The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories

The Sealed Angel

I

It happened during Christmastime, on the eve of St. Basil’s.¹ The weather was raging most unmercifully. A severe, ground-sweeping blizzard, of the kind for which the winters of the Transvolga steppe are famous, drove a multitude of people into a solitary inn that stood like an old bachelor in the midst of the flat and boundless steppe. Here gentlefolk, merchants, and peasants, Russians, and Mordovians, and Chuvashes, all ended up in one heap. To observe grades and ranks in such night lodgings was impossible: wherever you turned, it was crowded, some drying off, others warming themselves, still others looking for a bit of space to huddle up in; the dark, low cottage, crammed with people, was stuffy and filled with dense steam from the wet clothes. There was no free space to be seen: on the bunks, on the stove,² on the benches, and even on the dirty earth floor—people were lying everywhere. The innkeeper, a stern muzhik, was glad neither of the guests nor of the gains. Angrily slamming the gate after the last sleigh, carrying two merchants, forced its way in, he locked it with a padlock and, hanging the key in the icon corner, said firmly:

“Well, now whoever wants to can beat his head on the gate—I won’t open.”

But he had barely managed to say that and, having taken off his vast sheepskin coat, to cross himself with a big, old-style cross and prepare to get onto the hot stove, when someone’s timid hand knocked on the windowpane.

“Who’s there?” the innkeeper called in a loud and displeased voice.

“It’s us,” a muffled reply came from outside the window.

“Well, what do you want?”

“Let us in, for Christ’s sake, we’re lost … frozen.”

“Are there many of you?”

“Not many, not many, eighteen in all, just eighteen,” a man, obviously completely frozen, said outside the window, stammering and his teeth chattering.

“There’s no room for you, the whole cottage is packed with people as it is.”

“At least let us warm up a little!”

“What are you?”

“Carters.”

“Empty or loaded?”

“Loaded, dear brother, we’re carrying hides.”

“Hides! You’re carrying hides, and you ask to spend the night in the cottage? What’s become of the Russian people! Get out of here!”

“But what are they to do?” asked a traveler lying under a bearskin coat on an upper bunk.

“Pile up the hides and sleep under them, that’s what,” the innkeeper replied, and, giving the carters another good cursing out, he lay motionless on the stove.

From under his bearskin, the traveler reprimanded the innkeeper for his cruelty in tones of highly energetic protest, but the man did not honor his remarks with the slightest response. Instead of him, a small, red-haired man with a sharp, wedge-shaped little beard called out from a far corner.

“Don’t condemn our host, my dear sir,” he began. “He takes it from experience, and what he says is true—with the hides it’s safe.”

“Oh?” a questioning response came from under the bearskin.

“Perfectly safe, sir, and it’s better for them that he doesn’t let them in.”

“Why is that?”

“Because now they’ll get themselves useful experience from it, and meanwhile if some helpless person or other comes knocking here, there’ll be room for him.”

“Who else would the devil bring here now?” said the fur coat.

“Listen, you,” the innkeeper put in. “Don’t spout empty words. Can the foul fiend bring anybody to where there’s such holy things? Don’t you see the icon of the Savior and the face of the Mother of God here?”

“That’s right,” the red-haired little man seconded. “Every saved person is guided by an angel, not by the dark one.”

“That’s something I’ve never seen, and since I find this a vile place, I don’t want to think my angel brought me here,” replied the garrulous fur coat.

The innkeeper only spat angrily, but the little redhead said good-naturedly that not everybody could behold the angel’s path, and you could only get a notion of it from real experience.

“You speak of it as if you’ve had such experience yourself,” said the fur coat.

“Yes, sir, I have.”

“So you saw an angel, and he led you—is that it?”

“Yes, sir, I saw him, and he guided me.”

“What, are you joking, or making fun?”

“God keep me from joking about such things!”

“So what precisely was it that you saw: how did the angel appear to you?”

“That, my dear sir, is a whole big story.”

“You know, it’s decidedly impossible to fall asleep here, and you’d be doing an excellent thing if you told us that story now.”

“As you wish, sir.”

“Please tell it, then: we’re listening. But why are you kneeling over there? Come here to us, maybe we can make room and all sit together.”

“No, sir, I thank you for that! Why crowd yourselves? And besides, the story I’m going to tell you is more properly told kneeling down, because it’s a highly sacred and even awesome thing.”

“Well, as you wish, only tell us quickly, how could you see an angel and what did he do to you?”

“If you please, sir, I’ll begin.”

II

As you can undoubtedly tell from my looks, I’m a totally insignificant man, nothing more than a muzhik, and the education I received was most village-like, as suited that condition. I’m not from hereabouts, but from far away; by trade I’m a mason, and I was born into the old Russian faith.³ On account of my orphanhood, from a young age I went with my countrymen to do itinerant work and worked in various places, but always with the same crew, under our peasant Luka Kirilovich. This Luka Kirilovich is still alive: he’s our foremost contractor. His business was from old times, established by his forefathers, and he didn’t squander it, but increased it and made himself a big and abundant granary,⁴ but he was and is a wonderful man and not an offender. And where, where didn’t our crew go with him! Seems we walked all over Russia, and nowhere have I seen a better and steadier master than him. We lived under him in the most peaceful patriarchy, and he was our contractor and our guide in trade and in faith. We followed him to work the way the Jews followed Moses in their wanderings in the desert; we even had our own tabernacle with us and never parted with it: that is, we had our own “God’s blessing” with us. Luka Kirilovich passionately loved holy icons, and, my dear sirs, he owned the most wonderful icons, of the most artful workmanship, ancient, either real Greek, or of the first Novgorod or Stroganov icon painters.⁵ Icon after icon shone not so much by their casings as by the keenness and fluency of their marvelous artistry. I’ve never seen such loftiness anywhere since!

There were various saints, and Deisises, and the Savior-not-made-by-hands with wet hair,⁶ and holy monks, and martyrs, and the apostles, and most wondrous were the multifigured icons with different deeds, such as, for instance, the Indictus, the feasts, the Last Judgment, the Saints of the month, the Council of Angels, the Paternity, the Six Days, the Healers, the Seven Days of the Week with praying figures, the Trinity with Abraham bowing down under the oak of Mamre, and, in short, it’s impossible to describe all this beauty, and nowadays such icons aren’t painted anywhere, not in Moscow, not in Petersburg, not in Palekh;⁷ and there’s even no talking about Greece, because the know-how has long been lost there. We all passionately loved these holy icons of ours, and together we burned lamps before them, and at the crew’s expense we kept a horse and a special cart in which we transported this blessing of God in two big trunks wherever we went. We had two icons in particular, one copied from the Greek by old Moscow court masters: our most holy Lady praying in the garden, with all the cypress and olive trees bowing to the ground before her; and the other a guardian angel, Stroganov work. It’s impossible to express what art there was in these two holy images!

You look at Our Lady, how the inanimate trees bow down before her purity, and your heart melts and trembles; you look at the angel … joy! This angel was truly something indescribable. His face—I can see it now—is most brightly divine and so swiftly succoring; his gaze is tender; his hair is tied with a fine ribbon, its ends curling around his ears, a sign of his hearing everything from everywhere; his robe is shining, all spangled with gold; his armor is feathery, his shoulders are girded; on his chest the face of the infant Emmanuel; in his right hand a cross, in his left a flaming sword. Wondrous! Wondrous! … The hair on his head is wavy and blond, curly from the ears down, and traced hair by hair with a needle. His wings are vast and white as snow, but azure underneath, done feather by feather, and on each shaft barb by barb. You look at those wings, and where has all your fear gone to? You pray, “Overshadow me,” and you grow all quiet at once, and there’s peace in your soul. That’s what kind of icon it was! And for us these two icons were like the holy of holies for the Jews, adorned by the wonderful artistry of Bezaleel.⁸ All the icons I mentioned earlier were transported by horse in special trunks, but these two we didn’t even put in the cart, but carried: Luka Kirilovich’s wife, Mikhailitsa, always carried Our Lady, and Luka himself kept the image of the angel on his breast. He had a brocade pouch made for this icon, lined with dark homespun, and with a button, and on the front side there was a scarlet cross made from real damask, and there was a thick green silk cord to hang it round the neck. And so this icon that was always kept on Luka’s breast preceded us wherever we went, as if the angel himself were going before us. We used to go from place to place for new work over the steppe, Luka Kirilovich ahead of us all, waving his notched measuring stick instead of a staff, Mikhailitsa behind him in the cart with the icon of the Mother of God, and behind them the whole crew of us marching, and there in the field there’s grass, meadow flowers, herds pasturing here and there, a shepherd playing his reed … a sheer delight for heart and mind! Everything went beautifully for us, and wondrous was our success in all things: we always found good work; there was concord among us; peaceful news kept coming to us from our folks at home; and for all that we blessed the angel who went before us, and it seemed to us it would be harder to part with his most wonderful icon than with our own lives.

And could we have thought that somehow, by some chance or other, we would be deprived of our most precious and holy thing? And yet that grief awaited us, and was arranged for us, as we perceived only later, not through people’s perfidy, but through the providence of our guide himself. He himself wished to be insulted, in order to grant us the holy ordeal of sorrow, and through it to show us the true path, before which all the paths we had trodden were like a dark and trackless wilderness. But allow me to inquire whether my story is interesting and I am not troubling your attention for nothing?

“Not at all, not at all: be so kind as to continue!” we exclaimed, having become interested in what he was telling.

“Very well, sirs, I obey, and will begin, as best I can, to set forth the wondrous wonders that came to us from our angel.”

III

We came to do big work near a big city on a big stream of water, the Dniepr River, to build there a big and now highly famous stone bridge.⁹ The city stands on the steep right bank, and we settled on the low left bank covered with meadows, and a beautiful peosage opened before us: old churches, holy monasteries with the relics of many saints; lush gardens and trees such as are pictured in the frontispieces of old books, that is, sharp-pointed poplars. You look at it all and it’s as if somebody’s plucking at your heart—it’s so beautiful! You know, of course, we’re simple people, but all the same we do feel the all-graciousness of God-created nature.

And so we fell so cruelly in love with this place that, on the very first day, we started building ourselves a temporary dwelling there. We first drove in long piles, because the place was low-lying, right next to the water, then on those piles we set about constructing a room, with an adjacent storeroom. In the room we set out all our holy icons as they ought to be by our forefathers’ rules: along the length of one wall we opened a folding iconostasis of three levels, the lowest for big icons, and the two upper shelves for smaller ones, and thus we built a stairway, as it should be, up to the crucifix itself, and we put the angel on the lectern on which Luka Kirilovich read the Scriptures. Luka Kirilovich and Mikhailitsa set up house in the storeroom, and we closed off a little barrack for ourselves beside it. On looking at us, the others who came to work for a long stretch began building for themselves in the same way, and so, across from the great, established city, we had our light little town on piles. We got down to work, and everything went as it ought to! The money counted out by the Englishmen in the office was reliable; God sent us such good health that we didn’t have a single sick man all summer, and Luka’s Mikhailitsa even started complaining, “I’m not glad, myself, I’ve grown so plump in all quarters.” What we Old Believers especially liked about it was that, while we were subjected to persecution everywhere back then, we had an easy time of it here: there were no town or district authorities, no priests; we didn’t set eyes on anybody, and nobody was concerned or interfered with our religion … We prayed our fill: put in our hours of work and then gathered in the room, and there the holy icons shone so much from all the lamps that your heart even got to glowing. Luka Kirilovich would begin by pronouncing the blessing, and then we’d all join in and sing praises so that sometimes, in calm weather, it could be heard far beyond our settlement. And our faith didn’t bother anybody, and many even seemed to fall in with our way, and it pleased not only simple people, who were inclined to worship God in Russian fashion, but even those of other faith. Many churchgoers of pious disposition, who had no time to go to church across the river, used to stand under our windows and listen and begin to pray. We didn’t forbid them this standing outside: we couldn’t drive them all away, because even foreigners who were interested in the old Russian rite came more than once to listen to our singing and approved of it. The head of the English builders, Yakov Yakovlevich, would even come and stand under the window with a piece of paper and kept trying to take down our chanting in notes, and then he’d go around the works humming to himself in our way: “God is the Lord and has revealed Himself to us”—only for him, naturally, it all came out in a different style, because this singing, which is set down in the old notation, can’t be accurately recorded in the new Western notes. The English, to do them credit, were most reliable and pious people themselves, and they liked us very much, considered us good people, and praised us. In short, the Lord’s angel brought us to a good place and opened to us all the hearts of people and all the peosage of nature.

In this same peaceful spirit as I’ve represented to you, we lived nigh onto three years. Everything went swimmingly, successes poured down on us as from Amalthea’s horn,¹⁰ when we suddenly perceived that among us there were two vessels chosen by God for our punishment. One such was the blacksmith Maroy, and the other the accountant Pimen Ivanovich. Maroy was quite simple, even illiterate, which is even a rarity among the Old Believers, but he was a peculiar man: of clumsy appearance, like a camel, and stout as a boar—an armful and a half in girth, and his brow all overgrown with a thick mane like an old antlion,¹¹ and in the middle of his head, on top, he used to shear a bare patch. He was dull and incomprehensible of speech, he maundered with his lips, and his mind was slow and inept at everything, so that he couldn’t even learn prayers by heart and used to repeat just some one word, but he could foresee the future and had the gift of prophecy, and could give intimations of what was to come. Pimen, on the other hand, was a foppish man: he liked to behave with great swagger and spoke with such a clever twisting of words that you could only wonder at his speech; but then he was of a light character and easily carried away. Maroy was an elderly man, in his seventies, but Pimen was middle-aged and refined: he had curly hair parted down the middle; bushy eyebrows; a pink-cheeked face—Belial, in a word.¹² In these two vessels there was suddenly fermented the vinegar of that bitter draft we were to drink.

IV

The bridge we were building on eight granite piers was already rising high above the water, and in the summer of the fourth year we were starting to put iron chains on those piers. At that point there was a little hitch: as we started sorting out the links and fitting steel rivets to each hole by measure, it turned out that many of the bolts were too long and had to be cut, and each of those bolts—steel rods all made in England—was cast of the strongest steel and thick as a grown man’s arm. To heat up these bolts was impossible, because it softens the steel, and no tool could saw through them: but our blacksmith Maroy suddenly came up with this method: he’d coat the place where it had to be cut with thick axle grease mixed with coarse sand, and then stick the whole thing into the snow, and crumble salt around it, and turn it, spin it; then snatch it out of there all at once, put it on a hot anvil, and give it such a whack with a sledge that it would get cut off like a wax candle with snips. All the Englishmen and Germans came to look at Maroy’s cleverness, stared and stared, then suddenly laughed and started talking among themselves first, and then said in our language:

“So, Russ! You fine fellow; you goot understand physic!”

But what sort of “physic” could Maroy understand? He had no understanding of science at all, and simply did it with the wisdom the Lord gave him. And our Pimen Ivanovich went and started boasting about it. So it went badly on both sides: some ascribed it to science, of which this Maroy of ours had no notion, and others started saying that a visible blessing of God was upon us, working wonders such as had never been seen. And this last thing was worse for us than the first. I’ve already told you that Pimen Ivanovich was a weak man and a sensualist, and I will now explain why we nevertheless kept him in our crew. He went to town after provisions for us, made whatever purchases were necessary; we sent him to the post office to mail passports and money back home, and to retrieve the new passports when they came.¹³ Generally, it was that sort of thing he took care of, and, to tell the truth, in that sense he was a necessary and even very useful man. A real, solid Old Believer, naturally, always shuns that sort of vanity, and flees from dealings with officials, for we saw nothing but vexation from them, but Pimen was glad of the vanity, and had acquired a most abundant acquaintance across the river in town: merchants and gentlefolk he had to do with on the crew’s business—everybody knew him and considered him the first man among us. We, naturally, chuckled at that, but he was terribly fond of having tea with gentlefolk and showing off his eloquence: they called him our chief, and he only smiled and spread his beard on his chest. In short, an empty fellow! And this Pimen of ours wound up at a certain not unimportant person’s, whose wife was born in our parts, also a wordy one, and she had read herself up on some new books about Old Believers, in which we’ve no notion what’s written about us, and suddenly, I don’t know why, it entered her head that she had a great liking for us. The surprising thing was why she chose to be such a vessel! Well, if she liked us, she liked us, and whenever our Pimen came to her husband for something, she immediately sat him down to tea, and Pimen was glad of it and immediately rolled out his scrolls before her.

She pours out her woman’s vain talk, that you Old Believers are this and that, holy people, righteous, ever-blessed, and our Belial goes cross-eyed with pleasure, head bowed, beard smooth, voice soothing:

“Of course, madam. We observe the law of our forefathers, we’re this and that, we hold to these rules, and keep an eye on each other for the purity of our customs,” and, in a word, he says all sorts of things to her that don’t belong to a conversation with a worldly woman. And yet, just imagine, she’s interested.

“I’ve heard,” she says, “that God’s blessing is manifested visibly to you.”

And the man chimes in at once:

“Of course, my dear lady,” he replies, “it is manifested; it is manifested quite ocularly.”

“Visibly?”

“Visibly,” he replies, “visibly, madam. Just a couple of days ago one of our men snipped off stout steel like a cobweb.”

The little lady just clasped her sweet little hands.

“Ah,” she says, “how interesting! Ah, I love miracles terribly, and I believe in them! Listen,” she says, “please ask your Old Believers to pray that God will give me a daughter. I have two sons, but I absolutely must have a daughter. Is that possible?”

“It is, ma’am,” Pimen replies. “Why not? It’s perfectly possible! Only,” he says, “in such cases you must always have sacrificial oil burning.”

With the greatest pleasure, she gives him ten roubles for the oil, and he puts the money in his pocket and says:

“Very well, ma’am, be of good hope, I’ll tell them.”

Naturally, Pimen tells us nothing about it, but the lady gives birth to a daughter.

Pah, what a noise she made! She’s barely recovered from the delivery when she summons our empty fellow and honors him as if he was a wonderworker, and he accepts that as well. Such was the vanity of the man, and the darkening of his mind, and the freezing of his feelings. A year later, the lady again had a request for our God, that her husband should rent her a summer house—and again everything was done according to her wishes, and Pimen got more offerings for candles and oil, and he disposed of those offerings as he saw fit, without sending them our way. And incomprehensible wonders indeed got done: this lady’s elder son was in school, and he was the foremost hooky player, and a lazy dunce, and didn’t study at all, but when it came time for examinations, she sent for Pimen and gave him a commission to pray that her son pass to the next class. Pimen says:

“That’s hard. I’ll have to get all our men together to pray all night and call out by candlelight till morning.”

But she didn’t bat an eye. She handed him thirty roubles—only pray! And what do you think? This wastrel son of hers runs into such luck that he passes to the upper class. The lady nearly went out of her mind with joy that our God showed her such kindness! She started giving Pimen commission after commission, and he had already petitioned God and obtained health for her, and an inheritance, and high rank for her husband, and so many decorations that there was no more room on his chest and they say he carried one in his pocket. Wondrous, that’s all, and we knew nothing about it. But the time came for all that to be revealed and for some wonders to be exchanged for others.

V

Trouble was brewing in the commercial dealings among the Jews in one of the Jewish towns of that province. I can’t tell you for sure whether it was about some wrong money or some duty-free trading, but it had to be looked into by the authorities, and here there was the prospect of a mighty reward. So the lady sends for our Pimen and says:

“Pimen Ivanovich, here’s twenty roubles for oil and candles; tell your people to pray as zealously as they can that my husband gets sent on this mission.”

Nothing to it! He’s already acquired a taste for collecting this oil tax and replies:

“Very well, my lady, I’ll tell them.”

“And they should pray good and proper,” she says, “because it’s very necessary for me!”

“As if they dare to pray badly on me, my lady, when I order them,” Pimen reassured her. “I’ll have them go hungry till their prayer’s answered.” He took the money and was off, and that same night the lady’s husband got the job she wished for him.

Well, this time the blessing went to her head so much that she wasn’t satisfied with having us pray, but absolutely desired to go and pray to our holy images herself.

She said so to Pimen, but he turned coward, because he knew our people wouldn’t let her go near our holy images. But the lady wouldn’t leave off.

“Say what you like,” she said, “but I’ll take a boat towards evening today and come to you with my son.”

Pimen tried to talk her out of it. “It’s better,” he says, “if we pray by ourselves. We have this guardian angel, you donate for the oil to burn before him, and we’ll entrust him with safeguarding your spouse.”

“Ah, splendid,” she replies, “splendid. I’m very glad there’s such an angel. Here’s for the oil. Be sure to light three lamps before him, and I’ll come and look.”

Trouble caught up with Pimen. He came to us and started saying, “Thus and so, it’s my fault, I didn’t contradict this vile heathen woman in her wishes, because her husband is somebody we need.” And so he told us a cock-and-bull story, but still didn’t tell us all he’d done. Well, unpleasant as it was for us, there was nothing else to do. We quickly took our icons off the walls and hid them away in the trunks, and replaced them with some substitutes we kept for fear the authorities might come and inspect us. We put them on the shelves and waited for the visitor. And she came, spiffed up something awful, sweeping around with her long, wide skirts, looking at our substitute icons through a lorgnette and asking: “Tell me, please, which one is the wonderworking angel?” We didn’t even know how to get her off the subject:

“We have no such angel,” we said.

And no matter how she insisted and complained to Pimen, we didn’t show her the angel and quickly took her away to have tea and whatever little treats we could give her.

We disliked her terribly, and God knows why: her look was somehow repulsivous, for all that she was considered beautiful. Tall, you know, with such spindly legs, thin as a steppe goat, and straight-browed.

“You don’t like that kind of beauty?” the bearskin coat interrupted the storyteller.

“Good grief, what’s likeable in such snakiness?” he replied.

“Do your people consider it beautiful if a woman looks like a hump or something?”

“A hump?” the storyteller repeated, smiling and not taking offense. “Why do you suggest that? In our true Russian understanding concerning a woman’s build, we keep to a type of our own, which we find much more suitable than modern-day frivolity, and it’s nothing like a hump. We don’t appreciate spindliness, true; we prefer that a woman stand not on long legs, but on sturdy ones, so that she doesn’t get tangled up, but rolls about everywhere like a ball and makes it, where a spindly-legged one will run and trip. We also don’t appreciate snaky thinness, but require that a woman be on the stout side, ample, because, though it’s not so elegant, it points to maternity in them. The brow of our real, pure Russian woman’s breed is more plump, more meaty, but then in that soft brow there’s more gaiety, more welcome. The same for the nose: ours have noses that aren’t hooked, but more like little pips, but this little pip itself, like it or not, is much more affable in family life than a dry, proud nose. But the eyebrows especially, the eyebrows open up the look of the face, and therefore it’s necessary that a woman’s eyebrows not scowl, but be opened out, archlike, for a man finds it more inviting to talk with such a woman, and she makes a different, more welcoming impression on everybody coming to the house. But modern taste, naturally, has abandoned this good type and approves of airy ephemerality in the female sex, only that’s completely useless. Excuse me, however, I see we’ve started talking about something else. I’d better go on.”

Our Pimen, being a vain man, notices that we, having seen the visitor off, have begun to criticize her, and says:

“Really, now! She’s a good woman.”

And we reply: what kind of good is she, if there’s no goodness in her appearance? But God help her: whatever she is, let her be. We were glad enough to be rid of her, and we hastened to burn some incense so that there would be no smell of her in our place.

After that we swept all traces of the dear guest’s visit from the room, put the substitute images back into the trunks behind the partition, and took out our real icons, placed them on the shelves as they had been before, sprinkled them with holy water, said some initial prayers, and went each to his own night’s rest, only, God knows why and wherefore, we all slept poorly that night and felt somehow eerie and restless.

VI

In the morning we all went to work and set about our tasks, but Luka Kirilovich wasn’t there. That, judging by his punctuality, was surprising, but it seemed still more surprising to me that he turned up after seven all pale and upset.

Knowing that he was a self-possessed man and did not like giving way to empty sorrows, I paid attention to that and asked: “What’s the matter with you, Luka Kirilovich?” And he says: “I’ll tell you later.”

But, being young then, I was awfully curious, and, besides, a premonition suddenly came to me from somewhere that this was something bad to do with our faith; and I honored our faith and had never been an unbeliever.

And therefore I couldn’t stand it for long, and, under some pretext or other, I left work and ran home. I think: while nobody’s home, I’ll worm something out of Mikhailitsa. Though Luka Kirilovich hadn’t revealed anything, she, in all her simplicity, could still somehow see through him, and she wouldn’t conceal anything from me, because I had been an orphan from childhood, and had grown up like a son to them, and she was the same to me as a second mother.

So I rush to her, and I see she’s sitting on the porch, an old coat thrown over her shoulders, and herself as if sick, sad, and a sort of greenish color.

“My second mother,” I say, “why are you sitting here of all places?”

And she says:

“And where am I to huddle up, Marochka?”

My name is Mark Alexandrovich, but she, having maternal feelings for me, called me Marochka.

“What’s she giving me this nonsense for,” I think, “that she’s got nowhere to huddle up?”

“Why don’t you lie down in your closet?” I say.

“I can’t, Marochka,” she says, “old Maroy’s praying in the big room.”

“Aha!” I think. “So it’s true that something’s happened to do with our faith.” And Aunt Mikhailitsa begins:

“You probably don’t know what happened here during the night, do you, Marochka, my child?”

“No, second mother, I don’t.”

“Ah, terrible things!”

“Tell me quickly, second mother.”

“Ah, I don’t know how I can tell you.”

“How is it you can’t tell me?” I say. “Am I some kind of stranger to you, and not like a son?”

“I know, my dearest,” she replies, “that you’re like a son to me, only I don’t trust myself to put it in the right words for you, because I’m stupid and untalented, but just wait—uncle will come back at quitting time, he’ll surely tell you everything.”

But there was no way I could wait, and I pestered her to tell me, tell me right now, what it was all about.

And I see she keeps blinking, blinking her eyes, and her eyes get all filled with tears, and she suddenly brushes them away with her shawl and softly whispers to me:

“Our guardian angel came down last night, child.”

This revelation threw me into a fit of trembling.

“Say quickly,” I ask, “how did this wonder happen and who were the beholders of it?”

And she replies:

“It was an unfathomable wonder, child, and nobody beheld it but me, because it happened in the deepest midnight hour, and I was the only one not asleep.”

And this, my dear sirs, is the story she told me:

“I fell asleep having said my prayers,” she says. “I don’t remember how long I slept, but suddenly in my dreams I see a fire, a big fire: as if everything here is burning down, and the river carries the ashes and whirls them around the piers, and swallows them, sucks them into the depths.” And as for herself, it seemed to Mikhailitsa that she ran out in a threadbare nightshirt, all holes, and stood right by the water, and across from her, on the other bank, a tall red pillar thrust itself up, and on that pillar was a small white cock, and he kept flapping his wings. And it was as if Mikhailitsa said: “Who are you?”—because her feeling told her that he was announcing something. And the cock suddenly exclaimed “Amen” as if in a human voice, and drooped, and was no longer there, and around Mikhailitsa it became quiet and there was such spentness in the air that Mikhailitsa became frightened and couldn’t breathe, and she woke up and lay there, and she heard a lamb start bleating outside the door. And she can hear from its voice that it’s a very young lamb that still hasn’t shed its newborn wool. Its pure, silvery little voice rings out “Ba-a-a,” and suddenly Mikhailitsa senses that it’s walking about the prayer room, its little hooves beating out a quick tap-tap-tap on the floorboards, as if it’s looking for someone. Mikhailitsa reasons to herself: “Lord Jesus Christ! What is it? There are no sheep in our whole settlement and no lambing either, so where has this little one dropped from?” And at the same time she gives a start: “How, then, did it end up in the house? It means that, with all last night’s bustle, we forgot to bolt the front door. Thank God,” she thinks, “it’s just a lamb that’s wandered in, and not a yard dog getting at our holy icons.” And she tries to wake up Luka with it: “Kirilych!” she calls him. “Kirilych! Wake up quick, dearest, we’ve left the door open and some little lamb’s wandered in.” But Luka Kirilovich, as bad luck would have it, was wrapped up in a dead sleep. No matter what Mikhailitsa did, she couldn’t wake him up: he groaned, but didn’t speak. The harder Mikhailitsa shook and shoved him, the louder he groaned, and that was all. Mikhailitsa began asking him at least “to remember the name of Jesus,” but she had barely uttered that name herself when something in the room squealed, and at the same moment Luka tore himself from the bed and went rushing forward, but in the middle of the room it was as if a metal wall suddenly flung him back. “A light, woman! A light, quickly!” he shouted to Mikhailitsa, and he himself couldn’t move from the spot. She lit a candle and ran out, and saw him, pale as a condemned man, trembling so much that not only was the clasp moving on his neck, but even his pants were shaking on his legs. The woman turned to him again. “My provider,” she said, “what is it?” And he just pointed his finger at the empty spot where the angel used to be, while the angel himself was lying on the floor by Luka’s feet.

Luka Kirilovich went at once to old Maroy and said, thus and so, this is what my woman saw and what happened to us. Come and look. Maroy came and knelt before the angel lying on the floor and stayed motionless over him for a long time, like a marble tombstone. Then, raising his hand, he scratched the bare patch on the crown of his head and said softly:

“Bring me twelve clean, newly fired bricks.”

Luka Kirilovich brought them at once, Maroy looked them over and saw that they were all clean, straight from the fiery furnace, and told Luka to stack them one on top of the other, and in that way they erected a pillar, covered it with a clean towel, raised the icon up on it, and then Maroy, bowing to the ground, exclaims:

“Angel of the Lord, may thy footsteps be poured out wheresoe’er thou wishest!”

And he had only just uttered these words, when there suddenly comes a rap-rap-rap on the door, and an unfamiliar voice calls out:

“Hey, you schismatics, which of you is the chief here?”

Luka Kirilovich opens the door and sees a soldier with a badge standing there.

Luka asks what chief he wants, and the soldier replies:

“The one who visited the lady and calls himself Pimen.”

Well, Luka sent his wife for Pimen at once, and asked the soldier what was the matter. Why had he been sent at night to find Pimen?

The soldier says:

“I don’t know for certain, but the word is that the Jews set up some awkward business with the gentleman.”

But precisely what it was, he couldn’t tell.

“I heard,” he says, “that the gentleman sealed them, and they put a seal on him.”

But how it was that they sealed each other, he couldn’t tell coherently.

Meanwhile Pimen came over and, like a Jew himself, rolled his eyes this way and that: obviously, he didn’t know what to say. Luka says:

“What are you standing there for, you spielman, go on now and bring your spielmaning to an end!”

Pimen and the soldier got into the boat and left.

An hour later our Pimen comes back and puts up a cheerful front, but it’s clear he’s cruelly out of sorts.

Luka questions him:

“Tell me, featherbrain,” he says, “and you’d better tell me in all frankness, what were you up to there?”

And he says:

“Nothing.”

Well, so it was left at nothing, and yet it was by no means nothing.

VII

A most astonishing thing had happened with the gentleman our Pimen supposedly had us pray for. As I told you, he set out for the Jewish town and arrived there late at night, when nobody was thinking about him, and at once sealed every one of the shops, and informed the police that he would come and inspect them the next morning. The Jews, naturally, found it out at once and came to him at once that night asking to make a deal, meaning they had no end of illegal goods. They come and shove ten thousand roubles at the gentleman straight off. He says: “I can’t, I’m a big official, invested with confidence, and I don’t take bribes,” and the Jews psht-psht-psht among themselves and offer him fifteen. He says again: “I can’t.” They offer twenty. He says: “What is it, don’t you understand that I can’t, I’ve already let the police know about going there together tomorrow to inspect.” They psht-psht again, and then say:

“Vel, Your Excellency, dat’s nothing dat you let the police know, here ve’re giffing you tventy-five tousend, and you jes gif us your seal till morning and go peacefully to bed, and ve don’t need anyting else.”

The gentleman thought and thought: he considered himself a big person, but, obviously, even big persons don’t have hearts of stone. He took the twenty-five thousand and gave them his seal, with which he had done the sealing, and went to bed. During the night, the Jews, naturally, dragged everything they had to out of their cellars and sealed them again with the same seal, and the gentleman was still asleep when they were already psht-pshting in his front hall. Well, so he lets them in; they thank him and say:

“And now, Your Honor, you’re velcome to inspect.”

Well, he makes as if he doesn’t hear that, and says:

“Give me back my seal, quickly.”

And the Jews say:

“And you gif us back our money.”

“What? How’s that?” says the gentleman. But they stand their ground:

“Ve left you de money as a pledge.”

“What do you mean, as a pledge?”

“Dat’s right, zir,” they say, “it vas a pledge.”

“You’re lying,” he says, “scoundrels that you are, Christ-sellers, you gave me that money to keep.”

They nudge each other and chuckle:

“Hörst-du,” they say, “you hear, ve supposedly gafe it outright … Hm, hm! Oy vey, as if ve could be so shtupid, just like some muzhiks mitout politics, to gif such a big person a khabar.” (“Khabar” is their word for a bribe.)

Well, sirs, can you imagine anything better than this story? The gentleman, naturally, should have given back the money, and that would have been the end of it, but he held out a little longer, because he was sorry to part with it. Morning came; all the shops in town were locked; people came and marveled; the police demand the seal, and the Jews shout: “Oy vey, vat kind of gofernment is dis! De high autorities vant to ruin us.” A terrible uproar! The gentleman locks himself in and sits there almost out of his mind till dinnertime, but in the evening he summons those clever Jews and says: “Take your money, curse you, and give me back my seal!” But they no longer want that. They say: “How can you do dat! In de whole town ve did no business all day: now Your Honor muss gif us fifty tousend.” You see what came of it! And the Jews threaten: “If you don’t gif fifty tousend today, tomorrow it vill cost you anoder tventy-fife tousend more!” The gentleman didn’t sleep all night, and in the morning he sent for the Jews again, gave them back all the money he had taken from them, and wrote a promissory note for another twenty-five thousand, and went ahead with the inspection anyhow; found nothing, naturally, quickly went home to his wife, and stormed and raged before her: where was he to get twenty-five thousand to buy back the promissory note from the Jews? “We’ll have to sell the estate that came as your dowry.” But she says: “Not for anything in the world—I’m attached to it.” He says: “It’s your fault, you prayed through some schismatics that I be sent on this mission and assured me their angel would help me, and yet see how nicely he’s helped me.” But she replies: “No, the fault is yours. Why were you so stupid that you didn’t arrest those Jews and declare that they stole the seal from you? But, in any case,” she says, “never mind: just listen to me and I’ll set things right, and others will pay for your injudiciousness.” And she suddenly shouted out to whoever happened to be there: “Quick, hurry, go across the Dniepr and bring me the schismatics’ headman.”

Well, the envoy, naturally, went and brought our Pimen, and the lady says directly, not beating about the bush: “Listen, I know you’re an intelligent man and will understand what I need: there’s been a little unpleasantness with my husband, some scoundrels have robbed him … Jews … you understand, and now we absolutely must have twenty-five thousand today or tomorrow, and there’s nowhere I can get it that quickly; but I’ve called you in and am at peace, because Old Believers are intelligent and rich people, and, as I’ve become convinced, God Himself helps you in all things, so kindly give me twenty-five thousand, and I, for my part, will tell all the ladies about your wonderworking icons, and you’ll see how much you get for wax and oil.”

I suppose it’s not hard for you to imagine, my dear sirs, what our spielman felt about such a turn of events. I don’t know what words he used, but only—and I do believe him—that he began hotly vowing and swearing, testifying to our poverty in the face of such a sum, but she, this new Herodias,¹⁴ didn’t even want to know about it. “No,” she says, “I know very well that the Old Believers are rich, and for you twenty-five thousand is nonsense. When my father was serving in Moscow, the Old Believers did him such favors more than once and for more than that. No, twenty-five thousand is a trifle.”

Here, too, naturally, Pimen tried to explain to her that the Moscow Old Believers were capital people, while we were simple, hardworking hayseeds and had no place competing against Muscovites. But she must have had good Muscovite lessons in her and suddenly cut him short:

“What’s this?” she says. “What’s this you’re telling me? Don’t I know how many wonderworking icons you’ve got, and weren’t you telling me yourself how much they send you for wax and oil from all over Russia? No, I don’t want to listen. I must have the money right now, otherwise my husband will go to the governor today and tell him all about how you pray and seduce people, and it’ll be bad for you.” Poor Pimen nearly fell off the porch; he came home as I told you, and just kept repeating the one word “Nothing,” and he himself was all red, like from the steambaths, pacing up and down and blowing his nose. Well, Luka Kirilovich finally got a little something out of him, only the man, naturally, didn’t reveal everything to him, but just gave away the most insignificant part of the essence, like saying: “This lady demands of me that I get you to lend her five thousand.” Well, hearing that, Luka, naturally, flies into a temper: “Ah, you spielman, you,” he says, “you just had to go dealing with them and then bring them here! What, are we so rich, are we, that we can raise that kind of money? And why should we give it to them? And where is it, anyway? … Since you dealt yourself into it, you can deal yourself out of it—we can’t get five thousand anywhere.” With that, Luka Kirilovich went on his way to work and arrived, as I told you, pale as a condemned man, because, going by the night’s events, he anticipated trouble for us; and Pimen himself went the other way. We had all seen him emerge from the bulrushes in a little boat and cross over to town, and now, once Mikhailitsa had told me everything in order, how he’d dunned them for the five thousand, I figured he was probably in a rush to sweeten up the lady. In such reflections, I was standing by Mikhailitsa, thinking whether something harmful for us might come of it, and whether measures ought to be taken against this possibly occurring evil, when I suddenly saw it was too late for the whole undertaking, because a big boat had come to shore, and just behind my back I heard the noise of many voices, and, turning, I saw a number of different officials, in various corresponding uniforms, and with them no small number of policemen and soldiers. And, my dear sirs, before Mikhailitsa and I had time to blink, they all poured past us straight to Luka’s room, and at the door they placed two sentries with drawn sabers. Mikhailitsa started throwing herself at these sentries, not so much to be allowed in as to endure suffering. They, naturally, pushed her away, but she threw herself at them still more fiercely, and their combat went so far that one of the gendarmes finally hurt her badly, so that she went rolling head over heels off the porch. I rushed to the bridge to fetch Luka, but I saw Luka himself already running towards me, and our whole crew after him, they had all risen up, and with whatever they had in their hands, one a crowbar, another a mallet, came running to save our holy icons … Those who didn’t catch a boat and had no way of reaching the shore dove off the bridge into the water, in all their clothes, as they had been at work, and swam one after another through the cold waves … It was terrible even to think how it would end. About twenty guardsmen came there, and they were all in various bold attire, but ours numbered more than fifty, and all of them animated by lofty, ardent faith, and they all swam through the water like sea dogs, and though they might be bashed on the head with mallets, they reached the bank where their holy icons were, and suddenly, all soaking wet, marched forward like your living and indestructible stones.

VIII

Now kindly remember that, while Mikhailitsa and I were talking on the porch, old Maroy was praying in the room, and the gentlemen officials and their sbirri found him there. He told us later that, as soon as they came in, they bolted the door and threw themselves straight at the icons. Some were putting out the lamps, others were tearing the icons from the walls and piling them on the floor, shouting to him: “Are you the priest?” He says: “No, I’m not.” They say: “Who is your priest, then?” He replies: “We have no priest.” And they say: “What do you mean, no priest! How dare you say you have no priest!” Here Maroy began explaining to them that we don’t have priests, but since he spoke badly, mumblingly, they didn’t try to make out what he meant. “Bind him,” they said, “he’s under arrest!” Maroy let them bind him: it was nothing to him that a common soldier tied his hands with a piece of string, but he stood there and, accepting it all for the sake of the faith, watched for what would follow. And the officials meanwhile lit candles and started placing seals on the icons: some placed the seals, others wrote them down on a list, still others bored holes in the icons and strung them on iron rods like kitchen pots. Maroy looked at all this blasphemous outrage and didn’t even flinch, because, he reasoned, it was probably God’s will to allow such savagery. But just then Uncle Maroy heard one gendarme cry out, and another after him: the door flew open, and our sea dogs, wet as they were, straight from the water, pushed their way into the room. Fortunately, Luka Kirilovich found himself at the head of them. He shouted at once:

“Wait, Christian folk, don’t brazen it out!” And he himself turned to the officials and, pointing to the icons strung on rods, said: “Why, gentlemen superiors, have you damaged the holy images like this? If you have the right to take them from us, we do not resist authority—take them; but why do you damage the rare artwork of our forefathers?”

But that husband of Pimen’s lady acquaintance, who was there at the head of them all, shouted at Uncle Luka:

“Silence, scoundrel! How dare you argue!”

And Luka, though he was a proud man, humbled himself and said softly:

“Permit me, Your Honor, we know the procedure. We have some hundred and fifty icons in this room. Allow us to pay you three roubles per icon, and take them, only don’t damage our ancestral art.”

The gentleman flashed his eyes and shouted loudly:

“Away with you!” But in a whisper he whispered: “Give me a hundred roubles apiece, or else I’ll torch them all.”

Luka could not give or even consider giving such big money, and said:

“In that case, God help you: ruin it all however you like, we don’t have that kind of money.”

But the gentleman started yelling wrathfully:

“Ah, you bearded goat, how dare you talk about money in front of us?”—and here he suddenly started rushing about, and all the divine images he saw, he strung together, and they screwed nuts onto the ends of the rods and sealed them, too, so that it was impossible to take them off and exchange them. And it was all gathered up and ready, they were about to leave for good: the soldiers took the rods strung with icons on their shoulders and carried them to the boat; but Mikhailitsa, who had sneaked into the room with the other folk, had meanwhile quietly stolen the angel’s icon from the lectern and was carrying it to the closet under her shawl, but as her hands were trembling, she dropped it. Saints alive, how the gentleman flew into a temper! He called us thieves and knaves, and said:

“Aha! You knaves wanted to steal it so that it wouldn’t end up on the bolt; well, then it won’t end up there, but here’s what I’m going to do to it!” And heating the stick of sealing wax, he jabbed the boiling resin, still flaming, right into the angel’s face!

My dear sirs, don’t hold it against me if I can’t even try to describe what happened when the gentleman poured the stream of boiling resin onto the face of the angel and, cruel man that he was, raised the icon up, so as to boast of how he’d managed to spite us. All I remember is that the bright, divine face was red and sealed, and the varnish, which had melted slightly under the fiery resin, ran down in two streams, as if it were blood mixed with tears …

We all gasped and, covering our eyes with our hands, fell on our faces and groaned as if we were being tortured. And we went on groaning, so that the dark night found us howling and lamenting over our sealed angel, and it was here, in this darkness and silence, over the devastated holiness of our fathers, that a thought occurred to us: we would keep an eye out for where they put our guardian, and we swore to steal him back, even at the risk of our lives, and unseal him, and to carry out this resolve, they chose me and a young fellow named Levonty. In years this Levonty was still a downright boy, no more than seventeen, but he was big of body, good of heart, God-fearing from childhood, and obedient and well-behaved, just like your ardent white, silver-bridled steed.

A better co-thinker and co-worker couldn’t have been asked for in such a dangerous deed as tracking down and purloining the sealed angel, whose blinded appearance was unbearable for us to the point of illness.

IX

I’m not going to trouble you with the details of how I and my co-thinker and co-worker passed through the eyes of needles, going into all this, but I’ll tell you directly of the grief that came over us when we learned that our icons, drilled through by the officials and strung on rods as they were, had been piled up in the basement of the diocesan office. This was a lost cause, as if they had been buried in the grave, and there was no use thinking about them. The nice thing, however, was that they said the bishop himself did not approve of such savagery of behavior and, on the contrary, said: “Why that?” and even stood up for the old art and said: “It’s ancient, it must be cherished!” But here was the bad thing, that the disaster of irreverence had only just passed, when a new, still greater one arose from his very reverence: this same bishop, it must be supposed, not with bad but precisely with good consideration, took our sealed angel, studied him for a long time, then averted his eyes and said: “Disturbing sight! How terribly they’ve disfigured him! Don’t put this icon in the basement,” he says, “but set it up in the sanctuary, on the windowsill behind the altar.” The bishop’s servants did as he ordered, and I must tell you that such attention on the part of a Church hierarch was, on the one hand, very agreeable to us, but, on the other—we could see that any plan we had of stealing our angel had become impossible. There remained another means: to bribe the bishop’s servants and with their help substitute for the icon an artfully painted likeness of itself. In this our Old Believers had also succeeded more than once, but to do it one first of all needed a skillful and experienced icon painter, who could make a substitute icon with precision, and we did not anticipate finding such an icon painter in those parts. And from then on a redoubled anguish came over us all; it spread through us like dropsy under the skin: in our room where only the praise of God had been heard, only laments began to ring out, and in a short time we had all lamented ourselves sick and our tear-filled eyes couldn’t see the ground under our feet, and owing to that, or not owing to that, an eye disease attacked us and began to spread through all our people. What had never happened before, happened now: there was no end of sick people! Talk went around among all the working people that all this was not for nothing, but on account of the Old Believers’ angel: “He was blinded by the sealing,” they said, “and now we’re all going blind.” And at this explanation not only we but all church-going people rose up, and however many doctors the English bosses brought, nobody went to them or took their medicine, but cried out as one:

“Bring us the sealed angel, we want to pray to him, and he alone will heal us.”

The Englishman Yakov Yakovlevich, having looked into the matter, went to the bishop himself and said:

“Thus and so, Your Grace, faith is a great thing, and to him who has faith, it is given according to his faith: let the sealed angel come to us on the other bank.”

But the bishop did not heed him and said:

“This should not be indulged.”

These words seemed cruel to us then, and we condemned the bishop with much vain talk, but afterwards it was revealed to us that this was all guided not by cruelty, but by divine providence.

Meanwhile the signs seemed unceasing, and the chastising finger sought out on the other bank the chief culprit of the whole thing, Pimen himself, who, after our calamity, fled from us and joined the Church. I met him in town once. He bowed to me, so I bowed to him, and he said:

“I have sinned, brother Mark, by going from you to a different faith.”

And I replied:

“Who is of what faith—that’s God’s business, but that you sold a poor man for a pair of boots, that, naturally, is not good, and, forgive me, but for that, as the prophet Amos ordered,¹⁵ I convict you in brotherly fashion.”

At the name of the prophet, he began to tremble.

“Don’t talk to me about prophets,” he says. “I remember the Scriptures myself and feel that ‘the prophets torment the dwellers on earth,’¹⁶ and I even have a sign of it,” and he complained that he had bathed in the river the other day and after that his whole body became piebald, and he unbuttoned his chest and showed me, and in fact he had spots on him, like on a piebald horse, covering his chest and creeping up on his neck.

Sinful as I was, I had a mind to tell him, “Beware of him whom God hath marked,” but I quashed these words on my lips and said:

“Pray, then, and rejoice that you’ve been stamped like that in this world—perhaps you’ll present yourself clean in the next.”

He started lamenting to me about how unhappy he was because of it and what it would cost him if the piebaldness spread to his face, because the governor himself, seeing Pimen when he was received into the Church, had admired his beauty and said to the mayor that, when important persons passed through town, Pimen should unfailingly be placed in front with the silver platter. Well, and how are they going to place him there if he’s piebald? But, anyhow, as there was no point in my listening to the vanity and futility of this Belial, I turned and left.

And with that we parted ways. His spots became ever more clearly marked, and we had no lack of other signs, at the end of which, in the fall, the ice had only just set in, when suddenly there was a thaw, all that ice was scattered and came to wreck our constructions, and from then on damage followed upon damage, until suddenly one granite pier gave way, and the deeps swallowed up all the work of many years, worth many thousands …

Our English bosses themselves were struck by that, and then word from someone reached their chief, Yakov Yakovlevich, that to be delivered from it all he had to drive out us Old Believers, but since he was a man of good soul, he didn’t listen to it, but, on the contrary, sent for me and Luka Kirilovich and said:

“Give me your advice, lads: isn’t there some way I can help you and comfort you?”

But we replied that, as long as the image of the angel, which was sacred to us and had gone before us everywhere, was sealed with fiery resin, we could not be comforted and were wasting away from sorrow.

“What do you hope to do?” he asks.

“We hope in time to replace him with a substitute and to unseal his pure face, scorched by the godless hand of an official.”

“Why is he so dear to you?” he asks. “Can’t you get hold of another one like him?”

“He’s dear to us,” we reply, “because he has protected us, and to get hold of another is impossible, because he was painted by a pious hand in times of firm faith and was blessed by an old-time priest according to the complete prayer book of Pyotr Mogila,¹⁷ and now we have neither priests nor that prayer book.”

“But how will you unseal him,” he asks, “if his whole face is burnt with resin?”

“Well,” we reply, “Your Honor needn’t worry on that account: it will be enough to have him in our hands; then our protector will stand up for himself. He wasn’t made by commercial painters, he’s real Stroganov work, and Stroganov and Kostroma varnish is boiled up so that it has no fear of fiery seals and won’t let the resin through to the delicate paint.”

“Are you sure of that?”

“We are, sir. That varnish is as strong as the old Russian faith itself.”

Here he swore at those who were unable to cherish such art, gave us his hands, and said once more:

“Well, don’t grieve, then: I’ll help you, and we’ll get hold of your angel. Do you need him for long?”

“No,” we say, “just for a short time.”

“Well, then I’ll say I want to have a rich gold casing made for your sealed angel, and once they give him to me, we’ll put a substitute in his place. I’ll get started on it tomorrow.”

We thanked him, but said:

“Only don’t do anything, sir, either tomorrow or the next day.”

“Why not?” he asks.

And we reply:

“Because, sir, first of all we’ve got to have a substitute icon made, as like the real one as two drops of water, and there are no such masters here, and none to be found anywhere nearby.”

“Nonsense,” he says. “I’ll bring a painter from town myself; he paints not only copies but portraits excellently well.”

“No, sir,” we reply, “kindly don’t do that, because, first of all, improper rumors may start up through this worldly artist, and, second of all, such a painter cannot carry out the work.”

The Englishman didn’t believe it, but I stepped forward and explained the whole difference to him: that nowadays the work of worldly artists is not the same; they work in oils, but for icons the colors are delicate, being mixed with egg; in oil painting the work is done in brushstrokes and looks natural only from a distance, but here the paint is applied in thin layers and is clear even close up. Besides, a worldly artist, I say, can’t transfer the drawing satisfactorily, because they’re trained to represent the flesh of the earthly, life-loving man, while in sacred Russian icon painting there is portrayed the heavenly type of the face, concerning which a material man cannot even have any real notion.

He became interested.

“But where are there such masters,” he asked, “who still understand that special type?”

“Nowadays they are very rare,” I tell him (and at that time they lived in the strictest hiding). “In the village of Mstera there’s a certain master Khokhlov, but he’s now very advanced in years, he can’t be taken on a long journey. There are two men in Palekh; they, too, are unlikely to come, and besides that,” I say, “neither masters from Mstera nor masters from Palekh are any good for us.”

“Why is that, now?” he persists.

“Because,” I reply, “they don’t have the right knack: Mstera icons are drawn big-headed and the painting is muddy, and in Palekh icons there’s a turquoise tinge, everything tends towards pale blue.”

“In that case,” he says, “what’s to be done?”

“Myself,” I say, “I don’t know. I’ve often heard that there’s a good master in Moscow named Silachev: he’s known among our folk all over Russia, but his work is more in the style of the Novgorodians and the court painters in Moscow, while our icon is done in the Stroganov manner, with the brightest and richest colors, and only the master Sevastian from the lower Dniepr can please us, but he’s a passionate wanderer: he walks all over Russia doing work for the Old Believers, and where to look for him nobody knows.”

The Englishman listened with pleasure to all these reports of mine and smiled, and then replied:

“You’re quite astonishing people, and, listening to you, it’s even gratifying to realize that you know so well everything that touches on your ways and can even understand art.”

“Why shouldn’t we understand art, sir?” I say. “Artwork is a divine thing, and we have such fanciers from among the simplest muzhiks as can not only distinguish, for example, between different schools of icon painting—Ustiug or Novgorod, Moscow or Vologda, Siberia or Stroganov—but even within one and the same school can distinguish without error between the work of one well-known old Russian master and another.”

“Can it be?” he asks.

“Just like you telling one person’s handwriting from another’s,” I reply, “so they look and see at once who painted it: Kuzma, Andrei, or Prokofy.”

“By what signs?”

“There’s a difference in the way the outline is transferred, and in the layering, and in the highlighting of the face and garments.”

He goes on listening; and I tell him what I know about Ushakov’s work, and about Rublev’s, and about the most ancient Russian artist Paramshin, whose icons our pious tsars and princes gave to their children as blessings and instructed them in their wills to cherish these icons like the apple of their eye.¹⁸

The Englishman straightaway snatched out his notebook and asked me to repeat the name of the painter and where his works could be seen. And I reply:

“It’s no use, sir, to go looking for them: there’s no memory of them left anywhere.”

“What’s become of them?”

“I don’t know,” I say, “maybe they turned them into chibouks or traded them to the Germans for tobacco.”

“That can’t be,” he says.

“On the contrary,” I reply, “it’s quite possible, and there are examples of it: in Rome the pope in the Vatican has folding icons painted in the thirteenth century by the Russian icon painters Andrei, Sergei, and Nikita. This miniature with multiple figures is so astonishing, they say, that even the greatest foreign artists, looking at it, go into raptures over its wondrous workmanship.”

“But how did it end up in Rome?”

“Peter the Great made a gift of it to a foreign monk, and he sold it.”¹⁹

The Englishman smiled and fell to thinking, and then said softly that in England they keep every painting from generation to generation, and that makes clear who comes from which genealogy.

“Well, but with us,” I say, “there’s most likely a different education, and the connection with the traditions of our ancestors is broken, so that everything seems new, as if the whole Russian race had been hatched only yesterday by a hen in a nettle patch.”

“But if your educated ignorance is such,” he says, “then why are those who preserve a love for your own things not concerned with maintaining your native art?”

“We have no one to maintain it, my good sir,” I reply, “because in the new art schools everywhere a corruption of the senses is developed and the mind is given over to vanity. The model of lofty inspiration is lost, and everything is taken from the earth and breathes of earthly passion. Our newest artists started by portraying the warrior-angel Michael as Prince Potemkin of Taurida, and now they’ve gone so far that Christ the Savior is depicted as a Jew.²⁰ What can be expected from such people? Their uncircumcised hearts may portray something even worse and worship it as a deity: in Egypt, after all, they worshipped a bull and a red onion; but we’re not going to bow down before strange gods, or take a Jewish face for the image of our Savior, and we even consider these portrayals, however artful they may be, as shameful ignorance, and we turn away from them, because our fathers said that ‘distraction of the eyes destroys the purity of reason, as a broken water pump spoils the water.’ ”

I finished with that and fell silent, but the Englishman says:

“Go on: I like the way you reason.”

“I’ve already said everything,” I reply, but he says:

“No, tell me what you mean by your notion of inspired representation.”

The question, my dear sirs, was quite difficult for a simple man, but, no help for it, I went ahead and told him how the starry sky is painted in Novgorod, and then I began to describe the decoration of St. Sophia in Kiev, where seven winged warrior-angels, who naturally do not resemble Potemkin, stand to the sides of the God of Sabaoth; and just below are the prophets and forefathers; on a lower level, Moses with the tables; still lower, Aaron in a miter and with a sprouting rod; then come King David in a crown, the prophet Isaiah with a scroll, Ezekiel with a shut gate, Daniel with a stone; and around all these who stand before God, showing us the way to heaven, are depicted the gifts through which man can reach that glorious path, namely: a book with seven seals—the gift of wisdom; a seven-branched candelabra—the gift of reason; seven eyes—the gift of counsel; seven trumpets—the gift of fortitude; a right hand amidst seven stars—the gift of vision; seven censers—the gift of piety; seven lightning bolts—the gift of the fear of God. “There,” I say, “is an uplifting picture!”

And the Englishman replies:

“Forgive me, my good man, but I don’t understand you. Why do you consider it uplifting?”

“Because this picture says clearly to the soul what a Christian ought to pray and yearn for, in order to ascend from earth to the unutterable glory of God.”

“But,” he says, “anyone can comprehend that from the Scriptures and prayers.”

“By no means, sir,” I reply. “It is not given to everyone to comprehend the Scriptures, and the uncomprehending mind can be darkened even in prayer: a man hears the exclamation, ‘Awaiting Thy great and rich mercies,’ and immediately thinks it’s about money and starts bowing greedily. But when he sees the picture of heavenly glory before him, then he thinks on the lofty prospects of life and understands how that goal is to be reached, because here everything is simple and reasonable: a man should first pray that his soul be given the gift of the fear of God, and then it will proceed lightly from step to step, assimilating at each step the superabundance of higher gifts, and in those moments of prayer, money and all earthly glory will seem to a man no more than an abomination before the Lord.”

Here the Englishman stands up and says merrily:

“And what do you odd birds pray for?”

“We,” I reply, “pray for a Christian ending to our life and a good defense before the dread judgment seat.”

He smiled and suddenly pulled a green curtain open by a golden cord, and behind that curtain his English wife was sitting in an armchair, knitting on long needles by a candle. She was a fine, affable lady, and though she didn’t speak much of our language, she understood everything and had probably wanted to hear our conversation about religion.

And what do you think? When the curtain that hid her was pulled aside, she stood up at once, seemed to shudder, and came, the dear woman, to me and Luka, offered both hands to us muzhiks, and there were tears glistening in her eyes, and she pressed our hands and said:

“Goot people, goot Russian people!”

Luka and I kissed both her hands for those kind words, and she put her lips to our muzhik heads.

The storyteller stopped and, covering his eyes with his sleeve, wiped them discreetly, and murmured in a whisper: “A touching woman!” and with that he straightened up and went on again.

Having begun with these affectionate acts of hers, the Englishwoman said something to her husband in their language, which we didn’t understand, but we could tell by her voice that she was probably speaking on our behalf. And the Englishman—this kindness in his wife evidently pleased him—gazes at her, beaming all over with pride, and strokes his wife’s little head, and coos like a dove in his language: “Goot, goot,” or however they say it, only it’s clear that he’s praising her and confirming her in something. Then he goes to his desk, takes out two hundred-rouble bills, and says:

“Here’s money for you, Luka: go and look where you know for an artful icon painter of the kind you need, let him do what you need and also paint something of the same sort for my wife—she wants to give such an icon to our son—and my wife is giving you this money for all your trouble and expenses.”

And she smiles through her tears and says quickly:

“No, no, no: that’s from him, mine’s separate,” and so saying, she fluttered out the door and came back with a third hundred-rouble bill.

“My husband gave it to me for a dress, but I don’t want a dress, I donate it to you.”

We, naturally, started to refuse, but she wouldn’t even hear of it and ran away, and he says:

“No, don’t you dare refuse; take what she’s giving you,” and he turns away and says, “And get out, you odd birds!”

Naturally, we weren’t in the least offended by this expulsion, because, though the Englishman turned away from us, we saw that he did it to conceal the fact that he was deeply moved himself.

So it was, my dear sirs, that our own native people treated us unjustly, but the English nation comforted us and lent zeal to our souls, just as if we’d received the bath of regeneration!

Now from here on, my dear sirs, the second half of my story begins, and I’ll tell you briefly how, taking my silver-bridled Levonty, I set out after an icon painter, and what places we went to, what people we saw, what new wonders were revealed to us, and, finally, what we found, and what we lost, and what we came back with.

X

For a man going on a journey, the first thing is a companion; cold and hunger are easier with an intelligent and good comrade, and this blessing was granted me in that wonderful youth Levonty. We set out on foot, taking with us our shoulder bags and a sufficient sum of money, and to protect it and our own lives we took with us an old, short-bladed saber with a broad back, which we always carried in case of danger. We made our way like tradespeople, inventing errands at random as the supposed causes for our traveling, and all the while, naturally, with an eye on our business. At the very beginning we visited Klintsy and Zlynka, then called on some of our people in Orel, but did not obtain any useful results: nowhere did we find any good icon painters, and so we got to Moscow. But all I can say is: Woe to thee, Moscow! Woe to thee, most glorious queen of the ancient Russian people! We of the old belief were not comforted by thee either.

I’m not eager to say it, but it’s impossible to keep silent: we did not meet in Moscow the spirit we were thirsting for. We found that the old ways there no longer stood upon piety and love of the good, but only upon obstinacy, and becoming more and more convinced of it every day, Levonty and I began to be ashamed of each other, for we both saw things that were insulting to a peaceful follower of the faith, but, being ashamed in ourselves, we kept silent about it all with each other.

Naturally, we found icon painters in Moscow, and quite artful ones, but what use was that, since all these people were not of the spirit which the tradition of our forefathers tells us about? In olden times, pious painters, when taking up their holy artwork, fasted and prayed, and worked in the same way for big money or for little, as the honor of the lofty task demands. But these paint one slap, another dash, to last a short time, not for long years; they lay a weak ground of chalk, not of alabaster, and, being lazy, they flow the paint on all at once, not like in the old days, when they flowed on four or even five layers of paint, thin as water, which produced that wonderful delicacy unattainable nowadays. And, aside from carelessness in their art, they’re all of lax behavior, and boast before each other, and say anything at all to humiliate another painter; or, worse still, they band together, carry out clever deceptions, gather in pot-houses and drink and praise their own art with conceited arrogance, and blasphemously call other painters’ work “infernography,” and there are always junkmen around them, like sparrows around owls, who pass various old icons from hand to hand, alter them, substitute them, make fake boards, smoke them in chimneys, giving them a decrepit and worm-eaten look; they cast bronze folding icons from old molds and coat them with antiquated patina; they refashion copper bowls into baptismal fonts and put old-fashioned splayed eagles on them as in the time of Ivan the Terrible, and sell them to inexperienced buyers as genuine fonts from that period, though there’s countless numbers of these fonts going the rounds in Russia, and it’s all a shameless lie and deception. In a word, as swarthy Gypsies cheat each other with horses, so all these people do with holy objects, and they treat it all in such a way that you feel ashamed for them and see in it all only sin and temptation and abuse of faith. For those who have acquired the habit of this shamelessness, it’s nothing, and among Moscow fanciers there are many who are interested in such dishonest trading and boast that so-and-so cheated so-and-so with a Deisis, and this one stuck that one with a Nicholas, or fobbed off a fake Our Lady in some scoundrelly manner: and they all cover it up, and vie with each other in how best to hoodwink the trustful inexperienced with God’s blessing, but to Levonty and me, being of simple village piety, all this seemed unbearable to such a degree that we both even felt downcast and fear came over us.

“Can it be,” we thought, “that in these times our ill-fated Old Belief has come to this?” But, though I thought that, and I could see that he harbored the same thing in his grieving heart, we didn’t reveal it to each other, and I only noticed that my youth kept seeking some solitary place.

I looked at him once and thought to myself: “What if in his confusion he decides on something improper?” So I say:

“What is it, Levonty, are you sorrowing over something?”

And he replies:

“No, uncle, it’s nothing: never mind.”

“Then let’s go to the Erivan Tavern in Bozheninova Street to chat up the icon painters. There are two who promised to come there and bring old icons. I’ve already bartered for one, and I’d like to obtain another today.”

But Levonty replies:

“No, uncle, you go by yourself, I won’t go.”

“Why won’t you?” I ask.

“I’m just not feeling myself today,” he replies.

Well, once I didn’t insist, and twice I didn’t insist, but the third time I called him again:

“Let’s go, Levontiushka, let’s go, my lad.”

And he bows meekly and pleads:

“No, dear uncle, my white dove: allow me to stay home.”

“What is it, Levonty?” I say. “You came with me as my co-worker, but you sit at home all the time. I don’t get much help from you this way, my dove.”

And he:

“My own, my dearest Mark Alexandrych, my lord and master, don’t call me to where they eat and drink and make unsuitable speeches about holy things, or I may be drawn into temptation.”

This was his first conscious word about his feelings, and it struck me to the very heart, but I didn’t argue with him and went alone, and that evening I had a big conversation with the two icon painters, and they put me in terrible distress. It’s frightful to say what they did to me! One sold me an icon for forty roubles and left, and then the other said:

“Watch out, man, don’t venerate that icon.”

“Why not?” I ask.

And he says:

“Because it’s infernography,” and he picked off a layer of paint at the corner with his nail, and under it a little devil with a tail was painted on the priming! He picked the paint off in another place, and underneath there was another little devil.

“Lord!” I wept. “What does it mean?”

“It means,” he says, “that you shouldn’t order from him, but from me.”

And here I already saw clearly that they were one band and aimed to deal wrongly and dishonestly with me, and, abandoning the icon to them, I left with my eyes full of tears, thanking God that my Levonty, whose faith was in agony, had not seen it. But I was just drawing near our house, and I saw there was no light in the window of the room we rented, and yet a high, delicate singing was coming from it. I recognized at once that it was Levonty’s pleasant voice singing, and singing with such feeling as if he were bathing each word in tears. I came in quietly, so that he wouldn’t hear me, stood by the door, and listened to how he intoned Joseph’s lament:²¹

To whom will I tell my sorrow,

Who will share in my weeping?

This chant, if you happen to know it, is so pitiful to begin with that it’s impossible to listen to it calmly, but Levonty himself also wept and sobbed as he sang:

My brothers they have sold me!

And he weeps and weeps, singing about seeing his mother’s coffin and calling upon the earth to cry out for his brothers’ sin! …

These words can always stir a man, and especially me at that moment, as I came running from the brother-baiting. They moved me so much that I began to snivel myself, and Levonty, hearing it, stopped singing and called to me:

“Uncle! Hey, uncle!”

“What,” I say, “my good lad?”

“Do you know,” he says, “who this mother of ours is, the one that’s sung about here?”

“Rachel,” I reply.

“No,” he says, “in ancient times it was Rachel, but now it should be understood mysteriously.”

“What do you mean, mysteriously?” I ask.

“I mean,” he replies, “that this word signifies something else.”

“Beware, child,” I say. “Aren’t you reasoning dangerously?”

“No,” he replies, “I feel in my heart that Christ is being crucified for us, because we don’t seek him with one mouth and one heart.”²²

I was frightened still more by what he was aiming at and said:

“You know what, Levontiushka? Let’s get out of this Moscow quickly and go to the country around Nizhny Novgorod, to seek out the icon painter Sevastian. I hear he’s going about there now.”

“Well, let’s go then,” he replies. “Here in Moscow some sort of needy spirit irks me painfully, but there there are forests, the air is cleaner, and I’ve heard there’s an elder named Pamva, a hermit totally envyless and wrathless. I would like to see him.”

“The elder Pamva,” I reply sternly, “is a servant of the ruling Church. Why should we go looking at him?”

“Where’s the harm in it?” he says. “I’d like to see him, in order to comprehend the grace of the ruling Church.”

I chided him, saying, “What sort of grace could there be?”—yet I felt he was more right than I was, because he wished to test things out, while I rejected what I didn’t know, but I insisted on my rejection and talked complete nonsense to him.

“Church people,” I say, “look at the sky not with faith, but through the gates of Aristotle, and determine their way in the sea by the star of the pagan god Remphan, and you want to have the same view as theirs?”²³

But Levonty replies:

“You’re inventing fables, uncle: there was no such god as Remphan, and everything was created by one wisdom.”

That made me feel even more stupid and I said:

“Church people drink coffee!”

“Where’s the harm in that?” Levonty replies. “The coffee bean was brought to King David as a gift.”

“How do you know all that?” I ask.

“I’ve read it in books,” he says.

“Well, know then that not everything is written in books.”

“And what isn’t written in them?” he says.

“What? What isn’t written in them?” I myself have no idea what to say, and blurt out to him:

“Church people eat hare, and hare is unclean.”

“Don’t call God’s creature unclean,” he says. “It’s a sin.”

“How can I not call hare unclean,” I say, “when it is unclean, when it has an ass’s constitution and a male-female nature and generates thick and melancholy blood in man?”

But Levonty laughs and says:

“Sleep, uncle, you’re saying ignorant things!”

I admit to you that at the time I had not yet discerned clearly what was going on in the soul of this blessed young man, but I was very glad that he did not want to talk anymore, for I myself understood that in my anger I say God knows what, and so I fell silent and only lay there thinking:

“No, such doubts in him come from anguish, but tomorrow we’ll get up and go, and it will all disperse in him.” But just in case, I decided in my mind that I would walk silently with him for some time, in order to make a show of being very angry with him.

But my inconstant character totally lacked the firmness for pretending to be angry, and Levonty and I soon began talking again, only not about divine things, because he was very well read compared to me, but about our surroundings, for which we were hourly given a pretext by the sight of the great, dark forests through which our path led. I tried to forget about my whole Moscow conversation with Levonty and decided to observe only one precaution, so that we would not somehow run across that elder Pamva the hermit, to whom Levonty was attracted and of whose lofty life I myself had heard inconceivable wonders from Church people.

“But,” I thought to myself, “there’s no point in worrying much, since if I flee from him, he’s not going to find us himself!”

And once again we walked along peacefully and happily and, at last, having reached a certain area, we heard that the icon painter Sevastian was in fact going about in those parts, and we went searching for him from town to town, from village to village, and we were following right in his fresh tracks, we were about to catch up with him, but we couldn’t catch up with him. We ran like hunting dogs, making fifteen or twenty miles without resting, and we’d come, and they’d say:

“He was here, he was, he left barely an hour ago!”

We’d go rushing after him, and not catch up with him!

And then suddenly, during one of these marches, Levonty and I got to arguing. I said, “We must go to the right,” and he said, “To the left,” and in the end he almost argued me down, but I insisted on my way. But we went on and on, and in the end I saw we’d wound up I don’t know where, and further on there was no path, no trail.

I say to the youth:

“Let’s turn back, Levonty!”

And he replies:

“No, I can’t walk anymore, uncle—I have no strength.”

I get all in a flutter and say:

“What’s the matter, child?”

And he replies:

“Don’t you see I’m shaking with fever?”

And I see that he is, in fact, trembling all over, and his eyes are wandering. And how, my good sirs, did all this happen so suddenly? He hadn’t complained, he had walked briskly, and suddenly he sits down on the grass in the woods, puts his head on a rotten stump, and says:

“Ow, my head, my head! Oh, my head’s burning with fiery flames!

I can’t walk, I can’t go another step!” And the poor lad even sinks to the ground and falls over.

It happened towards evening.

I was terribly frightened, and while we waited to see if he’d recover from his ailment, night fell; the time was autumnal, dark, the place was unknown, only pines and firs all around, mighty as an archaic forest, and the youth was simply dying. What was I to do? I say to him in tears:

“Levontiushka, dear heart, make an effort, maybe we’ll find a place for the night.”

But his head was drooping like a cut flower, and he murmured as if in sleep:

“Don’t touch me, Uncle Mark; don’t touch me, and don’t be afraid.”

I say:

“For pity’s sake, Levonty, how can I not be afraid in such a deep thicket?”

And he says:

“He who sleeps not and watches will protect.”

I think: “Lord, what’s the matter with him?” And, fearful myself, all the same I started listening, and from far away in the forest I heard something like a crunching … “Merciful God,” I think, “that must be a wild beast, and he’s going to tear us to pieces!” And I no longer call to Levonty, because I see it’s like he’s flown out of himself and is hovering somewhere, but only pray: “Angel of Christ, protect us in this terrible hour!” And the crunching is coming nearer and nearer, and now it’s right next to us … Here, gentlemen, I must confess to you my great baseness: I was so scared that I abandoned the sick Levonty where he lay and climbed a tree more nimbly than a squirrel, drew our little saber, and sat on a branch waiting to see what would happen, my teeth clacking like a frightened wolf’s … And suddenly I noticed in the darkness, which my eyes had grown used to, that something had come out of the forest, looking quite shapeless at first—I couldn’t tell if it was a beast or a robber—but I began to peer and made out that it was neither a beast nor a robber, but a very small old man in a skullcap, and I could even see that he had an axe tucked in his belt, and on his back a big bundle of firewood, and he came out into the clearing. He sniffed, sniffed the air several times, as if he were picking up scents all around, and suddenly threw the bundle on the ground and, as if he’d scented a man, went straight to my comrade. He went up to him, bent over, looked in his face, took him by the hand, and said:

“Stand up, brother!”

And what do you think? I see him raise Levonty, lead him straight to his bundle, and place it on his shoulders. And he says:

“Carry it behind me!”

And Levonty carries it.

XI

You can imagine, my dear sirs, how frightened I must have been by such a wonder! Where had this commanding, quiet little old man appeared from, and how was it that my Levonty, who had just been as if given over to death and unable to raise his head, was now carrying a bundle of wood!

I quickly jumped down from the tree, put the saber behind my back on its cord, broke off a young tree for a big stick just in case, went after them, and soon caught up with them and saw: the little old man goes on ahead, and looks exactly as he had seemed to me at first—small and hunched over, his wispy little beard like white soapsuds; and behind him walks my Levonty, stepping briskly in his footsteps and not looking at me. I tried several times to address him and to touch him with my hand, but he paid no attention to me and went on walking as if in his sleep.

Then I run to the little old man from the side and say:

“My good-honest man!”

And he replies:

“What is it?”

“Where are you leading us?”

“I don’t lead anyone anywhere,” he says. “The Lord leads us all!”

And with that word he suddenly stopped: and I saw before us a low wall and a gateway, and in the gateway a little door, and the old man began to knock on this door and call out:

“Brother Miron! Hey, brother Miron!”

And an insolent voice rudely replies:

“Again you drag yourself here at night. Sleep in the forest! I won’t let you in!”

But the old man begged again, entreating gently:

“Let me in, brother!”

The insolent fellow suddenly opened the door, and I saw it was a man in the same kind of skullcap as the old man’s, only he was very stern and rude, and just as the old man stepped across the threshold, he shoved him so that he almost fell.

“God save you, brother mine, for your service!” said the old man.

“Lord,” I thought, “where have we landed!” And suddenly it was as if lightning struck me and lit me up.

“Merciful Savior,” it dawned on me, “if this isn’t Pamva the wrathless! It would be better,” I think, “for me to perish in the thick of the forest, or to come upon some beast’s or robber’s den, than to be under his roof.”

And once he had led us into the small hut and lit a yellow wax candle, I guessed straight off that we were indeed in a forest hermitage, and, unable to stand it any longer, I said:

“Forgive me, pious man, for asking you: is it good for me and my comrade to remain here where you’ve brought us?”

And he replies:

“All the earth is the Lord’s and blessed are all who dwell in it²⁴—lie down, sleep!”

“No, allow me to inform you,” I say, “that we are of the old belief.”

“We’re all members of the one body of Christ! He will gather us all together!”

And with that he led us to a corner, where a meager bed of bast matting had been made on the floor, with a round block of wood covered with straw at the head, and, now to us both, he again says:

“Sleep!”

And what then? My Levonty, as an obedient youth, falls onto it at once, but I, pursuing my apprehensions, say:

“Forgive me, man of God, one more question …”

He replies:

“What is there to ask? God knows everything.”

“No,” I say, “tell me: what is your name?”

And he, with a totally unsuitable, womanish singsong, says:

“My name is lucky: they call me ducky”—and with these frivolous words he crawled off with his candle stub to some tiny closet, small as a wooden coffin, but the insolent one shouted at him again from behind the wall:

“Don’t you dare light a candle! You’ll burn down the cell! You pray enough from books in the daytime; now pray in the dark!”

“I won’t, brother Miron,” he replies, “I won’t. God save you!”

And he blew out the candle.

I whisper:

“Father, who’s that yelling at you so rudely?”

And he replies:

“That’s my lay brother Miron … a good man, he watches over me.”

“Well, that’s that!” I think. “It’s the hermit Pamva! It’s none other than him, the envyless and wrathless. Here’s real trouble! He’s found us, and now he’s going to rot us the way gangrene rots fat. There’s only one thing left, to carry Levonty away from here early tomorrow morning and flee the place, so he won’t know where we’ve been.” Holding to this plan, I decided not to sleep and watch for the first light, so as to waken the youth and flee.

And so as not to doze off and oversleep, I lay there and repeated the Creed, in the old way as it should be, and after each repetition I would add: “This is the apostolic faith, this is the catholic faith, on this faith the universe stands firm,”²⁵ and then I’d start all over. I don’t know how many times I recited the Creed so as not to fall asleep, but it was many; and the little old man went on praying in his coffin, and it was as if light came through the cracks between the boards, and I could see him bowing, and then suddenly it was as if I began to hear a conversation and … a most inexplicable one: as if Levonty had come in, and he and the elder were talking about faith, but without words, just looking at each other and understanding. And this vision lasted for a long time, and I forgot to repeat the Creed, but it was as if I heard the elder say to the youth: “Go and purify yourself,” and the youth reply: “I will.” And I can’t say now whether this was in a dream or not, only afterwards I slept for a long time, and finally woke up and saw it was morning, fully light, and the elder, our host, the hermit, was sitting and poking with a spike at a bast shoe on his knee. I began to look closely at him.

Ah, how good! Ah, how spiritual! As if an angel were sitting before me and plaiting bast shoes, so as to appear simple to the world.

I gaze at him and see that he looks at me and smiles, and says:

“Enough sleeping, Mark, it’s time to go about your business.”

I answer:

“What is my business, godly man? Or do you know everything?”

“I do,” he says, “I do. When did a man ever make a long journey without any business? Everyone, brother, everyone is seeking the Lord’s path. May the Lord help you, help your humility!”

“What is my humility, holy man?” I say. “You are humble, but what humility is there in my vanity!”

But he replies:

“Ah, no, brother, I’m not humble: I’m a most impudent man, I wish for a share in the heavenly kingdom.”

And suddenly, having acknowledged his crime, he pressed his hands together and wept like a little child.

“Lord,” he prayed, “do not be angry with me for this willfulness: send me to the nethermost hell and order the demons to torment me as I deserve!”

“Well, no,” I think, “thank God, this isn’t Pamva, the sagacious hermit, this is just some mentally deranged old man.” I decided that, because who in his right mind could renounce the kingdom of heaven and pray that the Lord send him to be tormented by demons? Never in my life had I heard such a desire from anyone, and, counting it as madness, I turned away from the elderly weeping, considering it idolatrous grief. But, finally, I reasoned: what am I doing lying down, it’s time to get up, but suddenly I look, the door opens, and in comes my Levonty, whom I seem to have forgotten all about. And as soon as he comes in, he falls at the old man’s feet, and says:

“I have accomplished everything, father: bless me now!”

The elder looks at him and replies:

“Peace be unto you: rest.”

And my youth, I see, again bows down to him and leaves, and the hermit again starts plaiting his bast shoe.

Here I jumped up at once, thinking:

“No, I’ll go quickly and take Levonty, and we’ll flee from here without looking back!” And with that I went out to the little entry-way and saw my youth lying flat on his back on a plank bench with his arms crossed on his chest.

I asked him loudly, so as not to look alarmed:

“Do you know where I can get a splash of water to wash my face?” and in a whisper I added: “I adjure you by the living God, let’s get out of here quickly!”

Then I look closely at him and see that Levonty isn’t breathing … He’s passed away! … He’s dead! …

I howled in a voice not my own:

“Pamva! Father Pamva, you’ve killed my youth!”

But Pamva came out quietly to the porch and said with joy:

“Our Levonty’s flown off!”

I was even seized with rage.

“Yes,” I replied through my tears, “he’s flown off. You let his soul go like a dove from a cage!” And, throwing myself down at the dead boy’s feet, I lamented and wept over him all the way till evening, when monks came from the monastery, tidied up his remains, put them in a coffin, and carried them off, because that morning, while I slept like a sluggard, he had joined the Church.

Not one word more did I say to Father Pamva, and what could I have said to him? Treat him rudely and he blesses you; beat him and he bows down to you. A man of such humility is invincible! What has he to be afraid of, if he even prays to be sent to hell? No, it was not for nothing that I trembled and feared he would rot us the way gangrene rots fat. He could drive all the demons of hell away with his humility, or convert them to God! They’d torment him, and he’d beg: “Torture me harder, for I deserve it.” No, no! Even Satan couldn’t bear that humility! He’d bruise his hands on him, break all his claws, and realize his impotence before the Maker who created such love, and be ashamed.

So I decided to myself that this elder with the bast shoe was created to destroy hell! And I wandered all night in the forest, not knowing why I didn’t go further, and I kept thinking:

“How does he pray, in what manner, and with what books?”

And I remembered that I hadn’t seen a single icon in his cell, only a cross of sticks tied together with bast, and hadn’t seen any fat books …

“Lord,” I dared to reason, “if there are only two such men in the Church, we’re lost, for this one is all animated by love.”

And I kept thinking and thinking about him, and suddenly, before morning, I began to yearn to see him, if only for a moment, before leaving there.

And I had only just thought it, when suddenly I again heard the same crunching, and Father Pamva came out again with his axe and a bundle of wood and said:

“Why are you tarrying so long? Aren’t you in a hurry to build Babylon?”

These words seemed very bitter to me, and I said:

“Why do you reproach me with such words, old man? I’m not building any Babylon, and I shun the Babylonian abomination.”

And he replies:

“What is Babylon? A pillar of pride. Don’t be proud of the truth, lest the angel withdraw.”

I say:

“Father, do you know why I am going about?”

And I told him all our grief. And he listened, listened, and replied:

“The angel is gentle, the angel is meek, he clothes himself in whatever the Lord tells him to; he does whatever is appointed to him. That is the angel! He lives in the human soul, sealed by vain wisdom, but love will shatter the seal …”

And with that I saw him withdraw from me, and I couldn’t take my eyes from him and, unable to master myself, I fell prostrate on the ground behind him, and when I raised my face, I saw he was no longer there—either he went off into the trees, or … Lord knows what became of him.

Here I started ruminating on the sense of his words: “The angel lives in the soul, but sealed, and love will free him”—and suddenly I thought: “What if he himself is the angel, and God orders him to appear to me in another guise: I’ll die, like Levonty!” Having imagined that, I crossed the little river on some sort of stump, I don’t remember how myself, and broke into a run: forty miles I went without stopping, all in a fright, thinking whether I had seen an angel, and suddenly I stopped at one village and found the icon painter Sevastian. We talked everything over right then and decided to set out the next day, but we talked coldly and traveled still more coldly. And why? For one thing, because the icon painter Sevastian was a pensive man, and still more because I was no longer the same myself: the hermit Pamva hovered in my soul, and my lips whispered the words of the prophet Isaiah, that “the spirit of God is in this man’s nostrils.”²⁶

XII

My return trip with the icon painter Sevastian went quickly and, arriving at the construction site at night, we found everything there in good order. After seeing our own people, we appeared at once before the Englishman Yakov Yakovlevich. Curious as he was, the man was interested in seeing the icon painter at once, and he kept looking at his hands and shrugging, because Sevastian’s hands were huge as rakes, and dark, inasmuch as he himself had the look of a swarthy Gypsy. Yakov Yakovlevich finally says:

“I’m surprised, brother, that you can paint with such huge hands.”

And Sevastian replies:

“How so? What’s unsuitable about my hands?”

“You can’t trace anything small with them,” he says.

“Why?” the man asks.

“Because the finger joints aren’t flexible enough to allow it.”

But Sevastian says:

“That’s nonsense! How can my fingers allow or not allow me something? I’m their master, and they’re my servants and obey me.”

The Englishman smiles.

“So,” he says, “you’ll copy the sealed angel for us?”

“Why not?” the man says. “I’m not one of those masters who fears work, it’s work that fears me. I’ll copy it so you can’t tell it from the real one.”

“Very well,” says Yakov Yakovlevich, “we’ll immediately set about getting hold of the real one, and in the meantime, to convince me, you show me your artistry: paint an icon for my wife of the ancient Russian sort, and one that she’ll like.”

“Of what type?”

“That I don’t know,” he says. “Paint what you know how, it makes no difference to her, so long as she likes it.”

Sevastian pondered a moment and then asked:

“And about what does your spouse pray to God the most?”

“I don’t know, my friend,” he says, “I don’t know what, but I think most likely about the children, that the children grow up to be honest people.”

Sevastian pondered again and replied:

“Very well, sir, I can satisfy that taste as well.”

“How will you satisfy it?”

“I’ll paint it so that it will be contemplative and favorable to the increase of your wife’s prayerful spirit.”

The Englishman ordered that he be given all comfort in his own upstairs rooms, but Sevastian would not work there, but settled by the window in the attic above Luka Kirilovich’s room and went into action.

And what he did, sirs, was something we couldn’t imagine. As it had to do with children, we thought he would portray the wonderworker Roman, whom people pray to about infertility, or the slaughter of the innocents in Jerusalem, which is always pleasing to mothers who have lost children, for there Rachel weeps with them for their little ones and will not be comforted;²⁷ but this wise icon painter, realizing that the Englishwoman had children and poured out her prayers not about the having of children, but about the rightness of their morals, went and painted something completely different, still more suitable to her purposes. He chose for it a very small, old board of a hand’s length in size, and began to exercise his talents upon it. First of all, naturally, he gave it a good priming with sturdy Kazan alabaster, so that the priming came out smooth and hard as ivory, and then he divided it into four equal spaces, and in each space he marked out a separate little icon, and he reduced each of them still more by placing borders of gold leaf between them, and then he started painting. In the first space he painted the nativity of John the Baptist—eight figures, the newborn baby, and the chamber; in the second, the nativity of our most holy Lady, the Mother of God—six figures, the newborn baby, and the chamber; in the third, the most pure nativity of our Savior, the stable, the manger, Our Lady and Joseph standing, and the God-guided Magi prostrating, and the wise-woman Salomé, and various kinds of livestock: oxen, sheep, goats, and asses, and the dry-legged heron, which the Jews are forbidden to eat,²⁸ included to signify that this comes not from Judaism, but from God, the creator of all. And in the fourth section was the nativity of St. Nicholas, and here again was the saint in infancy, and the chamber, and many standing figures. And the point here was that you see before you the raisers of such good children, and with what art it was done, all the figures the size of a pin, yet you can see their animation and movement! In the nativity of the Mother of God, for instance, St. Anne, as prescribed by the Greek original, lies on her bed; before her stand maidens with timbrels, and some hold gifts, and others sun-shaped fans, and others candles. One woman supports St. Anne by the shoulders; Joachim looks into the upper chamber; the wise-woman washes the Mother of God, who is in a font up to her waist; another girl pours water from a vessel into the font. The chambers are all laid out with a compass, the upper chamber is greenish blue and the lower crimson, and in this lower chamber sit Joachim and Anne on a throne, and Anne holds the most holy Mother of God, and around them there are stone pillars dividing the chambers, the curtains are red, and the surrounding fence is white and ochre … Wondrous, wondrous was all that Sevastian depicted, and in each miniature face he expressed divine contemplation, and he inscribed the image “Good Childbearing,” and brought it to the Englishmen. They looked, started examining, and just threw up their hands: “Never,” they say, “did we expect such fantasy, and such fineness of meagroscopic depiction is unheard-of.” They even looked through a meagroscope and found no mistakes, and they gave Sevastian two hundred roubles for the icon and said:

“Can you do still finer work?”

Sevastian replies:

“I can.”

“Then make a copy of my wife’s portrait for a signet ring.”

But Sevastian says:

“No, that I cannot do.”

“Why not?”

“Because,” he says, “first of all, I’ve never tried that kind of work, and, second, I cannot humiliate my art for the sake of it, lest I fall under the condemnation of our forefathers.”

“That’s rubbish!”

“By no means is it rubbish,” he replies. “We have a statute from the good times of our forefathers, and it is confirmed by patriarchal decree, that ‘If anyone is found worthy to undertake this sacred work, which is the painting of icons, then let this artist be of goodly life and paint nothing except holy icons!’ ”

Yakov Yakovlevich says:

“And if I give you five hundred roubles for it?”

“Though you promise me five hundred thousand, all the same they will remain with you.”

The Englishman beamed all over and said jokingly to his wife:

“How do you like that? He considers painting your face a humiliation for him!”

And he added in English: “Oh, goot character.” But in the end he said:

“Watch out, brothers, we now undertake to bring this whole thing off, and I see you’ve got your own rules for everything, so make sure nothing’s omitted or forgotten that could hinder it all.”

We replied that we foresaw nothing of the kind.

“Well, watch out, then,” he says, “I’m beginning.” And he went to the bishop with the request that he wanted out of zealousness to gild the casing and embellish the crown on the sealed angel. The bishop said neither yes nor no to that: he neither refused nor ordered it. But Yakov Yakovlevich did not give up and persisted; and we were now waiting like powder for the match.

XIII

With all that, let me remind you, gentlemen, that since this affair began, no little time had passed, and Christmas was at the door. But don’t compare Christmas in those parts with ours here: the weather there is capricious, and one time this feast is celebrated in the winter way, but another time who knows how: in rain, in wetness. One day there’s a light frost, on the next it all melts away; now the river’s covered with sheet ice, then it swells and carries off the broken ice, as in the high water of spring … In short, the most inconstant weather, and in those parts it’s not called weather, but simply snow-slush—and snow-slush it is.

In the year my story belongs to, this inconstancy was most vexing. Since I returned with the icon painter, I can’t even count for you the number of times our crew set themselves up now for winter, now for summer conditions. And that was the hottest time, in terms of work, because we already had seven piers done and were putting up chains from one bank to the other. Our bosses, naturally, would have liked very much to have those chains linked up quickly, so that by the high water some sort of temporary bridge could be hung for the delivery of materials, but that didn’t work out: we had just stretched the chains across, when we were hit by such a frost that we couldn’t lay any planks. And so it remained: the chains were hung, but there was no bridge. Instead God made another bridge: the river froze over, and our Englishman crossed the Dniepr on the ice to see about our icon, and he comes back from there and says to me and Luka:

“Tomorrow, lads, just wait, I’ll bring you your treasure.”

Lord, how that made us feel then! At first we wanted to keep it a secret and only tell the icon painter, but how could the human heart endure it! Instead of keeping the secret, we ran around to all our people, knocking on all the windows and whispering it to each other, running from cottage to cottage not knowing why, helped by the bright, magnificent night, the frost scattering precious stones over the snow, and Hesperus blazing in the clear sky.

Having spent the night in such joyful rushing about, we greeted the day in the same delighted expectation, and from morning on never left our icon painter’s side and couldn’t do enough to please him, because the hour had come when everything depended on his artistry. If he told us to give him or fetch him something, ten of us flew off together, and so zealously that we knocked each other down. Even old Maroy ran around so much that he tripped over something and tore off his boot heel. Only the icon painter himself was calm, because it wasn’t the first time he’d done such work, and therefore he prepared everything without any fuss: diluted the egg with kvass, inspected the varnish, prepared the primed canvas, set out some old boards to see which was the right size for the icon, tuned up a little saw like a string in its sturdy bow, and sat by the window, rubbing in his palm the pigments he foresaw would be necessary. And we all washed ourselves in the stove, put on clean shirts, and stood on the bank, looking at the city refuge from where our light-bearing guest was to visit us; and our hearts now trembled, now sank …

Ah, what moments those were, and they went on from early dawn until evening, and suddenly we saw the Englishman’s sleigh racing across the ice from the city and straight towards us … A shudder went through us all, we all threw our hats at our feet and prayed:

“God, father of spirits and angels: have mercy on Thy servants!”

And with that prayer we fell on our faces in the snow, eagerly stretching out our arms, and suddenly we hear the Englishman’s voice above us:

“Hey, you Old Believers! See what I’ve brought you!”—and he handed us a little bundle in a white handkerchief.

Luka took the bundle and froze: he felt it was something small and light! He opened a corner of the handkerchief and saw it was just our angel’s casing, and the icon itself wasn’t there.

We flung ourselves at the Englishman and said to him in tears:

“Your Honor’s been deceived, there’s no icon, they just sent the silver casing.”

But the Englishman was no longer the one he had been to us till then. This long affair must have vexed him, and he yelled at us:

“You confuse everything! You yourselves told me to ask for the casing, and so I did: you just don’t know what you want!”

We saw that he was seething, and were carefully beginning to explain to him that we needed the icon in order to make a copy, but he no longer listened to us, drove us out, and only showed us one mercy, that he ordered the icon painter sent to him. The icon painter Sevastian came to him, and he treated him in the same seething manner.

“Your muzhiks,” he says, “don’t know themselves what they want: first they asked for the casing, said you only had to take the dimensions and outline, and now they’re howling that that’s not what they need; but I can’t do any more for you, because the bishop won’t give me the icon. Imitate the icon quickly, we’ll put the casing on it and give it back, and my secretary will steal me the old one.”

But the icon painter Sevastian, as a reasonable man, tried to charm him with gentle speech and made answer:

“No, Your Honor, our muzhiks know their business, and we really must have the original icon first. It’s been thought up only in offense to us,” he says, “that we copy icons as if by stencils. What we have is rules about the originals, but in executing the icon, there is room for free artistry. According to the original, for example, we must depict St. Zosima or Gerasim with a lion, but there’s no restriction on the painter’s fantasy in how he paints the lion. The rule is to paint St. Neophytus with a dove, Konon the Gardener with a flower, Timothy with a coffer, George and Sabbas Stratilatos with spears, Photius with his jerkin, and Kondraty with clouds, for he taught the clouds, but every icon painter is free to portray them as his artistic fantasy permits, and therefore again I cannot know how the angel that is to be replaced was painted.”

The Englishman listened to all that and chased Sevastian out, as he had us, and there were no further decisions from him, and so, my dear sirs, we sat over the river like crows on a ruin, and didn’t know whether to be in total despair, or to expect something more, but we no longer dared go to the Englishman; moreover, the weather was again of like character to us: a terrible thaw set in, and it poured rain, the sky at midday was like a smokehouse, and the nights were so dark that even Hesperus, which never leaves the heavenly firmament in December, hid and refused to come out … A prison for the soul, that’s what! And so Christmas came, and right on the eve there was thunder, a downpour, and it poured and poured without stopping for two or three days: the snow was all washed away into the river, and the ice on the river began to turn blue and swell, and suddenly, two days before the New Year, it burst and was carried away … Block upon block shot up and hurtled over the turbid waves, clogging the whole river around our constructions: mountains of ice arose chunk upon chunk, and whirled and crashed, God forgive me, like demons. How the constructions stood and endured such inconceivable pressure was even astonishing. Frightful millions might have been destroyed, but we were past worrying, because our icon painter Sevastian, seeing that there was nothing for him to do, rose up—he started packing his bags and wanted to go to other parts, and there was no way we could hold him back.

The Englishman was also past worrying, because something happened to him during this foul weather, so that he nearly went out of his mind. He kept going about, they say, asking everybody: “What am I to do? What am I going to do?” And then he suddenly mastered himself, called Luka, and said:

“You know what, my muzhik? Why don’t we go and steal your angel?”

“Agreed,” says Luka.

Luka’s observation was that the Englishman apparently wished to experience danger and had decided to go the next day to the bishop in the monastery, to take the icon painter with him in the guise of a goldsmith, and ask to be shown the icon of the angel, so that he could make a detailed outline of it, as if for a casing; and meanwhile the man would examine it the best he could and paint an imitation of it at home. Then, when the real goldsmith had the casing ready for us, he would bring it to us across the river, and Yakov Yakovlevich would go to the monastery again and say that he wanted to see the festal episcopal service, and would go into the sanctuary and stand in his overcoat in the darkness by the altar, where our icon was kept on the windowsill, and would hide it under the skirt of his coat, and, giving the coat to his servant, as if from the heat, would take it away. And in the yard behind the church, our man would at once take the icon out of the overcoat and fly to our side with it, and there, during the time that the vigil lasted, the icon painter would have to remove the old icon from its old board, replace it with the copy, cover it with the casing, and send it back, so that Yakov Yakovlevich could return it to the windowsill as if nothing had happened.

“Why not, sir?” we say. “We agree to everything!”

“Only watch out,” he says. “Remember that I’ll be standing there in the role of the thief, and I want to have faith in you, that you won’t give me away.”

Luka Kirilovich says:

“We’re not the sort of people who deceive their benefactors, Yakov Yakovlevich. I’ll take the icon and bring both back to you, the real one and the copy.”

“Well, and if something prevents you?”

“What can prevent me?”

“Well, if you suddenly die or drown?”

Luka thinks: why should there be such a hindrance? But then he figures that it does sometimes happen that while digging a well you discover treasure, or you go to the market and meet a rabid dog, so he replies:

“In that case, sir, I’ll leave a man with you, one of ours, who will take all the blame on himself in case I fail you, and will suffer death rather than give you away.”

“And who is this man you rely on so much?”

“The blacksmith Maroy,” replies Luka.

“That old man?”

“True, he’s not young.”

“But it seems he’s stupid?”

“His mind we don’t need, but the man has a worthy spirit.”

“What kind of spirit can a stupid man have?” he says.

“The spirit, sir,” Luka answers, “does not go according to reason: the spirit bloweth where it listeth,²⁹ the same as one person has long and luxuriant hair and another scarcely any.”

The Englishman ponders and says:

“Very well, very well: these are all interesting sensations. But how will he bail me out if I get caught?”

“Here’s how,” Luka replies. “You’ll stand in the church by the window, and Maroy will stand outside under the window, and if I don’t come with the icons before the end of the service, he’ll break the glass, climb through the window, and take all the blame on himself.”

The Englishman liked that very much.

“Curious,” he said, “very curious! And why should I trust that your stupid man with spirit won’t just run away?”

“Well, that is a matter of mutual trust.”

“Mutual trust,” he repeats. “Hm, hm, mutual trust! Either I go to hard labor for a stupid muzhik, or he goes under the knout for me? Hm, hm! If he keeps his word … it’s under the knout … That’s interesting.”

We sent for Maroy and explained to him what it was about, and he says:

“Well, what of it?”

“And you won’t run away?” says the Englishman.

And Maroy replies:

“Why should I?”

“So as not to be flogged and sent to Siberia.” And Maroy says:

“Oh, that!”—and wouldn’t talk anymore.

The Englishman was overjoyed: he got all livened up.

“Delightful,” he says. “How interesting!”

XIV

Right after this discussion, the action began. We hung oars on the Englishman’s big longboat the next morning and transported him to the city side. There he and the icon painter Sevastian got into a carriage and drove to the monastery, and after a little more than an hour, we see our icon painter come running, and in his hand there’s a sheet of paper with the tracing of our icon.

We ask:

“Did you see it, dear man, and can you now copy it nicely for us?”

“Yes, I saw it,” he replies, “and I can do it, except that it may come out a bit more vivid. But that doesn’t matter. When the icon gets here, I can then tone down the brightness in a minute.”

“Dear heart,” we beg him, “do your best.”

“Don’t worry,” he replies, “I will!”

And as soon as we brought him back, he immediately sat down to work and by the end of the day had an angel ripe on the canvas, as like our sealed one as two drops of water, except that the colors seemed a bit fresher.

By evening the goldsmith had also sent the new casing, because it had been commissioned earlier on the model of the old silver one.

The most dangerous time of our thievery was coming.

We were all prepared, naturally, and had prayed before evening, and were waiting for the right moment; and as soon as the first bell rang for vigil in the monastery on the other side, the three of us—myself, old Maroy, and Uncle Luka—got into a small boat. Old Maroy brought along an axe, a chisel, a crowbar, and a rope, so as to look more like a thief, and we headed straight for the monastery wall.

At that time of year, naturally, twilight came early, and the night, despite the full moon, was pitch-dark, really thievish.

Having crossed, Maroy and Luka left me at the bank in the boat and went sneaking into the monastery themselves. I shipped the oars, caught hold of the end of the rope, and waited impatiently, so as to cast off as soon as Luka set foot in the boat. The time seemed terribly long to me, out of anxiety for how it was all going to turn out and whether we would succeed in covering up our thievery while the vespers and vigil were still going on. And it seemed to me that God knows how much time had already passed; it was frightfully dark, the wind was fierce, and instead of rain wet snow began to pour down, the boat rocked slightly in the wind, and I, the wicked servant, gradually warming up in my coat, began to doze off. But suddenly there came a shove to the boat, and it began to pitch about. I roused myself and saw Uncle Luka standing in it, and he says in a stifled voice, not his own:

“Row!”

I took the oars, but couldn’t get them into the oarlocks from fear. I managed with great effort and pushed off from the shore, and then asked:

“Did you get the angel, uncle?”

“He’s with me. Row harder!”

“Tell me,” I persist, “how did you get him?”

“Just the way we said.”

“And we’ll have time to bring him back?”

“We should. They’ve just sung the great prokeimenon.³⁰ Row! Where are you rowing to?”

I turned around. Oh, Lord! True enough, I was rowing in the wrong direction: it seemed I kept steering across the current, as I ought to, but our settlement wasn’t there—it was because there was such snow and wind, it was awful, and it blinded your eyes, and all around there was roaring and heaving, and the surface of the river seemed to breathe ice.

Well, anyway, by God’s mercy we made it, jumped out of the boat, and ran. The icon painter was ready: he acted coolly, but firmly. He took the icon in his hands, and once the people had fallen down and venerated it, he let them all cross themselves before the sealed face, while he looked at it and at his forgery and said:

“Fine work! Only it has to be toned down a bit with dirt and saffron!” And then he clamped the icon by the edges, tuned up his saw, which he had put into the tight bow, and … the saw went into a flutter. We all stood there seeing if he’d damage it! Awful, sirs! Can you picture him to yourselves, with his enormous hands, sawing a layer from the board no thicker than a sheet of the finest writing paper? … It’s a short step to sin: if the saw goes off by a hair, it will tear through the image and come out the other side! But the icon painter Sevastian performed the whole action with such coolness and artistry that, looking at him, we felt more at peace in our souls every minute. And indeed, he sawed off the image on its paper-thin layer, then in one minute he cut the image out, leaving a border, and glued the border back onto the same board. Then he took his copy and crumpled it, crumpled it in his fists, scraped it on the edge of the table, and rubbed it between his palms, tearing at it as if he wanted to destroy it, and finally held it up to the light, and the whole of this new copy was full of cracks like a sieve … Then Sevastian took it at once and glued it onto the old board inside the border, filled his palm with some sort of dark pigment, he knew which, added old varnish and saffron, mixed it with his fingers into a sort of paste, and rubbed it hard into the crumpled copy … He did it all very briskly, and the newly painted icon became quite old and looked just like the real one. In a moment, this copy was varnished, and our people were putting the casing on it, while the icon painter put the real icon he had sawed out onto the prepared board and quickly demanded a scrap of an old felt hat.

This was the beginning of the most difficult action—the unsealing.

They gave the icon painter a hat, he immediately tore it in half on his knee and, covering the sealed icon with it, shouted:

“Give me the hot iron!”

On the stove, at his orders, a heavy tailor’s iron had been heated burning hot.

Mikhailitsa picked it up with tongs and gave it to him, and Sevastian wrapped the handle with a cloth, spat on the iron, and passed it quickly over the scrap of hat! … An evil stench arose from the felt at once, and the icon painter did it again, and pressed, and snatched it away. His hand flew like lightning, and a column of smoke already rose from the felt, but Sevastian went on scorching: with one hand he turned the felt a little, with the other he worked the iron, and each time more slowly and pressing harder, and suddenly he set both the iron and the felt aside and held the icon up to the light, and it was as if the seal had never been: the strong Stroganov varnish had held out, and the sealing wax was all gone, only a sort of fiery red dew was left on the image, but the whole brightly divine face was visible …

Here some of us prayed, some wept, some tried to kiss the painter’s hands, but Luka Kirilovich did not forget what he was about and, treasuring every minute, handed the painter his forged icon and said:

“Well, finish quickly!”

The man replies:

“My action is finished, I’ve done everything I promised.”

“What about placing the seal?”

“Where?”

“Why, here on the face of this new angel, like on the other one.”

Sevastian shook his head and replied:

“Oh, no, I’m no official, I wouldn’t dare do such a thing.”

“Then what are we to do now?”

“That I don’t know,” he says. “You ought to have had an official or some German on hand, but since you failed to supply them, you’ll have to do it yourselves.”

Luka says:

“What? We wouldn’t dare do that!”

And the icon painter replies:

“I don’t dare either.”

And in those brief moments of great turmoil, Yakov Yakovlevich’s wife suddenly comes flying into the cottage, all pale as death, and says:

“Aren’t you ready yet?”

“Ready and not ready,” we say. “The most important thing is done, but the paltry one we can’t do.”

And she babbles in her language:

“What are you waiting for? Don’t you hear what’s going on outside?”

We listened and turned paler than she was: amidst our cares, we had paid no attention to the weather, but now we heard the noise: the ice was moving!

I sprang outside and saw it had already covered the whole river—block heaving upon block like rabid beasts, whirling into each other, and crashing, and breaking up.

Forgetting myself, I rushed to the boats, but there wasn’t a single one left: they had all been swept away … My tongue went stiff in my mouth, I couldn’t move it, and my ribs sank one after another, as if I was going down into the earth … I stand there, and don’t move, and don’t give voice.

But while we were rushing around in the dark, the Englishwoman stayed in the cottage alone with Mikhailitsa, found out what had caused the delay, snatched up the icon and … a moment later rushed out to the porch with it, holding a lantern, and cried:

“Here, it’s ready!”

We looked: the new angel had a seal on his face!

Luka immediately put both icons in his bosom and shouted:

“A boat!”

I let on that there were no boats, they’d been swept away.

And the ice, I tell you, came thronging like a herd, smashing against the icebreakers and shaking the bridge, so that even the chains, for all that they were thick as good floorboards, could be heard rattling.

The Englishwoman, when she understood that, clasped her hands, shrieked “James!” in an inhuman voice, and fell as if dead.

And we stand there, all feeling the same thing:

“What of our word? What will happen to the Englishman now? What will happen to old Maroy?”

Just then the bells in the monastery bell tower rang for the third time.

Uncle Luka suddenly roused himself and exclaimed to the Englishwoman:

“Come to your senses, lady, your husband will be safe, and maybe our old Maroy will just have his decrepit hide torn by the executioner and his honest face dishonored by a brand, but that will happen only after my death!” And with those words he crossed himself, stepped out, and left.

I cried out:

“Uncle Luka, where are you going? Levonty perished, and you’re going to perish!”—and I rushed after him to hold him back, but he picked up an oar that I thrown down when we came and, brandishing it at me, cried:

“Away, or I’ll strike you dead!”

Gentlemen, I have rather openly confessed my faintheartedness to you in my story, how I abandoned the late youth Levonty on the ground that time and climbed a tree, but really and truly I say to you, this time I would not have feared the oar and retreated before Uncle Luka, but—believe it or not, as you like—at that moment, just as I remembered Levonty’s name, the youth Levonty appeared in the darkness between me and him and shook his hand at me. This terror I couldn’t bear, and I drew back. Meanwhile, Luka was already standing at the end of the chain and, having set his foot firmly on it, suddenly said through the storm:

“Start singing!”

Our choir director, Arefa, was standing right there and obeyed at once and struck up “I will open my mouth,” the others joined in, and we shouted out the hymn, fighting against the howling of the storm, and Luka, fearless of this deadly terror, walked along the chain of the bridge. In one minute he had walked the first span and descended into the next … And further on? Further on the darkness enveloped him, and we couldn’t see whether he was still walking or had already fallen and the cursed blocks of ice had whirled him into the abyss, and we didn’t know whether to pray for his safety or weep for the repose of his firm and honor-loving soul.

XV

Now, sirs, what was happening on the other bank? His grace the bishop, according to his rule, was celebrating the vigil in the main church, knowing nothing about the robbery being carried out at the same time in the side chapel. With his permission, our Englishman, Yakov Yakovlevich, stood in the chapel sanctuary, and, having stolen our angel, sent it out of the church, as he had intended, in his overcoat, and Luka raced off with it. Meanwhile old Maroy, keeping his word, remained outside by the same window, waiting till the last moment, so that, in case Luka did not come back, the Englishman could retreat, and Maroy would break the window and get into the church with a crowbar and a chisel, like a real villain. The Englishman didn’t take his eyes off him, and he saw that old Maroy was standing strictly by his duty, and the moment he saw the Englishman press his face to the window so as to see him, he nodded at once, meaning, “I’m here to answer for the theft—I’m here!”

And in this manner the two showed each other their nobility, and would not allow one to outdo the other in mutual trust, but with these two trusts a third, still stronger trust was at work, only they didn’t know what this third trust was doing. But then, as soon as the last bell of the vigil was rung, the Englishman quietly opened the casement, to tell Maroy to climb in, and he himself prepared to retreat, when he suddenly saw old Maroy had turned away and wasn’t looking at him, but was staring fixedly across the river and repeating:

“God, bring him over! God, bring him over! God, bring him over!” and then he suddenly jumped up and danced as if he were drunk, and shouted: “God brought him over, God brought him over!”

Yakov Yakovlevich was thrown into the greatest despair, thinking:

“Well, that’s it: the stupid old man has gone crazy, and I’m done for.” Then he looks, and Maroy and Luka are already embracing.

Old Maroy muttered:

“I watched the way you walked along the chain with those lanterns.”

And Uncle Luka says:

“I didn’t have any lanterns.”

“Then where did the light come from?”

Luka replies:

“I don’t know, I didn’t see any light, I just made a run for it and don’t know how I didn’t fall as I ran … it was as if somebody held me up under both arms.”

Maroy says:

“It was angels—I saw them, and for that I’ll now die before noon today.”

But Luka had no time to talk much. He didn’t reply to the old man, but quickly gave the Englishman both icons through the window. He took them and handed them back.

“What’s this?” he says. “There’s no seal?”

Luka says:

“There isn’t?”

“No, there isn’t.”

Well, here Luka crossed himself and said:

“That’s it! Now there’s no time to fix it. The Church angel performed this miracle, and I know why.”

And Luka rushed to the church at once, pushed his way to the sanctuary, where the bishop was being divested, fell at his feet, and said:

“Thus and so, I’ve blasphemed, here’s what I’ve just done: order me put in chains and taken to jail.”

But the bishop, more honor to him, listened to it all and replied:

“That should bring home to you now where the true faith is at work: you took the seal off your angel by deceit, but ours took it off himself and brought you here.”

Luka says:

“I see, Your Grace, and I tremble. Order me to be handed over quickly for punishment.”

But the bishop replies with an absolving word:

“By the power granted me by God, I forgive and absolve you, child. Prepare yourself to receive the most pure body of Christ tomorrow morning.”³¹

Well, gentlemen, I think there’s nothing further to tell you: Luka Kirilovich and Maroy came back in the morning and said:

“Fathers and brothers, we have seen the glory of the angel of the ruling Church and all the divine Providence of it in the goodness of its hierarch, and we have been anointed unto it with holy chrism, and today at the liturgy we partook of the body and blood of our Savior.”

And I, who for a long time, ever since I was the elder Pamva’s guest, had been drawn to become one in spirit with all of Russia, exclaimed for us all:

“And we shall follow you, Uncle Luka!” And so all of us gathered together in one flock, with one shepherd, like lambs, and only then did we realize where and to what our sealed angel had brought us, first bending his steps away and then unsealing himself for the sake of the love of people for people, manifested on that terrible night.

XVI

The storyteller had finished. The listeners remained silent, but one of them finally cleared his throat and observed that everything in the story was explicable—Mikhailitsa’s dreams, and the vision she had imagined half awake, and the fall of the angel, whom a dog or a cat running in had knocked to the floor, and the death of Levonty, who had been ill even before meeting Pamva. Explicable, too, were all the chance coincidences in the words spoken by Pamva in some sort of riddles.

“And it’s understandable,” the listener added, “that Luka crossed on the chain with an oar: masons are known to be good at walking and climbing anywhere, and the oar was for balance; it’s also understandable, I think, that Maroy could see a light around Luka, which he took for angels. Under great strain, a badly chilled man can start seeing all kinds of things. I’d even find it understandable if, for example, Maroy had died before noon, as he predicted …”

“He did die, sir,” Mark put in.

“Splendid! There’s nothing astonishing in an eighty-year-old man dying after such agitation and cold. But here’s what I really find totally inexplicable: how could the seal disappear from the new angel that the Englishwoman had sealed?”

“Well, that’s the simplest thing of all,” Mark replied cheerfully, and he told how, soon after that, they had found the seal between the icon and the casing.

“How could it happen?”

“Like this: the Englishwoman also didn’t dare spoil the angel’s face, so she made a seal on a piece of paper and tucked it under the edges of the casing … It was done very cleverly and skillfully, but when Luka carried the icons in his bosom, they shifted on him, and that made the seal fall off.”

“Well, now, that means the whole affair was simple and natural.”

“Yes, many people suggest that it all took place in the most ordinary way. And not only the educated gentlemen who know of it, but even those of our brothers who have remained in the schism laugh at us, saying the Englishwoman slipped us into the Church on a scrap of paper. But we don’t argue against such reasoning: each man judges as he believes, and for us it’s all the same by which paths the Lord calls a man to Him and from what vessel He gives him to drink, so long as He calls him and quenches his thirst for unanimity with the fatherland. But here come our peasant lads, crawling out from under the snow. Looks like they’ve had a rest, the dear hearts, and will soon be on their way. Perhaps they’ll give me a ride. St. Basil’s night has gone by. I’ve wearied you and led you around to many places with me. But to make up for it I have the honor of wishing you a happy New Year, and forgive me, for Christ’s sake, ignorant as I am!”