Golovan’s means of livelihood consisted of his milk cows and their healthy spouse. Golovan, as I said above, provided the club of the nobility with cream and milk, which were famous for their high quality, owing, of course, to the good breed of his cattle and his good care of them. The butter supplied by Golovan was fresh, yellow as egg yolk, and fragrant, and the cream “didn’t flow”—that is, if you turned the bottle neck down, the cream did not pour out in a stream, but fell out in a thick, heavy mass. Golovan didn’t deal in products of inferior quality, and therefore he had no rivals, and the nobility of that time not only knew how to eat well, but also had the means to pay for it. Besides that, Golovan also supplied the same club with excellent big eggs from his especially big Dutch hens, of which he kept a great many, and, finally, he “prepared calves,” fattening them expertly and always on time, for instance, for the largest gathering of the nobility or other special occasions in noble circles.
In view of these things, which Golovan depended on as a means of livelihood, it was very handy for him to stick close to the streets of the nobility, where he provided for interesting individuals, whom the Orlovians recognized once upon a time in Panshin, Lavretsky, and other heroes and heroines of A Nest of Gentlefolk.4
Golovan lived, however, not on the street itself, but “apart.” The construction that was known as “Golovan’s house” stood not in the row of houses, but on a small terrace of the bank, below the left side of the street. The surface of this terrace was some forty feet in length and about the same in width. It was a ledge of earth that had slid down once, but had stopped on its way, stuck there, and, offering no firm support, hardly constituted anyone’s property. Back then it was still possible.
Golovan’s construction could be called neither a barn nor a house in the proper sense. It was a big, low shed that took up all the space of the fallen ledge. It may be that this formless building was erected there long before the ledge decided to descend, and at that time was part of the nearest household, whose owner did not chase after it, but ceded it to Golovan for the low price that the mighty man could offer him. I even remember it being said that this shed was given to Golovan for some service, at the rendering of which he was a great and willing master.
The shed was divided in two: one half, plastered and whitewashed, with three windows looking out on the Orlik, served as living quarters for Golovan and the five women who were with him; in the other, stalls were made for the cows and bull. In the low garret lived the Dutch hens and a black “Spanish” cock, who lived for a very long time and was considered a “wizard’s bird.” In him Golovan was growing a cock’s stone, which was useful in a great many cases: to bring happiness, to recover a state fallen into enemy hands, to transform old people into young. This stone ripens for seven years and is fully ripe only when the cock stops crowing.
The shed was so big that both parts—for people and for cattle—were very roomy, but, despite all the care taken over it, it held warmth poorly. However, warmth was needed only for the women, while Golovan himself, being insensible to atmospheric changes, slept both summer and winter on an osier mat in a stall, beside his favorite—the red Tyrolean bull Vaska. Cold didn’t get to him, and that constituted one of the peculiarities of this mythical person, which earned him his legendary reputation.
Of the five women living with Golovan, three were his sisters, one was his mother, and the fifth was called Pavla, or sometimes Pavlageyushka. But more often she was called “Golovan’s sin.” I was used to hearing that since childhood, when I still didn’t even understand the meaning of the insinuation. For me this Pavla was simply a very affectionate woman, and I can remember as now her tall stature, pale face with bright red spots on the cheeks, and eyebrows of an extraordinary blackness and regularity.
Such black eyebrows in regular half circles could only be seen in pictures portraying a Persian woman reclining on the knees of an elderly Turk. Our girls knew, however, and explained to me very early on, the secret of those eyebrows: the thing was that Golovan was a potion-maker and, loving Pavla, he anointed her eyes with bear grease while she slept, so that no one would recognize her. After that, naturally, there was nothing remarkable about Pavla’s eyebrows, and she became attached to Golovan by a power other than her own.
Our girls knew all that.
Pavla herself was an extraordinarily meek and “ever silent” woman. She was so silent that I never heard more than one word from her, and that the most necessary: “greetings,” “sit,” “good-bye.” But in each of these brief words could be heard no end of welcome, benevolence, and kindness. The same was expressed in the sound of her quiet voice, in the gaze of her gray eyes, and in her every movement. I also remember that she had remarkably beautiful hands, which constitutes a great rarity in the working class, and she was such a worker that her industriousness distinguished her even in Golovan’s hardworking family.
They all had a great deal to do there: the “deathless” himself had work at the boil from morning till late at night. He was a herdsman, and a deliveryman, and a cheese-maker. At dawn he drove his herd into the dew beyond our fences, and he kept moving his stately cows from ledge to ledge, choosing where the grass was lusher. When people were just getting up in our house, Golovan would already appear with the empty bottles he had taken from the club in place of the new ones he had brought there that day; with his own hands he would hollow out the ice in our ice house for his jugs of freshly drawn milk, while talking something over with my father, and when I went out to the garden after finishing my lessons, he would already be sitting outside our fence again, tending his cows. There was a small gate in the fence, through which I could go out to Golovan and talk with him. He was so good at telling the hundred and four sacred stories that I knew them from him without ever learning them from a book.5 Some simple folk also used to come to him there—always seeking advice. One of them would come and begin like this:
“I’ve been looking for you, Golovan. Give me some advice.”
“What is it?”
“This and that: something’s going wrong in the household, or there’s family discord.”
Most often they came with matters of this second category. Golovan would listen, while plaiting osier or shouting to the cows, and smiling all the while, as if paying no attention, and then he would raise his blue eyes to his interlocutor and reply:
“I’m a poor adviser, brother! Ask God’s advice.”
“How can I do that?”
“Oh, very simple, brother: pray and then do as you would if you had to die at once. Tell me: what would you do in that case?”
The man would think and reply.
Golovan would agree, or else say:
“And if I was the one to die, brother, I’d rather do this.”
And he usually said it all quite cheerfully, with his customary smile.
His advice must have been very good, because people always listened to it and thanked him very much.
Could there be a “sin” for such a man in the person of the most meek Pavlageyushka, who at that time, I think, was a little over thirty, a limit she was not to go beyond? I didn’t understand that “sin” and in my innocence did not insult her and Golovan by rather general suspicions. Yet there were grounds for suspicion, and very strong grounds, even irrefutable, judging by appearances. Who was she to Golovan? A stranger. Not only that: he had known her once, they had belonged to the same masters, Golovan had wanted to marry her, but it hadn’t taken place. He had been sent to serve the hero of the Caucasus, Alexei Petrovich Ermolov,6 and meanwhile Pavla had been given in marriage to the horse-master Ferapont, or “Khrapon,” as the locals said. Golovan had been a needed and useful servant, because he could do everything—he was not only a good cook and confectioner, but a keen-witted and ready servant on campaign. Alexei Petrovich had paid what he owed to his landowner for Golovan, and besides, they say, had lent Golovan the money to buy himself out. I don’t know if that’s true, but soon after he returned from serving Erm
olov, Golovan did indeed buy himself out and always called Alexei Petrovich his “benefactor.” And once Golovan was free, Alexei Petrovich gave him a good cow and calf for his farm, from which came Golovan’s “Ermolov breed.”
IV
Precisely when Golovan settled in the shed on the landslip I don’t know at all, but it coincided with the first days of his “freemanship”—when he was faced with major concerns about his kin, who remained in servitude. Golovan bought himself out personally, but his mother, his three sisters, and his aunt, who later became my nanny, remained “in bondage.” And their tenderly beloved Pavla, or Pavlageyushka, was in the same position. Golovan made it his first concern to buy them all out, and for that he needed money. His expertise qualified him to become a cook or a confectioner, but he preferred something else, namely dairy farming, which he started with the help of the “Ermolov cow.” There was an opinion that he chose that because he himself was a molokan.7 Maybe that simply meant that he always busied himself with milk, but maybe the title aimed directly at his faith, in which he appeared as odd as in his many other doings. It’s very possible that he had known molokans in the Caucasus, and had borrowed something from them. But that has to do with his oddities, which we will touch upon below.
The dairy farming went beautifully: in some three years, Golovan already had two cows and a bull, then three, four cows, and he had made enough money to buy out his mother, then each year he bought out a sister, and brought them all together in his roomy but chilly hovel. In that way, after six or seven years, he had freed his whole family, but the beauty Pavla had flown from him. By the time he was able to buy her out as well, she was already far away. Her husband, the horse-master Khrapon, was a bad man—he had not pleased his master in something, and, as an example to others, had been sent as a soldier without conscription.
In the service, Khrapon landed among the “gallopers,” that is, as a rider in the Moscow fire brigade, and had his wife sent there; but he soon did something bad there as well and ran away, and his abandoned wife, having a quiet and timid character, feared the whirl of life in the capital and returned to Orel. Here she also didn’t find any support in her old place and, driven by need, she went to Golovan. He, naturally, took her in at once and placed her in the same big room where his sisters and mother lived. How Golovan’s mother and sisters looked upon the installing of Pavla, I don’t know for certain, but it didn’t sow any discord in their house. The women all lived in great friendship with each other, and even loved poor Pavlageyushka very much, and Golovan paid equal attention to them all, except for the special respect he showed his mother, who was now so old that in summer he carried her out to the sun in his arms, like a sick child. I remember how she “went off” into terrible coughing fits and kept praying to be “taken.”
All of Golovan’s sisters were old maids, and they all helped their brother on the farm: they mucked out and milked the cows, tended the hens, and spun an extraordinary yarn, from which they then wove extraordinary fabrics such as I’ve never seen since. This yarn went by the very unattractive name of “spittings.” Golovan brought material for it from somewhere in bags, and I saw and remember that material: it consisted of small, twiggy scraps of various colored cotton thread. Each scrap was from two to ten inches long, and on each such scrap there was sure to be a more or less fat knot or snarl. Where Golovan got these scraps I don’t know, but it was obviously factory refuse. That’s also what his sisters told me.
“They spin and weave cotton there, dearest,” they said to me, “and each time they come upon a knot, they tear it off and spit it out on the floor, because it won’t go through the reed. My brother gathers them up, and we make warm blankets out of them.”
I saw how they patiently sorted these pieces of thread, tied them together, wound the resulting motley, multicolored threads on long spools. Then they spliced them together, spun them into thicker ones stretched along the wall on pegs, sorted those of the same color for stripes, and finally wove these “spittings” through a special reed into “spitting blankets.” These blankets looked like today’s woolen ones, each with the same two stripes, but the fabric was always marbleized. The knots in them were somehow smoothed out from the spinning, and though they were, of course, very noticeable, that did not keep the blankets from being light, warm, and sometimes even rather pretty. Besides, they were sold very cheaply—at less than a rouble apiece.
This cottage industry in Golovan’s family went on nonstop, and he probably had no trouble finding a market for the spitting blankets.
Pavlageyushka also tied and spun the spittings and wove blankets, but, besides that, in her zeal for the family that had given her shelter, she also took on all the heaviest work in the house: went down the steep bank to the Orlik for water, brought in fuel, and so on and so forth.
Firewood in Orel was already very expensive even then, and poor people heated either with buckwheat chaff or with dung, and the latter required big provisions.
All this Pavla did with her slender hands, in eternal silence, looking at God’s world from under her Persian eyebrows. Whether she knew that her name was “sin” I am not aware, but that was her name among the people, who stand firmly by the nicknames they invent. And how else could it be? Where a woman, a loving one, lives in the house of a man who loved her and sought to marry her, there is, of course, sin. And indeed, back in my childhood, when I first saw Pavla, she was unanimously considered “Golovan’s sin,” but Golovan himself did not lose the least bit of general respect on account of it and kept his nickname of “deathless.”
V
People started calling Golovan “deathless” in the first year, when he settled by himself above the Orlik with his Ermolov cow and her calf. The occasion for it was the following wholly trustworthy circumstance, which nobody remembered about in the time of the recent “Prokofy” plague. It was the usual hard times in Orel, and in February, on the day of St. Agafya the Dairymaid,8 the “cow death” fittingly swept through the villages. It went as it usually does and as it is written in the universal book known as The Cool Vineyard:9 “As summer comes to an end and autumn draws near, the pestilential infection soon begins. And during that time it is needful that every man place his hope in almighty God and in His most pure Mother, and protect himself with the power of the honorable Cross, and hold back his heart from grief, and dread, and painful thoughts, for through these the human heart is diminished, and sores and cankers soon stick to it—seize the brain and heart, overcome the man, and he dies forthwith.” All this also went according to the usual pictures of the nature around us, “when the mists in autumn set in thick and dark, with wind from the meridian lands, followed by rain, and the earth steams in the sun, and then it is needful not to go out in the wind, but to sit in the warmth of the cottage and not open the windows, and best would be not to stay in that town, but to leave it and go to clean places.” When, that is, in what precise year, the pestilence occurred that gave Golovan his fame for being “deathless,” I don’t know. There was no great interest then in such trifles, and no noise was made on account of them, as there was on account of Naum Prokofiev.10 Local woes used to end locally, appeased by hope in God and His most pure Mother alone, and perhaps only in cases of the strong predominance of the sensible “intellectuals” in certain locales were unusual sanitary measures taken: “Build clean bonfires in the yards, of oak wood, so that the smoke disperses, and in the cottages burn wormwood and juniper and rue leaves.” But all that could be done only by intellectuals, and only well-to-do ones at that, while death carried off “forthwith” not the educated, but those who had no time to sit in warm cottages and were not up to burning oak wood in open yards. Death went arm in arm with famine, and they supported each other. The famished begged from the famished, the sick died “forthwith,” that is, quickly, which was more advantageous for peasants. There was no lengthy languishing, no rumors of recoveries were heard. Whoever fell sick, died “forthwith,” except for one man. What illness it was has not
been scientifically determined, but it was popularly known as “bosom,” or “boil,” or “oilcake carbuncle,” or even just “carbuncle.” It started in grain-producing districts, where, for lack of bread, they ate hempseed oilcakes. In the districts of Karachev and Bryansk, where peasants mixed unsifted flour with ground bark, the illness was different, also deadly, but not “carbuncle.” “Carbuncle” first appeared in cattle, and was then transmitted to people. “A red sore breaks out on a man’s bosom or neck, and he gets stitches all over his body, and an unquenchable burning inside, or a sort of chill in his limbs and heavy breathing, and he cannot breathe—he tries to draw a breath, but lets it out at once; he gets sleepy, cannot stop sleeping; feels a bitterness or sourness in the mouth and starts to vomit; the man’s countenance changes, a claylike look comes over him, and he dies forthwith.” Maybe it was anthrax, maybe it was some other pest, but in any case it was pernicious and merciless, and its most widespread name, I repeat again, was “carbuncle.” A pimple breaks out on your body, a “carbuncle” as simple folk called it, turns yellow-headed, reddens all around, and by morning the flesh begins to rot, and then it’s death forthwith. A quick death was seen, however, “in a good light.” The end was quiet, not painful, most peasant-like, only the dying all wanted to drink till the last minute. That constituted all the brief and unwearisome care demanded, or, better to say, begged for by the sick. Though caring for them even in this form was not only dangerous, but almost impossible—a man who gave a sick relation a drink today, would fall sick with “carbuncle” himself tomorrow, and it was not rare in a house to have two or three dead people lying next to each other. The last person in these orphaned houses died without help—without that one help our peasant cared about, “that someone give him a drink.” Such an orphan would first put a bucket of water by his head and drink from a dipper as long as he could raise his arm, and then he would twist a sleeve or shirttail, wet it, put it in his mouth, and go stiff like that.
The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories Page 37