The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories

by Nikolai Leskov

  “What do you want from me? Get out!”

  But he replies:

  “You took my life before I could confess.”

  “Well, it happens,” I reply. “What am I to do with you now? I didn’t do it on purpose. And what’s so bad for you now?” I say. “You’re dead, and it’s all over.”

  “It’s all over,” he says, “that’s true enough, and I’m very grateful to you for it, but I’ve come now from your own mother to ask you, do you know you’re her prayed-for son?”

  “Of course, I’ve heard that,” I say. “My grandmother Fedosya has told me so more than once.”

  “But do you know,” he says, “that you’re also a promised son?”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning,” he says, “that you’re promised to God.”

  “Who promised me to Him?”

  “Your mother.”

  “Well,” I say, “then let her come and tell me that herself, because maybe you’re making it up.”

  “No,” he says, “I’m not making it up, but she can’t come herself.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because,” he says, “here with us it’s not like with you on earth: here not everybody can speak or go places, but each of us does what he has a gift for. But if you like,” he says, “I can give you a sign to confirm it.”

  “I’d like,” I say, “only what sort of sign?”

  “Here is the sign for you,” he says, “that you’ll be dying many times, but you won’t die until real death comes for you, and then you’ll remember your mother’s promise and go to be a monk.”

  “Wonderful,” I say. “I accept and I’ll be waiting.”

  He disappeared, and I woke up and forgot all about it and didn’t foresee that all these deaths would begin right away one after another. But a short while later I went with the count and countess to Voronezh—to the newly revealed relics there,16 to cure the little countess, who had been born pigeon-toed—and we stopped in the Elets district, in the village of Krutoe, to feed the horses, and I fell asleep again by the trough, and I see—again that little monk comes, the one I did in, and says:

  “Listen, Golovan, I feel sorry for you, quickly ask your masters to go to the monastery—they’ll let you.”

  I answer:

  “Why should I?”

  And he says:

  “Well, look out, you’re going to suffer a lot of evil.”

  I thought, all right, you’ve got to caw about something, since I killed you, and with that I got up, hitched the horses with my father, and we drove out, and the mountain here was steep as could be, with a sheer drop on one side, where who knows how many people had perished by then. The count says:

  “Watch out, Golovan, be careful.”

  I was good at it, and though the reins of the shaft horses, which had to make the descent, were in the coachman’s hands, I could do much to help my father. His shaft horses were strong and reliable: they could make the descent simply by sitting on their tails, but one of them, the scoundrel, was into astronomy—you only have to rein him in hard, and straightaway he throws his head up and starts contemplating deuce knows what in the sky. There’s no worse harness horses than these astronomers—and they’re most dangerous especially between the shafts, a postillion always has to watch out for horses with that habit, because an astronomer doesn’t see where he puts his feet, and who knows where they’ll land. Naturally, I knew all about our astronomer and always helped my father: I’d hold the reins of my saddle horse and his mate under my left elbow, and place them so that their tails were just in front of the shaft horses’ muzzles and the shafts were between their croups, and I always held the whip ready in front of the astronomer’s eyes, and the moment I see him looking up in the sky, I hit him on the nose and he lowers his head, and we make the descent perfectly well. So it was this time: we’re taking the carriage down, and I’m fidgeting around in front of the shaft and controlling the astronomer with the whip, when suddenly I see that he no longer feels either my father’s reins or my whip, his mouth is all bloody from the bit and his eyes are popping, and behind me I suddenly hear something creak and crack, and the whole carriage lurches forward … The brakes have snapped! I shout to my father: “Hold up! Hold up!” And he also yells: “Hold up! Hold up!” But what is there to hold up, when all six are racing like lunatics and don’t see a thing, and something suddenly goes whizzing before my eyes, and I see my father fly off the box—a rein has broken … And ahead is that terrible abyss … I don’t know whether I felt sorry for my masters or for myself, but seeing death was inevitable, I threw myself off of the lead horse right onto the shaft and hung from the end of it … Again I don’t know how much weight was in me then, only I must have been much heavier in the overbalance, and I choked the two shaft horses till they wheezed and … I see my lead horses aren’t there, as if they’ve been cut off, and I’m hanging over the abyss, and the carriage is standing propped against the shaft horses that I had throttled with the shaft.

  Only then did I come to my senses and get frightened, and my hands lost their grip, and I went flying down and don’t remember anything more. I don’t know how long it was before I came to and saw that I’m in some cottage, and a stalwart muzhik says to me:

  “Well, can it be you’re alive, lad?”

  I answer:

  “Must be I am.”

  “And do you remember what happened to you?” he asks.

  I began to recall and remembered how the horses had bolted on us and I had thrown myself onto the end of the shaft and was left hanging over the abyss; but what happened next I didn’t know.

  The muzhik smiles:

  “And where could you know that from,” he says. “Your lead horses didn’t make it to the bottom of that abyss alive, they got all broken up, but it’s like you were saved by some invisible force: you dropped onto a lump of clay and slid down on it like on a sled. We thought you were quite dead, then we see you’re breathing, only the air has stopped your breath. Well,” he says, “now get up if you can, hurry quick to the saint: the count left money to bury you if you died, and to bring you to him in Voronezh if you should live.”

  So I went, only I didn’t say anything all the way, but listened to how that muzhik who was taking me kept playing “Mistress Mine” on the concertina.

  When we came to Voronezh, the count summoned me to his rooms and said to the countess:

  “So, my dear countess,” he says, “we owe this boy our lives.”

  The countess only nodded her head, but the count said:

  “Ask me whatever you like, Golovan—I’ll do it all for you.”

  I say:

  “I don’t know what to ask!” And he says:

  “Well, what would you like to have?”

  I think and think, and then say:

  “A concertina.”

  The count laughs and says:

  “Well, you’re a real fool, but anyhow, it goes without saying, I’ll remember you when the time comes. And,” he says, “buy him a concertina right now.”

  A footman went to a shop and brought me a concertina in the stables:

  “Here,” he says, “play.”

  I took it and started to play, but only saw that I didn’t know how and dropped it at once, and the next day some wanderers17 stole it on me from where I’d hidden it under the shed.

  I ought to have taken advantage of the count’s favor on that occasion and asked to go to a monastery right then, as the monk had advised; but, without knowing why myself, I had asked for a concertina, and had thereby refuted my very first calling, and on account of that went from one suffering to another, enduring more and more, yet didn’t die of any of them, until everything the monk had predicted to me in my vision came true in real life because of my mistrust.

  III

  I barely had time, after this show of benevolence from my masters, to return home with them on new horses, from which we again put together a six in Voronezh, when the fancy took me to acquire
a pair of crested pigeons, a male and a female, which I kept on a shelf in the stables. The male had clay-colored feathers, but the female was white and with such red legs, a real pretty little thing! … I liked them very much: especially when the male cooed in the night, it was so pleasant to listen to, and in the daytime they’d fly among the horses and land in the manger, pecking up food and kissing each other … It was comforting for a young boy to see it all.

  And after this kissing children came along; they hatched one pair, and they were growing up, and they went kiss-kissing, and more eggs got laid and hatched … They were such tiny little pigeons, as if all furry, with no feathers, yellow as the little chamomile known as “cat’s communion,” but they had beaks on them worse than on a Circassian prince, big and strong … I started examining them, these pigeon chicks, and so as not to squash them, I picked one up by the beak and looked and looked at it, and got lost in contemplating how tender it was, and the big pigeon kept driving me away. I amused myself with them—kept teasing him with the pigeon chick; but then when I went to put the little bird back in the nest, it wasn’t breathing anymore. What a nuisance! I warmed it in my hands and breathed on it, kept trying to revive it; but no, it was dead, that’s all! I got angry and threw it out the window. Well, never mind; the other one was left in the nest, and the dead one got snatched up and carried off by some white cat that ran past from who knows where. And I made good note of this cat then, that she was all white and had a black spot on her forehead like a little hat. Well, I thought to myself, darn it all, let her eat the dead one. But that night I was asleep, and suddenly I heard the pigeon on the shelf above my bed fighting angrily with someone. I jumped up and looked, and it was a moonlit night, and I saw it was the same white cat carrying off my other pigeon chick, the live one.

  “Well,” I thought, “no, why should she do that?” and I threw my boot after her, only I missed, and she carried off my pigeon chick and no doubt ate it somewhere. My two pigeons were left childless, but they didn’t pine for long and began kissing again, and again they had a pair of children ready, but that cursed cat was there again … Deuce knows how she managed to spy it all out, only I look once, and in broad daylight she’s dragging off another pigeon chick, and just when I had nothing to fling after her. But for that I decided to pull a fast one on her and set a trap in the window, so that as soon as she showed her face at night, it slammed shut on her, and she sat there complaining and miaowing. I took her out of the trap at once, stuffed her head and front paws into a boot to keep her from scratching, held her back paws and tail in my left hand, with a mitten on it, took a whip from the wall with my right hand, and began teaching her a lesson on my bed. I think I gave her some hundred and fifty hot ones, with all my might, so that she even stopped struggling. Then I took her out of the boot, wondering: is she done in or not? How, I wonder, can I test whether she’s alive or not? And I put her on the threshold and chopped her tail off with a hatchet: she went “Mia-a-a-ow,” shuddered all over, spun around ten times or so, and then ran off.

  “Good,” I thought, “now you’re sure not to come here after my pigeons again.” And to make it still scarier for her, the next morning I nailed the chopped-off tail outside over my window, and was very pleased with that. But an hour later, or two hours at the most, I look, and the countess’s maid comes running in, though she’s never set foot in our stable in all her born days, and she’s holding a parasol over herself, and she screams:

  “Aha, aha! So that’s who, that’s who!”

  I say:

  “What’s the matter?”

  “It’s you,” she says, “who mutilated Zozinka! Confess: it’s her tail you’ve got nailed over the window!”

  I say:

  “Well, what’s so important about a nailed-up tail?”

  “How dared you?” she says.

  “And how dared she eat my pigeons?”

  “Well, what’s so important about your pigeons!”

  “Your cat’s no great lady either.”

  You see, I was already old enough for back talk.

  “She’s just a crummy cat,” I say.

  And the fidget says:

  “How dare you speak that way: don’t you know that she’s my cat and the countess herself has petted her?” And with that she slaps me across the cheek with her hand, but I, since I had also been quick with my hands since childhood, not thinking twice, grabbed a dirty broom that was standing by the door and hit her across the waist with it …

  My God, here everything blew up! I was taken to the German steward’s office to be judged, and he decided I should be given the severest possible thrashing and then be taken from the stables and sent to the English garden, to crush gravel for the paths with a hammer … They gave me a terribly severe hiding, I couldn’t even pick myself up, and they took me to my father on a bast mat, but that would have been nothing to me; but then there was this last punishment, of going on my knees and crushing stones … That tormented me so much that I kept thinking and thinking how to get out of it, and decided to put an end to my life. I provided myself with a stout cord, having begged it from a houseboy, and went for a swim in the evening, then to the aspen grove behind the threshing floor, got on my knees, prayed for all Christians, tied the cord to a branch, made a noose, and put my head in it. It only remained for me to jump, and the story would be all told … Given my character, I could have done it quite easily, but I had only just swung, jumped off the branch, and hung down, when I saw that I was lying on the ground, and in front of me stood a Gypsy with a knife, laughing—his bright white teeth flashing against his swarthy mug in the night.

  “What’s this you’re up to, farmhand?” he says.

  “And you, what do you want with me?”

  “Or,” he persisted, “is your life so bad?”

  “Seems it’s not all sweetness,” I say.

  “Instead of hanging by your own hand,” he says, “come and live with us, maybe you’ll hang some other way.”

  “But who are you and what do you live by? I’ll bet you’re thieves.”

  “Thieves we are,” he says, “thieves and swindlers.”

  “There, you see,” I say, “and, on occasion, I’ll bet you put a knife in people?”

  “Occasionally,” he says, “we do that, too.”

  I thought over what to do: at home it would be the same thing again tomorrow and the day after, going on your knees in the path, and tap, tap, crushing little stones with a hammer, and I already had lumps growing on my knees from the work, and all I had in my ears was people jeering at me, that the fiend of a German had condemned me to make rubble of a whole mountain of stones on account of a cat’s tail. Everybody laughed: “And yet they call you a savior: you saved the masters’ lives.” I simply couldn’t stand it, and figuring that, if I didn’t hang myself, I’d have to go back to the same thing, I waved my hand, wept, and went over to the robbers.

  IV

  That sly Gypsy gave me no time to collect my wits. He said:

  “To convince me you won’t go back on it, you must bring me a pair of horses from the master’s stable right now, and take the best ones, so that we can gallop far away on them before morning.”

  I grieved inwardly: Lord knows I didn’t want to steal; but then it was sink or swim; and, knowing all the ins and outs of the stables, I had no trouble leading two fiery steeds, the kind that knew no fatigue, out beyond the threshing floor, and the Gypsy had already taken wolves’ teeth on strings from his pocket, and he hung them on each horse’s neck, and the Gypsy and I mounted them and rode off. The horses, scenting wolves’ teeth on them, raced so fast I can’t tell you, and by morning we were seventy miles away, near the town of Karachev. There we sold the horses at once to some innkeeper, took the money, went to the river, and began settling our accounts. We had sold the horses for three hundred roubles—in banknotes, of course, as it was done then—but the Gypsy gave me one silver rouble and said:

  “Here’s your share.”

&nb
sp; I found that insulting.

  “How come?” I say. “I stole the horses and could suffer more for it than you—why is my share so small?”

  “Because,” he says, “that’s how big it grew.”

  “That’s nonsense,” I say. “Why do you take so much for yourself?”

  “And again,” he says, “it’s because I’m a master and you’re still a pupil.”

  “Pupil, hah!” I say. “What drivel!” And one word led to another, and we got into a quarrel. Finally, I say:

  “I don’t want to go any further with you, because you’re a scoundrel.”

  And he replies:

  “Do leave me, brother, for Christ’s sake, because you’ve got no passport,18 and I could get in trouble with you.”

  So we parted ways, and I was about to go to the local justice and turn myself in as a runaway, but when I told my story to his clerk, the man says to me:

  “You fool, you: why go turning yourself in? Have you got ten roubles?”

  “No,” I say, “I’ve got one silver rouble, but not ten.”

  “Well, then maybe you’ve got something else, maybe a silver cross on your neck, or what’s that in your ear—an earring?”

  “Yes,” I say, “it’s an earring.”

  “A silver one?”

  “Yes, a silver one, and I’ve also got a silver cross from St. Mitrofan’s.”19