Of course this spoiled the shooting-party. My leg was bleeding profusely and began to be painful, and as I was unable to walk, my comrades had to carry me all the way home on an improvised litter made with the rifles.
I stayed at home and the wound soon healed, as only the flesh had been injured; but I limped for a long time afterwards.
The coincidence of this accident with the prediction of the local oracle made me think a great deal. On a later visit at my uncle’s house I heard that Eoung-Ashokh Mardiross had returned to the district and I asked my aunt to send for him.
The fortune-teller came. He was tall and thin, with very faded eyes and the nervous, disordered movements of a half-wit. He shuddered from time to time and smoked incessantly. He was certainly a very sick man.
His way of telling fortunes was as follows:
Sitting between two lighted candles, he held his thumb up before him and stared for a long time at his thumb-nail until he fell into a doze. Then he began to tell what he saw in the nail, first of all saying what the person was wearing and then what would happen to him in the future. If he were telling the fortune of someone absent, he would first ask for his name, the details of his face, the general direction of the place where he lived, and if possible his age.
On this occasion he again made predictions about me. And one day, without fail, I will relate how these predictions were fulfilled.
That summer, also in Alexandropol, I met with another phenomenon for which I could not then find any explanation.
Across from my uncle’s house was some vacant land, in the middle of which was a little grove of poplars. I liked this spot and used to go there with a book or with work of some sort.
Children were always playing there, gathered from all parts of the town—children of all colours and different races. There were Armenians and Greeks, Kurds and Tartars, and their games made an incredible noise and commotion—which, however, never disturbed my work.
One day I was sitting under the poplars, busy with some work ordered by a neighbour for his niece’s wedding the following day. My task was to draw a monogram on a shield—to be hung over the door of his house—a monogram combining his niece’s initials with those of the man she was to marry. I had also to find space on the shield for the day of the month and the year.
Certain strong impressions somehow deeply imprint themselves on one’s memory. I remember even now how I racked my brains to find the best way to fit in the figures of the year 1888. I was deep in my work when suddenly I heard a desperate shriek. I jumped up, certain that an accident had happened to one of the children during their play. I ran and saw the following picture:
In the middle of a circle drawn on the ground stood one of the little boys, sobbing and making strange movements, and the others were standing at a certain distance laughing at him. I was puzzled and asked what it was all about.
I learned that the boy in the middle was a Yezidi, that the circle had been drawn round him and that he could not get out of it until it was rubbed away. The child was indeed trying with all his might to leave this magic circle, but he struggled in vain. I ran up to him and quickly rubbed out part of the circle, and immediately he dashed out and ran away as fast as he could.
This so dumbfounded me that I stood rooted to the spot for a long time as if bewitched, until my usual ability to think returned. Although I had already heard something about these Yezidis, I had never given them any thought; but this astonishing incident, which I had seen with my own eyes, now compelled me to think seriously about them.
Looking round and seeing that the boys had gone back to their games, I returned to my place, full of my thoughts, and continued the work on the monogram, which was not going well but had to be finished at all costs that same day.
The Yezidis are a sect living in Transcaucasia, mainly in the regions near Mount Ararat. They are sometimes called devil-worshippers.
Many years after the incident just described, I made a special experimental verification of this phenomenon and found that, in fact, if a circle is drawn round a Yezidi, he cannot of his own volition escape from it. Within the circle he can move freely, and the larger the circle, the larger the space in which he can move, but get out of it he cannot. Some strange force, much more powerful than his normal strength, keeps him inside. I myself, although strong, could not pull a weak woman out of the circle; it needed yet another man as strong as I.
If a Yezidi is forcibly dragged out of a circle, he immediately falls into the state called catalepsy, from which he recovers the instant he is brought back inside. But if he is not brought back into the circle, he returns to a normal state, as we ascertained, only after either thirteen or twenty-one hours.
To bring him back to a normal state by any other means is impossible. At least my friends and I were not able to do so, in spite of the fact that we already possessed all the means known to contemporary hypnotic science for bringing people out of the cataleptic state. Only their priests could do so, by means of certain short incantations.
Having somehow finished and delivered the shield that evening, I set off to the Russian quarter, where most of my friends and acquaintances lived, in the hope that they might help me understand this strange phenomenon. The Russian quarter of Alexandropol was where all the local intelligentsia lived.
It should be mentioned that from the age of eight, owing to chance circumstances, my friends in Alexandropol as well as in Kars were much older than I and belonged to families who were considered socially higher than mine. In the Greek part of Alexandropol, where my parents formerly lived, I had no friends at all. They all lived on the opposite side of the town in the Russian quarter, and were the children of officers, officials and clergymen. I often went to see them, and getting to know their families, gradually gained the entrée into almost all the houses of the quarter.
I remember that the first person I spoke to about the phenomenon which had so greatly astonished me was my good friend Ananiev, who was also much older than I. He did not even listen until I finished, but authoritatively stated:
‘These boys simply played on your credulity. They were pulling your leg and have made an ass of you. But look, how smart this is!’ he added, running to the next room and putting on, as he came back, his brand new uniform. (He had recently been appointed a postal-telegraph official.) He then asked me to go with him to the public gardens. I made the excuse of not having time and went off to see Pavlov, who lived in the same street.
Pavlov, who was a treasury official, was a very good fellow but a great drinker. At his house were the deacon of the fortress church, Father Maxim, an artillery officer called Artemin, Captain Terentiev, the teacher Stolmakh and two others whom I hardly knew. They were drinking vodka, and when I came in they asked me to join them and offered me a drink.
It must be said that that year I had already begun to drink, not much, it is true, but when I was invited to do so, as sometimes happened, I did not refuse. I had begun to drink owing to an incident in Kars. One morning, being very tired from studying all night long, I was about to go to bed when suddenly a soldier came to call me to come to the cathedral. That day a service was to be held at a certain fort—I do not remember in honour of what—and at the last minute it was decided to have the choir for it, so the attendants and orderlies were sent to all parts of the town to call the choristers.
Having had no sleep all night, I was so exhausted by the walk up the steep hill to the fort and by the service itself that I could hardly stand on my feet. After the service a dinner had been prepared at the fort for the people invited and a special table had been laid for the choristers. The choir-master, a hearty drinker, seeing how weak I was, persuaded me to drink a small glass of vodka. When I had drunk it I did in fact feel much better, and after taking a second glass all my weakness disappeared. After that whenever I was very tired or nervous I took one or two, or sometimes even three, small glasses.
On this evening also I took a glass of vodka with my friends, but, ho
wever much they tried to persuade me, I refused a second one. The company was not yet drunk, as they had only just begun drinking. But I knew how things usually went in this gay crowd. The first one to get tipsy was always the father deacon. When only slightly intoxicated he would, for some reason or other, begin to intone a prayer for the repose of the soul of that true believer, etc., the late Alexander I.... But seeing that he was still sitting there glum, I could not resist telling him what I had seen that day. I did not, however, speak so seriously about it as I did to Ananiev, but instead spoke somewhat jokingly.
Everybody listened to me attentively and with great interest, and when I finished my story they began to express their opinions. The first to speak was the captain, who said that he himself had recently seen some soldiers draw a circle on the ground round a Kurd who begged them almost in tears to rub it away. Not until he, the captain, had ordered a soldier to erase a part of the circle, was the Kurd able to get out of it. ‘I think,’ added the captain, ‘that they take some vow never to go out of a closed circle, and they do not go out of it, not because they cannot, but because they do not wish to break their vow.’
The deacon said: ‘They are devil-worshippers and under ordinary circumstances the devil does not touch them, as they are his own. But as the devil himself is only a subordinate and is obliged by his office to impose his authority on everyone, he therefore, as you might say, for the sake of appearances, has limited the Yezidis’ independence in this way so that other people should not suspect that they are his servants. It’s exactly like Philip.’
Philip was a policeman who stood at the street-corner and whom these fellows, having no one else available, sometimes sent for cigarettes and drinks. The police service there at that time, as is said, ‘even made the cat laugh’.
‘Now if I,’ the deacon continued, ‘make a row, let’s say, in the street, this Philip is obliged without fail to take me to the police-station, and for appearances’ sake, so that it should not seem strange to others, he will of course do so, but as soon as we turn the corner he will let me go, not forgetting to say, “Please, a little tip . . .”
‘Well, the Unclean One is just the same, you might say, with his servants, the Yezidis.’
I do not know whether he invented this episode on the spur of the moment, or whether it had really taken place.
The artillery officer said that he had never heard about such a phenomenon and that, in his opinion, nothing of the sort could exist. He much regretted that we, intelligent people, should believe in such marvels and, still more, rack our brains about them.
Stolmakh, the teacher, retorted that on the contrary he firmly believed in supernatural phenomena and that, if there were much that positive science could not explain, he was fully convinced that, with the present rapid progress of civilization, contemporary science would soon prove that all mysteries of the metaphysical world could be fully explained by physical causes. ‘In regard to the fact you are now talking about,’ he continued, ‘I think it is one of those magnetic phenomena which are now being investigated by scientists at Nancy.’
He was going to say something more but Pavlov interrupted him, exclaiming: ‘The devil take them and all the devil-worshippers! Give them each a half-bottle of vodka and then no devil will hold them back. Let’s drink to the health of Isakov!’ (Isakov was the proprietor of the local vodka distillery.)
These discussions not only did not calm my thoughts, but on the contrary on leaving Pavlov’s I began to think all the more, and at the same time began to have doubts about people whom I had until then considered educated.
The next morning I met by chance the chief physician of the 39th Division, Dr. Ivanov. He had been called to see a sick Armenian neighbour of ours and I was asked to come and serve as interpreter. Dr. Ivanov had a good reputation among the townspeople and had a very large practice. I knew him well as he was often at my uncle’s.
After his visit to the sick man, I said to him: ‘Your Excellency,’ (he had the rank of a general) ‘please explain to me why Yezidis cannot get out of a circle.’
‘Ah, you mean those devil-worshippers?’ he asked. ‘That is simply hysteria.’
‘Hysteria?’ I queried.
‘Yes, hysteria ...’ and then he rattled off a long rigmarole about hysteria, and all I could gather from it was that hysteria is hysteria. This I already knew myself, as there was not a single book on neuropathology and psychology in the library of the Kars military hospital that I had not read, and read very attentively, carefully going over almost every line in my intense desire to find, through these branches of science, an explanation of the phenomenon of table-turning. Therefore I already well understood that hysteria is hysteria, but I wished to know something more.
The more I realized how difficult it was to find a solution, the more I was gnawed by the worm of curiosity. For several days I was not myself and did not wish to do anything. I thought and thought of one thing only: ‘What is true? What is written in books and taught by my teachers, or the facts I am always running up against?’
Soon another incident occurred and this time I was completely bewildered.
Five or six days after the incident of the Yezidis, while going one morning to the fountain to wash—it was the custom there to wash in spring water every morning—I saw a group of women at the comer talking excitedly. I went up to them and learned the following:
That night in the Tartar quarter a gornakh had appeared. This was the name there of an evil spirit which used the bodies of people who had recently died and appeared in their shape to do all sorts of villainies, especially to the enemies of the dead person. This time one of these spirits had appeared in the body of a Tartar who had been buried the day before, the son of Mariam Batchi.
I knew about the death and burial of this man, as his house was next to our old house, where our family had lived before our departure for Kars and where I had gone the day before to collect the rent from the tenants. I had also called on several Tartar neighbours and had seen the body of the dead man being carried out.
He was a young man who had recently joined the police guard, and he used to visit us. I had known him very well.
Several days before, during a dhigitovka contest, he had fallen from his horse and, as they said, had twisted his intestines. Although a military doctor, named Koulchevsky, had given him a full glass of mercury to ‘readjust his intestines’, the poor man had died and, according to the Tartar custom, was buried very soon.
Then this evil spirit, it seems, entered his body and tried to drag it back home, but someone, happening to see this, raised an outcry and rang the alarm, and to prevent the spirit from doing any great harm the good neighbours quickly cut the throat of the body and carried it back to the cemetery.
It is believed there among the followers of the Christian religion that these spirits enter exclusively the bodies of Tartars because, according to the Tartar custom, the coffin is not deeply buried at first but only lightly covered with earth, and food is often put inside. It is difficult for spirits to go off with the bodies of Christians buried deep in the earth, and that is why they prefer Tartars.
This incident completely stupefied me. How could I explain it to myself? What did I know? I looked round me. Gathered at the corner were my uncle, the esteemed Giorgi Mercourov, and his son, who had nearly finished school, and a police official, all talking about this. All were generally respected; all had lived much longer than I and surely knew many things that I had not even dreamed of. Did I see in their faces indignation, grief or astonishment? No; they even seemed to be glad that somebody had succeeded this time in punishing the evil spirit and warding off its mischief.
I gave myself up again to reading books, hoping that through them I could satisfy the worm which was gnawing me.
Bogachevsky helped me very much, but unfortunately he soon went away, because two years after his arrival in Kars he was appointed chaplain of the garrison in a town of the Transcaspian region.
Wh
ile he lived in Kars and was my teacher, he introduced into our relationship a certain peculiarity, namely, although he was not yet a priest, he confessed me every week. When he left he bade me, among other things, write out my confession each week and send it to him in a letter, promising that he would sometimes reply. We agreed that he would send his letters through my uncle, who would forward them to me.
A year later in the Transcaspian region, Bogachevsky gave up his duties as chaplain and became a monk. At the time it was said that the cause of his action was that his wife seemed to be having an affair with some officer, and Bogachevsky had turned her out and had not wished to remain in the town or even to hold office in the church.
Soon after Bogachevsky’s departure from Kars I went to Tiflis. At this time I received two letters from Bogachevsky through my uncle, after which I had no news of him for several years.
Once, much later, I met him quite by accident in the town of Samara as he was leaving the house of the local bishop. He was then wearing the monk’s habit of a well-known monastery. He did not immediately recognize me, as I had by then grown up and changed a good deal, but when I told him who I was he was very glad to see me, and for several days we saw each other often, until both of us left Samara.
After this meeting I never saw him again. I heard later that he had not wished to remain in his monastery in Russia and had soon left for Turkey, then for Holy Athos, where he also did not stay long. He had then renounced his monastic life and had gone to Jerusalem. There he chanced to become friends with a vendor of rosaries who traded near the Lord’s Temple.
This trader was a monk of the Essene Order who, having gradually prepared Bogachevsky, introduced him into his brotherhood. Owing to his exemplary life, Bogachevsky was appointed warden and, a few years later, prior in one of the branches of this brotherhood in Egypt; and later, on the death of one of the assistants to the abbot of the chief monastery, Bogachevsky was appointed in his place.
Meetings With Remarkable Men Page 8