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 car
ried 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.
“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.”
The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories Page 11
