Golovan, however, was so little burdened by the mystical cloud that popular fama shrouded him in, that he made no effort to undo the image people had formed of him. He knew it would be useless.
When I eagerly leafed through Victor Hugo’s novel Toilers of the Sea and there met Gilliatt, with his brilliantly outlined severity towards himself and indulgence towards others, which reached the point of utter selflessness, I was struck not only by the grandeur of the figure and the power of its portrayal, but also by the similarity of the Guernsey hero to the living person I had known under the name of Golovan. In them lived the same spirit and in both a like heart beat selflessly. They did not differ much in their fates: all their lives some sort of mystery thickened around them, precisely because they were all too pure and clear, and to the lot of the one as of the other there fell not a single drop of personal happiness.
VII
Golovan, like Gilliat, seemed to be “of dubious faith.”
He was thought to be some sort of schismatic, but that was not so important, because in Orel at that time there were many different beliefs: there were (and probably still are now) simple Old Believers, as well as not so simple ones—Fedoseevans, “Pilipons,” and the rebaptizers, there were even Flagellants and “people of God,” all of whom human justice sent far away.20 But all these people firmly held to their own flock and firmly disapproved of any other faith—they set themselves apart in prayer and eating and considered themselves the only ones on “the right path.” Whereas Golovan behaved himself as if he even knew nothing at all for sure about the best path, but shared his hunk of bread indiscriminately with anyone who asked, and himself sat down at any table you like when he was invited. He even gave the Jew Yushka from the garrison milk for his children. But people’s love for Golovan found an excuse for the non-Christian aspect of this last act: they perceived that, by cajoling Yushka, Golovan wanted to get from him the “lips of Judas,” carefully preserved by the Jews, with which one could lie one’s way out of court, or the “hairy vegetable” that the Jews quench their thirst with, so that they can go without drinking vodka. But the most incomprehensible thing about Golovan was that he kept company with the coppersmith Anton, who, in terms of all real qualities, enjoyed the worst of reputations. This man did not agree with anybody on the most sacred questions, but deduced something mysterious from the signs of the zodiac and even did some writing. Anton lived on the outskirts, in an empty little garret room, for which he paid fifty kopecks a month, but kept such frightful things there that nobody visited him except Golovan. It was known that Anton had a chart there called “the zodiac,” and a glass that “drew down the sun’s fire”; and besides that he had access to the roof, where he went at night, sat by the chimney like a tomcat, and “set up an aggrandizing tube,” and, during the sleepiest time, gazed at the sky. Anton’s devotion to this instrument knew no bounds, especially on starry nights, when he could see the whole zodiac. He came running from his boss’s shop, where he did his copper work, crept at once into his upstairs room, and immediately slipped through the dormer window to the roof, and if there were stars in the sky, he sat all night and gazed. This might have been forgiven him, if he had been a scientist or at least a German, but since he was a simple Russian man—they spent a long time breaking him of it, poked him with poles, threw dung at him and a dead cat, but he paid no attention to any of it and didn’t even notice they had poked him. They all laughingly called him “Astronomer,” and in fact he was an astronomer.* He was a quiet and very honest man, but a freethinker; he insisted that the earth turns and that we are sometimes upside down on it. For this last obvious absurdity, Anton was beaten and recognized as a fool, but then, as a fool, he began to enjoy the freedom of thought that is the privilege of this advantageous title among us, and reached the limits of the unbelievable. He did not acknowledge the seventy-times-seven years of the prophet Daniel21 as applicable to the Russian tsardom, said that the “ten-horned beast” was only an allegory, and the bear was an astronomical figure, which was found on his charts. Just as unorthodox was his reasoning about the “eagle’s wings,” about the cups, and about the seal of the Antichrist.22 But, because he was feebleminded, this was all forgiven him. He wasn’t married, because he had no time to get married and would have been unable to feed a wife—and anyway what fool would want to marry an astronomer? Yet Golovan, being of sound mind, not only kept company with the astronomer, but also never made fun of him. They could even be seen together at night, on the astronomer’s roof, taking turns looking at the zodiac through the aggrandizing tube. It’s understandable what sort of thoughts these two figures standing at the tube by night might inspire, with fanciful superstition, medical poetry, religious raving, and sheer bewilderment milling around them … And, finally, circumstances themselves put Golovan in a somewhat strange position: it was not known what parish he belonged to … His cold hovel stood out so much on its own that no spiritual strategist could add it to his jurisdiction, and Golovan himself was unconcerned about it and, if pestered too much about his parish, would reply:
“I’m of the parish of the Almighty Creator”—but there was no such church in all Orel.
Gilliatt, in answer to the question about where his parish was, only raised his finger and, pointing to the sky, said: “Up there”—but the essence of both answers was the same.
Golovan liked hearing about any faith, but didn’t seem to have his own opinions on the subject, and in cases of persistent questioning about what he believed, recited:
“I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, maker of all things visible and invisible.”24
That, of course, was evasiveness.
However, it would be wrong for anyone to think that Golovan was a sectarian or avoided the Church. No, he even went to Father Pyotr at the Boris-and-Gleb cathedral “to verify his conscience.” He would come and say:
“Cover me with shame, father, I don’t like myself these days.”
I remember this Father Pyotr, who used to come to visit us, and once, when my father said something to him about Golovan being a man of excellent conscience, Father Pyotr replied:
“Have no doubts: his conscience is whiter than snow.”
Golovan liked lofty thoughts and knew the poet Pope,25 but not as a writer is usually known by people who have read his works. No, Golovan, having approved of An Essay on Man, given him by the same Alexei Petrovich Ermolov, knew the whole poem by heart. And I can remember how he once stood by the doorpost, listening to the story of some sad new event, and, suddenly sighing, replied:
My gentle Bolingbroke, ’tis no surmise,
In pride, in reasoning pride, our error lies.
The reader need not be surprised that a man like Golovan could toss off a line from Pope. Those were harsh times, but poetry was in fashion, and its great word was dear even to men of good blood. From the masters it descended to the plebs. But now I come to the major incident in Golovan’s story—the incident which unquestionably cast an ambiguous light on him even in the eyes of people not inclined to believe all sorts of nonsense. Golovan came out as not clean in some remote past time. This was revealed suddenly, but in the most vivid form. There appeared on the squares of Orel a person who meant nothing in anyone’s eyes, but who laid the most powerful claims on Golovan and treated him with incredible insolence.
This person and the history of his appearance make a rather characteristic episode from the moral history of the time and a picture from life that is not without some color. And therefore I ask you to turn your attention for a moment slightly away from Orel, to still warmer parts, to a quiet-flowing river between carpeted banks, to the people’s “feast of faith,” where there is no room for everyday, practical life, where everything, decidedly everything, passes through a peculiar religiosity, which imparts to it all its special relief and liveliness. We must attend the revealing of the relics of a new saint—which was an event of the greatest significance for the most various representatives of society in those days.
For simple folk it was an epic event, or, as one of the bards of the time used to say, “the accomplishment of the sacred feast of faith.”
VIII
Not one of the printed accounts of that time can convey the commotion that set in at the opening of the solemnities. The living but low-life aspect of the thing escaped them. This was not today’s peaceful journey by coach or rail, with stops at comfortable inns, where there is everything necessary and at a reasonable price. Travel back then was a great feat, and in this case a feat of piety, which, however, was equal to the expected solemn event in the Church. There was also much poetry in it—once again of a special sort—motley and shot through with various tinges of the Church’s everyday life, of limited popular naïveté and the boundless yearnings of the living spirit.
A multitude of people from Orel set out for this solemnity. Most zealous of all, naturally, was the merchant estate, but landowners of the middling sort didn’t lag behind, and simple folk in particular came pouring in. They went on foot. Only those who transported the infirm “for healing” dragged along on some wretched nag. Sometimes, however, the infirm were transported on the back and were not even counted a burden, because the inns charged them less for everything, and sometimes even let them stay without paying at all. There were not a few who deliberately “invented a sickness for themselves: rolled up their eyes, and two would alternately transport a third on wheels, so as to earn income from donations for wax, and oil, and other rites.”
So I read in an account, unprinted but reliable, copied down not from a standard pattern, but from “living vision,” and by someone who preferred the truth to the tendentious mendacity of that time.
The movement was so populous that there were no places in the inns or hotels in the towns of Livny and Elets, through which its path lay. It would happen that important and eminent people spent the night in their carriages. Oats, hay, grain—the prices of everything along the high road went up, so that, as noted by my grandmother, whose memoirs I am using, the cost of feeding a man with head cheese, cabbage soup, lamb stew, and kasha at an inn rose from twenty-five kopecks (seven and a half in silver) to fifty-two (fifteen in silver). At the present time, of course, fifteen is still a completely incredible price, but that’s how it was, and the revealing of the relics of the new saint had the same significance for the area, in terms of raising the prices of living supplies, as the recent fire on the Mstinsky Bridge in Petersburg. “The prices soared and stayed there.”
Among other pilgrims setting out from Orel for the revealing was the merchant family S——, very well-known people in their time, “suppliers,” that is, to put it simply, rich kulaks,26 who collected wheat from the peasants’ wagons into big granaries, and then sold their supplies to wholesale dealers in Moscow and Riga. This was a profitable business, which, after the emancipation of the peasants,27 was not scorned even by the nobility; but they liked to sleep late, and soon learned from bitter experience that they weren’t capable even of this stupid kulak business. The merchants S—— were regarded as the foremost suppliers, and their importance went so far that their house was known, not by their name, but by an ennobling nickname. The house, to be sure, was a strictly pious one, where they prayed in the morning, oppressed and robbed people all day, and then prayed again in the evening. And by night, watchdogs on cables clanked their chains, and in all the windows it was “icon lamps and brightness,” loud snoring, and someone’s hot tears.
The ruler of the house, who today would be known as “the founder of the firm,” was then simply called himself. He was a mild little old man, whom, however, everyone feared like fire. It was said of him that he made for a soft bed, but hard sleeping: he fondly called everybody “my dearest,” and then sent them all into the teeth of the devil. A well-known and familiar type, the type of the merchant patriarch.
So this patriarch, too, traveled to the revealing “with full complement”—himself, and his wife, and his daughter, who suffered from “the disease of melancholy” and was to be cured. All the known remedies of folk poetry and creativity had been tried on her: she had been made to drink stimulating elecampane, had had powdered peony root poured all over her for repulsing phantoms, had been given wild garlic to sniff, so as to straighten the brain in her head, but nothing had helped, and now she was being taken to the saint, hurrying to have the first chance, when the very first force is released. Belief in the advantage of the first force is very great, and is rooted in the story of the pool of Siloam, where those were cured first who managed to get in first after the troubling of the water.28
The Orel merchants traveled through Livny and Elets, enduring great hardships, and were completely worn out by the time they reached the saint. But to seize the “first chance” from the saint turned out to be impossible. Such a host of people had gathered that there was no thought of forcing one’s way into the church for the vigil of the “revealing day,” when the “first chance,” properly speaking, would occur—that is, when the greatest force would issue from the new relics.
The merchant and his wife were in despair—the most indifferent of all was the daughter, who didn’t know what she was losing. There was no hope of doing anything about it—there were so many nobility, with such names, while they were simple merchants, who, if they were of some significance in their own place, were totally lost here, in such a concentration of Christian grandeur. And so one day, sitting in grief over tea under their little kibitka29 at the inn, the patriarch complained to his wife that he no longer had any hope of reaching the holy coffin either among the first or among the second, but only perhaps among the last, along with tillers of the soil and fishermen, that is, generally, with simple people. And by then what would be the good of it: the police would be ferocious and the clergy tired—they wouldn’t let you pray your fill, but would just push you by. In general, once so many thousands of people had put their lips to the relics, it wouldn’t be the same. In view of which, they could have come later, but that was not what they had striven for: they had traveled, worn themselves out, left the business at home in the assistants’ hands, and paid three times the price on the road, and suddenly here’s your consolation!
The merchant tried once or twice to get to the deacons; he was ready to show his gratitude, but there was no hope there either—on the one hand there was a hindrance in the form of a gendarme with a white glove or a Cossack with a whip (they, too, had come in great numbers to the revealing of the relics), and on the other, the great danger of being crushed by the good Orthodox folk, who surged like an ocean. There had already been “occasions,” and even a great many, both yesterday and today. At the stroke of a Cossack whip, our good Christians would rush aside somewhere in a wall of five or six hundred people, and would push and press together so much that only moans and stink came from inside, and then, when it eased off, you could see women’s ears with the earrings torn away and fingers with rings pulled off, and two or three souls gone to their reward altogether.
The merchant was telling about all these difficulties over tea to his wife and daughter, for whom it was necessary to seize the first force, and meanwhile some “wastrel” of no known city or country rank was walking about among all those kibitkas near the barn and seemed to be looking at the Orel merchants with some intention.
There were many “wastrels” gathered here at the time. They not only found their place at the feast of faith, but even found themselves good occupations; and so they came thronging in abundance from various places, especially from towns famous for their thievish folk, that is, from Orel, Kromy, Elets, and from Livny, renowned for its great experts at working wonders. All these “wastrels” rubbing elbows here were looking for some profitable business. The boldest among them acted in concert, placing themselves in groups among the crowds, the more conveniently to produce jostling and confusion, with the aid of a Cossack, and use the turmoil to search people’s pockets, tear off watches, belt buckles, and pull earrings from ears; but the more dignified went around the inn
yards singly, complained of their poverty, “told dreams and wonders,” offered potions to attract and detract, and “secret aids for old men, of whale semen, crow fat, elephant sperm,” and other nostrums, which “promoted permanent potency.” These nostrums did not lose their value even here, because, to the credit of humankind, conscience did not allow turning to the saint for every sort of healing. No less eagerly did the wastrels of peaceful ways take up simple thievery and on convenient occasions clean out visitors who, for lack of quarters, were living in their carts or under them. There was little space anywhere, and not all the carts could be put under the sheds of the inns; the rest stood outside town in the open fields. Here a still more varied and interesting life went on, and one still more filled with the nuances of sacred and medicinal poetry and amusing chicanery. Shady dealers poked about everywhere, but their home was this outlying “poor wagon train,” with ravines and hovels surrounding it, where there was a furious trade in vodka, and two or three carts stood with ruddy soldiers’ wives who had pitched together and come there. Here they also fabricated shavings from the coffin, “sealed earth,” pieces of rotted vestments, and even “fragments.” Occasionally, among the artisans who dealt in these things, very witty people turned up, who pulled interesting tricks remarkable for their simplicity and boldness. To these belonged the man whom the pious family from Orel had noticed. The swindler had overheard their lament about the impossibility of getting near the saint before the first streams of healing grace from the relics were exhausted, went straight up to them, and began speaking frankly:
The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories Page 39