“ ‘Wait, let’s bury him up to the neck in the sand: maybe that will bring him around.’
“And so they buried him, but the Jew just died buried like that, and his head stuck up black from the sand for a long time afterwards, but the children began to be afraid of it, so they cut it off and threw it into a dry well.”
“There’s your preaching to them!”
“Yes, sir, it’s very hard, but all the same that Jew did have money.”
“He did?!”
“He did, sir. Later on wolves and jackals began worrying him, and they dug him out of the sand bit by bit, and finally got to his boots. Once his boots fell apart, seven coins came out of the soles. They were found later.”
“Well, but how did you break free of them?”
“I was saved by a miracle.”
“Who performed this miracle that delivered you?”
“Talafa.”
“Who is this Talafa—also a Tartar?”
“No, sir, he’s of another race, an Indian, and not a simple Indian at that, but one of their gods who comes down to earth.”
Prevailed upon by his listeners, Ivan Severyanych Flyagin told the following about this new act in the tragicomedy of his life.
IX
After the Tartars got rid of our missaneries, again nearly a year went by, and again it was winter, and we drove our herds to graze further south, towards the Caspian, and there suddenly one day before evening two men came to us, if they could be called men. Nobody knew who they were and where from and of what sort and rank. They didn’t even have any real language, neither Russian nor Tartar, but they spoke a word in ours, a word in Tartar, and between themselves in who knows what. They weren’t old. One was dark, with a big beard, in a robe, something like a Tartar, only his coat wasn’t multicolored but all red, and on his head he had a conical Persian hat. The other one was red-haired, also in a robe, but a tricky fellow: he had all sorts of little boxes with him, and as soon as there was a moment when nobody was looking at him, he’d take off his robe and remain just in trousers and a little jacket, and these trousers and jacket were of the same fashion as what Germans wear in factories in Russia. And he kept turning over and sorting out something in those boxes, but what it was that he had in them—deuce knew. They said they came from Khiva25 to buy horses and wanted to make war on somebody at home, but who it was they didn’t say, they just kept stirring the Tartars up against the Russians. I heard him, this red-haired one—he couldn’t say much, but just brought out something like “soup-perear” in Russian and spat; but they had no money with them, because these Asiatics know that if you come to the steppe with money, you won’t leave with a head on your shoulders, and they urged our Tartars to drive the herds of horses to their river, the Darya, and settle accounts there. The Tartars were of two minds about that and didn’t know whether to agree or not. They thought and thought, as if they were digging gold, and were obviously afraid of something.
They tried persuading them honorably, and then also began to frighten them.
“Drive them,” they say, “or it may go badly for you: we have the god Talafa, who has sent his fire with us. God forbid he should get angry.”
The Tartars didn’t know this god and doubted that he could do anything to them with his fire on the steppe in winter. But that black-bearded man from Khiva, the one in the red robe, says, “If you have doubts, Talafa will show you his power this very night, only if you see or hear anything, don’t run outside, or he’ll burn you up.” Naturally, this was all terribly interesting amidst the boredom of the winter steppe, and we were all a bit afraid of this terrible thing, but eager to see what this Indian god could do and how, by what miracle, he would manifest himself.
We crawled into our tents early with our wives and children and waited … All was dark and quiet, as on any other night, but suddenly, during my first sleep, I heard something on the steppe hiss like a strong wind and explode, and through my sleep I fancied there were sparks falling from the sky.
I roused myself and saw my wives stirring and my children crying.
I say:
“Shh! Stop their gullets, get them sucking instead of crying.”
The children started smacking away, and it became quiet again, and on the dark steppe a fire suddenly went hissing up again … hissed and burst again …
“Well,” I think, “anyhow it’s clear this Talafa is no joke!”
And a little later he hissed again, but now in quite a different way—like a fiery bird fluttering up, and with a tail of fire as well, and the fire is of an extraordinary color, red as blood, and when it bursts, it all suddenly turns yellow and then blue.
In the camp, I can hear, it’s like everything has died. It was impossible, of course, for anybody not to hear such a cannonade, but it meant they were all frightened and lying under their sheepskins. You can only hear the earth tremble, start shaking, and stop again. That, you could figure, was the horses shying and huddling close together, and you could also hear those Khivians or Indians running somewhere, and all at once fire again shot over the steppe like a snake … The horses got terrified and bolted … The Tartars forgot their fear and all came jumping out, shaking their heads, howling “Allah! Allah!”—and set off in pursuit, but the Khivians vanished without a trace, just leaving one of their boxes behind as a souvenir … Now, when all our fighting men had gone in pursuit of the herd, and only women and old men were left in the camp, I took a look at that box: what’s in there? I see there are various powders, and mixtures, and paper tubes: I started examining one of the tubes close to the fire, and it burst, almost burned my eyes out, and flew upwards, and there—bang!—scattered in little stars … “Aha,” I thought, “so it’s not a god, it’s just fiverworks like they set off in our public garden.” I went bang with another tube, and saw that the Tartars, the old ones who had stayed here, had already fallen down and were lying on their faces where they fell, and only jerking their legs … At first I was scared myself, but when I saw them jerking like that, I suddenly acquired a completely different attitude, and for the first time since I fell into captivity, I gnashed my teeth and started uttering random, unfamiliar words at them. I shouted as loud as I could:
“Parley-bien-cumsa-shiray-mir-ferfluchter-min-adiew-moussiew!”
Then I sent up a spinning tube … Well, this time, seeing how the fire went spinning, they all nearly died … The fire went out, and they were all lying there, and only one of them raised his head every once in a while, and then put it mug-down again, while beckoning to me with his finger. I go up to him and say:
“Well, so? Confess what you want, curse you: death or life?”—because I can see they’re terribly afraid of me.
“Forgive us, Ivan,” they say, “don’t give us death, give us life.”
And the others also beckon to me from their places in the same way, and ask for forgiveness and life.
I see my case has taken a good turn: I must have suffered enough for all my sins, and I prayed:
“Mother of us, most holy Lady, St. Nicholas, my swans, my little doves, help me, my benefactors!”
And I myself sternly ask the Tartars:
“For what and to what end should I forgive you and grant you life?”
“Forgive us,” they say, “for not believing in your God.”
“Aha,” I think, “see how I’ve frightened them,” and I say: “Ah, no, brothers, that’s rubbish, I’m not going to forgive you for your opposition to relidgin!” And I gnashed my teeth again and unsealed one more tube.
This one turned out to have a rawcket … Terrible fire and crackling.
I shout at the Tartars:
“So, one more minute, and I’ll destroy you all, if you don’t want to believe in my God.”
“Don’t destroy us,” they reply, “we all agree to go under your God.”
Then I stopped setting off fiverworks and baptized them all in the river.
“You baptized them right then and there?”
&nb
sp; “That same minute, sirs. Why put it off for long? It had to be so they couldn’t think it over. I wetted their heads with water from a hole in the ice, recited ‘in the name of the Father and the Son,’ and hung those little crosses left from the missaneries on their necks, and told them to consider that murdered missanery a martyr and pray for him, and I showed them his grave.”
“And did they pray?”
“That they did, sir.”
“But I don’t suppose they knew any Christian prayers, or did you teach them?”
“No, I had no chance to teach them, because I saw the time had come for me to flee, but I told them: ‘Pray like you always prayed, the old way, only don’t you dare call on Allah, but instead of him name Jesus Christ.’ So they adopted that confession.”
“Well, but all the same, how did you escape from these new Christians then with your crippled feet, and how did you cure yourself?”
“Then I found some caustic earth in those fiverworks; as soon as you apply it to your body, it starts burning terribly. I applied it and pretended to be sick, and meanwhile, lying under the rug, I kept irritating my heels with this caustic stuff, and in two weeks I irritated them so much that the flesh on my heels festered and all the bristles the Tartars had sewn in ten years earlier came out with the pus. I got better as soon as I could, but gave no signs of it, and pretended that I was getting worse, and I ordered the women and old men to pray for me as zealously as they could, because I was dying. And I imposed a penitential fast on them and told them not to leave their yurts for three days, and to intimidate them even more I shot off the biggest fiverwork and left …”
“And they didn’t catch you?”
“No, and how could they catch me? With all the fasting and fear I put into them, they were probably only too glad to keep their noses inside their yurts for three days, and when they peeked out later, I was already too far away to go looking for. My feet, once I got all the bristles out, dried up and became so light that, when I started running, I ran across the whole steppe.”
“All on foot?”
“How else, sir? There’s no road there, nobody to meet, and if you do meet somebody, you won’t be glad of what you’ve acquired. On the fourth day, a Chuvash appeared, alone, driving five horses. ‘Mount up,’ he said.
“I felt suspicious and didn’t.”
“Why were you afraid of him?”
“Just so … he somehow didn’t look trustworthy to me, and besides that it was impossible to figure out what his religion was, and without that it’s frightening in the steppe. And the muddlehead shouts:
“ ‘Mount up—it’s merrier with two riding.’
“I say:
“ ‘But who are you? Maybe you’ve got no god?’
“ ‘How, no cod?’ he says. ‘It’s the Tartar has no cod, he eats horse, but I have a cod.’
“ ‘Who is your god?’ I say.
“For me,’ he says, ‘everything is cod: sun is cod, moon is cod, stars are cod … everything is cod. How I have no cod?’
“Everything! … Hm … so everything is god for you,’ I say, ‘which means Jesus Christ is not god for you?’
“ ‘No,’ he says, ‘he is cod, and his mother is cod, and Nikolach is cod …’
“ ‘What Nikolach?’ I ask.
“ ‘Why, the one who lives once in winter, once in summer.’
“I praised him for respecting our Russian saint, Nicholas the Wonderworker.26
“ ‘Always honor him,’ I said, ‘because he’s Russian’—and I was quite ready to approve of his faith and quite willing to ride with him, but, thankfully, he went on babbling and gave himself away.
“ ‘As if I don’t honor Nikolach,’ he says. ‘Maybe I don’t bow to him in winter, but in summer I give him twenty kopecks to take good care of my cows. Yes, and so as not to trust in him alone, I also sacrifice a bullock to the Keremet.’27
“I got angry.
“ ‘How dare you not trust in Nicholas the Wonderworker,’ I say, ‘and give him, a Russian, only twenty kopecks, while you give your foul Mordovian Keremet a whole bullock! Away with you,’ I say, ‘I don’t want … I won’t go with you, if you have such disrespect for Nicholas the Wonderworker.’
“And I didn’t go: I strode on with all my might, and before I realized it, towards evening on the third day, I caught sight of water and people. I lay in the grass out of apprehension and spied out what kind of people they were. Because I was afraid of falling again into a still worse captivity, but I see that these people cook their food … They must be Christians, I thought. I crawled closer: I saw them crossing themselves and drinking vodka—well, that means Russians! … Then I jumped up from the grass and showed myself. They turned out to be a fishing crew out fishing. They received me warmly, as countrymen should, and said:
“ ‘Have some vodka!’
“I reply:
“ ‘From living with the Tartars, brothers, I’m completely unused to it.’
“ ‘Well, never mind,’ they say, ‘here it’s your nation, you’ll get used to it again: drink!’
“I poured myself a glass and thought:
“ ‘Well then, with God’s blessing, here’s to my return!’—and I drank, but the crewmen—nice lads—persisted.
“ ‘Have another!’ they say. ‘Look how scrawny you’ve grown without it.’ ”
I allowed myself one more and became very outspoken: I told them everything, where I’m from and where and how I’d lived. I spent the whole night sitting by the fire, telling it all and drinking vodka, and it was so joyful to me that I was back in Holy Russia, only towards morning, when the fire began to go out and almost all the listeners had fallen asleep, one of the crew members says to me:
“And do you have a passport?”
I say:
“No, I don’t.”
“If you don’t,” he says, “it means jail for you.”
“Well, then,” I say, “I’m not going to leave you. I suppose I can live with you here without a passport.”
And he replies:
“You can live with us without a passport,” he says, “but you can’t die without one.”
I say:
“Why’s that?”
“How’s the priest going to register you,” he says, “if you’ve got no passport?”
“What’ll happen to me in that case?”
“We’ll throw you into the water,” he says, “as fish food.”
“Without a priest?”
“Without a priest.”
Being a little tipsy, I was terribly frightened at that and began weeping and lamenting, but the fisherman laughed.
“I was joking with you,” he says. “Die fearlessly, we’ll bury you in your native soil.”
But I was already very upset and said:
“A fine joke. If you joke with me like that very often, I won’t live to see the next spring.”
And as soon as this last crewman fell asleep, I quickly got up and went away and came to Astrakhan, earned a rouble doing day labor and went on such a drinking binge that I don’t remember how I wound up in another town, and by then I was sitting in jail, and from there they sent me under escort to my own province. I was brought to our town, given a whipping at the police station, and delivered to my village. The countess who had ordered me whipped for the cat’s tail was dead by then, only the count was left, but he had grown very old and pious and didn’t hunt on horseback any more. They reported to him that I had arrived, he remembered me, ordered me to be whipped once again at home, and to go to the priest, Father Ilya, for confession. Well, they gave me a whipping the old-fashioned way, in the village lockup, and I went to Father Ilya, and he heard my confession and forbade me to take communion for three years …
“Why so, Father? I’ve gone … so many years without communion … I’ve been waiting …”
“Well, no matter,” he says. “So you’ve been waiting, but how is it you kept Tartar women around you instead of wives? … Be it known to you,�
�� he says, “that I’m showing mercy in only forbidding you communion, and if you were handled according to the rules of the holy fathers, you’d have all your clothes burnt off you alive. Only don’t be afraid of that,” he says, “because the police laws don’t allow it now.”
“Well, there’s nothing to be done,” I thought, “so I’ll just stay like this, without communion, living at home, resting after my captivity.” But the count didn’t want it. He said:
“I will not tolerate having an excommunicated man near me.”
And he told the steward to whip me once more publicly as an example for everybody and then to release me on quitrent. And so they did: I was flogged in a new way this time, on the porch, before the office, in front of all the people, and then given a passport. I was delighted that, after so many years, I was a completely free man, with legal papers, and I left. I had no definite intentions, but it was my fate that God sent me employment.
“What sort?”
“The same thing again, in the horse line. I started from nothing, without a penny, but soon reached a very well-to-do state, and could have managed even better, if it hadn’t been for a certain matter.”
“What was it, if we may ask?”
“I fell into the great possession of various spirits and passions and yet another unseemly thing.”
“What was this unseemly thing that possessed you?”
“Magnetism, sir.”
“What? Magnetism?!”
“Yes, sir, the magnetic influence of a certain person.”
“How did you feel this influence upon you?”
“A foreign will worked in me, and I fulfilled a foreign destiny.”
“Was it then that your own ruin came upon you, after which you decided that you ought to fulfill your mother’s promise and go into a monastery?”
“No, sir, that came later, but meanwhile many other adventures of all sorts befell me, before I was granted real conviction.”
“Would you mind telling us those adventures, too?”
“Not at all. It will be a great pleasure for me.”
“Please do, then.”
X
Taking my passport, I went off without any intentions for myself, and came to the fair, and there I see a Gypsy trading horses with a muzhik and deceiving him godlessly. He started testing their strength, and hitched his own nag to a cart loaded with millet, and the muzhik’s horse to a cart loaded with apples. The loads, naturally, were of equal weight, but the muzhik’s horse got in a stew, because the smell of the apples stupefied it, since horses find that smell terribly repulsive, and, besides that, I could see that the Gypsy’s horse was prone to fainting, and you could tell it at once, because it had a mark on its forehead where it had been seared by fire, but the Gypsy said, “It’s a wart.” But I, naturally, felt sorry for the muzhik, because it would be impossible for him to work with a fainting horse, since it would fall over and that would be that, and besides I had a mortal hatred of Gypsies then, because it was from them that I first got tempted to ramble, and I probably also had a presentiment of things to come, which proved true. I revealed this flaw in the horse to the muzhik, and when the Gypsy began to argue that it wasn’t a mark from searing but a wart, to prove I was right I jabbed the horse in the kidney with a little awl, and it flopped to the ground and thrashed. Then I went and chose the muzhiks a good horse according to my understanding, and for that they treated me to food and drink and gave me twenty kopecks, and we had some good carousing. And it went on from there: my capital was growing and so was my zeal for drinking, and before the month was out, I saw that things were good. I hung myself all over with badges and horse doctor’s trappings and began going from fair to fair, giving guidance to poor people everywhere, and collecting income for myself, and wetting the good deals; and meanwhile I became just like the wrath of God for all the horse-trading Gypsies, and I learned indirectly that they intended to beat me up. I tried to avoid that, because they were many and I was one, and never once could they catch me alone and give me a sound beating, and with muzhiks around they didn’t dare, because they always stood up for me on account of the good I’d done them. Then they spread a bad rumor about me, that I was a sorcerer and it was not through my own powers that I knew about animals, but, naturally, that was all nonsense: as I told you, I have a gift for horses, and I’m ready to teach it to anybody you like, only the main thing is that it won’t be of use to anybody.
The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories Page 23