I myself remember how once, in the evening, when my father and the priest Pyotr were sitting by the window in the study, and Golovan was standing outside the window, and the three of them were having a conversation, the bedraggled Polecat ran through the gates, which happened to be open, and with the cry “You forgot, scoundrel!” struck Golovan in the face in front of everybody, and he, quietly pushing him away, gave him some copper money from his breast pocket and led him out of the gate.
Such acts were by no means rare, and the explanation that the Polecat knew something about Golovan was, of course, quite natural. Understandably, it also aroused curiosity in many, which, as we shall soon see, had solid grounds.
XI
I was about seven years old when we left Orel and moved to live permanently in the country. I didn’t see Golovan after that. Then it came time for me to go and study, and the original muzhik with the big head dropped from my sight. I heard of him only once, during the “big fire.” Not only did many buildings and belongings perish at that time, but many people were burned up as well—Golovan was mentioned among the latter. They said he had fallen into some hole that couldn’t be seen under the ashes and “got cooked.” I didn’t inquire about his family, who survived him. Soon after that I went to Kiev and revisited my native parts only ten years later. There was a new tsar, a new order was beginning; there was a breath of new freshness—the emancipation of the peasants was expected, and there was even talk of open courts. All was new: hearts were aflame. There were no implacables yet, but the impatient and the temporizing had already appeared.
On my way to my grandmother’s, I stopped for a few days in Orel, where my uncle, who left behind him the memory of an honest man, was then serving as a justice of conscience.34 He had many excellent sides, which inspired respect even in people who didn’t share his views and sympathies: when young he had been a dandy, a hussar, then a horticulturist and a dilettante artist of remarkable abilities; noble, straightforward, an aristocrat, and “an aristocrat au bout des ongles.”† Having his own understanding of his duties, he naturally submitted to the new, but wished to treat the emancipation critically and presented himself as a conservative. He wanted only such emancipation as in the Baltic countries. With the young he was protective and kind, but their belief that salvation lay in a steady movement forward, and not backward, seemed erroneous to him. My uncle loved me and knew that I loved and respected him, but he and I did not agree in our views of the emancipation and other questions of the time. In Orel he made me into a purifying sacrifice on those grounds, and though I carefully tried to avoid these conversations, he aimed for them and liked very much to “defeat” me.
Most of all my uncle liked to bring me to cases in which his justice’s practice revealed “popular stupidity.”
I recall a luxurious, warm evening that I spent with my uncle in the “governor’s garden” in Orel, taken up with the—I must confess—by then considerably wearisome argument about the properties and qualities of the Russian people. I insisted, incorrectly, that the people are very intelligent, and my uncle, perhaps still more incorrectly, insisted that the people are very stupid, that they have no notion of law, of property, and are generally Asians, who can astonish anyone you like with their savagery.
“And here, my dear sir,” he says, “is an example for you: if your memory has preserved the situation of the town, then you should remember that we have gullies, outskirts, further outskirts, of which the devil knows who fixed the boundaries and to whom the building permits were allotted. That has all been removed by fire in several stages, and in place of the old hovels, new ones of the same sort have been built, and now nobody can find out who has what right to be sitting there.”
The thing was that when the town, having rested from the fires, began to rebuild itself, and some people began to buy lots in the areas beyond the church of St. Basil the Great, it turned out that the sellers not only had no papers, but that these owners and their ancestors considered all papers utterly superfluous. Up to then, houses and land had been changing hands without any declaration to the authorities, and without any taxes or contributions to the treasury, and all this was said to have been written down in some “moatbook,” but the “moatbook” had burned up in one of the countless fires, and the one who kept the records in it had died, and along with it all traces of rights of ownership had vanished. True, there were no disputes about rights of ownership, but all this had no legal authority, and was upheld by the fact that Protasov said his father had bought his little house from the Tarasovs’ late grandfather, and the Tarasovs did not contest the Protasovs’ right of ownership. But since rights were now mandatory, and there were no rights, the justice of conscience was faced with resolving the question: did crime call up law, or did law create crime?
“And why did they do it that way?” asked my uncle. “Because these aren’t ordinary people, who need good state institutions to safeguard their rights, these are nomads, a horde that has become sedentary, but is still not conscious of itself.”
With that we fell asleep and slept well. Early in the morning I went to the Orlik, bathed, looked at the old places, remembered Golovan’s house, and on coming home found my uncle conversing with three “good sirs” unknown to me. They were all of merchant construction—two of them middle-aged, in frock coats with hooks, and one completely white-haired, in a loose cotton shirt, a long, collarless coat, and a tall peasant hat.
My uncle indicated them to me and said:
“Here’s an illustration of yesterday’s subject. These gentlemen are telling me their case: join our discussion.”
Then he turned to those present with a joke that was obvious to me, but, of course, incomprehensible to them, and added:
“This is my relative, a young prosecutor from Kiev, who is going to see a minister in Petersburg and can explain your case to him.”
The men bowed.
“Of the three of them, you see,” he went on, “this is Mr. Protasov, who wishes to buy a house and land from this man, Tarasov; but Tarasov has no papers. You understand: none! He only remembers that his father bought the house from Vlasov, and this man here, the third, is the son of Mr. Vlasov, who, as you see, is also of a certain age.”
“Seventy,” the old man observed curtly.
“Yes, seventy, and he also has no papers and never did have.”
“Never did,” the old man put in again.
“He came to certify that it was precisely so and that he doesn’t claim any rights.”
“I don’t—my forefathers sold it.”
“Yes, but the ones who sold it to your ‘forefathers’—are no more.”
“No, they were sent to the Caucasus for their beliefs.”
“They could be sought out,” I said.
“There’s nothing to seek out, the water there was no good for them—they couldn’t take it and all passed away.”
“Why is it,” I said, “that you acted so strangely?”
“We acted as we could. The government clerk was cruel, small landowners didn’t have enough to pay the taxes, but Ivan Ivanovich had a moatbook, and we wrote in it. And before him—I don’t even remember this—there was the merchant Gapeyev, he kept the moatbook, and after all of them it was given to Golovan, and Golovan got cooked in a foul hole, and all the moatbooks burned up.”
“This Golovan, it turns out, was something like your notary?” asked my uncle (who was not an old-timer in Orel).
The old man smiled and said softly:
“Why moatary! Golovan was a just man.”
“So everybody trusted him?”
“How could we not trust such a man: he cut his flesh off his living bones for the people.”
“There’s a legend for you!” my uncle said softly, but the old man heard him and replied:
“No, sir, Golovan’s not a liegend, but the truth, and he should be remembered with praise.”
“And with befuddlement,” my uncle joked. And he didn’t know how well his j
oking answered to the whole mass of memories that awakened in me at that time, to which, with my then curiosity, I passionately wanted to find the key.
And the key was waiting for me, kept by my grandmother.
XII
A couple of words about my grandmother. She came from the Moscow merchant family of the Kolobovs and was taken in marriage into a noble family “not for her wealth, but for her beauty.” But her best quality was an inner beauty and lucidity of mind, which always kept its common-folk cast. Having entered the circles of the nobility, she yielded to many of its demands and even allowed herself to be called Alexandra Vassilievna, though her real name was Akilina, but she always thought in a common-folk way and even retained—unintentionally, of course—a certain common-folk quality in her speech. She said “dat” instead of “that,” considered the word “moral” insulting, and couldn’t pronounce the word “registrar.” On the other hand, she never allowed any fashionable pressures to shake her faith in common-folk sense and never departed from that sense herself. She was a good woman and a true Russian lady; she kept house excellently and knew how to receive anyone from the emperor Alexander I to Ivan Ivanovich Androsov. She never read anything except her children’s letters, but she liked the renewal of the mind in conversation and for that “summoned people for talks.” Her interlocutors of this sort were the bailiff Mikhailo Lebedev, the butler Vassily, the head cook Klim, or the housekeeper Malanya. The talk was never idle, but to the point and useful—they discussed why the girl Feklusha had had “morals fall on her” and why the boy Grishka disliked his stepmother. These conversations were followed by talk of how to protect Feklusha’s maidenly honor and what to do so that the boy Grishka would not dislike his stepmother.
For her all this was filled with a living interest perhaps quite incomprehensible to her granddaughters.
When my grandmother came to visit us in Orel, her friendship was enjoyed by the archpriest Father Pyotr, the merchant Androsov, and Golovan, who were “summoned for talks” with her.
It must be supposed that here, too, the talk was not idle, not merely for passing the time, but probably also about some such matters as morals falling on someone or a boy’s dislike of his stepmother.
She therefore might have held the keys to many secrets, petty ones for us, perhaps, but quite significant in their milieu.
Now, in this last meeting of mine with my grandmother, she was already very old, but had preserved in perfect freshness her mind, memory, and eyes. She could still sew.
This time, too, I found her at the same worktable, with an inlaid top portraying a harp held up by two cupids.
Grandmother asked me whether I had visited my father’s grave, which of our relatives I had seen in Orel, and what my uncle was doing these days. I answered all her questions and enlarged upon my uncle, telling her how he dealt with old “liegends.”
Grandmother stopped and pushed her eyeglasses up on her forehead. She liked the word “liegend” very much: she heard in it a naïve alteration in the popular spirit, and laughed:
“That’s wonderful,” she said, “the way the old man said ‘liegend.’ ”
And I answered:
“I’d like very much to know how it happened in reality, not in liegend.”
“What precisely would you like to know?”
“About all that. What sort of man was Golovan? I do remember him a little, and all of it in some sort of liegends, as the old man says, but of course it was a simple matter …”
“Well, of course it was simple, but why does it surprise you that our people back then avoided deeds of purchase and just wrote down their transactions in notebooks? There’ll be a lot of that uncovered in the future. They were afraid of clerks and trusted their own people, that’s all.”
“But how,” I say, “could Golovan earn such trust? To tell the truth, I sometimes have the impression that he was a bit of a … charlatan.”
“Why is that?”
“Don’t I remember people saying, for instance, that he supposedly had some sort of magic stone, and that he stopped the plague with his blood or flesh, by throwing it into the river? And why was he called ‘deathless’?”
“It’s nonsense about the magic stone. People made it up, and it wasn’t Golovan’s fault, and he was nicknamed ‘deathless’ because, in that horror, when the fumiasms of death hovered over the earth and everybody got frightened, he alone was fearless, and death couldn’t touch him.”
“And why,” I say, “did he cut his leg?”
“He cut off his calf.”
“What for?”
“Because he also had a plague pimple on him. He knew there was no salvation from that, quickly grabbed the scythe, and cut the whole calf off.”
“Can it be?!” I said.
“Of course it can.”
“And what,” I say, “are we to think of the woman Pavla?”
Grandmother glanced at me and replied:
“What about her? The woman Pavla was Fraposhka’s wife. She was very unhappy, and Golovan gave her shelter.”
“But, all the same, she was called ‘Golovan’s sin.’ ”
“Each one judges and gives names by his own lights. He had no such sin.”
“But, Grandmother, dear, do you really believe that?”
“I not only believe it, I know it.”
“But how can you know it?”
“Very simply.”
Grandmother turned to the girl who was working with her and sent her to the garden to pick raspberries, and when the girl left, she looked me in the eye significantly and said:
“Golovan was a virgin!”
“How do you know that?”
“From Father Pyotr.”
And my grandmother told me how Father Pyotr, not long before his end, spoke to her of what incredible people there are in Russia, and that the late Golovan was a virgin.
Having touched upon this story, Grandmother went into fine detail and recalled her conversation with Father Pyotr.
“Father Pyotr had doubts himself at first,” she said, “and began to question him in more detail, and even alluded to Pavla. ‘It’s not good,’ he says. ‘You don’t repent, and you’re in temptation. It’s not meet for you to keep this Pavla. Let her go with God.’ But Golovan replies: ‘It’s wrong of you to say that, Father: better let her live with God at my place—I can’t let her go.’ ‘And why is that?’ ‘Because she has nowhere to lay her head …’ ‘Well,’ he says, ‘then marry her!’ ‘That,’ he replies, ‘is impossible.’ Why it was impossible, he didn’t say, and Father Pyotr had doubts about it for a long time. But Pavla was consumptive and didn’t live long, and before her death, when Father Pavel came to her, she revealed the whole reason to him.”
“What was that reason, Grandmother?”
“They lived according to perfect love.”
“What does that mean?”
“Like angels.”
“Excuse me, but why was that? Pavla’s husband disappeared, and there’s a law that after five years one can marry. Didn’t they know that?”
“No, I think they did, but they also knew something more than that.”
“What, for instance?”
“For instance, that Pavla’s husband survived it all and never disappeared anywhere.”
“But where was he?”
“In Orel!”
“Are you joking?”
“Not a bit.”
“And who knew about it?”
“The three of them: Golovan, Pavla, and the scoundrelly fellow himself. Maybe you remember Fotey?”
“The healed one?”
“Call him what you like, only now that they’re all dead, I can tell you that he wasn’t Fotey at all, but the runaway soldier Fraposhka.”
“What?! Pavla’s husband?”
“Precisely.”
“Then how was it …” I was about to begin, but was ashamed of my own thought and fell silent, but my grandmother understood me and finished:
“You surely want to ask: how was it that no one else recognized him, and Pavla and Golovan didn’t give him away? That’s very simple: others didn’t recognize him, because he wasn’t from this town, and he had grown old and was overgrown with hair. Pavla didn’t give him away out of pity, and Golovan out of love for her.”
“But in court, according to the law, Fraposhka didn’t exist, and they could have married.”
“They could have—according to court law they could have, but according to the law of their conscience they couldn’t.”
“Why, then, did Fraposhka persecute Golovan?”
“The deceased was a scoundrel and thought the same about them as everybody else.”
“But on account of him they deprived themselves of all their happiness!”
“That depends on what you consider happiness: there’s righteous happiness, and there’s sinful happiness. Righteous happiness doesn’t step over anybody, sinful happiness steps over everything. They loved the former better than the latter …”
“Grandmother,” I exclaimed, “these were astonishing people!”
“Righteous people, my dear,” the old woman replied.
But all the same I want to add—astonishing, too, and even incredible. They are incredible while they are surrounded by legendary fiction, but they become still more incredible when you manage to take that patina from them and see them in all their holy simplicity. The perfect love that alone inspired them placed them above all fear and even subdued their nature, without inducing them to bury themselves in the ground or fight the visions that tormented St. Anthony.
* My schoolmate, now the well-known Russian mathematician K. D. Kraevich,23 and I got to know this eccentric at the end of the forties, when we were in the third class of the Orel high school and roomed together in the Losevs’ house. “Anton the Astronomer” (then very old) actually had some sort of notion about the luminaries and the laws of their revolution, but the most interesting thing was that he made the lenses for his tubes himself, polishing them from the bases of thick crystal glasses with sand and stone, and he looked all over the heavens through them … He lived like a beggar, but he didn’t feel his poverty, because he was in constant ecstasy from his “zodiac.” Author.
The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories Page 41