The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories

“In expectation of the impossible answer to my prayer, I meanwhile began to occupy myself with this reading: once I finished grinding all the salt it was my task to grind, I’d start reading, and first I read about St. Tikhon, how our most holy Lady and the holy apostles Peter and Paul visited him in his cell. It was written that St. Tikhon then started asking the Mother of God to prolong peace on earth, and the apostle Paul answered him loudly about the sign of the cessation of peace: ‘When everyone talks of peace and stability,’ he says, ‘then suddenly will the all-destroyer come upon them.’ And I thought a long time about these apostolic words, and at first I couldn’t understand: why had the saint received these words of revelation from the apostle? Finally I read in the newspapers that at home and in foreign lands tireless voices were constantly proclaiming universal peace. And here my prayer was answered, and all at once I understood that the saying, ‘If they talk of peace, suddenly will the all-destroyer come upon them,’ was coming true, and I was filled with fear for our Russian people and began to pray and with tears exhorted all those who came to my pit to pray for the subjugation under the feet of our tsar of all enemies and adversaries, for the all-destroyer was near. And I was granted tears in wondrous abundance! … I kept weeping over our native land. They reported to the father superior that ‘our Ishmael in his cellar has started weeping a lot and prophesying war.’ For that the father superior gave me a blessing to be transferred to the empty cottage in the kitchen garden and given the icon ‘Blessed Silence,’ which shows the Savior with folded wings, in the guise of an angel, but with the Sabaoth’s eight-pointed halo, and his arms crossed meekly on his breast. And I was told to bow down before this icon every day, until the prophesying spirit in me fell silent. So I was locked up with this icon, and remained locked up there till spring and stayed in that cottage and kept praying to the ‘Blessed Silence,’ but as soon as I caught sight of a man, the spirit rose up in me again and I spoke. At that time the superior sent a doctor to me to see if my wits were addled. The doctor sat in my cottage for a long time, listened, like you, to my whole story, and spat:

“ ‘What a drum you are, brother,’ he says. ‘They beat and beat on you, and still can’t beat you down.’

“I say:

“ ‘What to do? I suppose it’s got to be so.’

“And he, having heard it all, says to the superior:

“ ‘I can’t figure him out. Is he simply a good soul, or has he gone mad, or is he a true soothsayer? That,’ he says, ‘is your department, I’m not versed in it, but my opinion is: chase him somewhere far away to get some air, he may have sat too long in one place.’

“So they released me, and now I have a blessing to go to Solovki and pray to Zosima and Sabbatius, and I’m on my way there.⁴³ I’ve been all over, but them I haven’t seen, and I want to bow down to them before I die.”

“Why ‘before I die’? Are you ill?”

“No, sir, I’m not. It’s still on this same chance that we’ll soon have to go to war.”

“Sorry, but it seems you’re talking about war again?”

“Yes, sir.”

“So the ‘Blessed Silence’ didn’t help you?”

“That’s not for me to know, sir. I try my best to keep silent, but the spirit wins out.”

“What does he say?”

“He keeps exhorting me to ‘take up arms.’ ”

“Are you prepared to go to war yourself?”

“What else, sir? Certainly: I want very much to die for my people.”

“So you mean to go to war in your cowl and cassock?”

“No, sir, I’ll take the cowl off and put on a uniform.”

Having said that, the enchanted wanderer seemed to feel prophetic inspiration coming upon him anew and lapsed into quiet concentration, which none of his interlocutors ventured to interrupt with any new question. And what more could they have asked him? He had divulged the story of his past with all the candor of his simple soul, and his predictions remained in the hands of Him who conceals their destinies from the wise and prudent and only sometimes reveals them unto babes.

* Russian for “big head.” Trans.

Singlemind

I

During the reign of Catherine II,¹ to a certain couple of the clerkly sort by the name of Ryzhov, a son was born named Alexashka. This family lived in Soligalich, one of the chief towns of Kostroma province, located on the rivers Kostroma and Svetitsa. Prince Gagarin’s dictionary² mentions it as having seven stone churches, two religious schools and one secular, seven factories and mills, thirty-seven shops, three taverns, two pot-houses, and 3,665 inhabitants of both sexes. The town had two annual fairs and weekly markets; besides that, there is mention of “a rather brisk trade in lime and tar.” In our hero’s lifetime there was also a saltworks.

All this must be known in order to form an idea of how the smalltime hero of our story, Alexashka, or, later, Alexander Afanasyevich Ryzhov, known around town as “Singlemind,” could and actually did live.