Petrovich had paid what he owed to his landowner for Golovan, and besides, they say, had lent Golovan the money to buy himself out. I don’t know if that’s true, but soon after he returned from serving Ermolov, Golovan did indeed buy himself out and always called Alexei Petrovich his “benefactor.” And once Golovan was free, Alexei Petrovich gave him a good cow and calf for his farm, from which came Golovan’s “Ermolov breed.”

IV

Precisely when Golovan settled in the shed on the landslip I don’t know at all, but it coincided with the first days of his “freemanship”—when he was faced with major concerns about his kin, who remained in servitude. Golovan bought himself out personally, but his mother, his three sisters, and his aunt, who later became my nanny, remained “in bondage.” And their tenderly beloved Pavla, or Pavlageyushka, was in the same position. Golovan made it his first concern to buy them all out, and for that he needed money. His expertise qualified him to become a cook or a confectioner, but he preferred something else, namely dairy farming, which he started with the help of the “Ermolov cow.” There was an opinion that he chose that because he himself was a molokan.⁷ Maybe that simply meant that he always busied himself with milk, but maybe the title aimed directly at his faith, in which he appeared as odd as in his many other doings. It’s very possible that he had known molokans in the Caucasus, and had borrowed something from them. But that has to do with his oddities, which we will touch upon below.

The dairy farming went beautifully: in some three years, Golovan already had two cows and a bull, then three, four cows, and he had made enough money to buy out his mother, then each year he bought out a sister, and brought them all together in his roomy but chilly hovel. In that way, after six or seven years, he had freed his whole family, but the beauty Pavla had flown from him. By the time he was able to buy her out as well, she was already far away. Her husband, the horse-master Khrapon, was a bad man—he had not pleased his master in something, and, as an example to others, had been sent as a soldier without conscription.

In the service, Khrapon landed among the “gallopers,” that is, as a rider in the Moscow fire brigade, and had his wife sent there; but he soon did something bad there as well and ran away, and his abandoned wife, having a quiet and timid character, feared the whirl of life in the capital and returned to Orel. Here she also didn’t find any support in her old place and, driven by need, she went to Golovan. He, naturally, took her in at once and placed her in the same big room where his sisters and mother lived. How Golovan’s mother and sisters looked upon the installing of Pavla, I don’t know for certain, but it didn’t sow any discord in their house. The women all lived in great friendship with each other, and even loved poor Pavlageyushka very much, and Golovan paid equal attention to them all, except for the special respect he showed his mother, who was now so old that in summer he carried her out to the sun in his arms, like a sick child. I remember how she “went off” into terrible coughing fits and kept praying to be “taken.”

All of Golovan’s sisters were old maids, and they all helped their brother on the farm: they mucked out and milked the cows, tended the hens, and spun an extraordinary yarn, from which they then wove extraordinary fabrics such as I’ve never seen since. This yarn went by the very unattractive name of “spittings.” Golovan brought material for it from somewhere in bags, and I saw and remember that material: it consisted of small, twiggy scraps of various colored cotton thread. Each scrap was from two to ten inches long, and on each such scrap there was sure to be a more or less fat knot or snarl. Where Golovan got these scraps I don’t know, but it was obviously factory refuse. That’s also what his sisters told me.

“They spin and weave cotton there, dearest,” they said to me, “and each time they come upon a knot, they tear it off and spit it out on the floor, because it won’t go through the reed. My brother gathers them up, and we make warm blankets out of them.”

I saw how they patiently sorted these pieces of thread, tied them together, wound the resulting motley, multicolored threads on long spools. Then they spliced them together, spun them into thicker ones stretched along the wall on pegs, sorted those of the same color for stripes, and finally wove these “spittings” through a special reed into “spitting blankets.” These blankets looked like today’s woolen ones, each with the same two stripes, but the fabric was always marbleized. The knots in them were somehow smoothed out from the spinning, and though they were, of course, very noticeable, that did not keep the blankets from being light, warm, and sometimes even rather pretty. Besides, they were sold very cheaply—at less than a rouble apiece.

This cottage industry in Golovan’s family went on nonstop, and he probably had no trouble finding a market for the spitting blankets.

Pavlageyushka also tied and spun the spittings and wove blankets, but, besides that, in her zeal for the family that had given her shelter, she also took on all the heaviest work in the house: went down the steep bank to the Orlik for water, brought in fuel, and so on and so forth.

Firewood in Orel was already very expensive even then, and poor people heated either with buckwheat chaff or with dung, and the latter required big provisions.

All this Pavla did with her slender hands, in eternal silence, looking at God’s world from under her Persian eyebrows. Whether she knew that her name was “sin” I am not aware, but that was her name among the people, who stand firmly by the nicknames they invent. And how else could it be? Where a woman, a loving one, lives in the house of a man who loved her and sought to marry her, there is, of course, sin. And indeed, back in my childhood, when I first saw Pavla, she was unanimously considered “Golovan’s sin,” but Golovan himself did not lose the least bit of general respect on account of it and kept his nickname of “deathless.”

V

People started calling Golovan “deathless” in the first year, when he settled by himself above the Orlik with his Ermolov cow and her calf. The occasion for it was the following wholly trustworthy circumstance, which nobody remembered about in the time of the recent “Prokofy” plague. It was the usual hard times in Orel, and in February, on the day of St. Agafya the Dairymaid,⁸ the “cow death” fittingly swept through the villages. It went as it usually does and as it is written in the universal book known as The Cool Vineyard:⁹ “As summer comes to an end and autumn draws near, the pestilential infection soon begins. And during that time it is needful that every man place his hope in almighty God and in His most pure Mother, and protect himself with the power of the honorable Cross, and hold back his heart from grief, and dread, and painful thoughts, for through these the human heart is diminished, and sores and cankers soon stick to it—seize the brain and heart, overcome the man, and he dies forthwith.” All this also went according to the usual pictures of the nature around us, “when the mists in autumn set in thick and dark, with wind from the meridian lands, followed by rain, and the earth steams in the sun, and then it is needful not to go out in the wind, but to sit in the warmth of the cottage and not open the windows, and best would be not to stay in that town, but to leave it and go to clean places.” When, that is, in what precise year, the pestilence occurred that gave Golovan his fame for being “deathless,” I don’t know. There was no great interest then in such trifles, and no noise was made on account of them, as there was on account of Naum Prokofiev.¹⁰ Local woes used to end locally, appeased by hope in God and His most pure Mother alone, and perhaps only in cases of the strong predominance of the sensible “intellectuals” in certain locales were unusual sanitary measures taken: “Build clean bonfires in the yards, of oak wood, so that the smoke disperses, and in the cottages burn wormwood and juniper and rue leaves.” But all that could be done only by intellectuals, and only well-to-do ones at that, while death carried off “forthwith” not the educated, but those who had no time to sit in warm cottages and were not up to burning oak wood in open yards. Death went arm in arm with famine, and they supported each other. The famished begged from the famished, the sick died “forthwith,” that is, quickly, which was more advantageous for peasants. There was no lengthy languishing, no rumors of recoveries were heard. Whoever fell sick, died “forthwith,” except for one man. What illness it was has not been scientifically determined, but it was popularly known as “bosom,” or “boil,” or “oilcake carbuncle,” or even just “carbuncle.” It started in grain-producing districts, where, for lack of bread, they ate hempseed oilcakes. In the districts of Karachev and Bryansk, where peasants mixed unsifted flour with ground bark, the illness was different, also deadly, but not “carbuncle.” “Carbuncle” first appeared in cattle, and was then transmitted to people. “A red sore breaks out on a man’s bosom or neck, and he gets stitches all over his body, and an unquenchable burning inside, or a sort of chill in his limbs and heavy breathing, and he cannot breathe—he tries to draw a breath, but lets it out at once; he gets sleepy, cannot stop sleeping; feels a bitterness or sourness in the mouth and starts to vomit; the man’s countenance changes, a claylike look comes over him, and he dies forthwith.” Maybe it was anthrax, maybe it was some other pest, but in any case it was pernicious and merciless, and its most widespread name, I repeat again, was “carbuncle.” A pimple breaks out on your body, a “carbuncle” as simple folk called it, turns yellow-headed, reddens all around, and by morning the flesh begins to rot, and then it’s death forthwith. A quick death was seen, however, “in a good light.” The end was quiet, not painful, most peasant-like, only the dying all wanted to drink till the last minute. That constituted all the brief and unwearisome care demanded, or, better to say, begged for by the sick. Though caring for them even in this form was not only dangerous, but almost impossible—a man who gave a sick relation a drink today, would fall sick with “carbuncle” himself tomorrow, and it was not rare in a house to have two or three dead people lying next to each other. The last person in these orphaned houses died without help—without that one help our peasant cared about, “that someone give him a drink.” Such an orphan would first put a bucket of water by his head and drink from a dipper as long as he could raise his arm, and then he would twist a sleeve or shirttail, wet it, put it in his mouth, and go stiff like that.

A great personal calamity is a poor teacher of mercy. At least it has no good effect on people of ordinary, mediocre morality, which doesn’t rise above the level of mere compassion. It dulls the sensitivity of the heart, which suffers painfully itself and is filled with the sense of its own torment. Instead, in such woeful moments of general calamity, the people’s milieu brings forth of itself heroes of magnanimity, fearless and selfless. In ordinary times they are not conspicuous and often are in no way distinguishable from the masses: but let “carbuncle” fall upon the people, and the people produce a chosen one for themselves, and he works wonders, which make of him a mythical, legendary, deathless person. Golovan was one of these, and during the very first plague he surpassed and eclipsed in people’s minds another remarkable local man, the merchant Ivan Ivanovich Androsov. Androsov was an honorable old man, respected and loved for his kindness and fairness, for he was “ready helpful” in all the people’s calamities. He also helped during the “plague,” because he had a written “treatment,” and he “recopied it all in multiples.” These copies of his were taken and read in various places, but nobody understood them or “knew how to go about it.” It was written: “Should a sore appear on the head or another place above the waist, let much blood from the median; should it appear on the brow, quickly let blood from under the tongue; should it appear by the ears or under the chin, let blood from the cephalic vein, but should it appear under one of the breasts, it means the heart is affected, and then the median should be opened on that side.” For each place “where a burden is felt,” it was written which vein to open: the “saphena,” or “the one opposite the thumb, or the spatic artery, the pulmatic, or the basical,” with the recommendation to “let the blood flow, till such time as it turns green and changes aspect.” And to treat also “with remedies of athelaea, sealed earth or Armenian earth, Malvasian wine, bugloss vodka, Venetian virian, mithridate, and Manus-Christi sugar.”¹¹ And those who entered the sickroom were advised “to hold Angelica root in their mouths, wormwood in their hands, have their nostrils wetted with wild rose vinegar, and sniff a vinegar-soaked sponge.” No one could make anything of it, as in official decrees, which have been written and rewritten, this way and that, and “in foursome thereforesomes.” The veins couldn’t be found, nor the Malvasian wine, nor the Armenian earth, nor the bugloss vodka, and people read good old Androsov’s copies more only so as to “quench my sorrows.” All they could apply were the concluding words: “And where there be plague, it behooves you not to go to those places, but to go away.” That was what most people followed, and Ivan Ivanovich himself adhered to the same rule and sat in his warm cottage and dispensed his medical prescriptions through a little slot, holding his breath and keeping angelica root in his mouth. The only ones who could enter a sickroom safely were those who had deer’s tears or a bezoar-stone;¹² but Ivan Ivanovich had neither deer’s tears nor a bezoar-stone, and while a bezoar-stone might have been found in the pharmacies on Bolkhovskaya Street, the pharmacists were one a Pole, the other a German, and they had no proper pity for Russian people and saved the bezoar-stones for themselves. This was fully trustworthy, because when one of the Orel pharmacists lost his bezoar, his ears began to turn yellow right there in the street, one eye grew smaller than the other, he started trembling, and though he wanted to sweat and for that asked them at home to put hot bricks to his soles, all the same he didn’t sweat, but died in a dry shirt. A great many people searched for the pharmacist’s lost bezoar, and somebody did find it, only not Ivan Ivanovich, because he also died.

And so in this terrible time, when the intellectuals wiped themselves with vinegar and did not give up the ghost, the “carbuncle” swept still more fiercely through the poor village huts; people began to die here “wholesale and with no help at all”—and suddenly, there, on the field of death, with astonishing fearlessness, appeared Golovan. He probably knew, or thought he knew, something of medicine, because he put a “Caucasian plaster” of his own making on the sick people’s swellings; but this Caucasian, or Ermolov, plaster of his was of little help. Like Androsov, Golovan did not cure the “carbuncle,” but his service to the sick and the healthy was great in this respect, that he went dauntlessly into the plague-stricken hovels and gave the infected not only fresh water but also the skim milk he had left after removing the cream for the club. In the early morning, before dawn, he crossed the Orlik on a shed gate he had taken off its hinges (there was no boat there), and went from hovel to hovel, his boundless bosom filled with bottles, moistening the dry lips of the dying from a flask, or putting a chalk cross on the door, if the drama of life was already over there and the curtain of death had been drawn on the last of its actors.

From then on the hitherto little-known Golovan became widely known in all the villages, and a great popular attraction to him began. His name, previously familiar to the servants in noble houses, came to be uttered with respect among simple folk; they began to see him as a man who not only could “replace the late Ivan Ivanovich Androsov, but meant even more than he to both God and men.” And they weren’t slow in finding a supernatural explanation for the very fearlessness of Golovan: Golovan obviously knew something, and by virtue of such knowledge he was deathless …

Later it turned out that it was precisely so: the herdsman Panka helped to explain it all, having seen Golovan do something incredible, and it was confirmed by other circumstances.

The pest did not touch Golovan. All the while it raged in the villages, neither he himself nor his Ermolov cow and calf got sick; but that wasn’t all: the most important thing was that he deceived and expelled—or, keeping to local speech, “denihilated”—the pest itself, and he did it not sparing his own warm blood for the peasant folk.

The bezoar-stone lost by the pharmacist was with Golovan. How he got it was not known. It was supposed that Golovan had been taking cream to the pharmacist for “daily unction,” had spotted the stone and secreted it away. Whether such secreting away is held to be honest or dishonest, there was no strong criticism of it, and there shouldn’t have been. If it is no sin to take and secrete away eatables, because God gives eatables to everybody, then still less is it blameworthy to take a healing substance, if it is meant for general salvation. So our people judge, and so say I. Golovan, having secreted away the pharmacist’s stone, acted magnanimously with it, letting it be of general benefit to the whole of Christendom.

All this, as I said above, was discovered by Panka, and the general intelligence of the people cleared it up.

VI

Panka, a muzhik with different-colored eyes and sun-bleached hair, was a herdsman’s helper, and besides his general herding duties, he also drove the rebaptizers’¹³ cows out to the dew in the morning. Being thus occupied early one morning, he spied out the whole business that raised Golovan to the height of popular greatness.

It was in springtime, doubtless soon after young St. George,¹⁴ bright and brave, rode out to the emerald Russian fields, his arms in red gold to the elbows, his legs in pure silver to the knees, on his brow the sun, on his nape the crescent moon, on all sides the moving stars, and the honest, righteous people of God drove their cattle big and small to meet him. The grass was still so short that the sheep and goats had barely enough, and the thick-lipped cows could take little. But in the shade under the fences and in the ditches, wormwood and nettles were already sprouting, which could be eaten at need with the dew.

Panka drove the rebaptizers’ cows out early, still in darkness, and led them straight along the bank of the Orlik to a clearing beyond the outskirts, just across from the end of Third Dvoryanskaya Street, where on one sloping side lay the old “city” garden, as it was known, and on the left Golovan’s nest clung to its ledge.

It was still cold in the morning, especially before dawn, and to someone who wants to sleep it feels even colder. Panka’s clothes, naturally, were poor, orphan-like, some sort of rags with hole upon hole. The lad turned one way, then the other, praying that St. Prokop would warm him up, but instead the cold went on. As soon as he closed his eyes, a little wind would sneak, sneak through a rip and awaken him again. However, young strength held its own: Panka pulled his coat over his head like a tent and dozed off. He didn’t hear what hour it was, because the green bell tower of the Theophany church was far away. And there was no one around, not a human soul, only fat merchants’ cows huffing, and every once in a while a frisky perch splashed in the Orlik. The herdsman slumbered in his tattered coat. But then it was as if something suddenly nudged him in the side—zephyr had probably found a new hole somewhere. Panka roused himself, looked around half-awake, was about to shout: “What are you up to, hornless!” and stopped. It seemed to him that somebody was going down the steep slope on the other side. Maybe a thief wanted to bury some stolen thing in the clay. Panka became interested: maybe he would sneak up on the thief and catch him red-handed, or shout “Let’s go halves,” or, better still, try to take good note of the burial place, then swim across the Orlik during the day, dig it up, and take it all for himself without sharing.

Panka began to stare, looking at the steep slope across the Orlik. It was still barely gray outside.

Somebody comes down the slope, steps out on the water, and begins to walk. Just simply walks on the water, as if on dry land, and doesn’t row with anything, but only leans on a stick. Panka was dumbfounded. A miracle was expected then in the Orel monastery, and voices had already been heard from under the floor. This began right after “Nikodim’s funeral.” Bishop Nikodim¹⁵ was a wicked man, who distinguished himself towards the end of his earthly career by this: that, wishing to have yet another decoration, he sought to please by sending a great many clerics as soldiers, among whom there were some only sons and even married deacons and sacristans. A whole party of them was leaving town, pouring out tears. Those seeing them off were also sobbing, and simple folk themselves, for all their dislike of well-stuffed priestly britches, wept and gave them alms. The officer of the party himself felt so sorry for them that, wishing to put an end to the tears, he ordered the new recruits to strike up a song, and when the chorus sang out loud and clear a song they themselves had composed:

Our old bishop Nikodim

Is as cruel as he is mean,

the officer himself supposedly burst out weeping. All this was drowned in a sea of tears and for sensitive souls represented an evil that cried out to heaven. And indeed, just as their cries reached heaven, “voices” came to Orel. At first the “voices” were inarticulate and it was not known who they came from, but when Nikodim died soon after that and was buried under the church, then the talking clearly came from a bishop buried there previously to him (Apollos, it seems¹⁶). The previously departed bishop was displeased with his new neighbor and, ashamed at nothing, said directly: “Take this carrion out of here, he makes me choke.” And he even threatened that, if the “carrion” was not removed, he himself “would go and appear in another town.” Many people heard it. They would come to the monastery for the vigil, stand through the service, and on the way out hear the old bishop moan: “Take the carrion away.” Everyone wished very much that the request of the kindly deceased be fulfilled, but the authorities, who are not always attentive to the needs of the people, did not throw Nikodim out, and the saint who was clearly revealing himself¹⁷ might at any moment “quit the premises.”

None other than that very thing was now happening: the saint was leaving, and no one saw him but one poor little shepherd, who was so bewildered by it that he not only did not hold him back, but did not even notice how the saint vanished from his sight. Dawn was just beginning to break. With light a man’s courage grows, and with courage his curiosity increases. Panka wanted to go near the water over which the mysterious being had just passed; but as soon as he came near, he saw a big, wet gate held to the bank by a pole. The matter became clear: meaning it had not been the saint passing over, but simply deathless Golovan floating. He had probably gone to comfort some orphaned children with milk from his bosom. Panka marveled: when did this Golovan sleep! … And how could such a huge man as he float on such a vessel—on half a gate? True, the Orlik is not a big river and its water, held back by a dam further down, is quiet as a puddle, but even so, what was this floating on a gate?

Panka decided to try it himself. He stepped onto the gate, took the pole, and, for a lark, crossed to the other side, got off on the bank there to have a look at Golovan’s house, because it was already good and bright, and meanwhile Golovan cried out just then from the other side: “Hey! Who made off with my gate! Bring it back!”

Panka was a lad of no great courage and was not used to counting on anybody’s magnanimity, and therefore he got frightened and did a foolish thing. Instead of bringing Golovan his raft, Panka went and hid himself in one of the clay pits, of which there were a multitude there. Panka lay in the pit and, no matter how Golovan called from the other side, he did not show himself. Then, seeing that he couldn’t get his boat back, Golovan threw off his coat, stripped naked, tied his whole wardrobe up with his belt, put it on his head, and swam across the Orlik. The water was still very cold.

Panka’s only care was that Golovan shouldn’t see him and give him a beating, but soon his attention was drawn to something else. Golovan crossed the river and began to get dressed, but suddenly he squatted down, looked under his left knee, and paused.

This was so close to the pit Panka was hiding in that he could see everything from behind the hummock that shielded him. And it was already quite light by then, dawn was blushing, and though most of the citizens were still asleep, a young fellow with a scythe appeared by the city garden and started mowing the nettles and putting them in a basket.

Golovan noticed the mower and, standing up in nothing but his shirt, shouted loudly to him:

“Hey, boy, give me that scythe, quick!”

The boy brought him the scythe, and Golovan said to him:

“Go and pick me a big burdock leaf.” And when the fellow turned away from him, he took the blade off the handle, squatted down again, pulled at his left calf with one hand, and with one stroke cut it off. He hurled the cut-off hunk of flesh, the size of a peasant flat-cake, into the Orlik, pressed the wound with both hands, and collapsed.

Seeing that, Panka forgot everything, jumped out, and started calling the mower.

The two fellows picked Golovan up and carried him to his house. There he came to his senses, and told them to take two towels from a trunk and bind the wound as tight as they could. They tightened it with all their might, and it stopped bleeding.

Then Golovan told them to set a bucket of water and a dipper beside him, go about their business, and not tell anybody what had happened. They went, shaking with horror, and told everybody. Those who heard about it figured out at once that Golovan hadn’t done it just like that, but, out of heartache for the people, had thrown the hunk of his body to the pest, so that this sacrificed hunk would pass down all the Russian rivers from the little Orlik to the Oka, from the Oka to the Volga, all across Great Russia to the wide Caspian Sea, and in that way Golovan suffered for all, and he himself would not die from it, because he possessed the pharmacist’s living stone and was a “deathless” man.

This story suited everybody’s thinking, and the prophecy also came true. Golovan did not die of his terrible wound. The evil sickness actually stopped after this sacrifice, and days of tranquillity set in: the fields and meadows were lush with green growth, and young St. George, bright and brave, could now freely ride over them, his arms in red gold to the elbows, his legs in pure silver to the knees, on his brow the sun, on his nape the crescent moon, and around him the moving stars. Canvas was bleached by the fresh St. George’s dew, and instead of the hero St. George, the prophet Jeremiah rode out to the field with a heavy yoke, dragging ploughs and harrows, nightingales whistled on St. Boris’s day, comforting the martyr, sturdy seedlings, owing to the efforts of St. Mavra, showed their bluish sprouts, St. Zosima passed with a long cane bearing a queen bee on its head; the day of St. John the Theologian, “father of St. Nicholas,” passed, and Nicholas himself was celebrated, and then came Simon the Zealot, when the earth celebrates its own day.¹⁸ On the earth’s day Golovan crept outside to sit by the wall, and after that he began little by little to walk and take up his business again. His health, evidently, hadn’t suffered in the least, only he began to “hitch”—hopping on his left leg.

Of the touchingness and courage of his bloody act upon himself people probably had a high opinion, but they judged it as I’ve said: they did not seek natural causes for it, but, wrapping it all in their own fantasy, from a natural event composed a fabulous legend, and of simple, magnanimous Golovan made a mythical personage, something like a magician or sorcerer, who possessed an invincible talisman and could venture upon anything and would perish nowhere.

Whether Golovan was aware or not that popular rumor attributed such deeds to him—I don’t know. However, I think he was, because people very often turned to him with requests and questions such as one would only turn to a good magician with. And to many such questions he gave “helpful advice,” and generally he did not frown at any requests. In the country roundabout he would be now a cow doctor, now a human doctor, or an engineer, or an astrologer, or a pharmacist. He knew how to get rid of mange and scabs, once again with some sort of “Ermolov ointment,” the cost of which was one copper kopeck for three people; he removed fever from the head with pickled cucumber; he knew that herbs should be gathered from St. John’s to St. Peter-and-Paul’s, and was excellent at “dowsing,” that is, at showing where a well should be dug. But he couldn’t do that all the time, but only from the beginning of June till St. Theodore of the Wells, when “you could hear how the water goes through the joints of the earth.”¹⁹ Golovan could also do everything else a man needs, but he had given God a pledge against the rest for stopping the pestilence. He had sealed it then with his blood, and he held firm to it. God loved him for that and had mercy on him, and the people, delicate in their feelings, never asked anything of Golovan that ought not to be asked. According to the people’s etiquette—that’s how it’s done with us.

Golovan, however, was so little burdened by the mystical cloud that popular fama shrouded him in, that he made no effort to undo the image people had formed of him. He knew it would be useless.

When I eagerly leafed through Victor Hugo’s novel Toilers of the Sea and there met Gilliatt, with his brilliantly outlined severity towards himself and indulgence towards others, which reached the point of utter selflessness, I was struck not only by the grandeur of the figure and the power of its portrayal, but also by the similarity of the Guernsey hero to the living person I had known under the name of Golovan. In them lived the same spirit and in both a like heart beat selflessly. They did not differ much in their fates: all their lives some sort of mystery thickened around them, precisely because they were all too pure and clear, and to the lot of the one as of the other there fell not a single drop of personal happiness.

VII

Golovan, like Gilliat, seemed to be “of dubious faith.”

He was thought to be some sort of schismatic, but that was not so important, because in Orel at that time there were many different beliefs: there were (and probably still are now) simple Old Believers, as well as not so simple ones—Fedoseevans, “Pilipons,” and the rebaptizers, there were even Flagellants and “people of God,” all of whom human justice sent far away.²⁰ But all these people firmly held to their own flock and firmly disapproved of any other faith—they set themselves apart in prayer and eating and considered themselves the only ones on “the right path.” Whereas Golovan behaved himself as if he even knew nothing at all for sure about the best path, but shared his hunk of bread indiscriminately with anyone who asked, and himself sat down at any table you like when he was invited. He even gave the Jew Yushka from the garrison milk for his children. But people’s love for Golovan found an excuse for the non-Christian aspect of this last act: they perceived that, by cajoling Yushka, Golovan wanted to get from him the “lips of Judas,” carefully preserved by the Jews, with which one could lie one’s way out of court, or the “hairy vegetable” that the Jews quench their thirst with, so that they can go without drinking vodka. But the most incomprehensible thing about Golovan was that he kept company with the coppersmith Anton, who, in terms of all real qualities, enjoyed the worst of reputations. This man did not agree with anybody on the most sacred questions, but deduced something mysterious from the signs of the zodiac and even did some writing. Anton lived on the outskirts, in an empty little garret room, for which he paid fifty kopecks a month, but kept such frightful things there that nobody visited him except Golovan. It was known that Anton had a chart there called “the zodiac,” and a glass that “drew down the sun’s fire”; and besides that he had access to the roof, where he went at night, sat by the chimney like a tomcat, and “set up an aggrandizing tube,” and, during the sleepiest time, gazed at the sky. Anton’s devotion to this instrument knew no bounds, especially on starry nights, when he could see the whole zodiac. He came running from his boss’s shop, where he did his copper work, crept at once into his upstairs room, and immediately slipped through the dormer window to the roof, and if there were stars in the sky, he sat all night and gazed. This might have been forgiven him, if he had been a scientist or at least a German, but since he was a simple Russian man—they spent a long time breaking him of it, poked him with poles, threw dung at him and a dead cat, but he paid no attention to any of it and didn’t even notice they had poked him. They all laughingly called him “Astronomer,” and in fact he was an astronomer.^* He was a quiet and very honest man, but a freethinker; he insisted that the earth turns and that we are sometimes upside down on it. For this last obvious absurdity, Anton was beaten and recognized as a fool, but then, as a fool, he began to enjoy the freedom of thought that is the privilege of this advantageous title among us, and reached the limits of the unbelievable. He did not acknowledge the seventy-times-seven years of the prophet Daniel²¹ as applicable to the Russian tsardom, said that the “ten-horned beast” was only an allegory, and the bear was an astronomical figure, which was found on his charts. Just as unorthodox was his reasoning about the “eagle’s wings,” about the cups, and about the seal of the Antichrist.²² But, because he was feebleminded, this was all forgiven him. He wasn’t married, because he had no time to get married and would have been unable to feed a wife—and anyway what fool would want to marry an astronomer? Yet Golovan, being of sound mind, not only kept company with the astronomer, but also never made fun of him. They could even be seen together at night, on the astronomer’s roof, taking turns looking at the zodiac through the aggrandizing tube. It’s understandable what sort of thoughts these two figures standing at the tube by night might inspire, with fanciful superstition, medical poetry, religious raving, and sheer bewilderment milling around them … And, finally, circumstances themselves put Golovan in a somewhat strange position: it was not known what parish he belonged to … His cold hovel stood out so much on its own that no spiritual strategist could add it to his jurisdiction, and Golovan himself was unconcerned about it and, if pestered too much about his parish, would reply:

“I’m of the parish of the Almighty Creator”—but there was no such church in all Orel.

Gilliatt, in answer to the question about where his parish was, only raised his finger and, pointing to the sky, said: “Up there”—but the essence of both answers was the same.

Golovan liked hearing about any faith, but didn’t seem to have his own opinions on the subject, and in cases of persistent questioning about what he believed, recited:

“I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, maker of all things visible and invisible.”²⁴

That, of course, was evasiveness.

However, it would be wrong for anyone to think that Golovan was a sectarian or avoided the Church. No, he even went to Father Pyotr at the Boris-and-Gleb cathedral “to verify his conscience.” He would come and say:

“Cover me with shame, father, I don’t like myself these days.”

I remember this Father Pyotr, who used to come to visit us, and once, when my father said something to him about Golovan being a man of excellent conscience, Father Pyotr replied:

“Have no doubts: his conscience is whiter than snow.”

Golovan liked lofty thoughts and knew the poet Pope,²⁵ but not as a writer is usually known by people who have read his works. No, Golovan, having approved of An Essay on Man, given him by the same Alexei Petrovich Ermolov, knew the whole poem by heart. And I can remember how he once stood by the doorpost, listening to the story of some sad new event, and, suddenly sighing, replied:

My gentle Bolingbroke, ’tis no surmise,

In pride, in reasoning pride, our error lies.

The reader need not be surprised that a man like Golovan could toss off a line from Pope. Those were harsh times, but poetry was in fashion, and its great word was dear even to men of good blood. From the masters it descended to the plebs. But now I come to the major incident in Golovan’s story—the incident which unquestionably cast an ambiguous light on him even in the eyes of people not inclined to believe all sorts of nonsense. Golovan came out as not clean in some remote past time. This was revealed suddenly, but in the most vivid form. There appeared on the squares of Orel a person who meant nothing in anyone’s eyes, but who laid the most powerful claims on Golovan and treated him with incredible insolence.

This person and the history of his appearance make a rather characteristic episode from the moral history of the time and a picture from life that is not without some color. And therefore I ask you to turn your attention for a moment slightly away from Orel, to still warmer parts, to a quiet-flowing river between carpeted banks, to the people’s “feast of faith,” where there is no room for everyday, practical life, where everything, decidedly everything, passes through a peculiar religiosity, which imparts to it all its special relief and liveliness. We must attend the revealing of the relics of a new saint—which was an event of the greatest significance for the most various representatives of society in those days. For simple folk it was an epic event, or, as one of the bards of the time used to say, “the accomplishment of the sacred feast of faith.”

VIII

Not one of the printed accounts of that time can convey the commotion that set in at the opening of the solemnities. The living but low-life aspect of the thing escaped them. This was not today’s peaceful journey by coach or rail, with stops at comfortable inns, where there is everything necessary and at a reasonable price. Travel back then was a great feat, and in this case a feat of piety, which, however, was equal to the expected solemn event in the Church. There was also much poetry in it—once again of a special sort—motley and shot through with various tinges of the Church’s everyday life, of limited popular naïveté and the boundless yearnings of the living spirit.

A multitude of people from Orel set out for this solemnity. Most zealous of all, naturally, was the merchant estate, but landowners of the middling sort didn’t lag behind, and simple folk in particular came pouring in. They went on foot. Only those who transported the infirm “for healing” dragged along on some wretched nag. Sometimes, however, the infirm were transported on the back and were not even counted a burden, because the inns charged them less for everything, and sometimes even let them stay without paying at all. There were not a few who deliberately “invented a sickness for themselves: rolled up their eyes, and two would alternately transport a third on wheels, so as to earn income from donations for wax, and oil, and other rites.”

So I read in an account, unprinted but reliable, copied down not from a standard pattern, but from “living vision,” and by someone who preferred the truth to the tendentious mendacity of that time.

The movement was so populous that there were no places in the inns or hotels in the towns of Livny and Elets, through which its path lay. It would happen that important and eminent people spent the night in their carriages. Oats, hay, grain—the prices of everything along the high road went up, so that, as noted by my grandmother, whose memoirs I am using, the cost of feeding a man with head cheese, cabbage soup, lamb stew, and kasha at an inn rose from twenty-five kopecks (seven and a half in silver) to fifty-two (fifteen in silver). At the present time, of course, fifteen is still a completely incredible price, but that’s how it was, and the revealing of the relics of the new saint had the same significance for the area, in terms of raising the prices of living supplies, as the recent fire on the Mstinsky Bridge in Petersburg. “The prices soared and stayed there.”

Among other pilgrims setting out from Orel for the revealing was the merchant family S——, very well-known people in their time, “suppliers,” that is, to put it simply, rich kulaks,²⁶ who collected wheat from the peasants’ wagons into big granaries, and then sold their supplies to wholesale dealers in Moscow and Riga. This was a profitable business, which, after the emancipation of the peasants,²⁷ was not scorned even by the nobility; but they liked to sleep late, and soon learned from bitter experience that they weren’t capable even of this stupid kulak business. The merchants S—— were regarded as the foremost suppliers, and their importance went so far that their house was known, not by their name, but by an ennobling nickname. The house, to be sure, was a strictly pious one, where they prayed in the morning, oppressed and robbed people all day, and then prayed again in the evening. And by night, watchdogs on cables clanked their chains, and in all the windows it was “icon lamps and brightness,” loud snoring, and someone’s hot tears.

The ruler of the house, who today would be known as “the founder of the firm,” was then simply called himself. He was a mild little old man, whom, however, everyone feared like fire. It was said of him that he made for a soft bed, but hard sleeping: he fondly called everybody “my dearest,” and then sent them all into the teeth of the devil. A well-known and familiar type, the type of the merchant patriarch.

So this patriarch, too, traveled to the revealing “with full complement”—himself, and his wife, and his daughter, who suffered from “the disease of melancholy” and was to be cured. All the known remedies of folk poetry and creativity had been tried on her: she had been made to drink stimulating elecampane, had had powdered peony root poured all over her for repulsing phantoms, had been given wild garlic to sniff, so as to straighten the brain in her head, but nothing had helped, and now she was being taken to the saint, hurrying to have the first chance, when the very first force is released. Belief in the advantage of the first force is very great, and is rooted in the story of the pool of Siloam, where those were cured first who managed to get in first after the troubling of the water.²⁸

The Orel merchants traveled through Livny and Elets, enduring great hardships, and were completely worn out by the time they reached the saint. But to seize the “first chance” from the saint turned out to be impossible. Such a host of people had gathered that there was no thought of forcing one’s way into the church for the vigil of the “revealing day,” when the “first chance,” properly speaking, would occur—that is, when the greatest force would issue from the new relics.

The merchant and his wife were in despair—the most indifferent of all was the daughter, who didn’t know what she was losing. There was no hope of doing anything about it—there were so many nobility, with such names, while they were simple merchants, who, if they were of some significance in their own place, were totally lost here, in such a concentration of Christian grandeur. And so one day, sitting in grief over tea under their little kibitka²⁹ at the inn, the patriarch complained to his wife that he no longer had any hope of reaching the holy coffin either among the first or among the second, but only perhaps among the last, along with tillers of the soil and fishermen, that is, generally, with simple people. And by then what would be the good of it: the police would be ferocious and the clergy tired—they wouldn’t let you pray your fill, but would just push you by. In general, once so many thousands of people had put their lips to the relics, it wouldn’t be the same. In view of which, they could have come later, but that was not what they had striven for: they had traveled, worn themselves out, left the business at home in the assistants’ hands, and paid three times the price on the road, and suddenly here’s your consolation!

The merchant tried once or twice to get to the deacons; he was ready to show his gratitude, but there was no hope there either—on the one hand there was a hindrance in the form of a gendarme with a white glove or a Cossack with a whip (they, too, had come in great numbers to the revealing of the relics), and on the other, the great danger of being crushed by the good Orthodox folk, who surged like an ocean. There had already been “occasions,” and even a great many, both yesterday and today. At the stroke of a Cossack whip, our good Christians would rush aside somewhere in a wall of five or six hundred people, and would push and press together so much that only moans and stink came from inside, and then, when it eased off, you could see women’s ears with the earrings torn away and fingers with rings pulled off, and two or three souls gone to their reward altogether.

The merchant was telling about all these difficulties over tea to his wife and daughter, for whom it was necessary to seize the first force, and meanwhile some “wastrel” of no known city or country rank was walking about among all those kibitkas near the barn and seemed to be looking at the Orel merchants with some intention.

There were many “wastrels” gathered here at the time. They not only found their place at the feast of faith, but even found themselves good occupations; and so they came thronging in abundance from various places, especially from towns famous for their thievish folk, that is, from Orel, Kromy, Elets, and from Livny, renowned for its great experts at working wonders. All these “wastrels” rubbing elbows here were looking for some profitable business. The boldest among them acted in concert, placing themselves in groups among the crowds, the more conveniently to produce jostling and confusion, with the aid of a Cossack, and use the turmoil to search people’s pockets, tear off watches, belt buckles, and pull earrings from ears; but the more dignified went around the inn yards singly, complained of their poverty, “told dreams and wonders,” offered potions to attract and detract, and “secret aids for old men, of whale semen, crow fat, elephant sperm,” and other nostrums, which “promoted permanent potency.” These nostrums did not lose their value even here, because, to the credit of humankind, conscience did not allow turning to the saint for every sort of healing. No less eagerly did the wastrels of peaceful ways take up simple thievery and on convenient occasions clean out visitors who, for lack of quarters, were living in their carts or under them. There was little space anywhere, and not all the carts could be put under the sheds of the inns; the rest stood outside town in the open fields. Here a still more varied and interesting life went on, and one still more filled with the nuances of sacred and medicinal poetry and amusing chicanery. Shady dealers poked about everywhere, but their home was this outlying “poor wagon train,” with ravines and hovels surrounding it, where there was a furious trade in vodka, and two or three carts stood with ruddy soldiers’ wives who had pitched together and come there. Here they also fabricated shavings from the coffin, “sealed earth,” pieces of rotted vestments, and even “fragments.” Occasionally, among the artisans who dealt in these things, very witty people turned up, who pulled interesting tricks remarkable for their simplicity and boldness. To these belonged the man whom the pious family from Orel had noticed. The swindler had overheard their lament about the impossibility of getting near the saint before the first streams of healing grace from the relics were exhausted, went straight up to them, and began speaking frankly:

“I heard your grievances and can help you, and you have no reason to shun me … Here, now, in this great and renowned assembly, you won’t get the satisfaction you desire without me, but I’ve been in such situations and know the ways. If you’d like to get the first force from the saint, don’t grudge a hundred roubles for your success, and I will provide it.”

The merchant looked at the fellow and said:

“Quit lying.”

But the man held his ground:

“You probably think that way judging by my nonentity,” he says, “but what is nonentity in the eyes of men may be reckoned quite differently with God, and what I undertake to do, I’m firmly able to accomplish. Here you’re worrying about earthly grandeur, that so much of it has come here, but to me it’s all dust, and if there were no end of princes and kings, they couldn’t hinder us in the least, and would even make way for us themselves. And so, if you wish to have a clear and smooth path ahead of you, and see the foremost persons, and give the first kisses to the friend of God, don’t stint on what I told you. But if you’re sorry about the hundred roubles and don’t scorn company, then I’ll promptly find two more persons I’ve already had my eye on, and that will make it cheaper for you.”

What did the pious worshippers have left to do? Of course, there was risk in trusting the wastrel, but they didn’t want to miss the chance, and the money he was asking wasn’t so much, especially with company … The patriarch decided to risk it and said:

“Get up a company.”

The wastrel took the down payment and ran off, having told the family to dine early and, an hour before the first bell rang for vespers, to take a new hand towel for each of them, go out of town to a designated place in the “poor train,” and wait for him there. From there they would immediately set out on their march, which, the entrepreneur assured them, no princes or kings could stop.

These “poor trains,” of larger or smaller dimensions, stood in vast camps during all such assemblies, and I myself saw and remember them in Korennaya, outside Kursk, and about the one our narrative has come upon I had heard tell from eyewitnesses to what is about to be described.

IX

The place occupied by the poor encampment was outside town, between the river and the high road, on a spacious and free common which at the end bordered on a big, meandering ravine, overgrown with thick shrubs and with a rivulet running through it. Beyond it began a mighty pine forest where eagles screamed.

On the common stood a multitude of poor carts and wagons, which, however, presented in all their indigence a rather motley diversity of national genius and inventiveness. There were ordinary bast mat hutches, canvas tents covering the whole cart, “bowers” made of fluffy feather grass, and perfectly hideous bast wagons. A whole big piece of bast from a century-old linden is bent and nailed to the sides of the wagon, leaving space enough to lie down underneath: people lie with their feet towards the inside of the vehicle and their heads towards the open air at both ends. The wind passes over them lying there, airing them out, so they don’t choke on their own breath. Right there, by the baskets and sacks of hay tied to the shafts, stood the horses, mostly skinny, all of them in collars, and some, owned by thrifty people, under matted “lids.” In some carts there were also dogs, which were not supposed to be taken on pilgrimages, but, being “zealous” dogs, had caught up with their owners at the second or third stop and, for all that they were beaten, did not want to be left behind. There was no place for them here, in true conditions of pilgrimage, but they were put up with and, sensing their contraband position, behaved very meekly; they huddled somewhere under a tar barrel by the cart wheel and maintained a grave silence. Modesty alone saved them from ostracism and from the danger posed for them by the baptized Gypsy, who would have “taken their coat off” in a minute. Here, in the poor train, under the open sky, life was merry and good, as at a fair. There was more diversity here than in hotel rooms, which only special chosen ones could get, or under the sheds of the inns, where, in eternal semidarkness, people of the second-best sort found shelter with their carts. True, fat monks and deacons did not come to visit the poor train, and there were also no real, experienced pilgrims to be seen, but instead there were jacks-of-all-trades, and a vast production of various “holy objects” went on. When I happened to read in the Kiev papers about a notorious case of faking relics from sheep bones, I was amazed at the childish methods of these fabricators, compared to the boldness of the artisans I had heard about earlier. Here it was a sort of frank negligée with valor. Even the street leading down to the common was already distinguished by a totally unrestrained freedom of the widest enterprise. People knew that such occasions do not occur often, and they didn’t waste time: little tables stood by many gateways, displaying little icons, crosses, and paper envelopes supposedly containing rotten wood dust from the old coffin, with shavings from the new one lying next to them. All these materials were, on the assurances of the sellers, of much higher quality than in the actual places, because they had been brought there by the woodworkers, diggers, and carpenters who had done the most important work. At the entrance to the camp, “hurriers and scurriers” ran around with little icons of the new saint, covered for the time being in white paper with a cross drawn on it. These icons were sold very cheaply and could be bought on the spot, but they were not supposed to be uncovered before the first prayer service was held. For many of the unworthy, who bought such icons and opened them beforehand, they turned out to be bare boards.

In the ravine behind the encampment, under overturned sledges, by the stream, a Gypsy lived with his Gypsy wife and Gypsy children. The Gypsy and his wife had a big medical practice there. They kept tied to one sledge runner a big, voiceless cock, who produced stones in the morning that “promoted bedstead potency,” and the Gypsy had a catnip that was then quite necessary against “aphedronian sores.”³⁰ This Gypsy was a celebrity of sorts. Word went around about him that when the seven sleeping virgins were “revealed” in infidel lands, he was not a superfluous man there: he could transform old people into young, could heal serfs punished by flogging, could make the pain of soldiers who had run the gauntlet pass out of their insides through the drainage system. His Gypsy wife seemed to know still greater secrets of nature. She gave husbands two kinds of water: one to expose wives who sin by fornication (such wives, when given this water, could not retain it, but passed it right out again); the other a magnetic water, which made an unwilling wife embrace her husband passionately in her sleep, but if she tried to love another man, she would fall out of bed.

In short, things were at the boil here, and the manifold needs of mankind found useful helpers.

When the wastrel caught sight of the merchants, he didn’t speak to them, but started beckoning to them to go down into the ravine, and darted down there himself.

Again this seemed a bit frightening: there was the danger of an ambush, in which evildoers could be hiding capable of robbing pilgrims blind, but piety overcame fear, and after some reflection, the merchant, having said a prayer and commemorated the saint, decided to go three steps down.

He moved carefully, holding on to little shrubs, after telling his wife and daughter to shout with all their might if anything happened.

There was indeed an ambush there, but it was not dangerous: the merchant found in the ravine two men like himself, pious men in merchant garb, with whom he was to be “put together.” They all had to pay the wastrel the promised sum for taking them to the saint, and then he would reveal his plan to them and take them there at once. There was no point in thinking long about it, and resisting would not have gotten them anywhere: the merchants put together the sum and handed it over, and the wastrel revealed his plan to them, a simple plan, but, in its simplicity, of pure genius. It consisted of there being in the “poor train” a paralytic whom the wastrel knew, who needed only to be picked up and carried to the saint, and nobody would stop them or bar their way with a sick man. All they had to do was buy a litter and a coverlet for the paralytic, and then the six of them would pick him up and carry the litter on towels.

The first part of this idea seemed excellent—with the paralytic, the bearers would, of course, be allowed in, but what would the consequences be? Wouldn’t there be embarrassment afterwards? However, they were also set at ease on this account; their guide simply said it wasn’t worthy of attention.

“We’ve already seen such occasions,” he said. “You’ll be honored with seeing everything to your satisfaction and with kissing the relics during the singing of the vigil, and as for the sick man, it’s as the saint wills: if he wishes to heal him, he will heal him, and if he doesn’t, again it’s as he wills. Now, just chip in quickly for the litter and coverlet, I’ve got it all ready in a house nearby, I only have to hand over the money. Wait here for me a little, and we’ll be on our way.”

After some bargaining, he took another two roubles per person for the tackle and ran off, came back ten minutes later, and said:

“Let’s go, brothers, only don’t step too briskly, and lower your eyes so you look a bit more God-fearing.”

The merchants lowered their eyes and walked along with reverence, and in the same “poor train” they came to a wagon where a completely sickly nag stood eating from a sack, and a scrofulous little boy sat on the box amusing himself by tossing the plucked hearts of yellow chamomile from hand to hand. In this wagon, under a bast top, lay a middle-aged man with a face yellower than the chamomile, and his arms were also yellow, stretched out and limp as soft wattle.

The women, seeing such terrible infirmity, began crossing themselves, but their guide addressed the sick man and said:

“Look, Uncle Fotey, these good people have come to help me take you to be healed. The hour of God’s will is approaching you.”

The yellow man began to turn towards the strangers, looking at them with gratitude and pointing his finger at his tongue.

They guessed that he was mute. “Never mind,” they said, “never mind, servant of God, don’t thank us, it’s God you must thank,” and they started pulling him from the wagon, the men taking him under the shoulders and legs, but the women only held up his weak arms, and became still more frightened by the man’s dreadful condition, because his arms were completely “loose” in the shoulder joints and were only held on somehow by horsehair ropes.

The litter stood right there. It was a little old bed, the corners thickly covered with bedbug eggs; on the bed lay a sheaf of straw and a piece of flimsy cloth with the cross, the spear, and the reed crudely painted on it.³¹ The guide fluffed up the straw with a deft hand, so that it hung over the edges on all sides; they put the yellow paralytic on it, covered him with the cloth, and carried him off.

The guide went ahead with a little clay brazier, censing them crosswise.

Even before they left the train, people began to cross themselves at the sight of them, and as they went down the streets, the attention directed at them became more and more serious: seeing them, everyone realized that this was a sick man being carried to the wonderworker, and they joined in. The merchants hastened on, because they heard the bells ringing for the vigil, and they arrived with their burden just in time, as they started singing: “Praise the name of the Lord, ye servants of the Lord.”³²

The church, of course, had no room for even a hundredth part of the assembled crowd; untold numbers of people stood in a packed mass around it, but as soon as they saw the litter and the bearers, everyone started buzzing: “They’re bearing a paralytic, there’ll be a miracle,” and the crowd parted.

They made a living passageway up to the door of the church, and then everything went as the guide had promised. Even the firm hope of his faith was not put to shame: the paralytic was healed. He stood up and walked on his own feet, “glorifying and giving thanks.”³³ Someone took notes about it all, in which the healed paralytic, in the words of the guide, was called a “relative” of the Orel merchant, which made many people envious, and the healed man, owing to the late hour, did not go to his poor train, but spent the night under the shed with his new relatives.

This was all very nice. The healed man was an interesting person, and many came to look at him and left “donations.”

But he still spoke little and indistinctly—he mumbled badly from lack of habit and mostly pointed to the merchants with his healed hand, meaning, “Ask them, they’re my relatives, they know everything.” And willy-nilly they had to say they were his relatives; but suddenly amidst all this an unexpected unpleasantness stole up on them: during the night following the healing of the yellow paralytic, it was noticed that a gold cord with a gold tassel had disappeared from the velvet cover on the saint’s coffin.

Discreet inquiries were made, and the Orel merchant was asked if he had noticed anything when he came close, and who were the people who had helped him to bear his sick relative. He answered in good conscience that they were all strangers from the poor train and had helped him out of zeal. He was taken there to identify the place, the people, the nag, and the wagon with the scrofulous boy who was playing with the chamomile, but only the place was in its place, while of the people, the cart, and the boy with the chamomile there was no trace.

The inquiry was abandoned, “so there would be no rumors among the people.” A new tassel was attached, and the merchants, after such unpleasantness, quickly made ready to go home. But here the healed relative gratified them with a new joy: he insisted that they take him with them, threatening to make a complaint otherwise, and reminding them of the tassel.

And therefore, when the time came for the merchants to leave for home, Fotey was found on the box beside the driver, and it was impossible to throw him off before they came to the village of Krutoe, which was on their way. In those days there was a very dangerous descent there and a difficult ascent up the other side, and all sorts of incidents occurred with travelers: horses fell, carriages overturned, and other things of that sort. One had to pass through the village of Krutoe while it was light, or else spend the night there. Nobody risked the descent in the dark.

Our merchants also spent the night there, and while ascending the hill in the morning found themselves “at a loss,” that is, they had lost their healed relative Fotey. They had “given him a good taste of the flask” in the evening, and in the morning had left without waking him up. But some other good people were found who set this loss to rights and, taking Fotey with them, brought him to Orel.

There he tracked down his ungrateful relatives, who had abandoned him in Krutoe, but he did not meet with a family welcome from them. He went around the town begging and telling how the merchant had not gone to the saint for his daughter, but to pray that the price of wheat would go up. Nobody was so precisely informed of that as Fotey.

X

Not long after the appearance in Orel of the known and abandoned Fotey, the merchant Akulov, from the parish of the Archangel Michael, set up “poor tables.” In the courtyard, on boards, stood big, steaming lime-wood bowls of noodles and iron kettles of kasha, and onion tarts and savory pies were handed out from the merchant’s porch. A multitude of guests gathered, each with his own spoon in his boot or on his bosom. The pies were handed out by Golovan. He was often invited to such “tables” as the architricline or chief butler, because he was fair, did not hide anything away for himself, and knew very well who deserved what sort of pie—with peas, with carrots, or with liver.

So he stood now and “endowed” each approaching person with a big pie, and if he knew someone had a sick person in the house, he gave them two or more as a “sick ration.” And among the various approaching people, Fotey also approached Golovan, a new man, who seemed to surprise Golovan. Seeing Fotey, it was as if Golovan remembered something, and he asked:

“Who are you and where do you live?”

Fotey winced and said:

“I’m God’s, that’s all, wrapped in a slave’s pall, living under the wall.”

Others said to Golovan: “The merchants brought him from the saint … He’s the Fotey who got healed.”

Golovan smiled and was starting to say:

“What kind of Fotey is he!” but at that very moment Fotey snatched a pie from him and with the other hand gave him a deafening slap in the face and shouted:

“Don’t shoot your mouth off!” and with that sat down at the table. And Golovan suffered it without saying a word. Everybody understood that it had to be so, that the healed man was obviously playing the holy fool, and Golovan knew that it had to be suffered. Only “by what reckoning did Golovan deserve such treatment?” That was a mystery that lasted for many years and established the opinion that Golovan was concealing something very bad, because he was afraid of Fotey.

And there really was something mysterious here. Fotey, who soon fell so low in the general opinion that they called after him “Stole a tassel from the saint and drank it away in the pot-house,” treated Golovan with extreme impudence.

Meeting Golovan anywhere at all, Fotey would stand in his way and shout: “Pay your debt.” And Golovan, without the least objection, would go to his breast pocket and take out a ten-kopeck piece. If he happened not to have ten kopecks, but had less, Fotey, who was called the Polecat because his rags were so motley, would fling the insufficient money back at Golovan, spit at him, and even beat him, throwing stones, mud, or snow.

I myself remember how once, in the evening, when my father and the priest Pyotr were sitting by the window in the study, and Golovan was standing outside the window, and the three of them were having a conversation, the bedraggled Polecat ran through the gates, which happened to be open, and with the cry “You forgot, scoundrel!” struck Golovan in the face in front of everybody, and he, quietly pushing him away, gave him some copper money from his breast pocket and led him out of the gate.

Such acts were by no means rare, and the explanation that the Polecat knew something about Golovan was, of course, quite natural. Understandably, it also aroused curiosity in many, which, as we shall soon see, had solid grounds.

XI

I was about seven years old when we left Orel and moved to live permanently in the country. I didn’t see Golovan after that. Then it came time for me to go and study, and the original muzhik with the big head dropped from my sight. I heard of him only once, during the “big fire.” Not only did many buildings and belongings perish at that time, but many people were burned up as well—Golovan was mentioned among the latter. They said he had fallen into some hole that couldn’t be seen under the ashes and “got cooked.” I didn’t inquire about his family, who survived him. Soon after that I went to Kiev and revisited my native parts only ten years later. There was a new tsar, a new order was beginning; there was a breath of new freshness—the emancipation of the peasants was expected, and there was even talk of open courts. All was new: hearts were aflame. There were no implacables yet, but the impatient and the temporizing had already appeared.

On my way to my grandmother’s, I stopped for a few days in Orel, where my uncle, who left behind him the memory of an honest man, was then serving as a justice of conscience.³⁴ He had many excellent sides, which inspired respect even in people who didn’t share his views and sympathies: when young he had been a dandy, a hussar, then a horticulturist and a dilettante artist of remarkable abilities; noble, straightforward, an aristocrat, and “an aristocrat au bout des ongles.”^† Having his own understanding of his duties, he naturally submitted to the new, but wished to treat the emancipation critically and presented himself as a conservative. He wanted only such emancipation as in the Baltic countries. With the young he was protective and kind, but their belief that salvation lay in a steady movement forward, and not backward, seemed erroneous to him. My uncle loved me and knew that I loved and respected him, but he and I did not agree in our views of the emancipation and other questions of the time. In Orel he made me into a purifying sacrifice on those grounds, and though I carefully tried to avoid these conversations, he aimed for them and liked very much to “defeat” me.

Most of all my uncle liked to bring me to cases in which his justice’s practice revealed “popular stupidity.”

I recall a luxurious, warm evening that I spent with my uncle in the “governor’s garden” in Orel, taken up with the—I must confess—by then considerably wearisome argument about the properties and qualities of the Russian people. I insisted, incorrectly, that the people are very intelligent, and my uncle, perhaps still more incorrectly, insisted that the people are very stupid, that they have no notion of law, of property, and are generally Asians, who can astonish anyone you like with their savagery.

“And here, my dear sir,” he says, “is an example for you: if your memory has preserved the situation of the town, then you should remember that we have gullies, outskirts, further outskirts, of which the devil knows who fixed the boundaries and to whom the building permits were allotted. That has all been removed by fire in several stages, and in place of the old hovels, new ones of the same sort have been built, and now nobody can find out who has what right to be sitting there.”

The thing was that when the town, having rested from the fires, began to rebuild itself, and some people began to buy lots in the areas beyond the church of St. Basil the Great, it turned out that the sellers not only had no papers, but that these owners and their ancestors considered all papers utterly superfluous. Up to then, houses and land had been changing hands without any declaration to the authorities, and without any taxes or contributions to the treasury, and all this was said to have been written down in some “moatbook,” but the “moatbook” had burned up in one of the countless fires, and the one who kept the records in it had died, and along with it all traces of rights of ownership had vanished. True, there were no disputes about rights of ownership, but all this had no legal authority, and was upheld by the fact that Protasov said his father had bought his little house from the Tarasovs’ late grandfather, and the Tarasovs did not contest the Protasovs’ right of ownership. But since rights were now mandatory, and there were no rights, the justice of conscience was faced with resolving the question: did crime call up law, or did law create crime?

“And why did they do it that way?” asked my uncle. “Because these aren’t ordinary people, who need good state institutions to safeguard their rights, these are nomads, a horde that has become sedentary, but is still not conscious of itself.”

With that we fell asleep and slept well. Early in the morning I went to the Orlik, bathed, looked at the old places, remembered Golovan’s house, and on coming home found my uncle conversing with three “good sirs” unknown to me. They were all of merchant construction—two of them middle-aged, in frock coats with hooks, and one completely white-haired, in a loose cotton shirt, a long, collarless coat, and a tall peasant hat.

My uncle indicated them to me and said:

“Here’s an illustration of yesterday’s subject. These gentlemen are telling me their case: join our discussion.”

Then he turned to those present with a joke that was obvious to me, but, of course, incomprehensible to them, and added:

“This is my relative, a young prosecutor from Kiev, who is going to see a minister in Petersburg and can explain your case to him.”

The men bowed.

“Of the three of them, you see,” he went on, “this is Mr. Protasov, who wishes to buy a house and land from this man, Tarasov; but Tarasov has no papers. You understand: none! He only remembers that his father bought the house from Vlasov, and this man here, the third, is the son of Mr. Vlasov, who, as you see, is also of a certain age.”

“Seventy,” the old man observed curtly.

“Yes, seventy, and he also has no papers and never did have.”

“Never did,” the old man put in again.

“He came to certify that it was precisely so and that he doesn’t claim any rights.”

“I don’t—my forefathers sold it.”

“Yes, but the ones who sold it to your ‘forefathers’—are no more.”

“No, they were sent to the Caucasus for their beliefs.”

“They could be sought out,” I said.

“There’s nothing to seek out, the water there was no good for them—they couldn’t take it and all passed away.”

“Why is it,” I said, “that you acted so strangely?”

“We acted as we could. The government clerk was cruel, small landowners didn’t have enough to pay the taxes, but Ivan Ivanovich had a moatbook, and we wrote in it. And before him—I don’t even remember this—there was the merchant Gapeyev, he kept the moatbook, and after all of them it was given to Golovan, and Golovan got cooked in a foul hole, and all the moatbooks burned up.”

“This Golovan, it turns out, was something like your notary?” asked my uncle (who was not an old-timer in Orel).

The old man smiled and said softly:

“Why moatary! Golovan was a just man.”

“So everybody trusted him?”

“How could we not trust such a man: he cut his flesh off his living bones for the people.”

“There’s a legend for you!” my uncle said softly, but the old man heard him and replied:

“No, sir, Golovan’s not a liegend, but the truth, and he should be remembered with praise.”

“And with befuddlement,” my uncle joked. And he didn’t know how well his joking answered to the whole mass of memories that awakened in me at that time, to which, with my then curiosity, I passionately wanted to find the key.

And the key was waiting for me, kept by my grandmother.

XII

A couple of words about my grandmother. She came from the Moscow merchant family of the Kolobovs and was taken in marriage into a noble family “not for her wealth, but for her beauty.” But her best quality was an inner beauty and lucidity of mind, which always kept its common-folk cast. Having entered the circles of the nobility, she yielded to many of its demands and even allowed herself to be called Alexandra Vassilievna, though her real name was Akilina, but she always thought in a common-folk way and even retained—unintentionally, of course—a certain common-folk quality in her speech. She said “dat” instead of “that,” considered the word “moral” insulting, and couldn’t pronounce the word “registrar.” On the other hand, she never allowed any fashionable pressures to shake her faith in common-folk sense and never departed from that sense herself. She was a good woman and a true Russian lady; she kept house excellently and knew how to receive anyone from the emperor Alexander I to Ivan Ivanovich Androsov. She never read anything except her children’s letters, but she liked the renewal of the mind in conversation and for that “summoned people for talks.” Her interlocutors of this sort were the bailiff Mikhailo Lebedev, the butler Vassily, the head cook Klim, or the housekeeper Malanya. The talk was never idle, but to the point and useful—they discussed why the girl Feklusha had had “morals fall on her” and why the boy Grishka disliked his stepmother. These conversations were followed by talk of how to protect Feklusha’s maidenly honor and what to do so that the boy Grishka would not dislike his stepmother.

For her all this was filled with a living interest perhaps quite incomprehensible to her granddaughters.

When my grandmother came to visit us in Orel, her friendship was enjoyed by the archpriest Father Pyotr, the merchant Androsov, and Golovan, who were “summoned for talks” with her.

It must be supposed that here, too, the talk was not idle, not merely for passing the time, but probably also about some such matters as morals falling on someone or a boy’s dislike of his stepmother.

She therefore might have held the keys to many secrets, petty ones for us, perhaps, but quite significant in their milieu.

Now, in this last meeting of mine with my grandmother, she was already very old, but had preserved in perfect freshness her mind, memory, and eyes. She could still sew.

This time, too, I found her at the same worktable, with an inlaid top portraying a harp held up by two cupids.

Grandmother asked me whether I had visited my father’s grave, which of our relatives I had seen in Orel, and what my uncle was doing these days. I answered all her questions and enlarged upon my uncle, telling her how he dealt with old “liegends.”

Grandmother stopped and pushed her eyeglasses up on her forehead. She liked the word “liegend” very much: she heard in it a naïve alteration in the popular spirit, and laughed:

“That’s wonderful,” she said, “the way the old man said ‘liegend.’ ”

And I answered:

“I’d like very much to know how it happened in reality, not in liegend.”

“What precisely would you like to know?”

“About all that. What sort of man was Golovan? I do remember him a little, and all of it in some sort of liegends, as the old man says, but of course it was a simple matter …”

“Well, of course it was simple, but why does it surprise you that our people back then avoided deeds of purchase and just wrote down their transactions in notebooks? There’ll be a lot of that uncovered in the future. They were afraid of clerks and trusted their own people, that’s all.”

“But how,” I say, “could Golovan earn such trust? To tell the truth, I sometimes have the impression that he was a bit of a … charlatan.”

“Why is that?”

“Don’t I remember people saying, for instance, that he supposedly had some sort of magic stone, and that he stopped the plague with his blood or flesh, by throwing it into the river? And why was he called ‘deathless’?”

“It’s nonsense about the magic stone. People made it up, and it wasn’t Golovan’s fault, and he was nicknamed ‘deathless’ because, in that horror, when the fumiasms of death hovered over the earth and everybody got frightened, he alone was fearless, and death couldn’t touch him.”

“And why,” I say, “did he cut his leg?”

“He cut off his calf.”

“What for?”

“Because he also had a plague pimple on him. He knew there was no salvation from that, quickly grabbed the scythe, and cut the whole calf off.”

“Can it be?!” I said.

“Of course it can.”

“And what,” I say, “are we to think of the woman Pavla?”

Grandmother glanced at me and replied:

“What about her? The woman Pavla was Fraposhka’s wife. She was very unhappy, and Golovan gave her shelter.”

“But, all the same, she was called ‘Golovan’s sin.’ ”

“Each one judges and gives names by his own lights. He had no such sin.”

“But, Grandmother, dear, do you really believe that?”

“I not only believe it, I know it.”

“But how can you know it?”

“Very simply.”

Grandmother turned to the girl who was working with her and sent her to the garden to pick raspberries, and when the girl left, she looked me in the eye significantly and said:

“Golovan was a virgin!”

“How do you know that?”

“From Father Pyotr.”

And my grandmother told me how Father Pyotr, not long before his end, spoke to her of what incredible people there are in Russia, and that the late Golovan was a virgin.

Having touched upon this story, Grandmother went into fine detail and recalled her conversation with Father Pyotr.

“Father Pyotr had doubts himself at first,” she said, “and began to question him in more detail, and even alluded to Pavla. ‘It’s not good,’ he says. ‘You don’t repent, and you’re in temptation. It’s not meet for you to keep this Pavla. Let her go with God.’ But Golovan replies: ‘It’s wrong of you to say that, Father: better let her live with God at my place—I can’t let her go.’ ‘And why is that?’ ‘Because she has nowhere to lay her head …’ ‘Well,’ he says, ‘then marry her!’ ‘That,’ he replies, ‘is impossible.’ Why it was impossible, he didn’t say, and Father Pyotr had doubts about it for a long time. But Pavla was consumptive and didn’t live long, and before her death, when Father Pavel came to her, she revealed the whole reason to him.”

“What was that reason, Grandmother?”

“They lived according to perfect love.”

“What does that mean?”

“Like angels.”

“Excuse me, but why was that? Pavla’s husband disappeared, and there’s a law that after five years one can marry. Didn’t they know that?”

“No, I think they did, but they also knew something more than that.”

“What, for instance?”

“For instance, that Pavla’s husband survived it all and never disappeared anywhere.”

“But where was he?”

“In Orel!”

“Are you joking?”

“Not a bit.”

“And who knew about it?”

“The three of them: Golovan, Pavla, and the scoundrelly fellow himself. Maybe you remember Fotey?”

“The healed one?”

“Call him what you like, only now that they’re all dead, I can tell you that he wasn’t Fotey at all, but the runaway soldier Fraposhka.”

“What?! Pavla’s husband?”

“Precisely.”

“Then how was it …” I was about to begin, but was ashamed of my own thought and fell silent, but my grandmother understood me and finished:

“You surely want to ask: how was it that no one else recognized him, and Pavla and Golovan didn’t give him away? That’s very simple: others didn’t recognize him, because he wasn’t from this town, and he had grown old and was overgrown with hair. Pavla didn’t give him away out of pity, and Golovan out of love for her.”

“But in court, according to the law, Fraposhka didn’t exist, and they could have married.”

“They could have—according to court law they could have, but according to the law of their conscience they couldn’t.”

“Why, then, did Fraposhka persecute Golovan?”

“The deceased was a scoundrel and thought the same about them as everybody else.”

“But on account of him they deprived themselves of all their happiness!”

“That depends on what you consider happiness: there’s righteous happiness, and there’s sinful happiness. Righteous happiness doesn’t step over anybody, sinful happiness steps over everything. They loved the former better than the latter …”

“Grandmother,” I exclaimed, “these were astonishing people!”

“Righteous people, my dear,” the old woman replied.

But all the same I want to add—astonishing, too, and even incredible. They are incredible while they are surrounded by legendary fiction, but they become still more incredible when you manage to take that patina from them and see them in all their holy simplicity. The perfect love that alone inspired them placed them above all fear and even subdued their nature, without inducing them to bury themselves in the ground or fight the visions that tormented St. Anthony.

* My schoolmate, now the well-known Russian mathematician K. D. Kraevich,²³ and I got to know this eccentric at the end of the forties, when we were in the third class of the Orel high school and roomed together in the Losevs’ house. “Anton the Astronomer” (then very old) actually had some sort of notion about the luminaries and the laws of their revolution, but the most interesting thing was that he made the lenses for his tubes himself, polishing them from the bases of thick crystal glasses with sand and stone, and he looked all over the heavens through them … He lived like a beggar, but he didn’t feel his poverty, because he was in constant ecstasy from his “zodiac.” Author.

† “To his fingertips.” Trans.