The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories

“For instance, they put something in your way or under your feet, and you tip it over or break it, and somebody gets upset and angry, for them that’s the foremost pleasure and fun. They clap their hands and run to their chief, saying: ‘We, too, cause trouble, give us a kopeck for it.’ That’s why they do it … Children.”

“Precisely how, for instance, did they manage to cause you trouble?”

“There was, for instance, this case with us, when a Jew hanged himself in the forest near the monastery, and the novices all started saying he was Judas, and that he went about the place sighing during the night, and there were many witnesses to it. I wasn’t even distressed about him, because I thought: as if we don’t have enough Jews left. Only one night I’m sleeping in the stable, and suddenly I hear somebody come up and stick his muzzle over the crossbar in the doorway and sigh. I say a prayer—no, he’s still standing there. I make a cross at him: he goes on standing there and sighs again.

‘What am I to do with you? I can’t pray for you, because you’re a Jew, and even if you weren’t a Jew, I have no blessing to pray for suicides. Leave me, go away to the forest or the desert.’ I laid that injunction on him, and he went away, and I fell asleep again, but the next night the blackguard came again and sighed again … disturbed my sleep, and that was it. I couldn’t stand it! ‘Pah, you lout,’ I think, ‘don’t you have enough room in the forest or on the church porch, that you have to come bursting into my stable? Well, no help for it, I’ve clearly got to invent some good remedy against you.’ The next day I took a clean piece of coal and traced a big cross on the door, and when night came, I lay down peacefully, thinking to myself: ‘He won’t come now,’ but I had only just fallen asleep, and there he was again, standing there and sighing! ‘Pah, you jailbird, what am I to do with you!’ All that night he scared me like that, but in the morning, at the first sound of the bell for the liturgy, I quickly jumped up and ran to complain to the superior, and met the bell ringer, Brother Diomed, and he says:

“ ‘Why are you so frightened?’

“I say:

“ ‘Thus and so, I’ve been bothered all night, and I’m going to the superior.’

“And Brother Diomed replies:

“ ‘Drop it, and don’t go. The superior put leeches in his nose last night, and now he’s very angry and won’t be of any help to you in this matter, but, if you want, I can help you much better than he can.’

“I say:

“ ‘It makes absolutely no difference to me: only be so good as to help me—for that I’ll give you my old warm mittens, they’ll be very good for ringing the bells in winter.’

“ ‘All right,’ he says.

“And I gave him the mittens, and he brought me an old church door from the belfry, on which the apostle Peter was painted with the keys to the kingdom of heaven in his hand.

“ ‘These keys

,’ he says, ‘are the most important thing: just close yourself behind this door, and nobody will get through it.’

“I all but bowed to his feet from joy, and I think: ‘Rather than just closing myself behind the door and then removing it, I’d better attach it fundamentally, so that it will always be a protection for me,’ and I hung it on very secure, strong hinges, and for more safety I also attached a heavy pulley to it with a cobblestone as counterweight, and I did it all quietly in one day, before evening, and when nighttime came, I went to bed at the proper hour and slept. But what would you think: I hear him breathing again! I simply can’t believe my ears, it’s impossible, but no: he’s breathing. And not just that! That was nothing, that he was breathing, but he also pushed the door … My old door had a lock inside, but with this one, since I was relying more on its holiness, I didn’t put a lock on it, because I had no time, and so he just pushes it, and more boldly each time, and finally I see something like a muzzle poking in, but then the door swung on the pulley and knocked him back with all its might … And he backed up, evidently scratched himself, waited a little, came even more boldly, and again the muzzle, but the pulley smacks him even harder … It must have been painful, he grew quiet and stopped pushing, and I fell asleep again, but only a short time went by, and I see the scoundrel is at it again, and with new artfulness. He doesn’t butt straight on now, but gradually opens the door with his horns, brazenly pulls off the sheepskin jacket I’ve covered my head with, and licks me on the ear. I couldn’t stand this insolence any longer: I reached under the bed, grabbed an axe, and bashed him with it. I heard him grunt and drop down on the spot. ‘Well,’ I think, ‘serves you right’—but instead of him, in the morning, I look, and there’s no Jew at all. Those scoundrels, those little devils, had put our monastery cow there for me instead of him.”

“And you had wounded her?”

“I’d hacked her to death with the axe, sir! It caused a terrible stir in the monastery.”