The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories

The water was awfully cold: I even got stitches in my armpits, and my chest went numb, cramps seized my legs, but I kept swimming … Above me flew our bullets, and around me Tartar bullets smacked into the water without touching me, and I didn’t know if I was wounded or not, but I did reach the bank … There the Tartars could no longer hit me, because I stood just under the ridge, and in order to shoot at me they would have had to lean out over it, and our men were raining bullets on them like sand from the other bank. So I stood under the rocks and pulled the cable, and pulled it all the way, and the bridge got thrown across, and suddenly our men are coming, and I go on standing there as if taken out of myself, I don’t understand anything, because I’m thinking: did anybody else see what I saw? Because as I was swimming I saw Grusha flying over me, and she was like a girl of about sixteen, and her wings were enormous now, bright, stretched across the whole river, and she shielded me with them … However, I see nobody says a word about it: well, I think, I’ll have to tell it myself. So when the colonel started embracing me, and kissing me, and praising me, saying:

“Oh, merciful God, what a fine fellow you are, Pyotr Serdyukov!”

I replied:

“I’m no fine fellow, Your Excellency, but a great sinner, and neither the earth nor the water wants to take me.”

He asks:

“What is your sin?”

And I reply:

“In my time, I’ve been the ruin of many innocent souls”—and that night in the tent I told him all that I’ve just told you.

He listened, listened, then pondered, and said:

“Merciful God, you’ve been through a lot, but above all, brother, whether you like it or not, you must be made an officer. I’ll send in a request for it.”

I say:

“As you please, but also send to find out whether it’s true, as I’ve testified, that I killed the Gypsy girl.”

“Very well,” he says, “I’ll ask about that, too.”

And he did, but the paper went around and around and came back with wrong information. It said there had never been such an incident with any Gypsy girl, and Ivan Severyanovich, though he had existed and had served the prince, had bought himself out and was freed in absentia, and after that had died in the house of the crown peasants, the Serdyukovs.³⁷

Well, what more could I do here? How could I prove my guilt?

But the colonel says:

“Don’t you dare to lie about yourself anymore, brother: when you swam across the Koysa, your mind got a bit addled from the cold water and the fear, and I,” he says, “am very glad that what you accused yourself of is all not true. Now you’ll be an officer, and, merciful God, that’s a good thing.”

Here I myself even got confused in my thoughts: had I really pushed Grusha into the water, or had I imagined it all so intensely then out of my terrible longing for her?

And they made me an officer for my bravery, only since I stood by my own truth, wanting to reveal my past life, they decided, so as to have no more bother from me about that, to award me the St. George Cross and retire me.

“Congratulations,” the colonel said, “you’re a nobleman now and can go into government service. Merciful God, how peaceful!” And he gave me a letter to some big personage in Petersburg. “Go,” he said. “He’ll be the making of your career and well-being.” With that letter I made my way to Petersburg, but I had no luck with a career.

“Why is that?”

“I was without a post for a very long time, and then I landed on theta, and that made everything worse.”

“On theta? What does that mean?”

“That patron I’d been sent to about a career appointed me as a consultant in the address bureau, where each consultant is responsible for a single letter. Some letters are very good, like, for instance, B, or P, or S. Many last names begin with them, and that brings the consultant income. But I was put in charge of θ. It’s the most insignificant letter, very few names begin with it, and even those that should belong to it all deviously shirk it: as soon as anybody wants to ennoble himself a bit, he highhandedly puts F in place of θ. You search and search for him under θ, only it’s wasted work, he’s registered himself under F. There’s no use at all, yet you sit there. Well, I saw things were bad, and out of old habit I tried to get myself hired as a coachman, but nobody would take me; they said: ‘You’re a noble officer, and with a decoration, it’s improper to yell at you or hit you …’ I was fit to hang myself, but, thank God, even in my despair I didn’t let myself go that far, and so as not to perish from hunger, I up and became an actor.”

“What sort of actor were you?”

“I played roles.”

“In what theater?”

“In a show-booth on Admiralty Square.³⁸ They don’t scorn the nobility, they take everybody: there are officers, and clerks, and students, and especially many scribes from the Senate.”

“And did you like that life?”

“No, sir.”

“Why not?”