The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories

Like Peter the Great, he was nearly seven feet tall; he was broadly built, lean and muscular; he was swarthy, had a round face, blue eyes, a very big nose, and thick lips. The hair on Golovan’s head and trimmed beard was very thick, the color of salt and pepper. His head was always close-cropped, his beard and mustache were also clipped. The calm and happy smile never left Golovan’s face for a minute: it shone in his every feature, but played mostly on his lips and in his eyes, intelligent and kind, but as if slightly mocking. It seemed Golovan had no other expression, at least none that I remember. To supplement this unskillful portrait of Golovan, it is necessary to mention one oddity or peculiarity, which consisted in his gait. Golovan walked very quickly, as if he was always hurrying somewhere, not evenly, though, but with little hops. He didn’t limp, but, in a local expression, “hitched”—that is, he stepped firmly on one leg, the right one, but on the left leg he hopped. It seemed as if the leg didn’t flex, but had a spring in it somewhere, in a muscle or a joint. People walk that way on an artificial leg, but Golovan’s wasn’t artificial; however, this peculiarity also did not come from nature; he brought it about himself, and there was a secret in it, which can’t be explained straight off.

Golovan dressed as a muzhik—summer and winter, in scorching heat and freezing cold, he always wore a long, raw sheepskin coat, all greasy and blackened. I never saw him in any other clothes, and I remember my father often joked about that coat, calling it “everlasting.”

Golovan belted his coat with a strap of white laminated harness, which had turned yellow in many places and in others had flaked off completely, exposing the wax-end and holes. But the coat was kept clean of various little tenants—I knew that better than anyone, because I often sat in Golovan’s bosom listening to his talk and always felt myself very comfortable there.

The wide collar of the coat was never buttoned, but, on the contrary, was left wide open to the waist. Here was the “bosom,” offering a very ample space for bottles of cream, which Golovan provided to the kitchen of the Orel Assembly of the Nobility.³ That had been his trade ever since he “went free” and was given a “Ermolov cow” to start out.

The powerful chest of the “deathless” was covered only with a linen shirt of Ukrainian cut, that is, with a standing collar, always white as milk and unfailingly with long, bright-colored ties. These ties were sometimes a ribbon, sometimes simply a strip of woolen cloth or even cotton, but they lent something fresh and gentlemanly to Golovan’s appearance, which suited him very well, because he was in fact a gentleman.

III

Golovan was our neighbor. Our house in Orel was on Third Dvoryanskaya Street, and it stood third in from the precipitous bank above the river Orlik. It’s a rather beautiful spot. At that time, before the fires, this was the edge of the city proper. To the right, beyond the Orlik, lay the small outlying hovels of the neighborhood adjoining the city center, which ended with the church of St. Basil the Great. To the side was the very steep and uncomfortable descent down the bank, and behind, beyond the gardens, a deep ravine, with open pasture beyond it, on which some sort of storehouse stuck up. In the morning, soldiers’ drills and beatings with rods took place there—the earliest pictures I saw and watched more often than anything else. On that same pasture, or, better to say, on the narrow strip that separated our fenced gardens from the ravine, grazed Golovan’s six or seven cows and the red bull of the Ermolov breed, which also belonged to him. Golovan kept the bull for his small but excellent herd, and also took him around on a halter to “lend” him to those who had need of him for breeding. That brought him some income.

Golovan’s means of livelihood consisted of his milk cows and their healthy spouse. Golovan, as I said above, provided the club of the nobility with cream and milk, which were famous for their high quality, owing, of course, to the good breed of his cattle and his good care of them. The butter supplied by Golovan was fresh, yellow as egg yolk, and fragrant, and the cream “didn’t flow”—that is, if you turned the bottle neck down, the cream did not pour out in a stream, but fell out in a thick, heavy mass. Golovan didn’t deal in products of inferior quality, and therefore he had no rivals, and the nobility of that time not only knew how to eat well, but also had the means to pay for it. Besides that, Golovan also supplied the same club with excellent big eggs from his especially big Dutch hens, of which he kept a great many, and, finally, he “prepared calves,” fattening them expertly and always on time, for instance, for the largest gathering of the nobility or other special occasions in noble circles.