“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:
The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories Page 9
