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 wander
ing. 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:
The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories Page 13