The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories

“Well,” I reply, “it’s all the same to me: I’ll pray to my saint, John the Baptist, and call myself anything you like.”

That was the end of it, and they took me to another town and handed me over as a recruit instead of their son, and gave me twenty-five roubles in cash for the road, and promised their help as long as they lived. The money I took from them, the twenty-five roubles, I placed with a poor monastery, as a contribution for Grusha’s soul, and I started asking my superiors to send me to the Caucasus, where I could die quickly for the faith. So they did, and I spent more than fifteen years in the Caucasus and never revealed my real name or condition to anyone, and was always called Pyotr Serdyukov, and only on St. John’s day I prayed for myself through my saint, the Baptist. And I forgot about my former existence and condition, and was serving out my last year that way, when suddenly, right on St. John’s day, we were pursuing the Tartars, who had done some nastiness and withdrawn across the Koysa River. There were several Koysas in those parts: the one that flows through Andia, and is called the Andian Koysa, another through Avaria, called the Avarian Koysa, and there’s also the Korikumuiskian and the Kuzikumuiskian, and they all flow together, and at the confluence the Sulak River begins. But each of them is swift and cold, especially the Andian, which the Tartars had crossed. We killed countless numbers of those Tartars, but the ones who crossed the Koysa sat behind the rocks on the other bank and kept firing at us the moment we showed ourselves. But they fired so skillfully that they never wasted a shot, but saved their powder for doing sure harm, because they knew we had much more ammunition than they had, and so they caused us real harm, because though we all stood in full view of them, the rogues never just popped off at us. Our colonel was a man of valiant soul and liked to imitate Suvorov,³⁶ saying “Merciful God” all the time and giving us courage by his example. So here, too, he sat down on the bank, took his boots off, put his legs up to the knees into that terribly cold water, and boasted:

“Merciful God, how warm the water is: just like your fresh-drawn milk in the bucket. Which of you, my benefactors, is willing to swim to the other side with a cable, so we can throw a bridge across?”

The colonel sat and gibble-gabbled with us like that, and on the other shore the Tartars put two gun barrels through a crack, but didn’t shoot. But as soon as two willing soldiers volunteered and started swimming, flames flashed, and both soldiers sank into the Koysa. We pulled out the cable, sent two more, and started showering bullets on the stones where the Tartars were hiding, but couldn’t do them any harm, because our bullets hit the stones, but they, the cursed ones, spat fire at the swimmers, the water clouded with blood, and again the two soldiers plunged down. A third pair went after them, but before they reached the middle of the Koysa, the Tartars sank them, too. After the third pair, there was a lack of volunteers, because it was obvious that this wasn’t war, but simple murder. Yet it was necessary to punish the villains. The colonel says:

“Listen, my benefactors. Isn’t there someone among you who has a mortal sin on his soul? Merciful God, how good it would be for him now to wash his iniquity away with his own blood.”

And I think:

“Why wait for a better occasion than this to end my life? Lord, bless my hour!”—and I stepped forward, undressed, recited the “Our Father,” bowed in all directions before my superior and my comrades, and said to myself: “Well, Grusha, my adopted sister, accept the blood I give for you!”—and with that I took a thin string in my mouth, the other end of which was tied to the cable, made a run to the bank, and dove into the water.