“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 diff
erent, 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 Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories Page 14